Mary Spongberg

If she's so great, how come so many pigs dig her? germaine greer and the malestream press

Abstract The quotation in the title has been attributed as Robyn Morgans response to Germaine Greers television debate with Norman Mailer. This paper will explore Germaine Greers turbulent relationship with the mainstream press both in Australia and abroad and will attempt to determine whether the flamboyant Dr Greer added “a much needed patina of glamour” to the movement or merely used feminism as yet another way to cash in on the counter-culture. It demonstrates the ability of the media to manipulate a feminism not grounded in an analysis of male power.

feminist publishing in a cold climate?: Australian Feminist Studies and the new ERA of research

This article explores the implications for feminist research and publishing in Australia in the new ‘ERA’ of research excellence. Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) is an initiative of the Australian Federal government to assess research quality within Australias higher education institutions using a combination of indicators and expert review by committees comprising experienced, internationally recognised experts (Australian Research Council, 2008).

Twenty Years On: feminist histories and digital media

As many scholars have remarked, the ‘conditions of the historian’s craft’ have changed dramatically over the last thirty years and continue to do so ‘in front of our very eyes’. In 2015 we reached the twentieth anniversary of the original feminist digitised archival projects conceived in the flush of a new digital ‘turn’ in scholarship in 1995: Orlando: women’s writing in the British Isles from the beginnings to the present; The Corvey Project on women’s writing of the romantic era; and the American based Victorian Women Writers Project, were all set up in the same year. They were followed in 1997 by the Perdita Project on early modern women’s manuscripts. Since then many other projects of differing scales have brought historical works written by women into the light of day for the first time and were characteristic of feminist scholars’ initial engagement with digital technologies. Feminist historians and literary scholars have built on the traditional paper-based tenet of the women’s movement to make women ‘visible’, to ‘recover women’s lives’ through the engagement with these new digital archives, although the methodological implications of this massive digitisation of print culture will take some time to be fully explored. Why then has the digital ‘revolution’ often been characterised as a ‘turn’, as though it were a fashion that will pass? There is no doubt that trends in feminist historical theory and practice do seem to be dynamic and changing rapidly; beyond the ‘digital turn’, the ‘transnational turn’, the ‘archival turn’ we are now experiencing the ‘participatory turn’, which has emerged partly as a consequence of the previous ones. Feminism, though, has not been called a ‘turn’ but rather has adapted since the 1970s to new ‘waves’. Limiting as these descriptive monikers are (and Kate Eichhorn amongst others has been critical of segregating feminism into generations and the reifying of feminist historiography through the wave metaphor), they nevertheless speak literally and symbolically about the fluidity of ideas in historical scholarship during these years, moving across geographical spaces and expressed in increasingly different forms. While some historians have treated the advent of digital technologies as though it were a pragmatic event—‘just new tools’—making research easier and more convenient, feminists in this volume are exploring both conceptual and methodological issues about what it means to extend the boundaries of the previously unknowable about the past. From theorists Foucault and Derrida to anthropologists and historians Ann Laura Stoler, Antoinette Burton and beyond, the confluence of digital technologies with theoretical reflexivity about the ‘archive’ has encouraged historians to explore the politics of the archiving and later the digitising process, analysing both its gendered and racially determined nature

Australian women's history in Australian feminist periodicals 1971-1988

This article traces the history of feminist periodical publishing in this country between 1970 and 1988 and its role in the development of Australian women’s history. It shows that a distinctly Australian feminist historiography developed within the pages of journals such as Refractory Girl, Hecate, and Australian Feminist Studies. While most studies of the evolution of Australian women’s history since the 1970s signal the importance of such journals, there has to date been no major study of their history or their influence within Australian historiography. This article has been peer-reviewed.

EDITORIAL: The Future of Feminist Research

Of particular interest has been the number of different countries from which manuscripts have been submitted. In addition to the United States and Canada, papers have come from fourteen others countries. Although the majority of the manuscripts come from the United States the percentage of submissions from other countries has increased in the last few months. Because an electronic journal is accessible worldwide it has always been editorial policy to serve the international medical physics community, and it is gratifying to see this taking place.

Australian Women's History

Living Feminism: the impact of the Womens Liberation Movement on three generations of Australian women CHILLA BULBECK, 1997 Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. xxii + 279 pp., A

EDITORIAL: Five Years On

29.95, ISBN 9 780521 465960

william godwin's memoirs of the author of a vindication of the rights of woman and the gender of romantic biography

