Maryanne Dever

Women, Research Performance and Work Context.

This article presents findings from a qualitative study focused on the conditions that support high research productivity in women. Interviewees were all active researchers and many were national or international leaders in their respective fields. While personal factors such as motivation, focus, and good scholarly habits were identified as influencing their research success, interviewees also placed significant emphasis on aspects of their workplace culture and practice (teaching and research connections, degrees of flexibility, work–family interface) that they felt were equally important in determining their options and opportunities for conducting research. This suggests that universities concerned with enhancing the research performance of staff need to recognize—and respond to—how workplace dynamics and culture shape individual research participation.

Housework, Wages and Money: The Category of the Female Principal Breadwinner in Financial Capitalism

Abstract According to a range of authors and popular commentators, the post-Fordist socioeconomic order has produced a new category of female labourer, the ‘female principal breadwinner’. This article opens out this category of worker to critical scrutiny. We suggest that while the very idea of the female principal breadwinner is open to all manner of existing lines of feminist critique, beyond this it forces a confrontation with a number of issues vital to feminist analyses of transformations to womens labour—both waged and unwaged—in contemporary financialised post-Fordism. We pursue two issues in particular. First, transformations to the labour of social reproduction—including transformations to the measurement and valuation of domestic labour—and second, the financialisation (and shifting capacities) of wages specifically and money more generally. We suggest that if transformations to womens labour are to be fully grasped and understood feminist theory must renew and rethink its analyses of domestic labour, wages and money.

Gender and Labour in New Times: An Introduction

This special issue is concerned with Gender and labour in new times. It confronts transformations to the economy—especially financialised post-Fordist economies—and how such transformations are entangled in rearrangements and reconfigurations of labour, particularly (although not exclusively) of women’s labour. It is therefore concerned with the gender order of post-Fordist labour. In addressing this order, Gender and labour in new times necessarily confronts the ongoing dismantling of the Fordist sexual contract (Pateman 1988) and the still unfolding contours of the post-Fordist sexual contract (McDowell 1991; McRobbie 2007; Adkins 2008). In so doing, it also necessarily confronts the key process driving contemporary capitalist accumulation: namely, the ongoing financialisation of the economy. Indeed, we maintain that any consideration of the post-Fordist sexual contract must place this process at its core, not least because—as analyses offered by the contributors here elaborate—financialisation is hardwired (and not incidental) to reconfigurations of the contours of labour and life in the contemporary present, including to reconfigurations of women’s labour. Ongoing financialisation is by no means the only concern of this special issue. For, in confronting the gender order of post-Fordist labour, it is impossible not to take into account the 2007–2008 global financial crisis, global economic recession and the roll-out and further entrenchment of austerity programmes and austerity measures ostensibly aimed at the management (and reduction) of debt. While contributors offer analyses of these latter, they are nonetheless wary of analyses that focus solely on moments of crisis, exception and breakdown. As Fiona Allon argues powerfully in her contribution, such a focus can direct attention away from the ordinary and normalised presence of contemporary economic processes and practices at the level of everyday life, a presence which is of profound significance in regard to the labour demanded from many women in post-Fordism. Indeed, in their analyses of the reconfiguration of women’s labour in the time of post-Fordism, the contributors to this special issue open out a range of issues which are often bracketed and sidestepped in discussions of recent economic events, as well as in the analyses of post-Fordist accumulation more generally. These issues include:

GRETA GARBO'S FOOT, OR, SEX, SOCKS AND LETTERS

In November 2006 I found myself staring at item no. 80 from Box 23 of the Greta Garbo material held at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia. Item 80 is an envelope from the Pont-Royal Hotel on the front of which is written ‘Greta’s foot Sept. 1958’. Inside is a pencil tracing of Garbo’s foot extending across two small sheets of unlined notepaper. I held the two pieces of paper in mid-air and stared at them with what I hoped was a look of sufficient scholarly intensity to satisfy the two archivists looking on. ‘Looks about a size 8’, I have written in my notes, but in my excitement I failed to note down whether it was her left or her right foot. Elsewhere in the collection*that of Mercedes de Acosta*I encountered a yellow cotton ankle sock with a lipstick kiss still visible upon it. Further afield in the same papers, there is a single silk stocking that once belonged to Marlene Dietrich. Nowhere present is the pair of slightly used socks that Greta generously offered to Mercedes in a note from 1938. But this is not what took me to Philadelphia; no, this visit was the culmination of a six-year desire to see what ‘nothing’ looked like. What took me on this hiding to ‘nothing’? In April 2000, the world’s press reported on the opening of a long-embargoed cache of letters from Greta Garbo to Mercedes de Acosta, the Spanish-born aristocrat turned screenwriter widely thought to have been Garbo’s lover. At issue was whether the letters would somehow ‘prove’ the nature of the relationship between the two women. De Acosta had met Garbo in Hollywood in June 1931 at the home of Austrian-born actress and screenwriter Salka Viertel. The usually guarded Garbo evidently was quite taken with de Acosta, as she initiated further contact. The two continued to keep company and their pairing received occasional mentions in fan magazines. Tension entered the relationship the following year when Garbo refused to permit de Acosta to accompany her to Sweden. Feeling herself to be abandoned, de Acosta embarked on a new affair with rival star Marlene Dietrich whose interest in the lovelorn Mercedes had apparently been piqued by the Garbo connection. The affair with Dietrich, while passionate and exciting, was relatively short lived; Dietrich tired not only of de Acosta’s stifling behaviour but also of her endless monologues on the subject of Garbo. The Garbo letters were deposited by de Acosta in the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia in 1960 with the condition that they remain sealed until 10 years after the star’s death. There are some 90 items, including 55 letters and a variety of telegrams, florists’ cards and ephemera: scraps of paper, mailing labels, a feather. These date from 1931 or 1932*the period of their initial meeting*to 1959, shortly before Garbo broke off contact as a result of the publication of de Acosta’s autobiography, Here Lies the Heart

