Mary Walsh

The Australian Moment: How We Were Made for These Times

would have made life hard for any government. Labor is most unlikely to govern again in NSW for a very long time. If it is ever again in a position to do so, the next crop of ministers could do worse than to examine this impressively researched, balanced and wide-ranging collection for its hints about what they might do, and what they should at all costs avoid. For scholars, it will stand as an indispensable source on one of the longest serving governments in Australian history – and a government to which future historians might be a little kinder than seems imaginable while ICAC remains in session.

Being Australian, Australian Nationalism and Australian Values

As we move into the new millennium there has been a renewed interest in the questions of what constitutes being Australian, and the importance of Australian nationalism and Australian values. There has been an increasing tendency to disparage those who claim that there is something unique about being Australian and that there are values that are distinctive to us as Australians. Detractors such as Mackay (2007) argue that Australian identity and values are still evolving and that there is nothing about Australians that characterises them differently from other citizens in Western liberal democracies. Of course, for those who believe that globalisation has meant a certain homogenisation of Western cultures, the idea of a distinctive and particular Australian Journal of Political Science, Vol. 43, No. 4, December 2008, pp. 719–727

Twenty years since ‘a critique of the sex/gender distinction’: a conversation with Moira Gatens

MG: Unlike a lot of papers I clearly remember my feelings when writing this paper. I was both perplexed and annoyed by the sudden (as I saw it) ubiquity of ‘gender’. No one was talking about ‘sex’ or ‘the sexes’ any more and everyone was talking about gender. I remember thinking: what is this thing ‘gender’? I mean seriously, what is gender? What are they talking about? Courses were starting to be called gender and sociology, gender and this, gender and that, and this puzzled me. I remember asking a sociologist where this concept of gender comes from, and she said Robert Stoller. I thought okay; this is annoying me, so I decided that I would do some research on Stoller. I found his book [Sex and Gender, 1968] really odd and reliant upon an unconvincing mind–body distinction. And then I started looking at the journals of the time. It seems a long time ago—what I was responding to was late 1970s feminist theory: journals like m/f and so on. I thought the replacement of ‘sex’ with ‘gender’ was a bad move politically, a suspect move. I thought that, like so much else in theory, it was leaving the body and corporeality out of the picture. So that’s how I started thinking about the sex/gender distinction and then I decided to write a critique of it, using Freud, because I thought with Freud you find the useful concepts of the ‘body ego’ and the ‘imaginary body’— that’s how it started. I wrote the first draft in 1981–1982 and presented it at various places and it wasn’t well received at all. I remember people used to get a bit annoyed. They would ask me a question and I would answer it and they would say ‘But, that’s not consistent with what you said earlier.’ There was a lot of confusion about it. It was published in Beyond Marxism: Interventions after Marx (1983) co-edited by Judith Allen, who was a really big supporter of that paper. She thought it was really important and interesting and she encouraged me to pursue the ideas behind it. So it was published and then I didn’t hear anything more about it for about five years. Really, five years later everyone spoke about that ‘important paper’. But initially it just disappeared into a black hole. So, the history of it is kind of interesting.

Hannah Arendt and Political Theory

The question of the contemporary relevance of the political theory of Hannah Arendt is rather timely. This review essay examines the continuing relevance of Arendt’s political theory in light of her lived experiences and previously unpublished manuscripts from the 1950s, as well as some recently published books on the influence of Hannah Arendt’s writings for contemporary political theory. Arendt demonstrates the strength of neopolitical theorising, one that makes possible a reintegration of thinking, action and experience for restoring the dignity of political theory into the new millennium. The Arendtian theorisation of the political (and its relation to the philosophical and the social) significantly reinvigorates contemporary discussions of the uniqueness of political theory, both within the discipline of political theory, between political theory and political science, and between various other disciplines, particularly philosophy, sociology and social theory. Responsibility and Judgment brings together unpublished writings from the last decade of Arendt’s life, as she attempted to understand the implications of Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). All the lectures, addresses and essays were written in English, a language Arendt acquired when she was 35, arriving in America as a refugee from Nazi-dominated Europe (p. xxxi). A core aspect of this book is Arendt’s ethical investigation, ‘Some Questions for Moral Philosophy’. Arendt is critical of existing standards of truth that do not allow human beings to understand what they are doing, much less distinguish between good and evil and right and wrong. Arendt’s earlier understandings of radical evil in her work on totalitarianism are expanded to understand banal evil, as a thoughtlessness that allows perpetrators to feel no remorse for their actions, forgetting them as soon as they are committed. Arendt’s phrase ‘the Australian Journal of Political Science, Vol. 42, No. 3, September, pp. 509–514

Review Article Irigaray and Difference: Towards a Culture of Two Subjects

The philosopher and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray has published a prolific number of books in the last three decades. Her earliest work sought to map out a space for the positive inscription of women’s specificity and desire. This task was both complex and highly political, as Irigaray sought to work within the disciplinary boundaries of philosophy and psychoanalysis utilising strategies of disruption and displacement to achieve two main goals. The first was to psychoanalyse psychoanalysis by using its techniques upon itself as an enabling device to get the other and its own discourse speaking. The second was to psychoanalyse philosophy by attending to the silences and gaps in philosophy itself. Irigaray’s work, situated with psychoanalysis and philosophy, constitutes a repetition with difference, and that difference is sexual difference. She takes on and uses aspects of psychoanalysis to deconstruct philosophy focusing upon the decentred subject, the ego and an extended critique of rationality. Irigaray urges strategic changes for promoting and speaking sexual difference that move beyond phallocentrism. Phallocentrism is about representational and discursive forms of women’s oppression (language, representation) and differs from the concept of patriarchy, which refers more to systematic and structural forms of oppression (economy, institutions). Phallocentric models conflate the two autonomous sexes (A–B) into a singular and universal model (A–not A). Irigaray encourages an active rewriting and inscription by women as a political strategy to counter the lack of positive inscriptions of women and women’s bodies, but she does not claim to speak for women. One of Irigaray’s key insights is the assertion that all theories of the subject are always appropriated by the masculine. While Irigaray does not support constructing women’s subjectivity in terms of equality with men, neither does she advocate doing away with the subject. Irigaray’s rethinking of subjectivity is not limited to the metaphysical constraints of the masculine subject, is not defined as a unitary, fully present and mastering subject, and does not consider the other as a repetition of the same. Irigaray is critical of the dominant modes of subjectivity that favour sameness at the expense of plurality and multiplicity. The female subject is not reducible to existing theories of the subject and Irigaray’s political project throughout all of her work has been to raise the possibility of

First above equals? Assessments of the Abbott Prime Ministership 2013–2015

A great deal has been said and written about Abbott over the years, particularly as opposition leader between 2009 and 2013 (Mitchell 2011; Grattan 2013; Kissel 2013; Marr 2013; Oakes 2013). Abbott achieved notoriety for arguably being the most ruthless opposition leader Australia has ever known and for having a leading role in creating a political culture characterised by negativity and disenchantment with politics (Walsh 2014). Abbott became prime minister at a time when many commentators discussed Australian politics in terms of crisis (Kelly 2014), political aberration (Walsh 2016) or the new normal (Watson 2015). There has been a great deal of academic and general interest in the revolving door of prime ministers with five prime ministers between 2010 and 2015 (Abjorensen 2015; Tiffen 2017). When the unthinkable happened and the Liberal party removed another first term prime minister, perhaps nobody was more blindsided than Abbott himself. One of the key aims of the review will be to assess the overall contribution these books make towards the discussion of the political issue at hand and this will be done by situating

Arendtian Thinking through Politics in Dark Times and Beyond

Hannah Arendt was one of the most original political thinkers to emerge in the twentieth century. As a political thinker, she did not attempt to indoctrinate her readers with a systematic political theory. Instead, she encouraged them to engage in thinking with her and with themselves. The following encounters with Arendt are noteworthy, each in its own way attempting to engage with Arendt’s political thinking, as well as thinking ‘with’ or ‘against’ her. In some ways this exposes an interesting tension in terms of thinking with or against Arendt. Given Arendt’s striking originality, I suggest that it may be more appropriate to think through Arendt about the political significance of thinking and the impact of experience on providing us with an understanding of the ‘unprecedented’. The collection edited by Berkowitz, Katz and Keenan originates from a conference at Bard College that commemorated what would have been Arendt’s one hundredth birthday. The conference theme ‘Thinking in Dark Australian Journal of Political Science, Vol. 46, No. 3, September 2011, pp. 573–581

Judith Butler and the Troubling of Politics and ‘the Political’

The publication of Judith Butler and Political Theory: Troubling Politics (2008), along with its companion volume Judith Butler’s Precarious Politics: Critical Encounters (2008) has been marked by the authors Chambers and Carver as ‘an intellectual event for political theory’ (p. i). They suggest taking ‘troublemaking’ seriously as a core theme and strategy of Butler’s work. ‘Indeed, we contend that the trope of ‘‘troubling’’ can serve both as a guide to grasping Butler’s central interactions with and contributions to contemporary political theory and as a method for putting them to work. Troubling Politics therefore names Butler’s theoretical stratagems and political conceptions’ (p. 2). As Butler doesn’t relegate the role of troublemaker this makes her a precise, difficult and key thinker of ‘the political’. The goal of Judith Butler and Political Theory: Troubling Politics is an attempt to understand the ways Butler gets herself and her readers into trouble, as well as examining the ways she has made trouble and what effects her troubling has had on politics and the political more generally. By bringing Butler into perspective as a political thinker, the authors hope ‘to bring to light her political theory as a politics of troubling and a troubling of politics’ (p. 2). In short, they seek ‘to introduce Butler as a troublemaker’ (p. 2): Australian Journal of Political Science, Vol. 45, No. 2, June 2010, pp. 291–298

INTERGENERATIONAL DIALOGUE IN THE AGE OF POST-FEMINISM

MW: In the final chapter of the second edition of Anne Summers’ landmark Damned Whores and God’s Police: The Colonisation of Women in Australia ([1975], 1994), ‘Letter to the Next Generation’, Summers recounts that in the 1980s she was ‘mortified’ to realise that many younger women considered feminists of the 1960s and 1970s, and feminism more generally, as irrelevant to their contemporary lives. Summers suggests that this may in some ways be because feminists of the 1960s and 1970s had not adequately explained themselves to future generations. Emily Maguire was born a year after Damned Whores and God’s Police was first published. Influenced by Summers’ book, her recently published Princesses and Pornstars: Sex, Power and Identity (2008) is a fascinating account of women born after the women’s liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s. This contemporary generation understand themselves as ‘people not genders’, yet the lived experience of their 20s and 30s has collided with the myth of a post-feminist world to provide a new generation of what Maguire refers to as ‘accidental feminists’. This Roundtable seeks to explore the wider implications of the emergence of ‘accidental feminists’ in a supposedly post-feminist age for a rethinking of intergenerational dialogue between feminists today, as well as underlying the importance of lived experience in shaping women’s understanding of contemporary political realities in Australia and internationally. Welcome here today to this event which marks 30 years of the Women’s Caucus of the Australian Political Studies Association. I am pleased to present Anne Summers, Emily Maguire and Marian Sawer and congratulate Marian Sawer, as a co-founder of the Women’s Caucus with Carole Pateman, on the success and longevity of the Woman’s Caucus on its 30th birthday. Professor Sawer has also been honoured by the Australian Political Studies Association with the Lifetime Achievement Award (2009). There clearly are still problems with equality between men and women in contemporary Australian society. I disagree with Anne Summers that somehow her generation had not adequately told their story to the younger generation. It seems to me that there are many other factors at play, including the rise of individualism and the shift

Simone de Beauvoir: Political Thinker and Philosophical Writer

The question of Simone de Beauvoir’s status as a political thinker and a philosopher binds all of these works together and, in some ways, this central contemporary question remains a rather baffling paradox. This is because de Beauvoir herself often claimed to be a writer rather than a philosopher. Despite this, many contemporary Beauvoirian scholars, particularly Margaret A. Simons, seem exasperated with Beauvoir’s refusal to recognise herself as a philosopher. In fact, Simons has gone to great lengths to demonstrate that there is a Beauvoirian existentialism and that de Beauvoir is a philosopher despite her protestations to the contrary. But what does all this mean? Is it reasonable to expect that de Beauvoir knows what her own being is in relation to the world and is capable of identifying that contribution, or is it more reasonable to accept the interpretation of those like Simons who have interviewed de Beauvoir and researched her earlier Diary? In many ways, this question