Nicole Moore

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.

National parapraxis : sex and forgetting in Australian censorship history

Can censorship be thought of as a process of forgetting, motivated by repressed sexual meaning, via the mechanism of parapraxis, as Freud described it? The present article pursues theoretical models for a new history of literary obscenity in Australia. It is an excursion through Freud and psychoanalysis, memory models for history, Michel Foucault on the archive, neo-Marxists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri on colonial modernity, and touches on feminist critiques. It turns finally to systematically examine the archived files of the Commonwealth Literary Censorship Board, arguing that the tension between empirical approaches and theoretical abstraction is both produced by and overwhelmed by the detailed complexity of archival sources.

Treasonous Sex: Birth Control Obscenity Censorship and White Australia*

Your body is your own; nobody owns it, nobody has any rights to dictate to you how you shall use it. It is no business of God or man what you do with it. (Margaret Leonora Eyles, Commonsense about ...

Red Love as Seditious Sex: Bans on Proletarian Women’s Writing in Australia in the 1930s

Compared to the rest of the English-speaking world, Australia was a severe censor of books throughout the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. Under the 1901 Customs Act, which restricted the importation of obscene, blasphemous, and seditious goods or articles, including publications, Australian Customs most assertively targeted obscenity, in the varied representation of sex of all kinds. Blasphemy was a less frequent offense but a live one, while increasingly, in the wake of World War I and the Russian Revolution, political offense, termed sedition, galvanized concern. Drawing on wartime statutes, sedition was defined by the 1920 Crimes Act as “to advocate the overthrow of civilized government.” Political censorship of literature, including novels, reached its peak in the 1930s, as Customs and the Attorney General’s department under the conservative United Australia Party’s government acted to curtail, obstruct, and prohibit the importation of English-language, identifiably leftist writing from the publishing hubs of New York, London, and Moscow. By the mid-1930s, the list of titles banned as seditious numbered more than two hundred.1

UnAUSTRALIA: The Cultural Studies Association of Australasia Annual Conference, 6–8 December 2006

Like Brigadoon, another mythic non-place that appears for a few days and then disappears, UnAustralia shimmered into contingent being for the few days of this conference. Held at the University of Canberra late last year, the annual conference of the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia (CSAA) nominated UnAustralia as its theme. Very popular with the 150-plus presenters, UnAustralia became a conjured mirage of negative possibility and a platform for estranged or defamiliarised critique on many topics. Reversing the logic through which a set of Australian values could be nominated for a citizenry and used to exclude potential migrants, UnAustralia offered instead a multivoiced set of revealing unvalues and non-certainties. With feminist scholarship strongly represented and a significant proportion of papers conducting more or less specifically gendered analysis of social and popular cultural formations, the conference was typical of the CSAA. As an indication of the contemporary state of the field, however, it was striking to see attention turned so directly onto the national or the nation-state. Deconstructed thoroughly by the originary figures of cultural studies in Australia in the 1980s, mythic ‘Australia’ has been superseded as a theorised object by the concerns of Indigenous critiques, postcolonialism, globalisation studies and transnationalism, as well as internationalised gender studies, expanding beyond the national as an exhausted and illusory frame. Its return, as the negative UnAustralia, by which trope cultural studies figures itself as outside or even refused by the national, is an indication of the degree to which the Australian political climate has succeeded in undermining the ideals attached to those understandings. Larissa Behrendt gave the opening keynote after a welcome from the traditional owners, and an outline of the state of cultural studies from Paul Magee, the conference ‘director’. Characteristically lucid and galvanising, Behrendt’s talk posed the question of the continual failure of mainstream Australia to address Indigenous disadvantage, under the title ‘Australian Values, Australian Fair’. Noting the ways in which modes of exclusion enacted in the constitution abide in federal power, despite the 1967 amendment, Behrendt argued for a civil rights model of explicit inclusion instead, as she has elsewhere. With particular mention of the recent press coverage of the rates of sexual abuse in Indigenous communities, she joined other women in pointing out that Indigenous women had been raising this issue for decades, with nothing like the same response from white authorities. Klaus Neumann’s keynote was delivered on the pavement of Canberra’s ‘Civic’, the mall-like public centre of the designed national capital, with its appropriately generic