Browsing the modern kitchen - a feast of gender, place and culture (part 1)

Assembling 10 essays from around the globe which engage variously with the space in which food preparation occurs—the kitchen—revealed stunning diversity but also commonalities. In this first of two sets of theme papers on this vital but often unexamined domestic space, the discourse of modernity unites the look and use of twentieth-century kitchens in Australia, Britain and Finland. Imbued with notions of scientific management, the modern kitchen had some common designs which prescribed women's place within it—first as the main occupant and then as the family overseer. The construction of this semi-private space also involved particular domestic technologies which, as the new century dawns, now literally connect the kitchen to the world beyond via the internet fridge. This Introduction begins the two-part feast of gender, place and culture—with an overview of Australia and sketch of subsequent essays—Supski on mid-century migrant Australia, Saarikangas on Finland, Bennett on rural Britain and Watkins on the fridge.

Ground truthing : explorations in a creative region

Australia’s evocative Mallee region is rich with histories, impressions and geographical complexities. It is also a microcosm of a world in turmoil.

Ground Truthing allows the Mallee to speak: to show its nurturing and renewable self. In searching for the creative principles that bring the Mallee into being, Carter digs, plots and weaves a poetic passage. A Wotjobaluk man, 'Jowley', the poet John Shaw Neilson and pastoralist William Stanbridge are among characters that give creative access to the region. Their voices mingle with those of vanished peoples and an ecological future crying out for renegotiation.

Through this spatial history of the Mallee, we see that regions contain 'the region of regions' that is the creative key to the production and sustenance of all places.

The performing frame

This project explores the ways that creative practices—improvised movement, choreographed dance, and digital video—produce new knowledge about the sociability of public space. In other words, it uses various theoretical concepts and practical strategies to document and analyse the ways people inhabit and sometimes subvert public spaces — such as plazas, malls and piazzas — as part of their everyday experience. Drawing on concepts developed within the fields of performance theory, spatial history, cultural geography and social theory, the project will build a methodological toolbox for understanding the relationships between the diverse groups that use public spaces in Melbourne, Australia. This ‘toolbox’ will subsequently be used to understand analogous public spaces in other parts of the world to generate comparative data about spatial sociability. The research will enable an innovative way of mapping social, civic and political relations in space through a series of creative interventions, and will reveal the politics of everyday movement while exposing tensions between the spaces of public culture — those framed and legitimated by state institutions — and what Michael Warner calls ‘Counter-Publics.’ That is, those oppositional groups who actively seek to use public space in subversive or unauthorised ways.

This project documents a series of performative interventions designed to harness the untapped potential of various forms of street performance genres to function as tools that can produce new ways of understanding the politics of movement in public space. These ‘interventions’ will be generated through a series of practical performance and movement workshops that will draw on street theatre techniques, contact improvisation, Laban movement analysis and contemporary dance choreography. The project will focus on a series of dyadic relationships: self and other, inside and outside, centre and periphery that are relevant to human interaction in public space.
Street performers — musicians, acrobats, jugglers, magicians, mimes and so on — seek public spaces with high volumes of pedestrian traffic in order to maximise their ability to draw an audience and make a living. These performers who create temporary performance zones alter the flow and intensity of movement around them, thereby transforming the plazas, piazzas, town squares and subways favoured by buskers. Some of these performers interact with their audience more than others, and are potentially capable of telling us something about the politics of space. The practice of ‘shadowing’ the movements of passers-by is an increasingly popular form of public entertainment around the world.

Tourist snapshot : the mediating gaze of the Sydney Opera House

There has already been much scholarly work produced about the Sydney Opera House, discussing the production of its architecture, historical and political context, and its symbolic meaning to Sydney. However little scholarly attention has been paid to the way this building is represented through tourist practices of photography. The essay attempts to bring an architectural perspective to the study of this tourist practice, which is usually addressed from the disciplines of cultural geography, sociology and anthropology. The essay considers the above questions by the analysis of some 300 images sourced from the photo sharing website Flickr (www.flickr.com). It draws on John Urry's notion of the 'tourist gaze' which describes how places are structured and regulated by the visual. The essay then uses Jonas Larsen's work, which position tourist photography as a performance of social relations to argue that the activity of photographing the Sydney Opera House is more than a ritual of consumption, and can be seen as an embodied performance located at the intersection of space, experience and image.

