Violence against women in Delhi: a sustainability problematic

Violence against women (VAW) has traditionally been of concern to feminists and cultural sociologists, and in recent decades, has also begun to be diagnosed and understood as a development problem. However, 20 women practitioners and scholars of development in Delhi have raised this issue explicitly as a sustainability problem while referring to the high rate of gender violence in the city’s public spaces. Sustainability is one of the most problematic political notions and scholars have been justifiably concerned that it has been hijacked to legitimise a variety of agendas, including unsustainable ones that contravene principles of social justice. However, it is also a compelling and powerful political concept and therefore, it is important to reconceptualise and reclaim from a feminist perspective, and from within the theoretical and empirical framework of equity, one of the central tenets of sustainability, and social justice. Therefore in this article, employing the primary research from Delhi, I use the notion of equity to frame the VAW in the city as a sustainability problem—the lack of which has an impact on urban design, which can constrain a city’s capacity to be sustainable.

The silent witness: art as a mode of representation of voices and visions of how,as a woman, I build borders and bridges in enacting my identit(ies)

Feminist theorists unveil how women negotiate their identities within complex entanglements of social constructs such as race, ethnicity, religious belief and practices, cultural tradition, and values. Feminist artists use subjective experiences that shape representation and performativity in empowering women to have a ‘voice’. In this paper, I focus on ‘breaking silences’ through series of my artworks (as part of my PhD research) that represent self-narratives as subjectivities of life experiences, contingencies, and cultural shifts through migration transitions as new ways of figuration and reflection on such issues. I look through discourses of gender differences, nomadic subjectivity, and new ways of figurations (Braidotti 2011, 10) and the affect theory (Gregg and Seigworth 2010), and the concept of giving ‘voice’ (Berlant 2011). Such discourses frame how I interrogate and represent my gendered identities.

Elite girls' schooling, social class and sexualised popular culture

Young women’s identities are an issue of public and academic interest across a number of western nations at the present time. This book explores how young women attending an elite school for girls understand and construct ‘empowerment’. It investigates the extent to which, and the ways in which, their constructions of empowerment and identity work to overturn, or resist, key regulations and normative expectations for girls in post-feminist, hyper-sexualised cultural contexts. The book provides a succinct overview of feminist theorisations of normative femininities in young women’s lives in western cultural contexts. It includes familiar sexist discourses such as sexual double standards, as well as more recent commentary about the regulation of young women’s subjectivities in neoliberal, post-feminist, hyper-sexualised cultures. Drawing on ethnographic research in the context of an elite girls’ secondary school, the author explores how empowerment for young women is constructed and understood across a range of textual practices. From visual representations of young women in school promotional material, to students’ constructions of popular celebrities, the question of how girls’ resistance to normative femininities begins to develop is examined. This rich empirical work makes a unique contribution to the study of elite schooling within the sociology of education, drawing on important insights from the field of critical girlhood studies, and posing a challenge to popular feminist notions about media literacy, young women and empowerment. It will be of interest to scholars and postgraduates in the areas of gender studies, sociology, education, youth studies and cultural studies.

Exploring subject positions and multiple temporalities through an Iranian migrant mother's family photograph albums

 In this article, I draw on a research study of one Iranian migrant mother's generation of selves through her material configuration of her personal photograph albums and through our verbal reading of her photographs. The research engages in a visual-material feminist ethnographic approach, and is informed by the work of Gillian Rose and the understanding that family photographs are a means by which women negotiate subject positions. In this article, I discuss an unexpected finding of my research, the significance of multiple temporalities in a migrant mother's production of selves. The photo album practices of the participant mother of this study, ‘Parvin’, depart from the common social convention of mothers arranging their photograph albums to chart family growth following the model of milestones occurring over linear developmental time. Parvin does not limit herself to linear developmental time, but rather she mixes up photographs in her post-migration family albums to generate multiple temporalities woven together by an enveloping ‘mixed’ time. Drawing on both Julia Kristeva and Homi Bhaba's theories of temporality and the subject, I suggest that Parvin produces subject positions for self and family through a continual interweaving of a multitude of pasts into the present and through a subsuming of milestones within cyclical family time. Further, I suggest that through her generation of multiple temporalities, Parvin produces the subject position of ‘accommodating mother’. Finally, I highlight the potential afforded by considering the temporal and the spatial together in studies of migrant identity.

"It's about freedom": contesting dominant representations of devout Muslim women in the space of the nation

Since September 11 there has been a rise of Islamophobia in Australian public discourse, matched by a growth of racialised attacks on visibly identifiable Muslims in public space. These cultural racisms have arisen in a context where Islamic religious signifiers and practices have come to be read as signs of fundamentalism, terrorism and threat to national political traditions and cultural values. In particular, the hijab has become a symbol of these tensions, with the veiled woman being read as the embodiment of a ‘repressive and fundamentalist religion’. However, as some Muslim and feminist scholars have proposed, these readings rob Muslim women of their ability to articulate the reasons why wear the veil or engage in gendered religious practices. This paper argues that this enacts a form of disembodiment, whereby Muslim womens’ ability to comfortably inhabit their bodies and assert themselves in the public sphere is limited. In particular the paper draws upon two case studies which express this disembodiment, whilst highlighting the counter-strategies that devout Muslim women are adopting to reinsert their bodies and narratives in the national frame. The first refers to the recent media backlash which followed a public lecture held at Melbourne University by Islamic organization Hikmah Way, where the audience was segregated along gender lines. The second draws upon interviews conducted with veiled Muslim women in Sydney, following the Cronulla riot. These interviews show how Muslim women are contesting dominant representations of the hijab in western popular discourse by recoding it as a signifier of religious and national identity, and as an expression of democratic freedom.

‘Wasting talent’? Gender and the problematics of academic disenchantment and disengagement with leadership

Confronted with the processes of massification, commercialisation, internationalisation and reduced funding, universities also face an ageing academic workforce, with implications of a shrinking pool from which to recruit managerial and research leaders. A feminist analysis suggests that the policy problematic has been wrongly conceptualised as disengagement with leadership due to the characteristics of the academic workforce. Instead, it is argued that the corporatisation of the academy has produced academic disenchantment due to managerial dominance, commercialisation and privatisation and disengagement with the dominant values, practices and images of university leadership. Furthermore, the intensification of academic labour and the lack of diversity in leadership discourage many women from aspiring to or achieving leadership.

Researching women in silent cinema: new findings and perspectives

This anthology exposes the richness and variety of interests that motivate feminist film research today. Exploring women’s contribution to silent cinema, scholars from across the globe address questions of performance, nationality, industry, technology, labor, and theory of feminist historiography. The volume builds on the thematic, methodological, and material diversity that characterized earlier efforts in women’s film history, and the originating context of the sixth Women and the Silent Screen conference (Bologna, 2010). Much emphasis is given to the transitional period of silent cinema (1910s to the early 1920s), which emerges as the field where feminist film scholars are beginning to claim their own theoretical and historical ‘place’. While giving a new impetus to the idea of transitional cinema, the collected essays also illuminate the importance of film’s transnational circulation. Questions of nation and nationhood, and women’s inclusion or exclusion within these terms, are examined in connection to issues of cultural globalization. How did American serial queens impact early Chinese film? How did the variety stage accommodate American films in Rio de Janeiro? Along what lines might we discuss women filmmakers who literally toured the world? These are just some of the issues that are discussed in the volume. Each investigation prompts us into distinct acts of cultural contextualization. A particular focus on acting and the agency of the actress is shared across the volume. The fundamental figure of the actress links multiple threads of scholarship, traversing different films and national cinemas. Alice Guy, Asta Nielsen, Florence Turner, Lois Weber, Mary Pickford, Esfir’ Shub, Pearl White, Vera Karalli, Aleksandra Khokhlova, Elsa Lanchester, Louise Fazenda, Sarah Bernhardt, Gemma Bellincioni, Angelina Buracci, Yin Mingzhu, Leni Riefensthal: these are but some of the names that are encountered across the essays in the collection. New findings are exposed and new research perspectives are opened through these and other figures, allowing us to uncover original ways of thinking about women’s visibility and agency on film.

Baudrillard, postfeminism, and the image makeover

Jean Baudrillard’s claim that we inhabit a transaesthetic and integral reality raises significant questions for feminists seeking to analyze how women are represented in Western media through the neoliberal guises of empowerment and choice. These questions relate to the impossibility of differentiating between feminist and antifeminist themes amid the implosive forces of a virtualized significatory and political economy. To map what a feminist-Baudrillardian approach to postfeminist media images might look like, this essay engages with current feminist theorizing about the postfeminist condition via the example of the UK reality makeover program How to Look Good Naked. In my analysis of this series, Baudrillard’s radical approach to the world “as is” illuminates some of the challenges an economy of exclusive positivity raises for the task of critical feminist inquiry. 

Iranian women's sports fandom : gender, resistance, and identity in the football movie offside

As sport enters new global territories, attending to questions of cultural difference is increasingly important to studies of women’s sports fanship. This article draws on theories of transnational feminism and feminist sports scholarship to contemplate the cinematic portrayal of the non-Western female football supporter. Women sports fans rarely appear as film protagonists, with the notable exception of the 2006 movie Offside, which tells the story of Iranian women soccer fans attending a World Cup qualifying match. By focusing on the ways that women fans negotiate their marginal status in the sporting arena, I argue that the film unsettles cultural associations between masculinity and football in Iran, and confounds the oppositional construction of the “other” woman as a passive victim of, or freedom fighter against, Islam. 

Resistance and reconstruction: Older women talk about childhood sexual abuse

Research which explores the experiences of women, who have experienced childhood sexual abuse is, in the main, focused on young and middle aged women. The perspectives of older women is often absent or hidden in the literature. This study explores the experiences of 16 Australian women aged 57 years and older who have experienced childhood sexual abuse. It aims to privilege their views and highlight their particular contexts in order to redress professional assumptions regarding the notions of recovery. Additionally, in discussing their experiences, the women contribute to insights regarding the patterns of inequality which are produced as a result of dominant discourses that promote ageist and sexist prescriptions in the construction of the self. These insights demonstrate how the women have resisted a range of oppressive patterns in their everyday lives. The study follows a feminist research framework and aims to contribute to the fields of social work practice and critical feminist gerontology.

Conversation pieces

This exhibition presented works by Australian artists Agatha Gothe-Snape, Alex Martinis Roe and Hannah Raisin and collaborative works by Catherine or Kate (Catherine Sagin and Kate Woodcroft), Scott Ferguson (Erika Scott and Brooke Ferguson) and Courtney Coombs and Caitlin Franzmann. These artists engage with ideas of contemporary feminism through processes of dialogue and exchange, exploring subjectivity, humour and intimacy in performance and installation artworks. These works are generated by physical, verbal or textual dialogues between collaborators, participants or the artist and audience; and spark a conversation about feminist art practice today.

We need to talk

We need to talk was a collaborative creative work by the feminist collective LEVEL - Rachael Haynes, Courtney Coombs, Caitlin Franzmann, Anita Holtsclaw and Courtney Pedersen. LEVEL was commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) to stage this event as part of the Re-School Program. This work utilises reflexive and discursive strategies to move beyond the script of feminism as a historical moment and back to the lived experience of feminist art as political understanding and social engagement.

Rejecting the ‘F-word’: How ‘feminism’ and ‘feminists’ are understood in the newsroom

Feminist media scholarship in the past 30 years has focused on the representation of women in the media while an understanding of those who produce the representations has received little attention. In this article I am concerned with how some Australian journalists understand and experience the social/political movement of feminism and its advocates, feminists, as news sources and colleagues. I particularly focus on fleshing out how female journalists and those who identify as feminist discuss, negotiate, compromise and sometimes ‘survive’ a masculine newsroom culture. Moreover, I ask why it is that male and female journalists in my interviews — feminist-identified or not — resist or reject embracing or using the terms ‘feminism’ and ‘feminist’ in the context of the newsroom. A decade ago, Kay Schaffer astutely noted that feminism had become a ‘scare word’ in media discourse. I take this idea a step further by analysing more broadly how some journalists talk about ‘feminism’ and ‘feminists’.

Blokey' newsroom culture

This paper seeks to address the gap in Australian media studies and feminist media scholarship relating to the way newsroom culture is embodied. How does the numerical dominance of men in journalism, particularly in decision-making roles, affect newsroom culture? How do male and female journalists understand this inequality? The paper first briefly attends to research into occupational culture and feminist theories of the body to address the central question ‘How is newsroom culture embodied?’ It then engages with this question more thoroughly via an analysis of my own interviews with 17 Australian male and female print news media journalists. It finds that, even though women have entered the industry in unprecedented numbers, a ‘blokey’ or hegemonic masculinity continues to shape news newsroom culture.

The gendered world of sports reporting in the Australian print media

The mainstream news media have long been charged by feminist and critical media scholars of largely excluding women from its sports coverage, and concomitantly highlighting the ongoing relative absence of female sports reporters. With the 2012 London Olympic Games just past, it is timely to reflect on two areas of sports journalism that recieve sparse scholarly interest from the majority of Australian journalism academics, as technology issues and the future of journalism debates take precedence. The Olympics typically generate more media exposure for female athletes than usual, nevertheless, it remains that there are particular types of 'gender appropriate' events that attract mainstream news media attention during the Games, and other sporting events in general. This paper analyses a month of pre-Olympic sports coverage and general sports coverage in two major Australian newspapers, finding that while pre-Olympic coverage includes more women's sport than in general sport, sportsmen and men's sport remains highly privileged in both areas. The fact that horseracing recieves three times more media coverage than women's sports in this study clearly identifies sportswomen's marginalised status. The paper also maps the number of female sports reporters at these two newspapers, and concludes with some insights into a newsroom culture that typically rejects women as athletes and as sports reporters