Journal articles on the topic 'Radial femist policy'

Feminist and design justice principles can be adopted into research praxis to make knowledge less extractive and more accessible. These principles include making research and outreach more participatory, translating academic knowledge into more accessible forms, and channelling research into action that can challenge patriarchy and other systems of domination. This paper focusses on the outreach and communication of policy research to outline its potential for producing radical change and translating knowledge across communities. The authors reflect on their experiences of producing research for domestic workers and workers’ collectives in India to highlight challenges and ways forward for accessible research forms.

The central thesis of Susan Okin'sJustice, Gender, and the Family—that the ideology of the traditional family is the linchpin of contemporary gender inequality in the US—remains significant more than a quarter‐century after the book's publication. On a political register, Okin's insistence on structural analysis of gender inequality is an important corrective to recent mainstream feminist emphasis on individual women's choices. On an academic register, her work reveals the incoherence of scholarly classifications of feminist theories as “liberal feminist” or “radical feminist” by confounding such distinctions. I argue that her thesis is best understood in relation to the early radical feminism of Juliet Mitchell'sWoman's Estate, a book Okin praised. Placing Okin's work in the context of its radical roots clarifies her “linchpin thesis,” but also reveals the limitations of her argument: in her emphasis on what Iris Young has termed the “distributive paradigm of justice,” Okin unnecessarily adopts a much narrower definition of the family than did Mitchell, and overestimates the influence of economic vulnerability after divorce on women's capacity to exit marriage. I suggest modifications to her theory, and conclude by showing the continuing relevance of her argument for analyzing recent legal, policy, and demographic shifts.

Author deals with a problem of a justification of the leading ideas that inspired new Code on Prevention of Family Violence in Serbia. Author proofs assumption that the Code is grounded on a basic premisses of the, so called, radical feminist criminology regarding family violence. After short retrospect to elementary rules of a scientifically founded criminal policy, in the second part author exhibit the origin of this legislative solution. Out of it becomes clear that this is a piece of legislation special to totality of legal system which bears the burden of a suppression of family violence in Serbian society, whose substance was compiled by the group of NGO of a radical feministic orientation. In the third, central part of the paper, author proofs the origin of a specific doctrines in the Code by comparison with key tenets of this extreme and radical school of criminological thought. Author concludes that they are nothing more but an unscientific attempt to shroud radical feministic ideas behind a mask of a scientific discipline - ethology of a crime. At the very end author illustrated aforementioned comparison with negative effects of a Code to family in Serbian society. In the same time author criticise total legislative indifference toward prevailing culture and values of a society in which the Code should apply.

Since 2000, the Scottish Government has adopted a gendered definition of domestic abuse which explicitly positions it as both a cause and a consequence of gender inequality. Following the launch of a new strategy to prevent and eradicate violence against women and girls, the Scottish Government announced proposals to create, for the first time, a bespoke offence of domestic abuse, designed to encompass the spectrum of abusive acts that constitute domestic abuse, including emotional and psychological abuse. The new offence is intended to better reflect the experience of victims subject to coercive control, improve the criminal justice response and facilitate access to justice. It represents one of the most radical attempts yet to align the criminal justice response with contemporary policy and feminist conceptual understanding of domestic abuse as a form of coercive control. Drawing on feminist scholarship which has interrogated the value of law reform, we critically assess the scope of the legislation, the likely challenges associated with its use in the Scottish context, and the potential for unintended consequences.

AbstractIndigenous peoples have long been successful at adapting to climatic and environmental changes. However, anthropogenic climatic crisis represents an epoch of intensified colonialism which poses particular challenges to Indigenous peoples throughout the world, including those in wealthier ‘modern’ nation states. Indigenous peoples also possess worldviews and traditional knowledge systems that are critical to climate mitigation and adaptation, yet, paradoxically, these are devalued and marginalized and have yet to be recognized as essential foundations of public health. In this article, we provide an overview of how public health policy and discourse fails Indigenous peoples living in the colonial nation states of Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand. We argue that addressing these systemic failures requires the incorporation of Indigenous knowledges and Indigenous feminist perspectives beyond superficial understandings in public health-related climate change policy and practice, and that systems transformation of this nature will in turn require a radical revision of settler understandings of the determinants of health. Further, public health climate change responses that centre Indigenous knowledges and Indigenous feminist perspectives as presented by Indigenous peoples themselves must underpin from local to global levels.

The Republic of Ireland is a good case study to highlight the problems associated with uncritical appeals to criminal law as the only appropriate tool to tackle demand and protect sex workers from harm. In 2017, the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act came into force in the Republic of Ireland (hereafter Ireland) making it a criminal offence to purchase sex in the jurisdiction. Ireland’s decision to introduce Swedish-style laws followed a protracted public campaign instigated in 2009 by the Irish and radical feminist inspired neo-abolitionist organisation, Turn off the Red Light. In this article, we confront and de-centre the Turn off the Red Light campaign’s hegemonic narrative that the criminal rather than social justice responses provide a more effective vehicle for sex workers’ empowerment. Undertaking our intervention in Irish feminist prostitution politics as a ‘politics of doing’ social justice through our separate and combined research, we extend our analysis by invoking Nancy Fraser and Barbara Hudson’s theoretical work on social and restorative justice. We wish to develop a theoretical framework that can serve as a roadmap for restorative social justice – the process of achieving rights, recognition and redistribution through relational, reflective and discursive interventions in sex work research, policy and practice. We argue that by ‘thinking’ sex workers’ positionality in social relations differently, the ‘doings’ of restorative social justice for sex workers can begin or take place.

An ecological and eco-feminist critique may promote an innovative environmentalist urban policy. A new relation between humanity and nature implies a different aesthetic and architecture of the city. In the past, in control of the public sphere, men built their cities according to their attitudes and values. Traditional (masculine) behavior produced an efficiency based in dominating a resilient nature. This approach is no longer viable given the environmental crisis. Women are the privileged subjects of radical change, assuming a leadership role in the environmentalist movement and proposing cities envisaged according to a new way of thinking and feeling that accords with a reconsidered relationship between humanity and nature.

After the #MeToo movement kicked off in the United States in 2018, it found its way to China and has triggered a number of exhibition projects around the country, organized by young activists, artists and curators, which have galvanized transnational feminist exchanges in the past few years. The article analyses exhibitions such as The Voiceless Rise Up: #MeToo in China, Her Story: Eliminating Gender Violence 2020, Above Ground: 40 Moments of Transformation and Stand by Her, which consisted of works documenting sexual assault and the #MeToo movement in China, as well as of artworks that are dealing with issues concerning sexual assault, the One Child Policy, motherhood, queerness and empowerment. These exhibitions and the #MeToo movement, respectively, demonstrate a growing transnational interconnectedness among activists fighting towards common feminist goals. What is more, these exhibitions are under constant scrutiny and fear of being cancelled, which is evidence of an exhaustive struggle for the official acceptance of women’s rights and ‘radical’ artworks. This article gives an overview of these projects, their transnational interconnectedness, as well as their perception and reaction of the general public, the press and censors. The article argues for a shift from women-centred exhibitions to exhibitions with a strong activist/feminist agenda that are also part of an unprecedented transnational framework.

While India has made rapid strides in building its medical manpower and medical service, yet many of the major health problems are far from being controlled. Although earlier Health problems have not been resolved, newer threats to health through misguided development are getting superadded. The major health threats today are the denial of minimal sustenance base, such as adequate food and water to an increasing number of people. The rapidly increasing uncontrolled chemicalization of body and environment is another health hazard. Experience has shown that health needs cannot be satisfied merely by expansion of the medical industry. Health care work would have to involve an attempt to arrest the growing threats to health and survival, and rebuilding of the ecological base, to ensure provision of basic needs to all. These efforts would be towards a new economics, because they include radical shifts in food agriculture policy, resources use policy, industrial policy etc and can only be guided by a deep sense of social justice and human concern. Contemporary health care work has increasingly to involve those who are already looking for alternatives e.g. those involved in ecology movements, feminist movement, peace and civil rights groups, those involved in alternative education, agriculture, health care journalism. Priority has to be given and strategies evolved to help add a health dimension, to various health or non health work and initiatives already existing, with a special effort to safeguard the traditional health care knowledge systems from total disintegration. Grass root level feed back should constitute an essential pre-requisite for any (health) policy formulation and its implementation.

In the aftermath of the January 25 Revolution, self-defense tactics became popular against the fear of disorder and the increase of public sexual violence in Cairo. In this article, I examine a number of examples of self-defense invoked by public and private actors after the 2011 Revolution, and differentiate between two types of practices. The first, articulated around the right of legitimate self-defense recognized in the Egyptian penal code, aim to maintain or to restore the established order through the identification of an Other that embodies a threat to the self, property or community. In contrast to this, radical modes of self-defense endeavor to subvert the given order by disrupting the gendered logic of masculinist and state protection and promoting horizontal relations of care and solidarity. Drawing on data generated through interviews with members of the initiative OpAntiSH and the collective WenDo, this article explores the importance of strategies and communities of autonomous self-defense in Egypt in relation to legal and policy measures adopted against sexual harassment by El-Sisi’s regime since 2014.

Artworks record history. The images of women’s fashion and beauty presented in the art history of modern China illustrate explicitly the challenging, changing and circuitous development of women’s rights and feminism in the country. In this study, I analyse and contextualize the most widespread representations of Chinese ‘modern women’s fashion’: (1) the geisha-like ladies of news illustrations before the 1911 Revolution, (2) the poster-calendar girls in the republican aesthetics of an early commercial society, (3) the papercutting folk art that profiles ‘half the sky’ in the uniform aesthetics of Marxist‐Leninist‐Maoist propaganda, (4) the gender-specific art themes and materials applied by female artists after the opening-up policy and (5) the feminist art in the Chinese contemporary art world. The resulting analysis helps to elucidate the interconnections among fashion, art and women’s status in China, in pursuit of modernity, the radical expansion of western colonization, domestic political turmoil and, in particular, longstanding patriarchal cultural norms and values.

Abstract This essay focuses on Nnedi Okorafor’s 2015 novel The Book of Phoenix and reads the black female protagonist and narrator, Phoenix Okore, as a powerful metaphor for a radical twenty-first-century black feminist politics and a signifier of the contemporary social movement Say Her Name. Phoenix is the product of experimentation, “a slurry of African DNA and cells” (146) who is birthed by an African American surrogate mother and then raised in a laboratory prison. She herself identifies as “SpeciMen, Beacon, Slave, Rogue, Fugitive, Rebel, Saeed’s Love, Mmuo’s Sister, Villain” (224). Okorafor thus imagines a multilayered metaphor that speaks to the complexities of black female identities in the new millennium. True to her name, Phoenix is repeatedly reborn from her own ashes after dying at the hands of a white supremacist organization called the Big Eye. Hers is, by turns, neo-slave narrative, cautionary tale, and social critique. As a revolutionary black woman who is never meant to be a simplistic paragon, Phoenix ultimately uses her superhuman abilities and her rage to change the world, albeit in a cataclysmic way. Although the novel predates our current historical moment—namely, international protests, calls for police reform in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, and the dismantling of racist iconography—it serves as an uncanny reflection, if not a harbinger, of this moment. Furthermore, it models the ways in which fiction channels our most desperate desires, especially the need for justice.

Aim. The purpose of this study was to analyze religious issues in gender and feminist electronic mass media in Ukraine, taking into account the specifics of their policy, audience, and communication strategy Methodology. The empirical methods were gathered by a grouping of sites and electronic media: the official sites, the convergent scanned print media, and the social network Facebook. Overall, the 21 electronic mass media were analyzed. The main method of this research is a discourse analysis of religious topics. The main identified topics are representation of religions, political issues, gender history of religion, female priesthood, dogma of religion, pedagogical and scientific topics, critique of religion/church, anti-gender and religion, LGBT issues, sexuality, body, and religion. Only a small amount of material and topics are dedicated to religion, which is marginalized in the Ukrainian media. Conclusions. Our main conclusion is that the more analytical analysis in the material, the more tolerant the authors are to religion, but not to religious organizations. The sensitive topics of sexual orientation, sexual violence, pedophilia, and abortion rights related to church activities, are raised in the feminist/gender mass media. Originality. The coverage of religious issues depends on the type of media that presents a particular gender discourse: the more radical Ukrainian media in their visions, the less critical and stereotypical the representation of religion. Most Ukrainian gender media reflect general trends in the representation of religion.

Police officers play an integral role in enhancing security, which is normally a very basic premise if the economy of a given country is to thrive. The effectiveness and efficiency of police work are doing the right thing to assist the citizens who are their customers at all time. If they don’t perform as expected the public can view it with negativity, and term them as either corrupt or unwilling to meet their needs. For a long time, police officers especially female police officers have had numerous challenges that have consistently contributed to their low morale at work thus subsequently having ripple effects on their performance. The purpose of this study was to determine the influence of work-life challenges on the performance of female police officers in Kenya. The objectives of this study were; to examine the influence of gender stereotypes on the performance of female police officers in Nakuru county; to determine the influence of work-life balance on the performance of female police officers in Nakuru county; to identify how social injustices influences the performance of female police officers in Nakuru County; and to identify the best strategy to help enhance the performance of female police officers in Nakuru county. The study was guided by radical feminist theory and liberal approach theory. This study also adopted a descriptive survey research design. This study relied on primary data specifically a questionnaire and focus group discussion. A sample of 135 female police officers was drawn through stratified and simple random sampling to respond to the questionnaires. On the other hand, convenience sampling was used to select the female police officers who would participate in the focus group discussion. Descriptive statistics such as mean, percentages and standard deviation were used to analyze quantitative data that was obtained. The data was presented in charts, frequency, and tables. Qualitative data were analyzed according to themes and patterns formed. They were presented in narrative and verbatim quotations forms. This study was expected to contribute to the body of knowledge already existing on challenges facing female police officers and even police officers in general. It was also going to inform the national government on various challenges facing female police officers and how to mitigate them to enhance performance and by extension improving security. The study findings indicated that female officers experienced work-life challenges which included gender stereotypes, work-life balance and social injustices that affected their productivity to some extent. The study concluded that female officers encountered many forms of gender stereotypes at their workplace thus influencing their performance. There was a lot of preference for certain people for promotions or recommendations for promotions that took place at the workplace, a lot of bureaucracy and red tape in the management of police operations and missing certain opportunities for handling certain cases in the force because of their gender. The study also concluded that there was a lack of work-life balance amongst the female police officers as they found it difficult to balance their work and family responsibilities. The study recommends that the government or rather the KPS should come up with policy/policies that will cater for both genders and ensure that there is no favouritism and nepotism in the service as well as adopt practical reforms where possible for female officers to be assigned duties during the day to avoid inconveniences of not being able to attend to family and children.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the sociological work of famous researchers — Ann Oakley, Donna Haraway, Shulamit Firestone and Judith Butler, who worked within the framework of the feminist paradigm in sociology, which interprets social phenomena and processes from a femininocentric point of view. The work of these women sociologists has become a kind of intellectual manifesto — a written statement of the scientific principles of the feminist trend in sociology, based on the belief in the constant discrimination of women in all spheres of social life.Ie author analyzes the works of a bright representative of the liberal-reformist trend in feminism, Ann Oakley, whose scientific work is divided into four areas: “sex and gender”, “domestic work and family life”, “childbirth and medicine” and “sociology proper”. Exactly E. Oakley is considered the ancestor of the concept of “gender” in sociology. She divorced the concepts of “gender” (gender) as an unshakable biological attribute and as a cultural determinant that determines the conceptualization of “masculinity” and “femininity”.The article pays enough attention to one of the founders of cyberfeminism — a trend in modern feminist thought associated with the study of cyberspace, the Internet and information technology — Donna Jean Haraway, whose greatest fame was brought by the “cyborg theory”. A cyborg is a being whose borderline position at the intersection of the boundaries between nature and culture, body and mind, sex and gender, fact and fiction, serves as an argument for denying biological sex as a determinant of gender inequality in culture and society.A significant place in the article is occupied by the figure of Shulamit Firestone, one of the founders of radical feminism. Her works, based on the fusion of ideas borrowed from Marxism, feminism and psychoanalysis, carried out a subtle scientific analysis that allowed linking the structures of gender inequality and economic stratification, as well as environmental degradation and the policy of scientific knowledge. In a style that later became a hallmark of feminist works of the 1970s, Sh. Firestone showed clear and internal links between the generally accepted expression of heterosexuality, “forced femininity” and the institutionalization of gender inequality.At the end of the article, the author turns to the work of Judith Butler, a representative of poststructuralism, a specialist in the Jeld of phenomenology and theory of gender, who opposes the existentialist vision of the problems of personality and being, culture and general human physiology, the interdependence between gender and sexual relations.In general, the works of modern theorists of sociology and at the same time feminist sociologists have set new fields of sociological search, these feminist sociologists call for the construction of a new model of society, up to the establishment of a “new gender order” at the macro and micro levels of social life.

The creation of the devolved Scottish parliament in 1999, argues Adrienne Scullion, has the potential to change everything that has been understood and imagined or thought and speculated about Scotland. The devolved parliament shifts the governance of the country, resets financial provisions and socio-economic management, recreates Scottish politics and Scottish society – and affects how Scotland is represented and imagined by artists of all kinds. The radical context of devolution should also afford Scottish criticism an unprecedented opportunity to rethink its more rigid paradigms and structures. Specifically, this article questions what impact political devolution might have on the rhetoric of Scottish cultural criticism by paralleling feminist analysis of three plays by women premiered in Scotland in 2000 with the flexible, even hybrid, model of the nation afford by devolution, resetting identity within Scottish culture as much less predictable and much more inclusive than has previously been understood. An earlier versions was delivered by the author on 5 March 2001 to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in receipt of the biennial RSE/BP Prize Lectureship in the Humanities. Adrienne Scullion teaches in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow, where she is also the academic director of the Centre for Cultural Policy Research.