Literary archives, materiality and the digital

In the field of literary studies, critical engagement with the materiality of archived artefacts has been rather limited and, as Johanna Drucker observes, ‘locked in a peculiar straight-jacket literalism’ characterised by ‘little actual skill in the undertaking’. The advent of the digital and the debates concerning the material status of digitised and born-digital collections, however, have brought a new intensity to reflections on the materially embodied status of traditional archival collections. Indeed, as various contributors to this special issue demonstrate, the arrival of digital technologies has provided a unique vantage point from which to theorise materiality anew and to address questions that were inadequately explored or unsuccessfully resolved in relation to traditional analogue sources and that we now recognise persist in relation to digital forms and formats. That is to say, these technologies have highlighted the assumptions and blind spots that have structured our existing practices and paradigms, pushing us to a fuller recognition, for example, of the relationship between matter and meaning and about the difference a specific medium makes. This is what Katherine Hayles identifies as the ‘something gained’ in an area of discussion often characterised by anxious discourses of ‘loss’. Thus, we have begun to understand how archived paper fonds – or individual documents – might be understood to do things or perform in ways that the digitised or born-digital cannot, and vice versa. This distinction, in turn, has generated novel research questions about how we work with such artefacts. The articles in this issue take up some of these questions, as they invite several others: how might the availability or otherwise of digital surrogates transform the conditions of scholarly engagement for specific literary holdings? Do different modes of material instantiation produce different objects of study? Do these objects demand different (and possibly new) methods? How might specific digital endeavours better meet the needs and expectations of literary researchers? Why choose not to digitise? These are just some of the provocations offered by authors in this special issue. The inspiration for the issue came from the inaugural meeting of the Archive Futures Research Network at the Grande Bibliothèque in Montreal in June 2013. That gathering brought archivists and information science specialists together with humanities researchers to track some of the new conversations taking place around materiality and method in the context of the increasingly digitally mediated nature of archives, archiving and archivebased humanities research. Although participants recognised the major shifts that digital innovations are producing in the conceptual and practical dimensions of building and maintaining literary archives and in the forms of research conducted within and around them, they were keen to explore these issues on a less macro and more granular level so as to tease out how such shifts organise specific inquiries and interventions. What follows from this is a series of articles that join the practical and speculative in useful and occasionally provocative ways.

Provocations on the pleasures of archived paper

Digital formats are often popularly imagined to spell the ‘end’ of paper. In this essay I pose a series of questions about the importance of materiality for how researchers understand and work with archived paper documents. Drawing examples from research among literary papers and personal correspondence, I highlight the ways in which paper traditionally ‘disappears’ from the researcher’s view and ask whether the conditions of the digital turn may in fact provide for a return to ‘thinking through paper’.

Academic labour on-the-move

As we write this editorial, a set of lively debates and discussions is unfolding in regard to the labour associated with academic publishing. This includes not simply the labour of producing standard research outputs—scholarly articles, books and chapters— but also the labour involved in the production of new kinds of outputs, outputs which are often explicitly encouraged by academic institutions, but at the same time are not recognised and counted as research outputs proper. We have in mind here outputs such as articles in The Conversation, a publication which stands in a space between academe and journalism and whose pages are filled with short ‘sound-bite’ pieces typically authored by academics. Such pieces usually comprise evidence-based news analysis, research reporting and evidence-based opinion pieces. Undoubtedly fuelled by the impact agenda, as well as by the incessant desire on the part of Universities to increase their brand awareness and influence, The Conversation’s global reach is expanding. Most universities are extremely keen and some provide media office support for academic staff to ‘do’ a Conversation piece. Indeed, in return for their financial support, The Conversation itself offers institutional (i.e. university) level metrics on who has published in the outlet and whose articles have the most readers and the most comments, metrics which in turn encourage institutional level calibration and internal competition. Yet surely the emergence of this kind of publication and the encouragement by universities for academic staff to publish in it demands a series of searching questions. If these publications do not count in metrics measuring individuals’ research outputs, why should academics take on this labour? Certainly, there may be benefits in potentially expanding an audience for research and its findings (after all, The Conversation is not only read by academics but is explicitly competing to become a standard news publication and hence is competing for global news audiences). As well, publication in The Conversation can act as a proxy metric for research impact. But beyond these individual benefits there is a more profound set of questions that the emergence of publications such as The Conversation raises around the nature of academic labour. As the blogging sociologist Mark Carrigan (2015) has recently asked, is there a risk in such developments that in the face of labour market precarity, academics, and especially junior and aspiring academics, will seek to differentiate themselves via such labour? In so doing, is there a further risk that such academics will come to be positioned ‘as a reserve army of well-educated quasijournalists who may write badly but will work for free?’ Indeed, Carrigan asks, ‘might we increasingly see academics become journalists?’ Certainly, we would suggest that publishing for The Conversation and similar outlets calls upon an entirely different skill set (including writing skill set) to that of scholarly writing and publishing. In this sense, The Conversation can be located as paradigmatic exemplar of how academic labour is on-themove. But we would also ask how—if at all—will universities deal with the paradox that they are increasingly calling on this labour from their academic staff but are not formally recognising it? Indeed, should this lack of recognition be located as yet a further example