The year 2010 marks my fifth year as editor of Australian Feminist Studies. Such anniversaries usually call for reflection, and on this occasion it is hard not to think about the intense changes that have faced feminist scholars over the last five years and the many challenges that arise within the academy and in our daily life. It often seems as if we are asked to face the same battles over again, as our rights in the workplace are slowly compromised and the pay gap between men and women ever increases. Yet new issues, too, continuously face us, around our health and well-being, the environment and sustainability, new technologies, the family, and the law, with which feminists must engage. Such challenges require the support of an active and engaged community, and I would like to thank our editorial board and all our readers for creating the conditions that allow feminist critique and scholarship around these issues to flourish within the pages of this journal. In this first issue for 2010 we publish a number of articles that demonstrate the vigour of feminist scholarship in Australia. It was inspiring to read Peta Cox on feminist pedagogy and to see the multiple and joyous meanings that have been attached to this term over time. It is critically important that we feel that our engagement with feminism can be ‘sensuous’, a ‘dance’ and a ‘charged passion’. I know that the articles we publish in this issue will evoke the joy and innovation of feminist scholarship and clearly attest to the importance of feminist theory to understanding the challenges women face today, whether it be the experience of education or migration, suicide or protesting against war and other forms of violence. I would like to wish all our readers a happy 2010, and again would like to thank those involved in all stages of the production of this journal, with particular thanks to Cathy Hawkins. I would also like to thank all our authors, especially Suellen Murray who has also provided the image for our cover.

Female Biography and the Digital Turn

the‘‘heloise complex’’ Some years after the publication of her ground-breaking article ‘‘Women and Philosophy’’ (1977), in which she describes women’s relationship to philosophical inquiry in terms of a ‘‘Heloise complex,’’ Michèle Le Dœuff wrote that she had not initially thought through how the tragic fate of the philosopher Peter Abelard might modify her thesis. The story of Abelard certainly complicates Le Dœuff’s understanding of how the ‘‘Heloise complex’’ functions as an impulse driving women to subsume themselves into a ‘‘philosopher lover.’’ Critical to Le Dœuff’s original thesis is the idea of ‘‘erotico-theoretical transference’’ (Moi 185), that is, while a male student is led to philosophise by a lack caused by his instructor (‘‘I imagined I had found the man who would teach me . . . but he disappointed me . . .’’), Le Dœuff has argued, a female student experiences not a philosophical lack but the ‘‘ordinary,’’ ‘‘classic,’’ ‘‘psychological’’ lack, the lack which the Other is seen as capable of meeting (Hipparchia’s Choice 188). Thus untroubled by the disappointment that propels men to theory, and embraced by their lover-instructor, women are ‘‘not condemned to philosophise, nor to write – not to say ‘I’ ’’ (188). Such abnegation of mind, Le Dœuff suggests, was always ‘‘profitable to him and fatal to her’’ (188). Abelard can, however, scarcely be described as having avoided the fatal consequences of his love for Heloise. While neither of them died for love, his castration at the hands of Heloise’s revengedriven Uncle Fulbert functioned as a kind of death for both the lovers. Heloise, at Abelard’s command, took the veil and remained sequestered in a convent for the rest of her life. Abelard experienced all the shame and humiliation befitting his emasculation. In his Historica Calamitatum, written years after the event, Abelard described the outcome of this brutal calamity in terms reflecting a gendered change in his identity, which he experienced as worse than death. He calls himself a ‘‘monstrous spectacle’’ (omnibus monstruousum spectaculum futurus) and adopts the abjection of the ‘‘unclean’’ (immundi) (Desmond 60). Abelard, too, retreated into holy orders. In the ‘‘Third Notebook’’ of Hipparchia’s Choice, Le Dœuff admits that in earlier writings on the subject she had thought only of ‘‘the beginning of their story, when they were still merely clandestine lovers’’ (163). Heloise’s pregnancy provided tangible proof of her sin and his weakness and generated a crisis in their relationship, which modified Le Dœuff’s analysis. She writes: ‘‘[S]peaking of an mary spongberg

The Trial(s) of Queen Caroline and Hays’s Memoirs of Queens, Illustrious and Celebrated

ABSTRACT The digital revolution gives new meaning to the concept of ‘shelf life’. It offers the promise of infusing surviving accounts of the ever-fragile female past with both a material and an electronic robustness. Among the many dusty volumes that have benefited dramatically from digital capabilities, few are more emblematic of the power of contemporary technology to advance feminist historical recovery than the six volumes of Mary Hays’s Female Biography: or memoirs of illustrious and celebrated women, of all ages and countries: alphabetically arranged (1803). Female Biography was an anomaly when first published and controversial ever since, imitated but unacknowledged, left to molder on library shelves and in the pages of histories of prosopography. It was the first attempt at a comprehensive biographical history of women in English by a named woman author since Christine de Pizans City of Ladies (1405) and the first compendium of women by either male or female compilers since Thomas Heywoods Generall Historie of Women (1624, 1657) to include rebellious and impious figures as well as learned ones. It was also the first Enlightenment prosopography of women and a compelling response to the great forgetting of women in traditional histories. While Hayss enterprise was a quintessentially ‘Enlightenment project’, the Female Biography Project to produce the Chawton House Library Edition was very much of the digital age. In this article we examine how Mary Hays put together Female Biography at the cusp of the nineteenth century and what happened in the twenty-first century when some two hundred scholars were assembled to grapple with the scope and scholarship of this work. We also explain the process of constructing a digital archive of Female Biography, and how this enabled a wonderful feat of feminist collaboration across the globe.