The non-philosophical conceptualisation of the self, and I am expanding the category to include the other forms of theoretical-methodological exit from philosophy’s sufficiency as its principle, thus also Marx, psychoanalysis, and linguistics, does not reduce the radical dyad of physicality/automaton to one of its constituents. It is determined by the radical dyad as its identity in the last instance and it is determined by the materiality or the real of the last instance. The real is that of the dyad, of its internal unilaterality and the interstice at the center of it. We have called this reality of selfhood the non-human: the interstice is insurmountable; the physical and the automaton are one under the identity in the last instance but a unification does not take place. It is the physical, the animal and nature, it is materiality of “use value” and the real production that needs to be delivered from exploitation, not the “workers” only, especially because many of the global labor force are bereft of the status (of workers). And the need to do so is not only moral but also political in the sense of political economy: capitalism is based on a flawed phantasm that the universe of pure value is self-sufficient on a sustainable basis, based on an abstracted materiality as endlessly mutable resource. A political economy detached from the material is untenable. Author(s): Katerina Kolozova Title (English): Marxism without Philosophy and Its Feminist Implications: The Problem of Subjectivity Centered Socialist Projects Journal Reference: Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 17, No. 2-3 (Winter 2020) Publisher: Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities - Skopje Page Range: 40-46 Page Count: 7 Citation (English): Katerina Kolozova, “Marxism without Philosophy and Its Feminist Implications: The Problem of Subjectivity Centered Socialist Projects,” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 17, No. 2-3 (Winter 2020): 40-46. Author Biography Katerina Kolozova, Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities - Skopje Dr. Katerina Kolozova is senior researcher and full professor at the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities, Skopje. At the Institute, she teaches policy studies, political philosophy and gender studies. She is also a professor of philosophy of law at the doctoral school of the University American College, Skopje. At the Faculty of Media and Communication, Belgrade, she teaches contemporary political philosophy. She was a visiting scholar at the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkley in 2009, under the peer supervision of Prof. Judith Butler. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the New Centre for Research and Practice – Seattle, WA. Kolozova is the first co-director and founder of the Regional Network for Gender and Women’s Studies in Southeast Europe (2004). Her most recent monograph is Capitalism’s Holocaust of Animals: A Non-Marxist Critique of Capital, Philosophy and Patriarchy published by Bloomsbury Academic, UK in 2019, whereas Cut of the Real: Subjectivity in Poststructuralist Philosophy, published by Columbia University Press, NY in 2014, remains her most cited book

This review article analyses approaches to the study of the rural family of the Soviet period that have taken shape in foreign (mainly Western) historiography between the 1960s and the present. The rural family was in the focus of social and political transformations of the twentieth century, suffered a severe deformation as a result of world and civil wars, as well as the urbanisation process, which took on a forced character under the influence of state policy measures. The article is intended to help bring together the methodological and thematic positions of Russian and foreign researchers in considering the phenomenon of the rural family. The study of the Soviet rural family, usually in a wider thematic context, began in line with the “anthropological” turn at the turn of the 1970s. At the suggestion of T. Shanin, family households entered the focus of the emerging peasant studies. Methodological preferences, as well as the relatively small number of available primary statistics, determined the limited interest of Western authors in the historical and demographic study of the Soviet rural family. In the 1980s and 1990s, within the framework of the revisionist paradigm, the rural family was studied mainly as an object of influence from the authorities (radical projects of the 1920s, collectivisation, and measures to strengthen the family in the 1930s). “Feminist” historiography was especially active in this field. In the second half of the 1990s and early 2000s, time came for balanced characteristics, quite free from politicised assessments. There was an opportunity to consider the Soviet family and family policy in a global context. The post-war period in the development of the rural family is represented in foreign works rather poorly. In general, Western authors managed to capture the directions of evolution and the new quality of the rural family, which have become apparent in the later Soviet decades.

First two years of implementation of the Law on prevention of family violence is a just an occasion to try to bring together results of its effects. Starting point for this analysis was presumption that the radical feminism and its counterpart in criminology, radical school of feminist criminology, shaped the Law. According to it family violence is a product of alleged male wish to control female sexuality. This control is conducted through social institutions such as family and marriage. As long as these institutions persist violence is repeated. Consequently, recidivism must be present as a rule. So, these institutions are to be destroyed. Some other personal factors of criminal behaviour within family do not exist. Other forms of family violence are not acknowledged and distinction between them is not made. At the beginning author gives detailed description of a numerous methodological obstacles which hamper analyses. In the next part basic presumptions originating from radical school of feminist criminology was summarily proved by brief analysis of a several provisions of the Law itself. In the third part author summarize effects of a Law by using 9 individual surveys of practice of a 9 different police departments in Republic of Serbia. Despite serious methodological obstacles and relatively scarcity of a survey sample, author's assessment of a practice shows that basic presumptions of the radical school of feminist criminology are not proved in context of a Serbian society. If this presumption were, proven violence between partners must have been dominant in comparison with violence between relatives in analysis. In reality, violence between relatives exists in almost one-half of all cases: 43%. Furthermore, a division between three possible partner relations, a marriage, extramarital relations and a simple romance (and then on existing ones and former) shows that more formal and more stable type of relations are more represented in analysis: 51% of all cases happened in existing marriages, further 19% in existing extramarital relations and 8% in existing romances. Likewise, all existing relations are more represented in analysis in relation to former ones: 20% of cases happened in former marriages and former extramarital relations and a simple romance are represented in analysis with only 1% of all cases respectively. It is quite possible that people, educated and raised in Serbian culture, are more violent in relations in which they "invested" more. Their "investment" is a spiritual and material energy spent in relation. Those who want to have kids, raise family and acquire property and the other way round choose more formal and stabile types of relations. When faced with deprivation of these investments (kids and property) or when these are endangered, it is quite possible for people to become violent. In relations that are temporary, ephemeral or lightly perceived there is no such a kind of "investment", and, it seems, no violence. Other possible personal factors of violent criminality are present in analysis. Perpetrators of violence are in 37% of cases unemployed. On the other hand, only 18% of them are repeated offenders, so recidivism is not high. When it comes to so called "urgent measures" as a specific type of sanctions for family violence they are issued in 2/3 of all cases. Restrain of approach and communication with victim is more frequent in comparison with eviction from home. This is understandable. With so broad definition of a member of a family, Law offers protection to persons who are in such a type of relations in which joint living is not an option. Therefore, there is not a joint accommodation from which a perpetrator should be evicted. The same applies for all former relationships, which also enjoy protections of the Law although former partners, by definition, do not live jointly any more. Ratio between measures is 35% eviction orders to 65% restrain orders. In all cases where eviction order is issued, the other measure is also issued. Out of these two facts it is possible to draw conclusion that eviction order is only measure necessary in Serbia. In Serbian culture, the notion family comprises only of relationships in which people share "table, bad and roof". Author argues that only this type of a relation is a family, which, as a case may be, needs protection. This is one proof more that radical school of feminist criminology shaped the Law. Its teaching tries to force all relations between man and a woman, existing and former, within the notion of a family. However, concludes the author, results of implementations of the Law in Serbia speaks, on the contrary, that such a teaching is a strange body in Serbian culture, society and, consequently, legal practice.

The article discusses the origin and evolution of women's visual art in China. The development of this artistic direction was due to the radical social transformations since the beginning of the Open Door Policy in 1978. Analysis of the art by Li Hong, Cui Xiuwen, Feng Jiali, Yuan Yaomin and others reveals main features of the evolution of women's creativity in China. The search and acquisition of female identity, the destruction of psychological barriers imposed by traditional ideas and stereotypes about a woman, her physicality, beauty, etc., the study of gender differences, the reflection of female subjectivity, the assertion of a new status for women in modern society - all this makes the content of Chinese women's art. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that the article studies the works of quite reputable Chinese artists who were not presented earlier in Russian art history science. This article is intended to contribute to the study of the processes of emancipation of the consciousness of the Chinese and raising the status of women artists in society. Reflections on personal experience, social problems and historical destinies determine the specifics of the artistic language of women's works. In view of the active feminist movements of our time, increasing attention to the inner world of women and criticism of patriarchal foundations, addressing this topic seems very relevant today.

Abstract It is more than 20 years since Marysia Zalewski and feminist scholars posed ‘the man question’ in International Relations, repositioning the gaze from female subjectivities to a problematization of the subjecthood of man. The field of masculinity studies has developed this initial question to a deep interrogation of the relationship between maleness and violence. Yet public and policy discourse often reduce the complexity of masculinities within extremism to issues of crisis and toxicity. Governments have prioritized the prevention of extremism, particularly violent Islamism, and in so doing have produced as ‘risk’ particular racialized and marginalized men. This article asks, what are the effects of the toxic masculinity discourse in understanding the British radical right? It argues that current understandings of extremism neglect the central aim of Zalewski's ‘man’ question to destabilize the field and deconstruct patriarchy. They instead position Islamophobia—which is institutionalized in state discourse—as the responsibility of particular ‘extreme’ and ‘toxic’ groups. In particular, the article outlines two ways in which ‘toxic masculinity’ is an inadequate concept to describe activism in the anti-Islam(ist) movement the English Defence League (EDL). First, the term ‘toxic masculinity’ occludes the continuities of EDL masculinities with wider patriarchal norms; second, it neglects the role of women as significant actors in the movement. Using an ethnographic and empathetic approach to this case-study, the article explores how Zalewski's theoretical position offers a route to analysis of the ways in which masculinities and patriarchy entwine in producing power and violence; and to a discussion of masculinities that need not equate manhood with threat.

Abstract The question of women became one of those fundamental issues used by North African nations in order to demonstrate to Western countries just how “democratic” they were. In this regard, the legislation in favour of women’s emancipation in Tunisia undoubtedly reveals an important peculiarity. In 1956 Tunisia underwent an important modernisation following the independence obtained from France. This produced a social emancipation not found in other Islamic countries, resulting in the acquisition of women’s rights, for example, the abolition of polygamy. Since the 1970s, women have felt as if they are hostages to politics and, through some feminist associations, denounce inequalities despite enjoying certain rights, becoming aware of their subordination in a male-dominated society. With Bourguiba’s successor, Ben ʿAlī, assuming power in 1987, a policy emerged in which the rights of women seemed to be guaranteed, without guaranteeing human rights. And Tunisia revealed, much like other countries, a sort of mutilated modernity, in which the modernisation process was put in motion, without the modernising state committing itself to promoting a political modernity with the adoption of true democratic principles. Moreover, how much did the secularism of the Ben ʿAlī regime coincide with the transformation of Tunisian society? Perhaps the abuse of power by the dictator neutralised the paradigm of human rights? Social and cultural transformation beginning with Bourguiba and continuing with Ben ʿAlī produced an “Islamic-secular” country also as it relates to gender issues. But, with the victory of the Islamic party al-Nahḍayn the 2011 elections, will there be a radical transformation of women in society? And with Tunisia’s new constitution finally being adopted in January 2014, has it been considered a victory for women? This paper seeks to stimulate debate on the issue in the context of post-colonial studies through a social-historical perspective.

Abstract.Ontario'sMidwifery Actcame into effect on January 1, 1994, at a time of radical health care restructuring, marked by hospital closures and staffing cuts. In addition, feminist backlash was rampant in the popular media. Given these conditions, some have suggested that midwifery legislation was implemented because it aligned with the government's cost-cutting initiatives, while others have suggested that the government was responding to the dissatisfaction with obstetric practice outlined by a well-organized lobby. While these factors were no doubt important in the passing of the legislation, I offer a more critical reading of the policy texts, suggesting that the legislation and its enabling regulations problematize not only costs or client satisfaction but also the knowledge of midwives and the women they serve. In framing the issue as one of public safety, the policy ensemble introduced a new form of birthing expert—the expert midwife—reimposing a hierarchical relationship in the birthing process, serving to reify medical science and to objectify birthing women. In so doing, the legislation potentially silences claims for both professional and reproductive autonomy.Résumé.LaLoi sur les sages-femmesde l'Ontario est entrée en vigueur le premier janvier 1994 au cours d'une période houleuse dans le domaine de la santé qui fut marquée par des fermetures d'hôpitaux et des réductions de la main-d'œuvre. De plus, à cette époque, les médias populaires avaient clairement adopté une position antiféministe. Étant donné cette conjoncture, on proposa dans quelques articles que cette loi fut adoptée parce qu'elle cadrait bien avec les priorités gouvernementales de coupures budgétaires, tandis que d'autres insistèrent que le gouvernement ne faisait que réagir au mécontentement à l'endroit de la pratique obstétricale exprimé par un groupe d'intérêts puissant. Ces facteurs ont sans doute joué un rôle important dans l'adoption de la loi, mais je propose, en contrepartie, une interprétation plus critique des textes de politiques publiques. J'avance que la loi et sa réglementation soulignent une problématique qui va au delà des coûts et de la satisfaction de la clientèle, englobant aussi le savoir des sages-femmes et celui de leurs clientes. En formulant le débat en termes de sécurité publique, la législation a instauré une nouvelle forme d'expertise – l'experte sage-femme – qui réimpose une hiérarchie professionnelle dans le domaine de l'accouchement, ce qui a pour effet de solidifier la position de la médecine traditionnelle et d'objectiver les femmes. Ce faisant, la loi risque de négliger les revendications d'autonomie des professionnelles et des partisanes de l'accouchement naturel.

As mobility becomes a key concept within geography it needs to be considered what a radical approach to mobility means. Reviewing literature on mobilities from within transport, policy mobilities and migration studies, this article discusses three interpretations of radical mobility: scale or speed of changes required in mobility, critical approaches tracing mobilities and relations of power and approaches that question the ontology of mobility. Drawing on material and radical black feminist thought, I instead suggest a rhizomatic understanding of mobility as material-semiotic transformation of energy. This ontology shifts understandings of what just and sustainable mobilities can be.

Since 2014, gender equality has gained momentum in Irish higher education. Feminist organising and media attention resulted in an ‘almost-perfect storm of pressure’ to which the state responded by developing an ‘ambitious and radical’ policy. Employing Bacchi's methodology (WPR), this article demonstrates the problem of gender inequality has been gradually narrowed to address the lack of ‘women’ in senior positions. Competing problematisations were marginalised. The unequal distribution of care work in and out of higher education was ignored, silencing the gendered experiences of academics and non-academics, particularly precarious and outsourced staff. The policy machinery is found to reduce gender transformation to state-led stages and sideline feminist demands, highlighting the need to investigate the role of gender expertise and national statistics. The focus on the glass ceiling (a trend across Europe) is a form of ‘gender branding’ drawing on and reproducing neo-colonial progress-scales while stalling intersectional agendas.

How and why neoliberal policies spread across political jurisdictions is a fundamental question for economic geographers and critical policy scholars. Many accounts inspired by the policy mobility approach point to neoliberalism as having a conditioning effect on the ease and speed with which policies transverse the globe. Yet the role that social movements and transnational advocacy networks play in shaping and at times facilitating neoliberal policy diffusion has been under-examined. In this article, I bring a new perspective to the policy mobilities literature, by incorporating insights from radical feminist and critical disability theorising. Drawing on the work of Nancy Fraser, I argue that in their haste to scrutinise and theorise neoliberalism as a project of the Right, policy mobility scholars have neglected the mobilising role of the transnational left. Elements of the Left have leant critical support to market-based models of state restructuring, out of concern for minority rights and the welfare state’s denial of individual agency and choice. To illustrate my argument, I use a case study of the disability movement and the policy model of individualised funding, which is driving the current trend towards greater marketisation in the provision of disability services.

This article analyses how sovereignty in Africa’s immediate post-independence period was necessarily conceptualised as a regional pan-African and internationalist project of decolonisation, outlining lessons for the contemporary period. The capacity of newly independent states to shape their domestic policy and mobilise resources was constrained by their subordinate place in the global political and economic order, which made them dependent on foreign capital and tied them to the interests of their former colonisers. As such, they fostered radical regional and international solidarity that would facilitate the continent’s development. Looking at a series of feminist conferences in the immediate post-independence era, the article also traces the contributions of Southern feminists to the decolonisation project and African feminists to the conception of pan-Africanism, breaking with Western feminists to conceptualise national liberation as fundamental to gender justice. Sara Salem, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, London School of Economics / Post-Colonialisms Today researcher. Email: s.salem3@lse.ac.uk

In this wide-ranging interview, which took place in spring 2021, Angela McRobbie talks about her work in relation to social politics, the contemporary conjuncture, cultural studies, decolonisation and feminism. Beginning with a discussion on her experience of Covid, it contextualises these reflections through a discussion of anti-welfarism and the scapegoating of dependency, drawing from her new book Feminism and the Politics of Resilience. It moves on to discuss different forms and experiences of feminism: including the neoliberal Anglo-German academic context; the legacies of queer theory and radical feminism; the ‘mud-slinging’ of social media which ‘does not allow us the time and space to rehearse what is really going on’; the need to engage with social policy alongside cultural theory; and the ongoing intersectional work of rewriting the curriculum.

AbstractIn this article we explore how Swedish citizens perceive security threats, and how threat perceptions overlap with ideology, trust and demographics. The results show that concerns over security threats are foremost connected to an authoritarian outlook. In addition, four typical groups of security orientations were identified. On the one end of the spectrum, we found one group with anti-immigrant, anti-feminist and anti-egalitarian opinions and low confidence in media and institutions. At the other end, we identified a group dominated by women with university degrees, who believe in egalitarian tolerance and display trust in societal institutions. Even though the findings are in line with previous research on the radical right globally, we were intrigued by the existence of a clearly defined group of respondents that oppose feminism to the extent that it is even seen as a security threat. This is particularly striking given that Sweden is thought of as one of the most equal countries in the world, with a government pursuing a feminist foreign policy.