Photographs and manuscripts: working in the archive

This essay opens out a series of questions concerning matter and materiality in the age of the digital via engagement with the literary papers of Australian writer Eve Langley (1904–74), held in the Mitchell Library in Sydney. Among those papers is a single black and white snapshot labelled ‘The Manuscript Cupboard, 1970’, which shows three shelves of a household cupboard filled with exercise books, folders and paper-wrapped parcels. The same collection also contains a series of colour snapshots showing Langley’s manuscripts arranged in a variety of tableaux laid out across her untended lawn. That Langley should have first taken and then preserved such photos is perhaps not surprising given her deep attachment to material conditions of writing and, in particular, to manuscripts and paper. For Langley, to write was quite simply to inhabit paper and she framed the experience of writing as one of immersion, not just in ideas and words, but literally in paper. Framed by a consideration of the anxieties around materiality provoked by the emergence of digital technologies, this essay explores paper’s presence as an integral dimension of the experience of being in the archive and working with original materials.

Greer now: editorial

Germaine Greer is undoubtedly one of the West’s most iconic feminists, and her public visibility never seems towane. Overmany decades she has worked actively to shape the public meanings that accrue to feminism. The academy, however, has always had an ambivalent relation to Greer – especially in light of her status as a star feminist author. While many feminist critics have sought to destabilise the troublesome academic–popular binary which privileges the former as the more ‘authentic’ form of feminism, the lack of a sustained critical engagement with Greer reveals that it persists. Even in Australia, Greer’s immense contribution to feminist thought is rarely situated within academic scholarship. Not only is it uncommon for undergraduate students to be given Greer’s work on survey courses on feminist theory but there have been surprisingly few critical studies of The Female Eunuch let alone her subsequent publications. Yet The Female Eunuch is one of second-wave feminism’s most widely consumed publications, and its celebrity author has come to embody and indeed expand our understanding of second-wave feminism in a way that few others have. The lack of critical attention to thiswork and its author is evenmore remarkable, given that research seeking to explore women’s understandings of modern feminism has shown that Greer has played a pivotal role, with interviewees often seeing her as synonymous with the second wave (Bulbeck 1997; Dux and Simic 2008). Similarly, letters received by Greer from readers of The Female Eunuch make clear that the book, and the copious media appearances of its author, had a transformative impact on many women. Indeed, the enduring cultural reverberations of Greer and her groundbreaking ‘feminist blockbuster’ are evident in the articles contained here, with a number being preoccupied with teasing out new understandings of its production and reception. The Female Eunuch has not been Greer’s only substantial contribution, however. A prolific writer, Greer has produced a series of popular and academic works, including The Obstacle Race (1979), Sex and Destiny (1984), Daddy, We Hardly Knew You (1989), The Change (1991), Slip-Shod Sybils: Recognition, Rejection and the Women Poets (1995), The Whole Woman (1999), The Boy (2003), Shakespeare’s Wife (2007), On Rage (2008), and most recently, White Beech (2013). As these titles suggest, throughout her career she has intervened in, and helped precipitate, public debates well beyond feminism and, as Donald McManus demonstrates in this issue, she also built an academic career based on her initial training as a literary scholar. Nevertheless, it is undoubtedly her status as an iconic feminist that has endured across her entire public career. That is,

It's not about the women: gender equality in research

The Australian Research Council (ARC) has recently released its Gender Equality Action Plan 2015–16 in which it pledges to carry out a program of monitoring, evaluating and raising awareness in regard to a range of existing and new gender equality initiatives. New initiatives include changes to eligibility requirements for the Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) to allow for career interruptions and investigating unconscious bias training for ARC College of Experts and/or assessors. While the Action Plan is extremely welcome—and indeed overdue—the short time frame for the plan arguably raises questions about its potential effectiveness. Moreover, existing ARC data already suggest clear areas and issues for attention in regard to gender equality, issues which we suggest require systematic and focused attention across the sector (and not just by the ARC in regard to its schemes and internal processes). Consider, for example, the following outcomes for women and men for ARC Fellowships which provide a useful shorthand guide to success at key career stages: