Dream dolls : misogyny and political mythology in fin de siecle Australian culture

Examines Australian nationalism from the 1890s onwards through the interaction between cultural stereotypes of the feminine and issues of identity, citizenship and political constructions of "democracy". The employment of an idealised masculine aesthetic as catalyst to creating an imagined state was compared in Australia and Wilhelmine Germany.

Indonesian masculinities : images of men in Indonesian TV advertising

This article examines images of men in Indonesian popular culture, focussing on TV advertising in particular.  Extending previous feminist scholarship on gendered representations in the Indonesian media, this article suggests that on the surface, Indonesian TV commercials reinforce and streobrthen male dominance in Indonesian society, promoting the notion that a man's primary roles are public ones, and a woman's primary roles are domestic ones. However, this investigation also suggests that so-called 'domesticated' women are also represented as actors in the public sphere, in roles as earners and spenders. This observation correlates with the argument that from the late New Order period, in media representation - and in some small sections of society, even in practice - women and men in Indonesia were becoming increasingly more equal (Sen, 1994, 2002). But is the pendulum of gender relations now swinging the other way? By examining Indonesian popular culture from the perspective of what it reveals about men and masculinity, this paper argues that a significant number of TV commercials may point towards another emergent trend in contemporary Indonesian popular culture: the rise of misandry, which is defined as a negative or contemptuous attitude towards men, 'the sexist counterpart of misogyny' (Nathanson and Young 2001, ix).

Introduction : women as cause – media, gender, responsibility

Introduces the five chapters on Australian media representations of women and men, with a current events related examination of today's news, especially in relation to Prime Minister Julia Gillard's now famous "Misogyny Speech" in Federal Parliament in 2012.

Feminine freakishness: Carnivalesque bodies in Angela Carter’s nights at the circus

Angela Carter described herself as being in the “demythologisingbusiness” (“Notes”, 38) and in her 1984 novel Nights at the CircusCarter’s interrogative scope is both broad and complex. The wingedaerialiste Fevvers and the rag-bag of circus freaks with whom shejourneys evoke the Rabelaisian carnivalesque that Bakhtin cites as apowerful challenge to the spatial, temporal, and linguistic fixities of themedieval world. The transformative and regenerative potential ofRabelais’ grotesque is evident in Nights' temporal setting, whichforegrounds the possibilities of birth through death. Set at the “fagend” of the nineteenth century (19), the characters are witness tohistory on the cusp as “[t]he old dying world gives birth to the newone” (Bakhtin, 435). Here Carter has shifted the point of historicalregeneration from Rabelais’ subversion of the Neo-Platonic medievalcosmology to, rather hopefully, symbolize the demise or at least thederailment of the Age of Reason, industrial progress, Imperialism, andtheir respective ideologies of misogyny. For Fevvers and Walser theexcess of the carnivalesque prompts a crisis of subjectivity thatsignals both the redundancy of restrictive ideologies of demarcationand hierarchy, but also the playful possibilities of corporeal fluidity andreferential relativism.