Purpose Researchers often debate health service structure. Understanding of the practical implications of this debate is often limited by researchers' neglect to integrate participants' views on structural options with discourses those views represent. As a case study, this paper aims to discern the extent to which and how conceptual underpinnings of stakeholder views on women's health contextualize different positions in the debate over the ideal structure of health services. Design/methodology/approach The researchers chose a self-standing, comprehensive women's health service facing the prospect of being dispersed into “mainstream” health services. The researchers gathered perspectives of 53 professional and consumer stakeholders in ten focus groups and seven semi-structured interviews, analyzed through inductive thematic analysis. Findings “Women's marginalization” was the core theme of the debate over structure. The authors found clear patterns between views on the function of women's health services, women's health needs, ideal client group, ideal health service structure and particular feminist discourses. The desire to re-organize services into separate mainstream units reflected a liberal feminist discourse, conceiving marginalization as explicit demonstration of its effects, such as domestic abuse. The desire to maintain a comprehensive women's health service variously reflected post-structural feminism's emphasis on plurality of identities, and a radical feminist discourse, holding that womanhood itself constituted a category of marginalization – that is, merely being at risk of unmet health needs. Originality/value As a contribution to health organizational theory, the paper shows that the discernment of discursive underpinnings of particular stakeholder views can clarify options for the structure of health services.

This article compares the conjunctions of emergency resilience and ecological resilience that underpin the creative cultural industry (CCI) crisis. It first introduces three characteristics that socially construct the CCI crisis and its hegemonic practice of emergency resilience (time, disaster discourse, and the adaptation of aesthetic digitalization) and exposes multiple discourses – from the technologies of cultural statistics to corporate financial modelling – that construct an ideology of ‘resilience-as-deficit’. In contrast to this approach, the article develops three characteristics of ecological resilience: a focus on transition and the long term; resilience as a decentred strategy and networked resource; and aesthetic digitization as a radical praxis of adaptability. Examining arts impact and cultural policy reports, drawing on ecological, feminist and cultural resilience studies, and analysing a digital cultural event in Asia (the Singapore LGBT cultural festival, Pink Dot), the article argues that ecological resilience offers new capacities towards a cultural ecology that can nurture fair work, artistic innovation, economic growth and cultural vitality.

AbstractThis paper develops the notion of being right-with, a conceptual lens that underscores what happens when individuals turn to human rights law and other legal processes and proceedings to address injustices by the state. It does this through a critical multi-directional reading of two Uganda High Court appeal cases that overturned the decision of a lower court which at first instance had convicted Dr Stella Nyanzi of the offences of cyber harassment and offensive communications. Being right-with is a regulative and coercive idea within human rights law that animates a violent irrepressible police drive. I use being right-with to assert that when individuals make rights claims under human rights law (however radical those assertions might be), they are still imbricated within a mode of liberal humanist subjecthood that is always conceptually unfree. In trying to move away from this conceptual and dialectical trap of being made right-with and unfree under liberal humanism, this paper tentatively considers Black feminist theorisations of care and freedom ‘to-come’, as well as Édouard Glissant’s notion of opacity to explore the concept of being with elsewhere as a way of articulating practices of Black life that make freedom elsewhere possible.

Abstract Background Sex work has a long history and takes different forms, but the associated precarity and danger, particularly where poorer women and minorities are concerned, is undeniable. There is growing evidence that decriminalisation reduces harm, and, indeed, it is the policy approach favoured by sex worker groups. Despite this, many feminists instead seek to “end demand” for paid sex, recommending legal penalties for sex buyers, with the aim of abolishing sex work altogether. Method This paper takes a comparative approach, examining why “end demand” is applied to sex work but not to care work. Abolition is typically justified both in terms of reducing harm to sex workers and to women more generally, with sex work’s very existence being thought to perpetuate the notion that all women are “sex objects.” Women are, however, not only exposed to harm within care work but are also commonly stereotyped as care givers, and in a way that has similarly been argued to contribute to gender inequality. Results By comparing sex work with care work, this paper reveals the logical inconsistency in the “end demand” approach; unlike with sex work, there is little push to criminalise those who purchase care or other such domestic labour services. By revealing the moral nature of abolitionist arguments, and the disrespectful way in which sex workers are characterised within radical feminist literature, it argues that, rather than reducing harm, the “end demand” approach perpetuates harm, conspiring in the notion that “immodest” women are the cause of social ills. Conclusions Reducing the harm that sex workers—and women more generally—face requires feminists to challenge “the cult of female modesty”, rather than to be complicit in it.

The emergence of COVID-19 as a distinct biomedical bordered and borderless site for anthropological exploration has sparked change in the biomedical imagination. Recent work in bio-cultural anthropology has offered important insights regarding the materiality and multiplicities, the realities and generalities, and the possibilities and police-abilities of COVID-19 related social and political concerns (e.g., Briggs 2020; Manderson & Devine 2020). This paper, however, asks anthropologists to reflect on bordered and borderless bodies that would typically invite historical and medical analysis owing to their substantial explorations of prolonged intersectional placement and occupation – “the gendered and racialized body”. Can anthropology, specifically medical or biocultural anthropology, as a reflexive practice, shed new light on the materiality of the gendered and racialized body that have conventionally been left to historical and medical interpretation? How does the use a reflexive anthropology of bordered and borderless bodies challenge neoliberal logics of exploration, discussion, analysis, or claims-making associated with the body as a site? Reflexive and critical autoethnographic medical anthropology challenges anthropologists to de-naturalize the dichotomy between wellness and illness, and to instead think of biomedical assemblages as (re)configurations, (re)imaginations, and (re)workings of reflexive and radical processes. This paper originates from cross-disciplinary explorations of the borderlands of health and illness, including from anthropological traditions that have long engaged with the contemporary as part of their wider praxis, such as Indigenous, Latinx, Black Feminist, and Queer anthropologies. I combine ethnographic methods with illness as material culture analysis, whether that be of objects of space and place, gendered bodies, or cultural and medical landscapes to address the interrelatedness of biomedical materiality.

Abstract Reproductive health care has been described as feminised and, in a neoliberal fashion, focussing on the individual patient rather than on their various relations within health care infrastructures, wider community and close social ties. In this context, there seems to be an implicit assumption of what a man actually is; namely partnered, cisgendered and heterosexual who are, generally speaking, not considered reproductive. As a consequence, men's sexual and reproductive health and rights are often marginalised and not meaningfully included in (co-)managing their own and their community's health outcomes. Furthermore, gender-transformative health scholars warn from possible pitfalls including simply ‘bolstering' gender onto existing policies, and continuing to look at men's and women's health as monolithic practices that are cordoned off from wider structures of intersectional inequalities. Within this area of research, the sociological concept of masculinities argues that gender is inherently relational, that means gender identity is not an inherent feature to ‘a' body but emerges and changes in response to its specific environment. It recognizes power imbalances within a hegemonic order and between genders. Looking across, beyond and between simple variables is therefore an essential skill to develop gender-transformative health care. Skills for gender-inclusive public health scholars must lie in developing a community-driven, feminist-inspired, rights-based approach, avoiding to fall back onto familiar assumptions as to how men do health, and demonstrating a radical openness towards new types of co-constituted masculinities. Specifically, this workshop operationalises masculinities in health care, building skills on four levels: conceptual framing of research; study and method design; data analysis and theory building; responding to broader societal discourses. The workshop will take the following structure: (1) Icebreaker (7 min): Participants present their own definition of masculinities; we reflect on assumptions and emerging questions; (2) Capacity Building (23 min): Chairpersons hold a presentation on a) social implications of a focus on masculinities within public health research; b) How men are marginalized in reproductive public health and why this affects everyone; c) and real-world implications of how gender-blind health research and care; Collaborative learning (15-20 min): Participants critically reflect on short excerpts in public health discourses on what men (supposedly) do and are (e.g. policy documents of UN and ICPD) and why certain depictions might be problematic for all and why; (4) Reflections, implications (10 min): We reflect on learnings, and on what we can do in terms of public health research methods, policy and practice; (5) Post-workshop: Participants are granted access to a shared folder with further readings and can continue to formulate policy and practice through a dedicated online space. Key messages We highlight masculinities as avenue towards gender-transformative reproductive health care, building skills for public health researchers and practitioners. We open up a collaborative platform and galvanise the political impetus towards gender-transformative best practices across health care.

Introduction In a 1984 New York Times interview, Germaine Greer discussed the quite different views that have surrounded her supposed attitude towards sex. As she put it, “People seem to think I'm Hugh Hefner and that the reason women started having sex is because I told them to” (qtd. in De Lacy). This view had, however, shifted by the 1980s. As she told reporter Justine De Lacy, “Now they are saying that I'm against sex.” In this article, I tease out Greer’s remarks about the supposed transformation of her political persona. I do so with reference to her work on Suck Magazine, which was billed by its editors as “The First European Sex Paper,” and which was first published in 1969 (cited in Gleeson 86). The article has two key aims. The first is to demonstrate that Greer has not (as it might seem) transformed from a sexual revolutionary to an anti-sex ideologue. This view is too simplistic. The article’s second aim is to explore Greer’s significant but under-acknowledged contribution to feminist debates about pornography. Far from being strictly anti- or pro-porn, Greer’s work on Suck actually aligns with both of these positions, and it appeared before the feminist porn debates really gained traction. Germaine Greer as Sexual Revolutionary and/or Anti-Sex Ideologue? The apparent political transformation that Greer mentioned in 1984 has been particularly apparent since the 1990s. Since that decade, she has criticised pornography on several occasions. For example, in her book The Whole Woman (1999), Greer argued, “Pornography is the flight from woman, men’s denial of sex as a medium of communication . . .” (181). In an article published in The Guardian in 2000, Greer wrote, “Can [pornography] go too far? No, it can't. As far as male sexual fantasy is concerned there is no too far.” In a 2012 episode of the Australian current affairs program Q&A, Greer argued, “Pornography is the advertisement of prostitution.”Greer’s stance on pornography, and particularly her invocation of female sexual subordination, might seem to represent a radical shift from the political persona that she cultivated during the 1960s and 1970s. During that earlier period, Greer was arguing for female sexual empowerment. She posed nude for Suck. In 1971, the US magazine Life described Greer as a “saucy feminist that even men like” (qtd. in Wallace, unpaginated photograph). There is nothing “saucy” about her more recent anti-porn posture; this posture is not concerned with “empowerment” in any obvious way. Yet I would suggest that Greer at least anticipated this posture in her work on Suck. In that magazine, she did not frame sex as being entirely emancipatory. Rather, Greer argued for sexual liberation (particularly for women), but (in doing so) she also invoked the hierarchical gender roles that would later be invoked in anti-porn feminist arguments. Examining some of Greer’s contributions to Suck will make clear the important contribution that she has made to feminist debates about pornography. These are debates which she has not generally been associated with, or at least not to the extent that Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. MacKinnon (both US feminists who have very publicly remonstrated against porn) have (see Dworkin; MacKinnon and Dworkin). The feminist porn debates gained ascendance during the late 1970s and early 1980s, and seem to have been liveliest in North America (see Bronstein; Duggan and Hunter; MacKinnon and Dworkin). These debates are significant because of what they say about the truly complex and contentious relationship between sex, gender, power, and representation. The feminist porn debates have been broad-ranging (Sullivan and McKee 10), though they tend to have been framed as polarised conflicts between anti-pornography feminists and “sex-positive”/“anti-censorship” feminists. For anti-pornography feminists, pornography always symptomatises and perpetuates gender hierarchy. Andrea Dworkin famously defined “pornography” as the graphic, sexually explicit subordination of women in pictures and/or words that also includes women presented dehumanized as sexual objects, things, or commodities; or women presented as sexual objects who enjoy pain or humiliation; or women presented as sexual objects who experience sexual pleasure in being raped; or women presented as sexual objects tied up or cut up or mutilated or bruised or physically hurt; or women presented in postures or positions of sexual submission, servility, or display; or women’s body parts—including but not limited to vaginas, breasts, buttocks—exhibited such that women are reduced to those parts; or women presented as whores by nature . . . (xxxiii) Conversely, sex-positive/anti-censorship feminists tend to assess pornography “on a case by case basis”; porn can range from woman-hating to politically progressive (McKee, Albury, and Lumby 22). For these feminists, attempts to legislate against pornography (for example, via the anti-porn ordinance drawn up in the US during the 1980s by Dworkin and MacKinnon) amount to censorship, and are not in the interest of women, feminism, or sexual liberation (Duggan and Hunter 29–39; and see also MacKinnon and Dworkin). Among the most striking aspects of Greer’s work on Suck is that it actually mobilises aspects of both these (loosely-defined) feminist positions, and appeared almost a decade before pornography became an issue of contention amongst feminists. This work was published not in North America, but in Europe; the Australian-born Greer was living in the United Kingdom at the time of that magazine’s publication, and indeed she has been described as “Britain’s . . . most well-known feminist” (Taylor 759; and see also Gleeson). Does Porn Suck? Greer co-founded Suck in 1969, the year before The Female Eunuch was published. Greer had already established a minor public profile through her journalistic contributions to the London-based Oz Magazine. Several of those contributions were written under the guise of “Dr G—the only groupie with a Ph.D in captivity,” and featured references to “groupiedom” and “cunt power” (qtd. in Gleeson 86). Suck was published in Amsterdam to circumvent “British censorship laws” (Wallace 15). The magazine was very much a product of the then-current sexual revolution, as suggested by the following passage from a 1971 editorial: “Our cause is sexual liberation. Our tactic is the defiance of censorship” (University of Melbourne Archives). Suck comprised sexually-explicit imagery (for example, nudity and shots of (hetero)sexual penetration) and similarly explicit articles. These articles are furnished with the vivid, deliberately provocative prose for which Greer is renowned.In some articles, Greer argues that women’s acceptance of their bodies constitutes a rebellion against patriarchy. In a 1971 article, she writes, “Primitive man feared the vagina . . . as the most magical of magical orifices of the body” (University of Melbourne Archives). The title of this piece is “Lady Love Your Cunt,” and indicates Greer’s view that patriarchal fears—or, as she puts it, the fears of “primitive man”—have contributed to stigma that has surrounded the vagina. Greer concludes thus: “Why not send a photograph of your own cunt, with your names labelled on?” (Whether any readers responded to this invitation remains unclear.) In “Bounce Titty Bounce,” she describes a “Mafia that controls the shapes of [women’s] bodies” (University of Melbourne Archives). This control is particularly evident in the brassiere, which Greer calls “a muzzle, a mask, binding joys and desires with wire and rubber and nylon and clips and cotton.” In a 1970 article entitled “Ladies get on top for better orgasms,” Greer opens with the statement: “The prevalence of the missionary position of fucking in the Western World [sic] seems to mean a widespread unfairness in sex.” She elaborates: Even if women were not . . . slighter than men, the missionary position would have little to commend it. The hands of the man are not free to play with his lover’s breasts or clitoris . . . because he must support himself, at least partially by them . . . The male ismin [sic] full control. Greer concedes that the “female on top position is perhaps the least popular of the alternatives to the missionary position.” The “female on top” position does, however, have advantages for women, one being that a woman “can arrive at a position to accept the cock without having to take her weight on her hands.” Greer’s best-known contribution to Suck is a selection of nude photographs that were published in a 1971 edition. In one shot, Greer is lying on her back, her legs behind her ears, her anus directly in front of the camera. In another shot, she is positioned in the same manner, although her anus and vagina are more central within the frame. In both shots, Greer is gazing directly into the camera and smiling. On one level, the textual and photographic examples described above—and, in fact, the very publication of Suck—suggest a rebellion against sexual repression. This rebellion was characteristic of the sexual revolution (Gleeson 86). Yet, in advocating female sexual empowerment, Greer distanced herself from the masculine bias of that movement. In her 1984 New York Times interview, Greer was quoted as saying that “. . . the sexual revolution never happened. Permissiveness happened, and that’s no better than repressiveness, because women are still being manipulated by men” (qtd. in De Lacy). Here, she anticipates arguments (e.g. Jeffreys) that the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s actually sanctioned (heterosexual) male desire and men’s sexual access to women. In Suck, then, Greer argued that women need to liberate themselves sexually, and not only be seen as instruments for male sexual liberation. Greer did pose nude, but, in doing so, she stared back into the camera/at the spectator—thus returning the gaze, rather than being objectified by this gaze (Mulvey). Greer has described her shots thus: “Face, pubes and anus, nothing decorative about it. Nothing sexy about it either. Confrontation was the name of the game” (qtd. in Gleeson 86). In 2013, Greer wrote of that photo shoot: “Women’s bodies were merchandised. Each week we saw a little more: nipples, then pussy . . . drip-feeding the masturbation fantasies of a [male] generation. My gesture aimed to short-circuit that process.” She has also been quoted as saying that she envisioned Suck as an “antidote to the exploitative papers like Screw and Hustler,” by “developing a new kind of erotic art, away from the tits ‘n’ ass and the peep show syndrome” (qtd. in Gleeson 86). Thus, Greer’s Suck contributions seem to foreshadow the “sex-positive” feminism that would emerge later in the 1970s in North America (e.g. Duggan and Hunter). Her work would also anticipate feminist uses of porn to explore female sexuality from specifically female and feminist perspectives (see Taormino et al.). A closer examination of these contributions, however, suggests a more complex picture. Witness Greer’s reference to the popularity of “missionary sex” as a reason for “widespread unfairness in sex,” or her description of a (presumably) male-dominated “Mafia” who control women’s bodies (for example, via the bra). In a newspaper interview that was published around the time of The Female Eunuch’s 1970 publication, Greer argued that sex needs to be “rescued” from the patriarchy by feminists. This is because sex under patriarchy has been characterised by the dichotomised positions of “powerful and powerless, masterful and mastered.” In this scenario, women are the ones who are “powerless” and “mastered.” The title of that interview is “Author Attacks Dominating Male” (University of Melbourne Archives).The above statements suggest a sexual landscape characterised by “potentially violent, dominant men and subordinated, silenced women” (Duggan and Hunter 7). In this landscape, sex is a site of gender inequality; and even something as apparently innocuous as underwear is used by men to control women. The pervasive sense of patriarchy invoked here would (as scholars such as Duggan and Hunter have argued) be invoked in much anti-pornography feminist writing. And Greer would go on to concur with the anti-porn stance, as the three pronouncements cited at the beginning of this article attest. (In Suck, Greer does not attempt to define “pornography,” and nor does she classify her contributions as being “pornography” or “anti-pornography.”)ConclusionI have argued that it is useful to revisit some of Germaine Greer’s contributions to Suck Magazine in order to reassess her apparent transformation from sexual revolutionary to anti-sex ideologue. These contributions (which include articles and photographs) are celebrations of female sexual empowerment and critiques of what Greer sees as a pervasive gender hierarchy. I have argued that this work is also useful in that it anticipates the feminist debates about pornography that would gain ascendance in North America almost a decade after Suck’s publication. Greer articulates arguments that would come to be aligned with both “sex-positive” and “anti-pornography” feminist discourses. To this extent, she has made an important and thus far largely unacknowledged contribution to these highly polarised feminist debates. ReferencesBronstein, Carolyn. Battling Pornography: The American Feminist Anti-Pornography Movement, 1976–1986. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011.De Lacy, Justine. “Germaine Greer’s New Book Stirs a Debate.” The New York Times. 5 Mar. 1984. 21 Oct. 2015 <https://www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/09/specials/greer-debate.html>.Duggan, Lisa, and Nan D. Hunter, eds. “Introduction.” Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture. 10th Anniversary Edition. London: Routledge, 2006. 1–13.Dworkin, Andrea. Pornography: Men Possessing Women. New York: Plume, 1989. Gleeson, Kate. “From Suck Magazine to Corporate Paedophilia: Feminism and Pornograph—Remembering the Australian Way.” Women’s Studies International Forum 38 (2013): 83–96.Greer, Germaine. The Whole Woman. London: Transworld Publishers, 1999. ———. “Gluttons for Porn.” The Guardian 24 Sep. 2000. 21 Oct. 2015 <http://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/sep/24/society>.———. “As Women Bare All in Feminist Protest, Germaine Greer Asks: Is This Feminism?” News.com.au 17 Mar. 2013. 30 July 2016 <http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/as-women-bare-all-in-feminist-protest-germaine-greer-asks-is-this-feminism/story-fneszs56-1226598414628>.Jeffreys, Sheila. Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution. London: The Women’s Press, 1990. MacKinnon, Catharine A., and Andrea Dworkin, eds. In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings. Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1997. McKee, Alan, Katherine Albury, and Catharine Lumby. The Porn Report. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2008. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16.3 (1975): 6–18. Q&A. “Politics and Porn in a Post-Feminist World.” First screened 19 Mar. 2012. 20 May 2016 <http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/txt/s3451584.htm>.Suck Magazine. Copies held by Germaine Greer Archive, University of Melbourne. Sullivan, Rebecca, and Alan McKee. Pornography: Structures, Agency and Performance. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015.Taormino, Tristan, Celine Parrenas Shimizu, Constance Penley, and Mireille Miller-Young, eds. The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure. New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2013.Taylor, Anthea. “Germaine Greer’s Adaptable Celebrity: Feminism, Unruliness, and Humour on the British Small Screen.” Feminist Media Studies 14.5 (2014): 759–74.University of Melbourne Archives, Germaine Greer archive. Undated. 2014.0038, Unit 216. File name “(Drawer 158) Press clippings about Germaine Greer.” “Author Attacks Dominating Male.” Interview with Germaine Greer. Interviewer and place of publication unknown. Unpaginated. ———. Undated. 2014.0038, Unit 219. File name “Bounce Titty Bounce.” “Bounce Titty Bounce.” Originally published in Suck Magazine. Viewed in unpublished manuscript form. Unpaginated. ———. 1971. 2014.0038, Unit 219. File name “Suck Editorial 1971?” “Editorial.” Suck Magazine. Issue number not provided. Unpaginated. ———. 1971. 2014.0038, Unit 219. File name: “Lady Love Your Cunt Suck.” “Lady Love Your Cunt.” Originally published in Suck Magazine. Viewed in unpublished manuscript form. Unpaginated. ———. Undated. 2014.0038, Unit 219. File name: “Suck Correspondence 73.” Untitled photographs of Germaine Greer. Originally published in Suck Magazine. Unpaginated. Wallace, Christine. Germaine Greer, Untamed Shrew. Sydney: Pan MacMillan, 1997.

AbstractTo commemorate 40 years since the founding of the Journal of Business Ethics, the editors in chief of the journal have invited the editors to provide commentaries on the future of business ethics. This essay comprises a selection of commentaries aimed at creating dialogue around the theme Ethics at the centre of global and local challenges. For much of the history of the Journal of Business Ethics, ethics was seen within the academy as a peripheral aspect of business. However, in recent years, the stakes have risen dramatically, with global and local worlds destabilized by financial crisis, climate change, internet technologies and artificial intelligence, and global health crises. The authors of these commentaries address these grand challenges by placing business ethics at their centre. What if all grand challenges were framed as grand ethical challenges? Tanusree Jain, Arno Kourula and Suhaib Riaz posit that an ethical lens allows for a humble response, in which those with greater capacity take greater responsibility but remain inclusive and cognizant of different voices and experiences. Focussing on business ethics in connection to the grand(est) challenge of environmental emergencies, Steffen Böhm introduces the deceptively simple yet radical position that business is nature, and nature is business. His quick but profound side-step from arguments against human–nature dualism to an ontological undoing of the business–nature dichotomy should have all business ethics scholars rethinking their “business and society” assumptions. Also, singularly concerned with the climate emergency, Boudewijn de Bruin posits a scenario where, 40 years from now, our field will be evaluated by its ability to have helped humanity emerge from this emergency. He contends that Milieudefensie (Friends of the Earth) v. Royal Dutch Shell illustrates how human rights take centre stage in climate change litigation, and how business ethics enters the courtroom. From a consumer ethics perspective, Deirdre Shaw, Michal Carrington and Louise Hassan argue that ecologically sustainable and socially just marketplace systems demand cultural change, a reconsideration of future interpretations of “consumer society”, a challenge to the dominant “growth logic” and stimulation of alternative ways to address our consumption needs. Still concerned with global issues, but turning attention to social inequalities, Nelarine Cornelius links the capability approach (CA) to global and corporate governance, arguing that CA will continue to lie at the foundation of human development policy, and, increasingly, CSR and corporate governance. Continuing debate on the grand challenges associated with justice and equality, Laurence Romani identifies a significant shift in the centrality of business ethics in debates on managing (cultural) differences, positing that dialogue between diversity management and international management can ground future debate in business ethics. Finally, the essay concludes with a commentary by Charlotte Karam and Michelle Greenwood on the possibilities of feminist-inspired theories, methods, and positionality for many spheres of business ethics, not least stakeholder theory, to broaden and deepen its capacity for nuance, responsiveness, and transformation. In the words of our commentators, grand challenges must be addressed urgently, and the Journal of Business Ethics should be at the forefront of tackling them.

The advent of the #MeToo movement and the scale of participation in 85 countries (Gill and Orgad; see Google Trends) has greatly expanded debate about the revival of feminism (Winch Littler and Keeler) and the contribution of digital media to a “reconfiguration” of feminism (Jouet). Insofar as these campaigns are concerned with sexual harassment and related forms of sexual abuse, the longer history of sexual harassment in which this practice was named by women’s movement activists in the 1970s has gone largely unremarked except in the broad sense of the recharging or “techno-echo[es]” (Jouet) of earlier “waves” of feminism. However, #MeToo and its companion movement #TimesUp, and its fighting fund timesupnow.org, stemmed directly from the allegations in 2017 against the media mogul Harvey Weinstein by Hollywood professionals and celebrities. The naming of prominent, powerful men as harassers and the celebrity sphere of activism have become features of #MeToo that warrant comparison with the naming of sexual harassment in the earlier era of feminism.While the practices it named were not new, the term “sexual harassment” was new, and it became a defining issue in second wave feminism that was conceptualised within the continuum of sexual violence. I outline this history, and how it transformed the private, individual experiences of many women into a shared public consciousness about sexual coercion in the workplace, and some of the debate that this generated within the women’s movement at the time. It offers scope to compare the threshold politics of naming names in the 21st century, and its celebrity vanguard which has led to some ambivalence about the lasting impact. For Kathy Davis (in Zarkov and Davis), for instance, it is atypical of the collective goals of second wave feminism.In comparing the two eras, Anita Hill’s claims against Clarence Thomas in the early 1990s is a bridging incident. It dates from closer to the time in which sexual harassment was named, and Hill’s testimony is now recognised as a prototype of the kinds of claims made against powerful men in the #MeToo era. Lauren Berlant’s account of “Diva Citizenship”, formulated in response to Hill’s testimony to the US Senate, now seems prescient of the unfolding spectacle of feminist subjectivities in the digital public sphere and speaks directly to the relation between individual and collective action in making lasting change. The possibility of change, however, descends from the intervention of the women’s movement in naming sexual harassment.The Name Is AllI found my boss in a room ... . He was alone ... . He greeted me ... touched my hair and ... said ... “Come, Ruth, sit down here.” He motioned to his knee. I felt my face flush. I backed away towards the door ... . Then he rose ... and ... put his hand into his pocket, took out a roll of bills, counted off three dollars, and brought it over to me at the door. “Tell your father,” he said, “to find you a new shop for tomorrow morning.” (Cohen 129)Sexual coercion in the workplace, such as referred to in this workplace novel published in 1918, was spoken about among women in subcultures and gossip long before it was named as sexual harassment. But it had no place in public discourse. Women’s knowledge of sexual harassment coalesced in an act of naming that is reputed to have occurred in a consciousness raising group in New York at the height of the second wave women’s movement. Lin Farley lays claim to it in her book, Sexual Shakedown, first published in 1978, in describing the coinage of the term from a workshop on women and work in 1974 at Cornell University. The group of participants was made up, she says, of near equal numbers of black and white women with “economic backgrounds ranging from very affluent to poor” (11). She describes how, “when we had finished, there was an unmistakable pattern to our employment ... . Each one of us had already quit or been fired from a job at least once because we had been made too uncomfortable by the behaviour of men” (11–12). She claims to have later devised the term “sexual harassment” in collaboration with others from this group (12).The naming of sexual harassment has been described as a kind of “discovery” (Leeds TUCRIC 1) and possibly “the only concept of sexual violence to be labelled by women themselves” (Hearn et al. 20). Not everyone agrees that Farley’s group first coined the term (see Herbert 1989) and there is some evidence that it was in use from the early 1970s. Catherine Mackinnon accredits its first use to the Working Women United Institute in New York in connection with the case of Carmita Wood in 1975 (25). Yet Farley’s account gained authority and is cited in several other contemporary radical feminist works (for instance, see Storrie and Dykstra 26; Wise and Stanley 48), and Sexual Shakedown can now be listed among the iconic feminist manifestoes of the second wave era.The key insight of Farley’s book was that sexual coercion in the workplace was more than aberrant behaviour by individual men but was systemic and organised. She suggests how the phrase sexual harassment “is the first verbal description of women’s feelings about this behaviour and it unstintingly conveys a negative perception of male aggression in the workplace” (32). Others followed in seeing it as organised expression of male power that functions “to keep women out of non-traditional occupations and to reinforce their secondary status in the workplace” (Pringle 93), a wisdom that is now widely accepted but seemed radical at the time.A theoretical literature on sexual harassment grew rapidly from the 1970s in which the definition of sexual harassment was a key element. In Sexual Shakedown, Farley defines it with specific connection to the workplace and a woman’s “function as worker” (33). Some definitions attempted to cover a range of practices that “might threaten a woman’s job security or create a stressful or intimidating working environment” ranging from touching to rape (Sedley and Benn 6). In the wider radical feminist discussion, sexual harassment was located within the “continuum of sexual violence”, a paradigm that highlighted the links between “every day abuses” and “less common experiences labelled as crimes” (Kelly 59). Accordingly, it was seen as a diminished category of rape, termed “little rape” (Bularzik 26), or a means whereby women are “reminded” of the “ever present threat of rape” (Rubinstein 165).The upsurge of research and writing served to document the prevalence and history of sexual harassment. Radical feminist accounts situated the origins in the long-standing patriarchal assumption that economic responsibility for women is ultimately held by men, and how “women forced to earn their own living in the past were believed to be defenceless and possibly immoral” (Rubinstein 166). Various accounts highlighted the intersecting effects of racism and sexism in the experience of black women, and women of colour, in a way that would be now termed intersectional. Jo Dixon discussed black women’s “least advantaged position in the economy coupled with the legacy of slavery” (164), while, in Australia, Linda Rubinstein describes the “sexual exploitation of aboriginal women employed as domestic servants on outback stations” which was “as common as the better documented abuse of slaves in the American South” (166).In The Sexual Harassment of Working Women, Catherine Mackinnon provided a pioneering legal argument that sexual harassment was a form of sex discrimination. She defined two types: the quid pro quo, when “sexual compliance is exchanged, or proposed to be exchanged, for an employment opportunity” (32); and sexual harassment as a “persistent condition of work” that “simply makes the work environment unbearable” (40). Thus the feminist histories of sexual harassment became detailed and strategic. The naming of sexual harassment was a moment of relinquishing women’s experience to the gaze of feminism and the bureaucratic gaze of the state, and, in the legal interventions that followed, it ceased to be exclusively a feminist issue.In Australia, a period of bureaucratisation and state intervention commenced in the late 1970s that corresponded with similar legislative responses abroad. The federal Sex Discrimination Act was amended in 1984 to include a definition of sexual harassment, and State and Territory jurisdictions also framed legislation pertaining to sexual harassment (see Law Council of Australia). The regimes of redress were linked with Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action frameworks and were of a civil order. Under the law, there was potential for employers to be found vicariously liable for sexual harassment.In the women’s movement, legislative strategies were deemed reformist. Radical and socialist feminists perceived the de-gendering effects of these policies in the workplace that risked collusion with the state. Some argued that naming and defining sexual harassment denies that women constantly deal with a range of harassment anywhere, not only in the workplace (Wise and Stanley 10); while others argued that reformist approaches effectively legitimate other forms of sex discrimination not covered by legislation (Game and Pringle 290). However, in feminism and in the policy realm, the debate concerned sexual harassment in the general workplace. In contrast to #MeToo, it was not led by celebrity voices, nor galvanised by incidents in the sphere of entertainment, nor, by and large, among figures of public office, except for a couple of notable exceptions, including Anita Hill.The “Spectacle of Subjectivity” in the “Scene of Public Life”Through the early 1990s as an MA candidate at the University of Queensland, I studied media coverage of sexual harassment cases, clipping newspapers and noting electronic media reports on a daily basis. These mainly concerned incidents in government sector workplaces or small commercial enterprises. While the public prominence of the parties involved was not generally a factor in reportage, occasionally, prominent individuals were affected, such as the harassment of the athlete Michelle Baumgartner at the Commonwealth Games in 1990 which received extensive coverage but the offenders were never publicly named or disciplined. Two other incidents stand out: the Ormond College case at the University of Melbourne, about which much has been written; and Anita Hill’s claims against Clarence Thomas during his nomination to the US Supreme Court in 1991.The spectacle of Hill’s testimony to the US Senate is now an archetype of claims against powerful men, although, at the time, her credibility was attacked and her dignified presentation was criticised as “too composed. Too cool. Too censorious” (Legge 31). Hill was also seen to counterpose the struggles of race and gender, and Thomas himself famously described it as “a hi-tech lynching of an uppity black” (qtd in Stephens 1). By “hi-tech”, Thomas alluded to the occasion of the first-ever live national broadcast of the United States Senate hearings in which Hill’s claims were aired directly to the national public, and re-broadcast internationally in news coverage. Thus, it was not only the claims but the scale and medium of delivery to a global audience that set it apart from other sexual harassment stories.Recent events have since prompted revisiting of the inequity of Hill’s treatment at the Senate hearings. But well before this, in an epic and polemical study of American public culture, Berlant reflected at length on the heroism of Hill’s “witnessing” as paradigmatic of citizenship in post-Reaganite America’s “shrinking” public sphere. It forms part of her much wider thesis regarding the “intimate public sphere” and the form of citizenship “produced by personal acts and values” (5) in the absence of a context that “makes ordinary citizens feel they have a common public culture, or influence on a state” (3), and in which the fundamental inequality of minority cultures is assumed. For Berlant, Hill’s testimony becomes the model of “Diva Citizenship”; the “strange intimacy” in which the Citizen Diva, “the subordinated person”, believes in the capacity of the privileged ones “to learn and to change” and “trust[s] ... their innocence of ... their obliviousness” of the system that has supported her subjugation (222–223). While Berlant’s thesis pertains to profound social inequalities, there is no mistaking the comparison to the digital feminist in the #MeToo era in the call to identify with her suffering and courage.Of Hill’s testimony, Berlant describes how: “a member of a stigmatised population testifies reluctantly to a hostile public the muted and anxious history of her imperiled citizenship” (222). It is an “act of heroic pedagogy” (223) which occurs when “a person stages a dramatic coup in a public sphere in which she does not have privilege” (223). In such settings, “acts of language can feel like explosives” and put “the dominant story into suspended animation” (223). The Diva Citizen cannot “change the world” but “challenges her audience” to identify with her “suffering” and the “courage she has had to produce” in “calling on people to change the practices of citizenship into which they currently consent” (223). But Berlant cautions that the strongest of Divas cannot alone achieve change because “remaking the scene of public life into a spectacle of subjectivity” can lead to “a confusion of ... memorable rhetorical performance with sustained social change itself” (223). Instead, she argues that the Diva’s act is a call; the political obligation for the action of change lies with the collective, the greater body politic.The EchoIf Acts of Diva Citizenship abound in the #MeToo movement, relations between the individual and the collective are in question in a number of ways. This suggests a basis of comparison between past and present feminisms which have come full circle in the renewed recognition of sexual harassment in the continuum of sexual violence. Compared with the past, the voices of #MeToo are arguably empowered by a genuine, if gradual, change in the symbolic status of women, and a corresponding destabilization of the images of male power since the second wave era of feminism. The one who names an abuser on Twitter symbolises a power of individual courage, backed by a responding collective voice of supporters. Yet there are concerns about who can “speak out” without access to social media or with the constraint that “the sanctions would be too great” (Zarkov and Davis). Conversely, the “spreadability” — as Jenkins, Ford and Green term the travelling properties of digital media — and the apparent relative ease of online activism might belie the challenge and courage of those who make the claims and those who respond.The collective voice is also allied with other grassroots movements like SlutWalk (Jouet), the women’s marches in the US against the Trump presidency, and the several national campaigns — in India and Egypt, for instance (Zarkov and Davis) — that contest sexual violence and gender inequality. The “sheer numbers” of participation in #MeToo testify to “the collectivity of it all” and the diversity of the movement (Gill and Orgad). If the #MeToo hashtag gained traction with the “experiences of white heterosexual women in the US”, it “quickly expanded” due to “broad and inclusive appeal” with stories of queer women and men and people of colour well beyond the Global North. Even so, Tarana Burke, who founded the #MeToo hashtag in 2006 in her campaign of social justice for working class women and girls of colour, and endorsed its adoption by Hollywood, highlights the many “untold stories”.More strikingly, #MeToo participants name the names of the alleged harassers. The naming of names, famous names, is threshold-crossing and as much the public-startling power of the disclosures as the allegations and stimulates newsworthiness in conventional media. The resonance is amplified in the context of the American crisis over the Trump presidency in the sense that the powerful men called out become echoes or avatars of Trump’s monstrous manhood and the urgency of denouncing it. In the case of Harvey Weinstein, the name is all. A figure of immense power who symbolised an industry, naming Weinstein blew away the defensive old Hollywood myths of “casting couches” and promised, perhaps idealistically, the possibility for changing a culture and an industrial system.The Hollywood setting for activism is the most striking comparison with second wave feminism. A sense of contradiction emerges in this new “visibility” of sexual harassment in a culture that remains predominantly “voyeuristic” and “sexist” (Karkov and Davis), and not least in the realm of Hollywood where the sexualisation of women workers has long been a notorious open secret. A barrage of Hollywood feminism has accompanied #MeToo and #TimesUp in the campaign for diversity at the Oscars, and the stream of film remakes of formerly all-male narrative films that star all-female casts (Ghostbusters; Oceans 11; Dirty, Rotten Scoundrels). Cynically, this trend to make popular cinema a public sphere for gender equality in the film industry seems more glorifying than subversive of Hollywood masculinities. Uneasily, it does not overcome those lingering questions about why these conditions were uncontested openly for so long, and why it took so long for someone to go public, as Rose McGowan did, with claims about Harvey Weinstein.However, a reading of She Said, by Jodie Kantor and Megan Tuohey, the journalists who broke the Weinstein story in the New York Times — following their three year efforts to produce a legally water-tight report — makes clear that it was not for want of stories, but firm evidence and, more importantly, on-the-record testimony. If not for their (and others’) fastidious journalism and trust-building and the Citizen Divas prepared to disclose their experiences publicly, Weinstein might not be convicted today. Yet without the naming of the problem of sexual harassment in the women’s movement all those years ago, none of this may have come to pass. Lin Farley can now be found on YouTube retelling the story (see “New Mexico in Focus”).It places the debate about digital activism and Hollywood feminism in some perspective and, like the work of journalists, it is testament to the symbiosis of individual and collective effort in the action of change. The tweeting activism of #MeToo supplements the plenum of knowledge and action about sexual harassment across time: the workplace novels, the consciousness raising, the legislation and the poster campaigns. In different ways, in both eras, this literature demonstrates that names matter in calling for change on sexual harassment. But, if #MeToo is to become the last long take on sexual harassment, then, as Berlant advocates, the responsibility lies with the body politic who must act collectively for change in ways that will last well beyond the courage of the Citizen Divas who so bravely call it on.ReferencesBerlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. 1997. Durham: Duke UP, 2002.Bularzik, Mary. “Sexual Harassment at the Workplace: Historical Notes.” Radical America 12.4 (1978): 25-43.Cohen, Rose. Out of the Shadow. NY: Doran, 1918.Dixon, Jo. “Feminist Reforms of Sexual Coercion Laws.” Sexual Coercion: A Sourcebook on Its Nature, Causes and Prevention. Eds. Elizabeth Grauerholz and Mary A. Karlewski. Massachusetts: Lexington, 1991. 161-171.Farley, Lin. Sexual Shakedown: The Sexual Harassment of Women in the Working World. London: Melbourne House, 1978.Game, Ann, and Rosemary Pringle. “Beyond Gender at Work: Secretaries.” Australian Women: New Feminist Perspectives. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1986. 273–91.Gill, Rosalind, and Shani Orgad. “The Shifting Terrain of Sex and Power: From the ‘Sexualisation of Culture’ to #MeToo.” Sexualities 21.8 (2018): 1313–1324. <https://doi-org.elibrary.jcu.edu.au/10.1177/1363460718794647>.Google Trends. “Me Too Rising: A Visualisation of the Movement from Google Trends.” 2017–2020. <https://metoorising.withgoogle.com>.Hearn, Jeff, Deborah Shepherd, Peter Sherrif, and Gibson Burrell. The Sexuality of Organization. London: Sage, 1989.Herbert, Carrie. Talking of Silence: The Sexual Harassment of Schoolgirls. London: Falmer, 1989.Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York UP, 2013.Jouet, Josiane. “Digital Feminism: Questioning the Renewal of Activism.” Journal of Research in Gender Studies 8.1 (2018). 1 Jan. 2018. <http://dx.doi.org.elibrary.jcu.edu.au/10.22381/JRGS8120187>.Kantor, Jodi, and Megan Twohey. She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement. London: Bloomsbury, 2019.Kelly, Liz. “The Continuum of Sexual Violence.” Women, Violence, and Social Control. Eds. Jalna Hanmer and Mary Maynard. London: MacMillan, 1989. 46–60.Legge, Kate. “The Harassment of America.” Weekend Australian 19–20 Oct. 1991: 31.Mackinnon, Catherine. The Sexual Harassment of Working Women. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.New Mexico in Focus, a Production of NMPBS. 26 Jan. 2018. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlO5PiwZk8U>.Pringle, Rosemary. Secretaries Talk. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1988.Rubinstein, Linda. “Dominance Eroticized: Sexual Harassment of Working Women.” Worth Her Salt. Eds. Margaret Bevege, Margaret James, and Carmel Shute. Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1982. 163–74.Sedley, Ann, and Melissa Benn. Sexual Harassment at Work. London: NCCL Rights for Women Unit, 1986.Stephens, Peter. “America’s Sick and Awful Farce.” Sydney Morning Herald 14 Oct. 1991: 1.Storrie, Kathleen, and Pearl Dykstra. “Bibliography on Sexual Harassment.” Resources for Feminist Research/Documentation 10.4 (1981–1982): 25–32.Wise, Sue, and Liz Stanley. Georgie Porgie: Sexual Harassment in Every Day Life. London: Pandora, 1987.Winch, Alison, Jo Littler, and Jessalyn Keller. “Why ‘Intergenerational Feminist Media Studies’?” Feminist Media Studies 16.4 (2016): 557–572. <https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2016.1193285>.Zarkov, Dubravka, and Kathy Davis. “Ambiguities and Dilemmas around #MeToo: #ForHowLong and #WhereTo?” European Journal of Women's Studies 25.1 (2018): 3–9. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1350506817749436>.

Problem setting. The functioning of the mechanism of public administration determines the need to establish the conceptual foundations of public policy, its strategic guidelines and directions for further development. There is no doubt about the social need for the humanization of consciousness, which is impossible without the introduction of the values of democracy and mutual respect in government.The relevance of modern gender research is due to the transformation of society, the emergence of new women's problems and the complication of existing ones, the need to understand the radical change in the position of women, strengthening and expanding the feminine principle in society.Thus, it is noticeable that in our time gender studies are especially relevant. All countries are faced with the task of developing a science-based policy on women. Without this, a realistic solution to many practical problems is impossible. Today, the women's issue is the focus of many social forces, it penetrates deeper into the consciousness of society and becomes a stimulus to social activity for both women and men.Recent research and publications analysis. At the present stage, Ukrainian researchers rely in their gender studies on the work of such Western authors as D. Butler, N. Khodorov, R. Bridotti, D. Dinerstein, D. Mitchell, E. Gross, K. Millet and S. de Beauvoir.In Russia, women's issues were developed by: A. Temkina, O. Zdravomyslova, O. Pushkareva.In Ukraine, the most famous are such researchers as I. Zherobkina, M. Alchuk, K. Karpenko, N. Chukhim and others.In Modern Ukraine, such researchers as Solomiya Pavlychko, Milena Rudnytska, Nila Zborovska, Maryana Rubchak and others have dealt with this issue.Highlighting previously unsettled parts of the general problem. Involving women in power and participating in politics (not just the right to vote) is the most important sign of a healthy democracy. Women's participation in politics is closing the gap that has so far prevented the formation of a truly democratic society and culture. And the parity of men and women in the adoption of state decisions is one of the prerequisites for democracy. Meanwhile, our women in positions of responsibility must constantly prove that they can act no worse than men, although at the same time they are forced to spend time caring for children and all housework.Paper main body. Realizing that humanity consists of two different but equal sexes, society must change its character in the public and private lives of men and women, because the worlds of public and private life are intertwined and interdependent. Now this balance is disturbed, women have en masse entered public life, but the organization of home life has not changed. This misunderstanding is based on the ancient tradition of neglecting the world of women and the unwillingness to bear some of the burden of women on the shoulders of men.Although scientific terminology is not yet fully established, so the words "gender" and "gender" and their derivatives are sometimes used interchangeably, their distinction is of fundamental importance. Gender is a natural physical phenomenon that allows for objective measurement. Gender is a historically, culturally determined category by which people group certain qualities, giving them a symbolic meaning.From all the above, the following worldview conclusions follow: the gender division of labor and norms of male and female behavior are not universal, but historically variable, they can and should be treated critically. The use of certain terms depends on the context. Thus, we see that the concept of "gender" means a complex socio-cultural process of society forming differences in male and female roles, behavior, mental and emotional characteristics, and the result itself - the social construct of gender.Modern gender theory does not try to deny the existence of certain biological, social, psychological differences between specific women and specific men. She argues that this fact of difference is not as important as her socio-cultural assessment, interpretation, and construction of a system of power based on these differences.Conclusions of the research and prospects for further studies. The Ukrainian intellectual space seeks to explore and use in socio-political practice the best achievements of world thought and civilization, among which a significant role belongs to gender studies, which are not losing popularity in the XXI century. acquiring new features and new meaning.Our state seeks to embody advanced democratic ideals, ensure the welfare of the people and the prosperity of the nation. And, as you know, a sign of culture and civilization of society is the attitude towards women, who in Ukraine are the majority of the population. Indeed, a democratic state cannot ignore the position and status of women in society, their right to self-affirmation in the private and public spheres, and the female voice in culture, politics, and society. The realities of today show the existence of serious problems in this area, and therefore the need for a thorough study of the situation of women in modern Ukraine.However, a significant part of Ukrainian society and even serious scholars are wary of feminist ideas, and sometimes hostile (as a danger to "real" women's interests, hatred of men or sexual dissatisfaction).It is feminism that offers a new alternative to women's choice, hard physical work or isolation in the private sphere and family responsibilities, and women need such an alternative not to make a choice without a choice, but to get all the opportunities of civilization. In this direction, feminism and gender studies are now humanizing the public consciousness.At the current stage of development of the civil service, it is necessary to develop mechanisms for implementing gender policy in the civil service, the formation and development of gender culture and gender education of civil servants of Ukraine.

Obscured in contemporary climate change discourse is the fact that under even the most serious mitigation scenarios being envisaged it will be virtually impossible to avoid runaway ecosystem collapse; so great is the momentum of global greenhouse build-up (Anderson and Bows). And under even the best-case scenario, two-degree warming, the ecological, social, and economic costs are proving to be much deeper than first thought. The greenhouse genie is out of the bottle, but the best that appears to be on offer is a gradual transition to the pro-growth, pro-consumption discourse of “ecological modernisation” (EM); anything more seems politically unpalatable (Barry, Ecological Modernisation; Adger et al.). Here, I aim to account for how cheaply EM has managed to allay ecology. To do so, I detail the operations of the co-optive, definitional strategy which I call the “high-ground” strategy, waged by a historic bloc of actors, discourses, and institutions with a common interest in resisting radical social and ecological critique. This is not an argument about climate laggards like the United States and Australia where sceptic views remain near the centre of public debate. It is a critique of climate leaders such as the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands—nations at the forefront of the adoption of EM policies and discourses. With its antecedent in sustainable development discourse, by emphasising technological innovation, eco-efficiency, and markets, EM purports to transcend the familiar dichotomy between the economy and the environment (Hajer; Barry, ‘Towards’). It rebuts the 1970s “limits to growth” perspective and affirms that “the only possible way out of the ecological crisis is by going further into the process of modernisation” (Mol qtd. in York and Rosa 272, emphasis in original). Its narrative is one in which the “dirty and ugly industrial caterpillar transforms into an ecological butterfly” (Huber, qtd. in Spaargaren and Mol). How is it that a discourse notoriously quiet on endless growth, consumer culture, and the offshoring of dirty production could become the cutting edge of environmental policy? To answer this question we need to examine the discursive and ideological effects of EM discourse. In particular, we must analyse the strategies that work to continually naturalise dominant institutions and create the appearance that they are fit to respond to climate change. Co-opting Environmental Discourse Two features characterise state environmental discourse in EM nations: an almost universal recognition of the problem, and the reassurance that present institutions are capable of addressing it. The key organs of neoliberal capitalism—markets and states—have “gone green”. In boardrooms, in advertising and public relations, in governments, and in international fora, climate change is near the top of the agenda. While EM is the latest form of this discourse, early hints can be seen in President Nixon’s embrace of the environment and Margaret Thatcher’s late-1980s green rhetoric. More recently, David Cameron led a successful Conservative Party “detoxification” program with an ostentatious rhetorical strategy featuring the electoral slogan, “Vote blue, go green” (Carter). We can explain this transformation with reference to a key shift in the discursive history of environmental politics. The birth of the modern environmental movement in the 1960s and 70s brought a new symbolic field, a new discourse, into the public sphere. Yet by the 1990s the movement was no longer the sole proprietor of its discourse (Eder 203). It had lost control of its symbols. Politicians, corporations, and media outlets had assumed a dominant role in efforts to define “what climate change was and what it meant for the world” (Carvalho and Burgess 1464). I contend that the dramatic rise to prominence of environmental issues in party-political discourse is not purely due to short-term tactical vote-winning strategy. Nor is it the case that governments are finally, reluctantly waking up to the scientific reality of ecological degradation. Instead, they are engaged in a proactive attempt to redefine the contours of green critique so as to take the discourse onto territory in which established interests already control the high ground. The result is the defusing of the oppositional element of political ecology (Dryzek et al. 665–6), as well as social critique in general: what I term the gentrification of climate change. If we view environmentalism as, at least partially, a cultural politics in which contested definitions of problem is the key political battleground, we can trace how dominant interests have redefined the contours of climate change discourse. We can reveal the extent to which environmentalism, rather than being integrated into capitalism, has been co-opted. The key feature of this strategy is to present climate change as a mere aberration against a background of business-as-usual. The solutions that are presented are overwhelmingly extensions of existing institutions: bringing CO2 into the market, the optimistic development of new techno-scientific solutions to climate problems, extending regulatory regimes into hitherto overlooked domains. The agent of this co-optive strategy is not the state, industry, capital, or any other manifest actor, but a “historic bloc” cutting across divisions between society, politics, and economy (Laclau and Mouffe 42). The agent is an abstract coalition that is definable only to the extent that its strategic interests momentarily intersect at one point or another. The state acts as a locus, but the bloc is itself not reducible to the state. We might also think of the agent as an assemblage of conditions of social reproduction, in which dominant social, political, and economic interests have a stake. The bloc has learned the lesson that to be a player in a definitional battle one must recognise what is being fought over. Thus, exhortations to address climate change and build a green economy represent the first stage of the definitional battle for climate change: an attempt to enter the contest. In practical terms, this has manifest as the marking out of a self-serving division between action and inaction. Articulated through a binary modality climate change becomes something we either address/act on/tackle—or not. Under such a grammar even the most meagre efforts can be presented as “tackling climate change.” Thus Kevin Rudd was elected in 2007 on a platform of “action on climate change”, and he frequently implored that Australia would “do its bit” on climate change during his term. Tony Blair is able to declare that “tackling climate change… need not limit greater economic opportunity” and mean it in all sincerity (Barry, ‘Towards’ 112). So deployed, this binary logic minimises climate change to a level at which existing institutions are validated as capable of addressing the “problem,” and the government legitimised for its moral, green stand. The Hegemonic Articulation of Climate Change The historic bloc’s main task in the high-ground strategy is to re-articulate the threat in terms of its own hegemonic discourse: market economics. The widely publicised and highly influential Stern Review, commissioned by the British Government, is the standard-bearer of how to think about climate change from an economic perspective. It follows a supremely EM logic: economy and ecology have been reconciled. The Review presents climate change, famously, as “the greatest market failure the world has ever seen” (Stern et al. viii). The structuring horizon of the Stern Review is the correction of this failure, the overcoming of what is perceived to be not a systemic problem requiring a reappraisal of social institutions, but an issue of carbon pricing, technology policy, and measures aimed at “reducing barriers to behavioural change”. Stern insists that “we can be ‘green’ and grow. Indeed, if we are not ‘green’, we will eventually undermine growth, however measured” (iv). He reassures us that “tackling climate change is the pro-growth strategy for the longer term, and it can be done in a way that does not cap the aspirations for growth of rich or poor countries” (viii). Yet Stern’s seemingly miraculous reconciliation of growth with climate change mitigation in fact implies a severe degree of warming. The Stern Review aims to stabilise carbon dioxide equivalent concentrations at 550ppm, which would correspond to an increase of global temperature of 3-4 degrees Celsius. As Foster et al. note, this scenario, from an orthodox economist who is perceived as being pro-environment, is ecologically unsustainable and is viewed as catastrophic by many scientists (Foster, Clark, and York 1087–88). The reason Stern gives for not attempting deeper cuts is that they “are unlikely to be economically viable” (Stern et al. 231). In other words, the economy-ecology articulation is not a meeting of equals. Central to the policy prescriptions of EM is the marketising of environmental “bads” like carbon emissions. Carbon trading schemes, held in high esteem by moderate environmentalists and market economists alike, are the favoured instruments for such a task. Yet, in practice, these schemes can do more harm than good. When Prime Minister Kevin Rudd tried to legislate the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme as a way of addressing the “greatest moral challenge of our generation” it represented Australia’s “initial foray into ecological modernisation” (Curran 211). Denounced for its weak targets and massive polluter provisions, the Scheme was opposed by environmental groups, the CSIRO, and even the government’s own climate change advisor (Taylor; Wilkinson). While the Scheme’s defenders claimed it was as a step in the right direction, these opponents believed it would hurt more than help the environment. A key strategy in enshrining a particular hegemonic articulation is the repetition and reinforcement of key articulations in a way which is not overtly ideological. As Spash notes of the Stern Review, while it does connect to climate change such issues as distributive justice, value and ethical conflicts, intergenerational issues, this amounts to nothing but lip service given the analysis comes pre-formed in an orthodox economics mould. The complex of interconnected issues raised by climate change is reduced to the impact of carbon control on consumption growth (see also Swyngedouw and While, Jonas, and Gibbs). It is as if the system of relations we call global capitalism—relations between state and industry, science and technology, society and nature, labour and capital, North and South—are irrelevant to climate change, which is nothing but an unfortunate over-concentration of certain gases. In redrawing the discursive boundaries in this way it appears that climate change is a temporary blip on the path to a greener prosperity—as if markets and capitalism merely required minor tinkering to put them on the green-growth path. Markets are constituted as legitimate tools for managing climate change, in concert with regulation internalised within neoliberal state competition (While, Jonas, and Gibbs 81). The ecology-economy articulation both marketises “green,” and “greens” markets. Consonant with the capitalism-environment articulation is the prominence of the sovereign individual. Both the state and the media work to reproduce subjects largely as consumers (of products and politics) rather than citizens, framing environmental responsibility as the responsibility to consume “wisely” (Carvalho). Of course, what is obscured in this “self-greening” discourse is the culpability of consumption itself, and of a capitalist economy based on endless consumption growth, exploitation of resources, and the pursuit of new markets. Greening Technology EM also “greens” technology. Central to its pro-growth ethos is the tapering off of ecosystem impacts through green technologies like solar, wind, tidal, and geothermal. While green technologies are preferable to dependence upon resource-intensive technologies of oil and coal, that they may actually deliver on such promises has been shown to be contingent upon efficiency outstripping economic growth, a prospect that is dubious at best, especially considering the EM settlement is one in which any change to consumption practices is off the agenda. As Barry and Paterson put it, “all current experience suggests that, in most areas, efficiency gains per unit of consumption are usually outstripped by overall increases in consumption” (770). The characteristic ideological manoeuvre of foregrounding non-representative examples is evident here: green technologies comprise a tiny fraction of all large-scale deployed technologies, yet command the bulk of attention and work to cast technology generally in a green light. It is also false to assume that green technologies do not put their own demands on material resources. Deploying renewables on the scale that is required to address climate change demands enormous quantities of concrete, steel, glass and rare earth minerals, and vast programs of land-clearing to house solar and wind plants (Charlton 40). Further, claims that economic growth can become detached from ecological disturbance are premised on a limited basket of ecological indicators. Corporate marketing strategies are driving this green-technology articulation. While a single advertisement represents an appeal to consume an individual commodity, taken collectively advertising institutes a culture of consumption. Individually, “greenwash” is the effort to spin one company’s environmental programs out of proportion while minimising the systemic degradation that production entails. But as a burgeoning social institution, greenwash constitutes an ideological apparatus constructing industry as fundamentally working in the interests of ecology. In turn, each corporate image of pristine blue skies, flourishing ecosystems, wind farms, and solar panels constitutes a harmonious fantasy of green industry. As David Mackay, chief scientific advisor to the UK Government has pointed out, the political rhetoric of green technology lulls people into a false sense of security (qtd. in Charlton 38). Again, a binary logic works to portray greener technologies—such as gas, “clean coal”, and biomass combustion—as green. Rescuing Legitimacy There are essentially two critical forces that are defused in the high-ground strategy’s definitional project. The first is the scientific discourse which maintains that the measures proposed by leading governments are well below what is required to reign in dangerous climate change. This seems to be invisible not so much because it is radical but because it is obscured by the uncertainties in which climate science is couched, and by EM’s noble-sounding rhetoric. The second is the radical critique which argues that climate change is a classic symptom of an internal contradiction of a capitalist economy seeking endless growth in a finite world. The historic bloc’s successful redefinition strategy appears to jam the frequency of serious, scientifically credible climate discourse, yet at the level of hegemonic struggle its effects range wider. In redefining climate change and other key signifiers of green critique – “environment”, “ecology”, “green”, “planet”—it expropriates key properties of its antagonist. Were it not that climate change is now defined on the cheery, reassuring ground of EM discourse, the gravity of the alarming—rather than alarmist (Risbey)—scientific discourse may just have offered radical critique the ammunition it needed to provoke society into serious deliberations over its socioeconomic path. Radical green critique is not in itself the chief enemy of the historic bloc. But it is a privileged element within antagonistic discourse and reinforces the critical element of the feminist, civil rights, and student movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In this way ecology has tended to act as a nodal point binding general social critique: all of the other demands began to be inscribed with the green critique, just as the green critique became a metaphor for all of the others (Laclau). The metaphorical value of the green critique not only relates to the size and vibrancy of the movement—the immediate visibility of ecological destruction stood as a powerful symbol of the kernel of antagonistic politics: a sense that society had fundamentally gone awry. While green critique demands that progress should be conditional upon ecology, EM professes that progress is already green (Eder 217n). Thus the great win achieved by the high-ground strategy is not over radical green critique per se but over the shifting coalition that threatens its legitimacy. As Stavrakakis observes, what is novel about green discourse is nothing essential to the signifiers it deploys, but the way that a common signifier comes to stand in and structure the field as a whole – to serve as a nodal point. It has a number of signifiers: environmental sustainability, social justice, grassroots democracy, and peace and non-violence, all of which are “quilted” around the master-signifiers of “ecology”, “green”, or “planet”. While these master-signifiers are not unique to green ideology, what is unique is that they stand at the centre. But the crucial point to note about the green signifier at the heart of political ecology is that its value is accorded, in large part, through its negation of the dominant ideology. That is to say, it is not that green ideology stands as merely another way of mapping the social; rather, the master-signifier "green" contains an implicit refutation of the dominant social order. That “green” is now almost wholly evacuated of its radical connotations speaks to the effectiveness of the redefinitional effort.The historic bloc is aided in its efforts by the complexity of climate change. Such opacity is characteristic of contemporary risks, whose threats are mostly “a type of virtual reality, real virtuality” (Beck 213). The political struggle then takes place at the level of meaning, and power is played out in a contest to fix the definitions of key risks such as climate change. When relations of (risk) definition replace relations of production as the site of the effects of power, a double mystification ensues and shifts in the ground on which the struggle takes place may go unnoticed. Conclusion By articulating ecology with markets and technology, EM transforms the threat of climate change into an opportunity, a new motor of neoliberal legitimacy. The historic bloc has co-opted environmentalist discourse to promote a gentrified climate change which present institutions are capable of managing: “We are at the fork in the road between order and catastrophe. Stick with us. We will get you through the crisis.” The sudden embrace of the environment by Nixon and by Thatcher, the greening of Cameron’s Conservatives, the Garnaut and Stern reports, and the Australian Government’s foray into carbon trading all have their more immediate policy and political aims. Yet they are all consistent with the high-ground definitional strategy, professing no contraction between sustainability and the present socioeconomic order. Undoubtedly, EM is vastly preferable to denial and inaction. It may yet open the doors to real ecological reform. But in its present form, its preoccupation is the legitimation crisis threatening dominant interests, rather than the ecological crisis facing us all. References Adger, W. Neil, Tor A. Benjaminsen, Katrina Brown, and Hanne Svarstad. ‘Advancing a Political Ecology of Global Environmental Discourses.’ Development and Change 32.4 (2001): 681–715. Anderson, Kevin, and Alice Bows. “Beyond ‘Dangerous’ Climate Change: Emission Scenarios for a New World.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 369.1934 (2010): 20–44. Barry, John, and Matthew Paterson. “Globalisation, Ecological Modernisation and New Labour.”Political Studies 52.4 (2004): 767–84. Barry, John. “Ecological Modernisation.” Debating the Earth : the Environmental Politics Reader. Ed. John S. Dryzek & David Schlosberg. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. ——-. “Towards a Model of Green Political Economy: From Ecological Modernisation to Economic Security.” Global Ecological Politics. Ed. John Barry and Liam Leonard. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing, 2010. 109–28. Beck, Ulrich. “Risk Society Revisited.” The Risk Society and Beyond: Critical Issues for Social Theory. Ed. Barbara Adam, Ulrich Beck, & Joost Van Loon. London: SAGE, 2000. Carter, Neil. “Vote Blue, Go Green? Cameron’s Conservatives and the Environment.” The Political Quarterly 80.2 (2009): 233–42. Carvalho, Anabela. “Ideological Cultures and Media Discourses on Scientific Knowledge: Re-reading News on Climate Change.” Public Understanding of Science 16.2 (2007): 223–43. Carvalho, Anabela, and Jacquelin Burgess. “Cultural Circuits of Climate Change in UK Broadsheet Newspapers, 1985–2003.” Risk analysis 25.6 (2005): 1457–69. Charlton, Andrew. “Choosing Between Progress and Planet.” Quarterly Essay 44 (2011): 1. Curran, Giorel. “Ecological Modernisation and Climate Change in Australia.” Environmental Politics 18.2: 201-17. Dryzek, John. S., Christian Hunold, David Schlosberg, David Downes, and Hans-Kristian Hernes. “Environmental Transformation of the State: The USA, Norway, Germany and the UK.” Political studies 50.4 (2002): 659–82. Eder, Klaus. “The Institutionalisation of Environmentalism: Ecological Discourse and the Second Transformation of the Public Sphere.” Risk, Environment and Modernity: Towards a New Ecology. Ed. Scott Lash, Bronislaw Szerszynski, & Brian Wynne. 1996. 203–23. Foster, John Bellamy, Brett Clark, and Richard York. “The Midas Effect: a Critique of Climate Change Economics.” Development and Change 40.6 (2009): 1085–97. Hajer, Maarten. The Politics of Environmental Discourse: Ecological Modernization and the Policy Process. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Laclau, Ernesto. On Populist Reason. London: Verso, 2005. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso, 1985. Risbey, J. S. “The New Climate Discourse: Alarmist or Alarming?” Global Environmental Change18.1 (2008): 26–37. Spaargaren, Gert, and Arthur P.J. Mol, “Sociology, Environment, and Modernity: Ecological Modernization as a Theory of Social Change.” Society and Natural Resources 5.4 (1992): 323-44. Spash, Clive. L. “Review of The Economics of Climate Change (The Stern Review).”Environmental Values 16.4 (2007): 532–35. Stavrakakis, Yannis. “Green Ideology: A Discursive Reading.” Journal of Political Ideologies 2.3 (1997): 259–79. Stern, Nicholas et al. Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change. Vol. 30. London: HM Treasury, 2006. Swyngedouw, Erik. “Apocalypse Forever? Post-political Populism and the Spectre of Climate Change.” Theory, Culture & Society 27.2-3 (2010): 213–32. Taylor, Lenore. “Try Again on Carbon: Garnaut.” The Australian 17 Apr. 2009: 1. While, Aidan, Andrew E.G. Jonas, and David Gibbs. “From Sustainable Development to Carbon Control: Eco-state Restructuring and the Politics of Urban and Regional Development.”Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35.1 (2010): 76–93. Wilkinson, Marian. “Scientists on Attack over Rudd Emissions Plan.” Sydney Morning Herald Apr. 15 2009: 1. York, Richard, and Eugene Rosa. “Key Challenges to Ecological Modernization theory.”Organization & Environment 16.1 (2003): 273-88.

