Susan Sheridan

Words and Things: Some Feminist Debates on Culture and Materialism

The subject I want to address here is a division which has plagued feminism for almost two decades. This is what some see as a major intellectual divide between cultural and social feminist analyses, brought about by feminism’s apparent ‘turn to culture’ under the intellectual impact of post-structuralist theories. This shift is said to have displaced the primacy of social and economic relations in analyses of women’s situation, and put in their place, at the top of the feminist agenda, issues of sexuality, subjectivity and textuality. Of course, this intellectual shift has had important political dimensions. For those feminists sympathetic to the ‘turn to culture’, it meant a productive and possibly irreversible move away from the dominance of empirical social analysis. For the sceptics it has been cause for regret that a focus on subjectivity has eclipsed questions of social structures and collectivities, and that the fashion for deconstructing discourses has often meant that the discourse is torn from its institutional embeddedness. Most of these sceptics have been social scientists, although many historians, sociologists and anthropologists now attend to the language of their sources as a matter of course. Yet in a climate where literary and philosophical studies appear to dominate, Marxist cultural historian and theorist Terry Lovell, in her Introduction to the anthology Feminist Cultural Studies, regrets in particular the lack of a feminist political economy of culture. For yet others, the ‘turn to culture’ was a marker of the separation between women working in the ‘real’ world and women working in an ‘ivory tower’. To my mind, this is a particularly fruitless way of stating the problem, one that leads to endless political posturing, claims to political correctness—for example, the move to defend a supposedly ‘real’ left against a phoney ‘cultural’ left, as Martha Nussbaum did in the American journal New Republic, opposing the ‘hip defeatism of Judith Butler’ with her focus on the symbolic against the ‘real struggles’ of feminists concerned with the ‘material conditions of real women’. Yet beyond the polemics and name-calling, there are important issues that need to be addressed. They are, at one level, issues concerning identity politics and the relationships among various axes of social difference—gender, race, class, sexuality—and these have been addressed in the recent debate between Judith Butler and Nancy Fraser in the pages of the New Left Review. At another level, there are issues concerning the

WHITE WOMEN WRITING IN THE CONTACT ZONE

Abstract Margaret Allens PhD thesis (1991) was concerned with South Australian women writers of the colonial period. A particularly exciting discovery was the work of Catherine Martin, who has been the subject of Allens sustained biographical research over many years. Among Martins publications was The Incredible Journey, the first Australian novel to feature an Aboriginal woman as its central character. Largely due to Margaret Allens subsequent work, Catherine Martins literary reputation has grown; and so too has research and debate about race relations in colonial Australia. Allens work on white women writing in the contact zone and other themes has made a vital contribution to the emergence of critical race and whiteness studies in Australia. In this paper I would like to offer a salute to her achievement in this area, and illustrate some implications of her approach in relation to the novels of a later South Australian writing about Aboriginal people in the contact zone, Nancy Cato.

Historical novels challenging the national story

Historical novels dealing with the colonial past have always played a key role in constructing popular understandings of the national story in Australia, whether by reinforcing its legends or challenging them. In recent debates historical fiction’s claims to authority have been perceived as competing with the work of historical scholars. By considering two such novels of the 1970s, Jessica Anderson’s The Commandant and Thea Astley’s A Kindness Cup, this essay offers a historical perspective on some questions of the relationship between historical novels and historical scholarship. This article has been peer-reviewed.

Thea Astley: a woman among the satirists of post-war modernity

Modernity differs from other kinds of periodization in possessing a normative as well as a descriptive dimension-one can be ‘for’ or ‘against’ modernity in a way that one cannot be for or against the Renaissance, for example. The symbolic force of the term lies in its enunciation of a process of differentiation, an act of separation from the past. The rhetorical power carried by the idea of the modern is, as Felski points out, combined with its factual ambiguity—there is no readily agreed definition of modernity, not even as an historical period. Furthermore, modernist art, ‘characterized by such features as aesthetic self-consciousness, stylistic fragmentation, and a questioning of representation... bore a highly ambivalent and often critical relationship to the processes of modernization’. These tensions and indeterminacies are magnified when we ask about the relationship between modernist art and popular modernity in mid-twentieth-century Australia. Certainly there has been, retrospectively at least, some recognition of an upsurge of innovation in the literary as well as the visual arts in the 1950s and 1960s, yet its relationship to earlier aesthetic modernisms of the 1920s remains unexplored. The presence or absence of women writers and artists in post-war modernism has barely been touched upon. Even more pertinently for my present subject, there has been minimal discussion of the relationship between post-war literary modernism and the normative force of post-war modernity, the modernity of post-war popular culture and consumerism. Consequently, it is no simple matter to sketch out the context of debates within which Thea Astleys early satires on suburban and small-town life need to be placed.

Indexing The Australian Women's Weekly

The Womens Studies Unit at Flinders University is undertaking a thematic and textual analysis of the Australian Womens Weekly over the period 1946–71. Preparatory to this task they have undertaken the creation of a detailed data base index of the Weekly for six years through this period. Because the Weekly covers the domestic sphere of life alongside the public, indexing it has created special demands on a thesaurus. This article discusses the peculiarities of indexing a womens magazine and the issues raised in choosing a thesaurus to act as an authority for descriptors. Persons interested in purchasing a copy of the index when it becomes available should contact the Womens Studies Unit at Flinders University.

Among the Reeds : A Lost Novel of Women’s Emancipation

Set in Sydney in 1913 but not published until 1933, Among the Reeds is the sole novel written by Alice Muskett, a woman better known as a painter in the period of women’s emancipation in Australia. It was published under the pen-name “Jane Laker”, and takes the form of Jane’s journal, over the period of a year. This chapter reads the novel as a perceptive and optimistic account of the key moment of feminist and modernist transition – until the shadow of the Great War falls across that sunlit Sydney world. This historically significant novel has long been out of print and the chapter explores the way it dramatises women’s conflicts over marriage and career.

Women’s leadership in writers’ associations

In thinking about women, leadership and literature, I have passed up the opportunity to celebrate writers like Henry Handel Richardson, Christina Stead and Judith Wright, whose creative achievements call for the discourse of heroic individualism. Rather, in accord with the feminist challenges to conventional concepts of leadership outlined by Amanda Sinclair’s leading chapter in this book, I looked for women who have sought to influence public opinion about literary matters and advocate in various ways for writers. In Australia women’s literary activism of this kind includes furthering the cause of Australian literature, as Miles Franklin did throughout her life, or forming writers’ associations which work to ensure the political, literary and economic independence of writers. Specifically feminist literary activism involves drawing attention to the previously neglected traditions of women’s writing and nurturing contemporary female writers, as feminist publishers, booksellers and academics have done since the 1970s.

Feminism and cultural studies: Same or different?

Terry Lovell (ed.), Feminist Cultural Studies, 2 vols, International Library of Studies in Media and Culture (Edward Elgar) Aldershot, UK, 1995. Glenn Jordan and Chris Weedon, Cultural Politics: Class, Gender, Race and the Postmodern World (Blackwell) Oxford, 1995. Rosemary Buikema and Anneke Smelik (eds), Womens Studies and Culture: A Feminist Introduction (Zed Books) London and New Jersey, 1995. Xtext, no. 1, August 1996, ‘Crossing Performances’.