Antisubjectivism and the (spectral) return of consciousness in landscape research

This paper analyses the changing conceptions of consciousness within landscape research over a critical period from the late 20th century to the present. The 1980s and 1990s mark a radical shift in the framing of consciousness away from psychological, perceptual, or experiential perspectives towards an ontology of consciousness as signifier, cultural artifact, and ideology. In cultural geography and the visual arts, these reframings can be characterised as anti subjectivist in that they do not attempt to problematize human consciousness so much as deactivate it and disqualify it from discussion. I draw out the theoretical and critical foundations of these antisubjectivist approaches as well as the subsequent opening out of the notion of landscape in more recent discussion. This ‘opening out’ implicates a more complex reengagement with minds, bodies, and landscapes and with the contested distinctions between subject and object. At the same time however, consciousness is seldom formulated explicitly within the literature and hence consciousness often occupies a spectral presence in the landscape of landscape research. I use one of my own paintings, Dalek in Landscape, to presage the discussion and attempt to highlight the tensions between these ideological, cultural and biological dimensions of consciousness at play within the landscape idea. Given the broader adoption of these anti-subjectivist developments within the academy, the example of landscape serves as a potentially useful case study for thinking upon the changing conceptions of consciousness in cognate creative and academic disciplines.

Feminist geography 30 years on : they came, they saw but did they conquer?

Feminist geography emerged in Australia in the 1980s, spurred on by the local Women’s Liberation Movement and inspired by the academic activism emanating from England, Canada and the United States. Producing critical evaluations of male-dominated geography departments, curriculum and journals, feminist geographers proceeded to stake claims in each of these spheres while also substantially revising the content of geographical research. There were significant interventions into urban, social, cultural and economic geography, in environmental discourses as well as into the gendered research process. Having arrived, identified and addressed these issues, the discipline was critiqued and transformed over the 1980s and 1990s. Crucial to the strength of this critique were key individuals, the Gender and Geography Group within the Institute of Australian Geographers and the role played by journals such as Geographical Research and the Australian Geographer in providing spaces for feminist work. However, as the new century dawned, the agenda changed and the anger and urgency dissipated as the broader and university contexts altered. It was a period of consolidation, as feminist insights and approaches were focused on key subject areas – such as the home, identity and sexuality – and became more mainstream. But is this work and the presence of women in the academy an indication of success or of co-option? This paper will trace these various shifts – from the arrival to the mainstreaming of feminist geography - and analyse what might be read as a retreat from feminist politics and practice within the discipline in Australia. I will conclude by re-stating the case to advance a new feminist agenda in the face of continuing gender inequality within the academy, in Australia and across the globe.

Cultural diplomacy, cosmopolitanism and global hierarchy at the Shanghai Expo

In 2010, the city of Shanghai hosted the largest and most spectacular World's Fair ever. Shanghai Expo attracted a staggering 73 million visitors, around 98% of whom were domestic Chinese, and involved the participation of 190 countries. As a forum of "virtual tourism," the event is significant given the rapid and long-term growth in outbound Chinese tourism. This article pursues a closer reading of how "the world" was performed and exhibited to these visitors. Oriented by two theoretical considerations - the spatial configuration of the expo site and its cosmopolitan imagination - the article considers how the format of the Expo revealed and declared certain elements of the global, while simultaneously effacing and squeezing out others. The Expo is thus interpreted as an important mechanism in the creation of a new national citizenry in China and as part of the ceremonialization of a global polity of a "family of nations."

Beating space and time: historical gay sex and queer cultural geographies of masculinities

This article focuses on historical queer cultural geographies of masculinities and to do so it focuses on two cases/places. The first is an archival case/place: a partial assembly of documents of beats and their uses during and in the wake of Gay Liberation in Australia. The second is a literary case/place: Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, a canonical twentieth-century imbrication of male homosexuality and geography. This article will seek to rationalize the mobilization of these two asynchronous cases/places through the insights that both afford, when brought together, for elaborating contributions that queer readings of Nietzsche can make to contemporary queer theories of space, time and masculinities.