This article explores how fat women protesting challenges norms of womanhood, the place of women in society, and who has the power to have their say in public spaces. We use the term fat as a political reclamation; Fat Studies scholars and fat activists prefer the term fat, over the normative term “overweight” and the pathologising term “obese/obesity” (Lee and Pausé para 3). Who is and who isn’t fat, we suggest, is best left to self-determination, although it is generally accepted by fat activists that the term is most appropriately adopted by individuals who are unable to buy clothes in any store they choose. Using a tweet from conservative commentator Ann Coulter as a leaping-off point, we examine the narratives around women in the public sphere and explore how fat bodies might transgress further the norms set by society. The public representations of women in politics and protest are then are set in the context of ‘activist wisdom’ (Maddison and Scalmer) from two sides of the globe. Activist wisdom gives preference to the lived knowledge and experience of activists as tools to understand social movements. It seeks to draw theoretical implications from the practical actions of those on the ground. In centring the experiences of ourselves and other activists, we hope to expand existing understandings of body politics, gender, and political power in this piece. It is important in researching social movements to look both at the representations of protest and protestors in all forms of media as this is the ‘public face’ of movements, but also to examine the reflections of the individuals who collectively put their weight behind bringing social change.A few days after the 45th President of the United States was elected, people around the world spilled into the streets and participated in protests; precursors to the Women’s March which would take place the following January. Pictures of such marches were shared via social media, demonstrating the worldwide protest against the racism, misogyny, and overall oppressiveness, of the newly elected leader. Not everyone was supportive of these protests though; one such conservative commentator, Ann Coulter, shared this tweet: Image1: A tweet from Ann Coulter; the tweet contains a picture of a group of protestors, holding signs protesting Trump, white supremacy, and for the rights of immigrants. In front of the group, holding a megaphone is a woman. Below the picture, the text reads, “Without fat girls, there would be no protests”.Coulter continued on with two more tweets, sharing pictures of other girls protesting and suggesting that the protestors needed a diet programme. Kivan Bay (“Without Fat Girls”) suggested that perhaps Coulter was implying that skinny girls do not have time to protest because they are too busy doing skinny girl things, like buying jackets or trying on sweaters. Or perhaps Coulter was arguing that fat girls are too visible, too loud, and too big, to be taken seriously in their protests. These tweets provide a point of illustration for how fat women protesting challenge norms of womanhood, the place of women in society, and who has the power to have their say in public spaces While Coulter’s tweet was most likely intended as a hostile personal attack on political grounds, we find it useful in its foregrounding of gender, bodies and protest which we consider in this article, beginning with a review of fat girls’ role in social justice movements.Across the world, we can point to fat women who engage in activism related to body politics and more. Australian fat filmmaker and activist Kelli Jean Drinkwater makes documentaries, such as Aquaporko! and Nothing to Lose, that queer fat embodiment and confronts body norms. Newly elected Ontario MPP Jill Andrew has been fighting for equal rights for queer people and fat people in Canada for decades. Nigerian Latasha Ngwube founded About That Curvy Life, Africa’s leading body positive and empowerment site, and has organised plus-size fashion show events at Heineken Lagos Fashion and Design Week in Nigeria in 2016 and the Glitz Africa Fashion Week in Ghana in 2017. Fat women have been putting their bodies on the line for the rights of others to live, work, and love. American Heather Heyer was protesting the hate that white nationalists represent and the danger they posed to her friends, family, and neighbours when she died at a rally in Charlottesville, North Carolina in late 2017 (Caron). When Heyer was killed by one of those white nationalists, they declared that she was fat, and therefore her body size was lauded loudly as justification for her death (Bay, “How Nazis Use”; Spangler).Fat women protesting is not new. For example, the Fat Underground was a group of “radical fat feminist women”, who split off from the more conservative NAAFA (National Association to Aid Fat Americans) in the 1970s (Simic 18). The group educated the public about weight science, harassed weight-loss companies, and disrupted academic seminars on obesity. The Fat Underground made their first public appearance at a Women’s Equality Day in Los Angeles, taking over the stage at the public event to accuse the medical profession of murdering Cass Elliot, the lead singer of the folk music group, The Mamas and the Papas (Dean and Buss). In 1973, the Fat Underground produced the Fat Liberation Manifesto. This Manifesto began by declaring that they believed “that fat people are full entitled to human respect and recognition” (Freespirit and Aldebaran 341).Women have long been disavowed, or discouraged, from participating in the public sphere (Ginzberg; van Acker) or seen as “intruders or outsiders to the tough world of politics” (van Acker 118). The feminist slogan the personal is political was intended to shed light on the role that women needed to play in the public spheres of education, employment, and government (Caha 22). Across the world, the acceptance of women within the public sphere has been varied due to cultural, political, and religious, preferences and restrictions (Agenda Feminist Media Collective). Limited acceptance of women in the public sphere has historically been granted by those ‘anointed’ by a male family member or patron (Fountaine 47).Anti-feminists are quick to disavow women being in public spaces, preferring to assign them the role as helpmeet to male political elite. As Schlafly (in Rowland 30) notes: “A Positive Woman cannot defeat a man in a wrestling or boxing match, but she can motivate him, inspire him, encourage him, teach him, restrain him, reward him, and have power over him that he can never achieve over her with all his muscle.” This idea of women working behind the scenes has been very strong in New Zealand where the ‘sternly worded’ letter is favoured over street protest. An acceptable route for women’s activism was working within existing political institutions (Grey), with activity being ‘hidden’ inside government offices such as the Ministry of Women’s Affairs (Schuster, 23). But women’s movement organisations that engage in even the mildest form of disruptive protest are decried (Grey; van Acker).One way women have been accepted into public space is as the moral guardians or change agents of the entire political realm (Bliss; Ginzberg; van Acker; Ledwith). From the early suffrage movements both political actors and media representations highlighted women were more principled and conciliatory than men, and in many cases had a moral compass based on restraint. Cartoons showed women in the suffrage movement ‘sweeping up’ and ‘cleaning house’ (Sheppard 123). Groups like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union were celebrated for protesting against the demon drink and anti-pornography campaigners like Patricia Bartlett were seen as acceptable voices of moral reason (Moynihan). And as Cunnison and Stageman (in Ledwith 193) note, women bring a “culture of femininity to trade unions … an alternative culture, derived from the particularity of their lives as women and experiences of caring and subordination”. This role of moral guardian often derived from women as ‘mothers’, responsible for the physical and moral well-being of the nation.The body itself has been a sight of protest for women including fights for bodily autonomy in their medical decisions, reproductive justice, and to live lives free from physical and sexual abuse, have long been met with criticisms of being unladylike or inappropriate. Early examples decried in NZ include the women’s clothing movement which formed part of the suffrage movement. In the second half of the 20th century it was the freedom trash can protests that started the myth of ‘women burning their bras’ which defied acceptable feminine norms (Sawer and Grey). Recent examples of women protesting for body rights include #MeToo and Time’s Up. Both movements protest the lack of bodily autonomy women can assert when men believe they are entitled to women’s bodies for their entertainment, enjoyment, and pleasure. And both movements have received considerable backlash by those who suggest it is a witch hunt that might ensnare otherwise innocent men, or those who are worried that the real victims are white men who are being left behind (see Garber; Haussegger). Women who advocate for bodily autonomy, including access to contraception and abortion, are often held up as morally irresponsible. As Archdeacon Bullock (cited in Smyth 55) asserted, “A woman should pay for her fun.”Many individuals believe that the stigma and discrimination fat people face are the consequences they sow from their own behaviours (Crandall 892); that fat people are fat because they have made poor decisions, being too indulgent with food and too lazy to exercise (Crandall 883). Therefore, fat people, like women, should have to pay for their fun. Fat women find themselves at this intersection, and are often judged more harshly for their weight than fat men (Tiggemann and Rothblum). Examining Coulter’s tweet with this perspective in mind, it can easily be read as an attempt to put fat girl protestors back into their place. It can also be read as a warning. Don’t go making too much noise or you may be labelled as fat. Presenting troublesome women as fat has a long history within political art and depictions. Marianne (the symbol of the French Republic) was depicted as fat and ugly; she also reinforced an anti-suffragist position (Chenut 441). These images are effective because of our societal views on fatness (Kyrölä). Fatness is undesirable, unworthy of love and attention, and a representation of poor character, lack of willpower, and an absence of discipline (Murray 14; Pausé, “Rebel Heart” para 1).Fat women who protest transgress rules around body size, gender norms, and the appropriate place for women in society. Take as an example the experiences of one of the authors of this piece, Sandra Grey, who was thrust in to political limelight nationally with the Campaign for MMP (Grey and Fitzsimmons) and when elected as the President of the New Zealand Tertiary Education Union in 2011. Sandra is a trade union activist who breaches too many norms set for the “good woman protestor,” as well as the norms for being a “good fat woman”. She looms large on a stage – literally – and holds enough power in public protest to make a crowd of 7,000 people “jump to left”, chant, sing, and march. In response, some perceive Sandra less as a tactical and strategic leader of the union movement, and more as the “jolly fat woman” who entertains, MCs, and leads public events. Though even in this role, she has been criticised for being too loud, too much, too big.These criticisms are loudest when Sandra is alongside other fat female bodies. When posting on social media photos with fellow trade union members the comments often note the need of the group to “go on a diet”. The collective fatness also brings comments about “not wanting to fuck any of that group of fat cows”. There is something politically and socially dangerous about fat women en masse. This was behind the responses to Sandra’s first public appearance as the President of TEU when one of the male union members remarked “Clearly you have to be a fat dyke to run this union.” The four top elected and appointed positions in the TEU have been women for eight years now and both their fatness and perceived sexuality present as a threat in a once male-dominated space. Even when not numerically dominant, unions are public spaces dominated by a “masculine culture … underpinned by the undervaluation of ‘women’s worth’ and notions of womanhood ‘defined in domesticity’” (Cockburn in Kirton 273-4). Sandra’s experiences in public space show that the derision and methods of putting fat girls back in their place varies dependent on whether the challenge to power is posed by a single fat body with positional power and a group of fat bodies with collective power.Fat Girls Are the FutureOn the other side of the world, Tara Vilhjálmsdóttir is protesting to change the law in Iceland. Tara believes that fat people should be protected against discrimination in public and private settings. Using social media such as Facebook and Instagram, Tara takes her message, and her activism, to her thousands of followers (Keller, 434; Pausé, “Rebel Heart”). And through mainstream media, she pushes back on fatphobia rhetoric and applies pressure on the government to classify weight as a protected status under the law.After a lifetime of living “under the oppression of diet culture,” Tara began her activism in 2010 (Vilhjálmsdóttir). She had suffered real harm from diet culture, developing an eating disorder as a teen and being told through her treatment for it that her fears as a fat woman – that she had no future, that fat people experienced discrimination and stigma – were unfounded. But Tara’s lived experiences demonstrated fat stigma and discrimination were real.In 2012, she co-founded the Icelandic Association for Body Respect, which promotes body positivity and fights weight stigma in Iceland. The group uses a mixture of real life and online tools; organising petitions, running campaigns against the Icelandic version of The Biggest Loser, and campaigning for weight to be a protected class in the Icelandic constitution. The Association has increased the visibility of the dangers of diet culture and the harm of fat stigma. They laid the groundwork that led to changing the human rights policy for the city of Reykjavík; fat people cannot be discriminated against in employment settings within government jobs. As the city is one of the largest employers in the country, this was a large step forward for fat rights.Tara does receive her fair share of hate messages; she’s shared that she’s amazed at the lengths people will go to misunderstand what she is saying (Vilhjálmsdóttir). “This isn’t about hurt feelings; I’m not insulted [by fat stigma]. It’s about [fat stigma] affecting the livelihood of fat people and the structural discrimination they face” (Vilhjálmsdóttir). She collects the hateful comments she receives online through screenshots and shares them in an album on her page. She believes it is important to keep a repository to demonstrate to others that the hatred towards fat people is real. But the hate she receives only fuels her work more. As does the encouragement she receives from people, both in Iceland and abroad. And she is not alone; fat activists across the world are using Web 2.0 tools to change the conversation around fatness and demand civil rights for fat people (Pausé, “Rebel Heart”; Pausé, “Live to Tell").Using Web 2.0 tools as a way to protest and engage in activism is an example of oppositional technologics; a “political praxis of resistance being woven into low-tech, amateur, hybrid, alternative subcultural feminist networks” (Garrison 151). Fat activists use social media to engage in anti-assimilationist activism and build communities of practice online in ways that would not be possible in real life (Pausé, “Express Yourself” 1). This is especially useful for those whose protests sit at the intersections of oppressions (Keller 435; Pausé, “Rebel Heart” para 19). Online protests have the ability to travel the globe quickly, providing opportunities for connections between protests and spreading protests across the globe, such as SlutWalks in 2011-2012 (Schuster 19). And online spaces open up unlimited venues for women to participate more freely in protest than other forms (Harris 479; Schuster 16; Garrison 162).Whether online or offline, women are represented as dangerous in the political sphere when they act without male champions breaching norms of femininity, when their involvement challenges the role of woman as moral guardians, and when they make the body the site of protest. Women must ‘do politics’ politely, with utmost control, and of course caringly; that is they must play their ‘designated roles’. Whether or not you fit the gendered norms of political life affects how your protest is perceived through the media (van Acker). Coulter’s tweet loudly proclaimed that the fat ‘girls’ protesting the election of the 45th President of the United States were unworthy, out of control, and not worthy of attention (ironic, then, as her tweet caused considerable conversation about protest, fatness, and the reasons not to like the President-Elect). What the Coulter tweet demonstrates is that fat women are perceived as doubly-problematic in public space, both as fat and as women. They do not do politics in a way that is befitting womanhood – they are too visible and loud; they are not moral guardians of conservative values; and, their bodies challenge masculine power.ReferencesAgenda Feminist Media Collective. “Women in Society: Public Debate.” Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equity 10 (1991): 31-44.Bay, Kivan. “How Nazis Use Fat to Excuse Violence.” Medium, 7 Feb. 2018. 1 May 2018 <https://medium.com/@kivabay/how-nazis-use-fat-to-excuse-violence-b7da7d18fea8>.———. “Without Fat Girls, There Would Be No Protests.” Bullshit.ist, 13 Nov. 2016. 16 May 2018 <https://bullshit.ist/without-fat-girls-there-would-be-no-protests-e66690de539a>.Bliss, Katherine Elaine. Compromised Positions: Prostitution, Public Health, and Gender Politics in Revolutionary Mexico City. Penn State Press, 2010.Caha, Omer. Women and Civil Society in Turkey: Women’s Movements in a Muslim Society. London: Ashgate, 2013.Caron, Christina. “Heather Heyer, Charlottesville Victim, Is Recalled as ‘a Strong Woman’.” New York Times, 13 Aug. 2017. 1 May 2018 <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/13/us/heather-heyer-charlottesville-victim.html>.Chenut, Helen. “Anti-Feminist Caricature in France: Politics, Satire and Public Opinion, 1890-1914.” Modern & Contemporary France 20.4 (2012): 437-452.Crandall, Christian S. "Prejudice against Fat People: Ideology and Self-Interest." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 66.5 (1994): 882-894.Damousi, Joy. “Representations of the Body and Sexuality in Communist Iconography, 1920-1955.” Australian Feminist Studies 12.25 (1997): 59-75.Dean, Marge, and Shirl Buss. “Fat Underground.” YouTube, 11 Aug. 2016 [1975]. 1 May 2018 <https://youtu.be/UPYRZCXjoRo>.Fountaine, Susan. “Women, Politics and the Media: The 1999 New Zealand General Election.” PhD thesis. Palmerston North, NZ: Massey University, 2002.Freespirit, Judy, and Aldebaran. “Fat Liberation Manifesto November 1973.” The Fat Studies Reader. Eds. Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay. New York: NYU P, 2009. 341-342.Garber, Megan. “The Selective Empathy of #MeToo Backlash.” The Atlantic, 11 Feb 2018. 5 Apr. 2018 <https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/02/the-selective-empathy-of-metoo-backlash/553022/>.Garrison, Edith. “US Feminism – Grrrl Style! Youth (Sub)Cultures and the Technologics of the Third Wave.” Feminist Studies 26.1 (2000): 141-170.Garvey, Nicola. “Violence against Women: Beyond Gender Neutrality.” Looking Back, Moving Forward: The Janus Women’s Convention 2005. Ed. Dale Spender. Masterton: Janus Trust, 2005. 114-120.Ginzberg, Lori D. Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States. Yale UP, 1992.Grey, Sandra. “Women, Politics, and Protest: Rethinking Women's Liberation Activism in New Zealand.” Rethinking Women and Politics: New Zealand and Comparative Perspectives. Eds. John Leslie, Elizabeth McLeay, and Kate McMillan. Victoria UP, 2009. 34-61.———, and Matthew Fitzsimons. “Defending Democracy: ‘Keep MMP’ and the 2011 Electoral Referendum.” Kicking the Tyres: The New Zealand General Election and Electoral Referendum of 2011. Eds. Jon Johansson and Stephen Levine. Victoria UP, 2012. 285-304.———, and Marian Sawer, eds. Women’s Movements: Flourishing or in Abeyance? London: Routledge, 2008.Harris, Anita. “Mind the Gap: Attitudes and Emergent Feminist Politics since the Third Wave.” Australian Feminist Studies 25.66 (2010): 475-484.Haussegger, Virginia. “#MeToo: Beware the Brewing Whiff of Backlash.” Sydney Morning Herald, 7 Mar. 2018. 1 Apr. 2018 <https://www.smh.com.au/national/metoo-beware-the-brewing-whiff-of-backlash-20180306-p4z33s.html>.Keller, Jessalynn. “Virtual Feminisms.” Information, Communication and Society 15.3(2011): 429-447.Kirston, Gill. “From ‘a Woman’s Place Is in Her Union’ to ‘Strong Unions Need Women’: Changing Gender Discourses, Policies and Realities in the Union Movement.” Labour & Industry: A Journal of the Social and Economic Relations of Work 27.4 (2017): 270-283.Kyrölä, Katariina. The Weight of Images. London: Routledge, 2014.Ledwith, Sue. “Gender Politics in Trade Unions: The Representation of Women between Exclusion and Inclusion.” European Review of Labour and Research 18.2 (2012): 185-199.Lyndsey, Susan. Women, Politics, and the Media: The 1999 New Zealand General Election. Dissertation. Massey University, 2002.Maddison, Sarah, and Sean Scalmer. Activist Wisdom: Practical Knowledge and Creative Tension in Social Movements. Sydney: UNSW P, 2006. Moynihan, Carolyn. A Stand for Decency: Patricia Bartlett & the Society for Promotion of Community Standards, 1970-1995. Wellington: The Society, 1995.Murray, Samantha. "Pathologizing 'Fatness': Medical Authority and Popular Culture." Sociology of Sport Journal 25.1 (2008): 7-21.Pausé, Cat. “Live to Tell: Coming Out as Fat.” Somatechnics 21 (2012): 42-56.———. “Express Yourself: Fat Activism in the Web 2.0 Age.” The Politics of Size: Perspectives from the Fat-Acceptance Movement. Ed. Ragen Chastain. Praeger, 2015. 1-8.———. “Rebel Heart: Performing Fatness Wrong Online.” M/C Journal 18.3 (2015).Rowland, Robyn, ed. Women Who Do and Women Who Don’t Join the Women’s Movement. London: Routledge, 1984.Schuster, Julia. “Invisible Feminists? Social Media and Young Women’s Political Participation.” Political Science 65.1 (2013): 8-24.Sheppard, Alice. "Suffrage Art and Feminism." Hypatia 5.2 (1990): 122-136.Simic, Zora. “Fat as a Feminist Issue: A History.” Fat Sex: New Directions in Theory and Activism. Eds. Helen Hester and Caroline Walters. London: Ashgate, 2015. 15-36.Spangler, Todd. “White-Supremacist Site Daily Stormer Booted by Hosting Provider.” Variety, 13 Aug. 2017. 1 May 2018 <https://variety.com/2017/digital/news/daily-stormer-heather-heyer-white-supremacist-neo-nazi-hosting-provider-1202526544/>.Smyth, Helen. Rocking the Cradle: Contraception, Sex, and Politics in New Zealand. Steele Roberts, 2000.Tiggemann, Marika, and Esther D. Rothblum. "Gender Differences in Social Consequences of Perceived Overweight in the United States and Australia." Sex Roles 18.1-2 (1988): 75-86.Van Acker, Elizabeth. “Media Representations of Women Politicians in Australia and New Zealand: High Expectations, Hostility or Stardom.” Policy and Society 22.1 (2003): 116-136.Vilhjálmsdóttir, Tara. Personal interview. 1 June 2018.

Briefs and Hot Brown Honey are two Brisbane based companies producing genre-bending work combining different mixes of circus, burlesque, hiphop, dance, boylesque, performance art, rap and drag. The two companies produce provocative performance that is entertaining and draws critical acclaim. However, what is particularly distinctive about these two companies is that they are both founded and directed by performers from Samoan cultural backgrounds who have leap-frogged over the normative whiteness of much contemporary Australian performance. Both companies have a radical political agenda. This essay argues that through the presentation of diverse alternative bodies, not only through the performing bodies presented on stage but also in the corporate bodies of the companies they have set up, they profoundly challenge the structure of the Australian performance industry and contribute a radical re-envisaging of the potential of circus to act as a vital political force.Briefs was co-founded by Creative Director, Samoan, Fez Fa’anana with his brother Natano Fa’anana in 2008. An experienced dancer and physical theatre performer, Fa’anana describes the company’s performances as the “dysfunctional marriage of theatre, circus, dance, drag and burlesque with the simplicity of a variety show format” (“On the Couch”). As Fa’anana’s alter ego, “the beautiful bearded Samoan ringmistress Shivannah says, describing The Second Coming, the Briefs show at the Sydney Festival 2017, the show is ‘A little bit butch with a f*** load of camp’” (Lavers). The show involves “extreme costume changes, extravagant birdbath boylesque, too close for comfort yo-yo tricks and more than one highly inappropriate banana” (“Briefs: The Second Coming”).Briefs is an all-male company with gender-bending forming an integral part of the ethos. In The Second Coming the accepted sinuous image of the female performer entwining herself around the aerial hoop or lyra is subverted with the act featuring instead a male contortionist performing the same seductive moves with silky smooth sensuousness. Another example of gender bending in the show is the Dita Von Teese number performed by a male performer in a birdbath filled with water with a trapeze suspended over the top of it. Perhaps the most sensational example of alternative bodies in the show is “the moment when performer Dallas Dellaforce, wearing a nude body stocking with a female body drawn onto it, and an enormously long, curly white-blond wig blown by a wind machine, stands like a high camp Botticelli Venus rising up out of the stage” (Lavers). The highly visible body of Fez Fa’anana as the gender-bending Samoan ringmistress challenges the pervasive whiteness in contemporary circus. Although there has been some discourse on the issue of whiteness within the context of Australian theatre, for example Lee Lewis arguing for an aggressive approach to cross-racial casting to combat the whiteness of Australian theatre and TV (Lewis), there has however been very little discussion of this issue within Australian contemporary circus. Mark St Leon’s discussion of historical attitudes to Aboriginal performers in Australian circus is a notable exception (St Leon).This issue remains widely unacknowledged, an aspect of whiteness that social geographers Audrey Kobashi and Linda Peake identify in their writing, whiteness is indicated less by its explicit racism than by the fact that it ignores, or even denies, racist indications. It occupies central ground by deracializing and normalizing common events and beliefs, giving them legitimacy as part of a moral system depicted as natural and universal. (Kobayashi and Peake 394)As film studies scholar, Richard Dyer writes,the invisibility of whiteness as a racial position in white (which is to say dominant) discourse is of a piece with its ubiquity … In fact for most of the time white people speak about nothing but white people, it’s just that we couch it in terms of ‘people’ in general. Research – into books, museums, the press, advertising, films, television, software – repeatedly shows that in Western representation whites are overwhelmingly and disproportionately predominant, have the central and elaborated roles, and above all, are placed as the norm, the ordinary, the standard. Whites are everywhere in representation … At the level of racial representation, in other words, whites are not of a certain race, they’re just the human race. (3)Dyer writes in conclusion that “white people need to learn to see themselves as white, to see their particularity. In other words whiteness needs to be made strange” (541). This applies in particular to contemporary circus. In a recent interview with the authors, ex-Circus Oz Artistic Director and CEO, Mike Finch, commented, “You could make an all-round entertaining family circus show with [racial] diversity represented and I believe that would be a deeply subversive act in a way in contemporary Australia” (Finch).Today in contemporary Australian circus very few racially diverse bodies can be seen and almost no Indigenous performers and this fact goes largely unremarked upon. In spite of there being Indigenous cultures within Australia that celebrate physical achievement, clowning and performance, there seem to be few pathways into professional circus for Indigenous athletes or artists. Although a considerable spread of social circus programs exists across Australia working with Indigenous youth at risk, there seem to be few structures in place to facilitate the transitioning between these social circus classes and entry into circus training programs or professional companies. Since 2012 Circus Oz has set up the program Blakflip to mentor and support young Indigenous performers to try and redress this problem. This has led to two graduates of the program moving on to perform with the company, namely Dale Woodbridge Brown and Ghenoa Gella, and also led to the mentorship and support of several students in gaining entry into the National Institute of Circus Arts in Melbourne. Circus Oz has also now appointed an Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander Program Officer, Davey Thomson, who is working to develop networks between past and present participants in the Blakflip program and to strengthen links with Indigenous Communities. However, it could be argued that Fez Fa’anana with Briefs has in fact leapfrogged over these programs aimed at addressing the whiteness in contemporary circus. As a Samoan Australian performer he has not only co-founded his own contemporary performance company in which he takes the central performing role, but has now also established another company called Briefs Factory, which is a creative production house that develops, presents, produces and manages artists and productions, and now at any one time employs around 20 people. In terms of his performative physical presence on stage, in an interview in 2015, Fa’anana described his performance alter ego, Shivannah, as the “love child of the bearded lady and ring master.” In the same interview he also described himself tellingly as “a Samoan (who is not a security guard, football player nor a KFC cashier),” and as “an Australian … a legal immigrant” (“On the Couch”). The radical racial difference that the alternative body of Shivannah the ringmistress presents in performance is also constantly reinforced by Fa’anana’s repartee. At the beginning of the show he urges the audience “to put their feet flat on the floor and acknowledge the earth and how lucky we are to be in this beautiful country that for 200 years now has been called Australia” (Fa’anana). Comments about his Samoan ancestry are sprinkled throughout the show and are delivered with a light touch, constantly making the audience laugh. At one point in the show resplendent in a sequined costume, Fa’anana stands downstage in front of two performers on their knees cleaning up the mess left on the stage from the act before, and he says, “Finally, I’ve made it! I’ve got a couple of white boys cleaning up after me” (Fa’anana). In another part of the show, alluding to white stereotypes of Indigenous performers, Fa’anana thanks the drag artist who taught him how to put his drag make-up on, saying “I used to put my make-up on with a burnt stick before he showed me how to do it” (Fa’anana).In his book on critical pedagogy, political activist and scholar Peter McLaren writes on approaches to developing the means to resist and subvert pervasive whiteness, saying, “To resist whiteness means developing a politics of difference […] we need to re-think difference and identity outside a set of binary oppositions. We need to view identity as coalitional, as collective, as processual, as grounded in the struggle for social justice” (213). One example of how identity outside binary oppositions was explored in The Second Coming was in an act by drag artist Dallas Dellaforce, who dressedin a sumptuous fifties evening dress with pink balloon breasts rising out of the top of his low cut evening dress and wearing a Marilyn Monroe blonde wig, camped it up as a fifties coquette, flipping from sultry into a totally scary horror tantrum, before returning to coquette mode with the husky phrase, ‘I love you.’ When at the end of the song, stripped naked, sporting a shaved bald head and wearing only a suggestive long thin pink balloon, the full potential of camp to reveal different layers of artifice and constructed identity was revealed. (Lavers)Fez Fa’anana comments at the end of the show that The Second Coming was not aimed at any particular group of people, but instead aimed to “celebrate being human.” However, if this is the case, Fa’anana is demanding an extended definition of being human that through the inclusion of diverse alternative bodies pushes for a new understandings of what constitutes being human and how human identity can be construed. His work demands an understanding that is not oppositional nor grounded in binary opposition to normative whiteness but instead forms part of a re-thinking of human identity through alternative bodies that are presented as processual, and deeply grounded in the struggle for the social justice issue of acceptance of difference and alternatives.Hot Brown Honey is another Brisbane based company working with circus in conjunction with other forms such as burlesque, hip hop, and cabaret. The all-female company was recently awarded the UK 2016 Total Theatre Award for Innovation, Experimentation and Playing with Form. The company was co-founded by dancer and choreographer Lisa Fa’alafi, who is from the same Samoan family as Fez and Natano Fa’anana, with sound designer Kim “Busty Beatz” Bowers, a successful hip hop artist, poet and record producer. From the beginning Hot Brown Honey was envisaged as providing a performance space for women of colour. Lisa Fa’alafi says the company was formed to address the lack of performance opportunities available, “It’s plain knowledge that there are limited roles for people of colour, let alone women of colour” (quoted in Northover).Lyn Gardner, arts critic for The Guardian in the UK, describing Hot Brown Honey’s performance, writes that the company fights “gender and racial stereotypes with a raucous glee, while giving a feminist makeover to circus, hip-hop and burlesque” (Gardner). The company includes women mainly “of Indigenous, Pacific Islander and Indonesian heritage taking on colonialism, sexism, gender stereotypes and racism through often confronting performance and humour; their tagline is ‘fighting the power never tasted so sweet’” (Northover).In their show Hot Brown Honey present a straps act. Straps is a physically demanding aerial circus act that requires great upper body strength and is usually performed by male aerialists. However, in the Hot Brown Honey show gender expectations are subverted with the straps act performed by a female aerialist. Gardner writes of the performance of this straps act at the 2016 Edinburgh Festival Fringe as a “sequence that conjures the twisted moves of a woman trying to escape domestic violence,” and “One of the best circus sequences I’ve seen at this festival” (Gardner). Hula hoops, a traditionally female act, is also subverted and used to explore the stereotypes of the “exotic notion of Pacific culture” (Northover). Gardner writes of this act that the hoola hoops “are called into service to explore western tourists’ culture of entitlement”. Company co-founder Kim “Busty Beatz” Bowers, talks about the group’s approach to flipping perceptions of women of colour through investigating the power dynamics in gender relations, “We have a lot of flips around sexuality,” says Bowers. “Especially around the way people expect a black woman to be. We like to shift the exploitation and the power” (quoted in Northover).Another pressing issue that Hot Brown Honey address is a strange phenomenon apparent in much contemporary circus. In addition to the pervasive whiteness in contemporary circus, relatively few women are visible in many contemporary circus companies. Suzie Williams from Acrobatic Conundrum, the Seattle-based circus company, writes in her blog, “there are a lot of shows that feature many young, fit, exuberant guys and one flexible girl who performs a sensual/sentimental/romantic solo act” (Williams). Writing about Complètement Cirque, Montreal’s international circus festival which took place in July 2016, Williams says, “this year at the festival, my least favorite trend was … out of the 9 ticketed productions only one had more than one woman in it” (Williams, emphasis in original).Circus scholars have started to research this trend of lack of female representation both in contemporary circus schools and performance companies. “Gender in Circus Education: the institutionalization of stereotypes” was the title of a paper presented at the Circus and Its Others Conference in Montreal in July 2016 by Alisan Funk, a circus choreographer, teacher and director and an MA candidate at Concordia University in Montreal. Funk cited research from France showing that the educational programs and the industry are 70% male dominated. Although recreational programs in France have majority female populations, there appears to be a bottleneck at the level of entrance exams to superior schools. The few female students accepted to those schools are then frequently pushed towards solo aerial work (Funk). This push to solo aerial work means that the group floor work and acrobatics are often performed by men who create acrobatic groups that often then go on to form the basis for companies. (In this context the work of Circus Oz in this area needs to be acknowledged with the company having had a consistent policy over its 39 year existence of employing 50% female performers, however in the context of international contemporary circus this is increasingly rare).Williams writes in her blog about contemporary circus performance, “I want to see more women. I want to see women who look different from each other. I want to see so many women that no single women has to stand as a symbol of what all women can be” (Williams).Hot Brown Honey tackle the issue Williams raises head on, and they do it in the form of internationally award winning circus/cabaret that is all-female, where the bodies of the performers offer a radical alternative to the norms of contemporary circus and performance generally. The work shows women, a range of women performing circus-women of colour, with a wide range of bodies of varying shapes and sizes on stage. In Hot Brown Honey no single women in the show has to stand as a symbol of what all women can be. Briefs and Hot Brown Honey, through accessible yet political circus/cabaret, subvert the norms and institutionalized racial and gender-based biases inherent in contemporary circus both in Australia and internationally. By doing so these two companies have leap-frogged the normative presentation of performers in contemporary circus by speaking directly to a celebration of difference and diversity through the presentation of radical alternative bodies.ReferencesAlthusser, L. For Marx. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: Verso, 1965/2005.Beeby, J. “Briefs: The Second Coming – Jack Beeby Chats with Creative Director Fez Faanana.” Aussie Theatre 2015. <http://aussietheatre.com.au/features/briefs-the-second-coming-jack-beeby-chats-with-creative-director-fez-faanana>.“Briefs: The Second Coming.” Sydney Festival 2016. <http://www.sydneyfestival.org.au/2017/briefs>.Dyer, R. White: Essays on Race and Culture. New York: Routledge, 1997. Fa’anana, F. Repartee as Shivannah in The Second Coming by Briefs. Magic Mirrors Spiegeltent, Sydney Festival, 7 Jan. 2017. Performance.Finch, M. Personal communication. 13 Dec. 2016.Funk, A. “Gender in Circus Education: The Institutionalization of Stereotypes.” Paper presented at Circus and Its Others, July 2016.Gardner, L. “Shameless and Subversive: The Feminist Revolution Hits the Edinburgh Fringe.” The Guardian Theatre Blog 14 Aug. 2016. <https://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2016/aug/14/feminist-revolution-edinburgh-stage-fringe-2016-burlesque>.Kyobashi A., and L. Peake. “Racism Out of Place: Thoughts on Whiteness and an Antiracist Geography in the New Millennium.” Annals of American Geographers 90.2 (2000): 392-403.Lavers, K. “Briefs: The Second Coming.” ArtsHub Reviews 2017. <http://performing.artshub.com.au/news-article/reviews/performing-arts/katie-lavers/briefs-the-second-coming-252936>.Lewis, L. Cross-Racial Casting: Changing the Face of Australian Theatre. Platform Papers No. 13. Strawberry Hills, NSW: Currency House, 2007. McLaren, P. Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education. 6th ed. New York: Routledge, 2016. McLaren, P., and R. Torres. “Racism and Multicultural Education: Rethinking ‘Race’ and ‘Whiteness’ in Late Capitalism.” Critical Multiculturalism: Rethinking Multicultural and Antiracist Education. Ed. S. May. Philadelphia, PA: Falmer Press, 1999. 42-76. Northover, K. “Melbourne International Comedy Festival: A Mix of Politically Infused Hip Hop and Cabaret.” Sydney Morning Herald 3 Apr. 2016. <http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/comedy/melbourne-international-comedy-festival-hot-brown-honey-a-mix-of-politicallyinfused-hiphop-and-cabaret-20160403-gnxazn.html>.“On the Couch with Fez Fa’anana.” Arts Review 2015. <http://artsreview.com.au/on-the-couch-with-fez-faanana/>.“Outrageous Boys’ Circus Briefs Is No Drag.” Daily Telegraph 2016. <http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/archive/specials/outrageous-boys-circus-briefs-is-no-drag/news-story/7d24aee1560666b4eca65af81ad19ff3>.St Leon, M. “Celebrated at First, Then Implied and Finally Denied.” The Routledge Circus Studies Reader. Eds. Katie Lavers and Peta Tait. London: Routledge, 2008/2016. 209-33. Williams, S. “Gender in Circus.” Acrobatic Conundrum 3 Aug. 2016. <http://www.acrobaticconundrum.com/blog/2016/8/3/gender-in-circus>.

The 2000s have been a lively decade for cities. The Worldwatch Institute estimated that 2007 was the first year in human history that more people worldwide lived in cities than the countryside. Globalisation and new digital media technologies have generated the seemingly paradoxical outcome that spatial location came to be more rather than less important, as combinations of firms, industries, cultural activities and creative talents have increasingly clustered around a select node of what have been termed “creative cities,” that are in turn highly networked into global circuits of economic capital, political power and entertainment media. Intellectually, the period has seen what the UCLA geographer Ed Soja refers to as the spatial turn in social theory, where “whatever your interests may be, they can be significantly advanced by adopting a critical spatial perspective” (2). This is related to the dynamic properties of socially constructed space itself, or what Soja terms “the powerful forces that arise from socially produced spaces such as urban agglomerations and cohesive regional economies,” with the result that “what can be called the stimulus of socio-spatial agglomeration is today being assertively described as the primary cause of economic development, technological innovation, and cultural creativity” (14). The demand for social justice in cities has, in recent years, taken the form of “Right to the City” movements. The “Right to the City” movement draws upon the long tradition of radical urbanism in which the Paris Commune of 1871 features prominently, and which has both its Marxist and anarchist variants, as well as the geographer Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) arguments that capitalism was fundamentally driven by the production of space, and that the citizens of a city possessed fundamental rights by virtue of being in a city, meaning that political struggle in capitalist societies would take an increasingly urban form. Manifestations of contemporary “Right to the City” movements have been seen in the development of a World Charter for the Right to the City, Right to the City alliances among progressive urban planners as well as urban activists, forums that bring together artists, architects, activists and urban geographers, and a variety of essays on the subject by radical geographers including David Harvey, whose work I wish to focus upon here. In his 2008 essay "The Right to the City," Harvey presents a manifesto for 21st century radical politics that asserts that the struggle for collective control over cities marks the nodal point of anti-capitalist movements today. It draws together a range of strands of arguments recognizable to those familiar with Harvey’s work, including Marxist political economy, the critique of neoliberalism, the growth of social inequality in the U.S. in particular, and concerns about the rise of speculative finance capital and its broader socio-economic consequences. My interest in Harvey’s manifesto here arises not so much from his prognosis for urban radicalism, but from how he understands the suburban in relation to this urban class struggle. It is an important point to consider because, in many parts of the world, growing urbanisation is in fact growing suburbanisation. This is the case for U.S. cities (Cox), and it is also apparent in Australian cities, with the rise in particular of outer suburban Master Planned Communities as a feature of the “New Prosperity” Australia has been experiencing since the mid 1990s (Flew; Infrastructure Australia). What we find in Harvey’s essay is that the suburban is clearly sub-urban, or an inferior form of city living. Suburbs are variously identified by Harvey as being:Sites for the expenditure of surplus capital, as a safety valve for overheated finance capitalism (Harvey 27);Places where working class militancy is pacified through the promotion of mortgage debt, which turns suburbanites into political conservatives primarily concerned with maintaining their property values;Places where “the neoliberal ethic of intense possessive individualism, and its cognate of political withdrawal from collective forms of action” are actively promoted through the proliferation of shopping malls, multiplexes, franchise stores and fast-food outlets, leading to “pacification by cappuccino” (32);Places where women are actively oppressed, so that “leading feminists … [would] proclaim the suburb as the locus of all their primary discontents” (28);A source of anti-capitalist struggle, as “the soulless qualities of suburban living … played a critical role in the dramatic events of 1968 in the US [as] discontented white middle-class students went into a phase of revolt, sought alliances with marginalized groups claiming civil rights and rallied against American imperialism” (28).Given these negative associations, one could hardly imagine citizens demanding the right to the suburb, in the same way as Harvey projects the right to the city as a rallying cry for a more democratic social order. Instead, from an Australian perspective, one is reminded of the critiques of suburbia that have been a staple of radical theory from the turn of the 20th century to the present day (Collis et. al.). Demanding the “right to the suburb” would appear here as an inherently contradictory demand, that could only be desired by those who the Australian radical psychoanalytic theorist Douglas Kirsner described as living an alienated existence where:Watching television, cleaning the car, unnecessary housework and spectator sports are instances of general life-patterns in our society: by adopting these patterns the individual submits to a uniform life fashioned from outside, a pseudo-life in which the question of individual self-realisation does not even figure. People live conditioned, unconscious lives, reproducing the values of the system as a whole (Kirsner 23). The problem with this tradition of radical critique, which is perhaps reflective of the estrangement of a section of the Australian critical intelligentsia more generally, is that most Australians live in suburbs, and indeed seem (not surprisingly!) to like living in them. Indeed, each successive wave of migration to Australia has been marked by families seeking a home in the suburbs, regardless of the housing conditions of the place they came from: the demand among Singaporeans for large houses in Perth, or what has been termed “Singaperth,” is one of many manifestations of this desire (Lee). Australian suburban development has therefore been characterized by a recurring tension between the desire of large sections of the population to own their own home (the fabled quarter-acre block) in the suburbs, and the condemnation of suburban life from an assortment of intellectuals, political radicals and cultural critics. This was the point succinctly made by the economist and urban planner Hugh Stretton in his 1970 book Ideas for Australian Cities, where he observed that “Most Australians choose to live in suburbs, in reach of city centres and also of beaches or countryside. Many writers condemn this choice, and with especial anger or gloom they condemn the suburbs” (Stretton 7). Sue Turnbull has observed that “suburbia has come to constitute a cultural fault-line in Australia over the last 100 years” (19), while Ian Craven has described suburbia as “a term of contention and a focus for fundamentally conflicting beliefs” in the Australian national imaginary “whose connotations continue to oscillate between dream and suburban nightmare” (48). The tensions between celebration and critique of suburban life play themselves out routinely in the Australian media, from the sun-lit suburbanism of Australia’s longest running television serial dramas, Neighbours and Home and Away, to the pointed observational critiques found in Australian comedy from Barry Humphries to Kath and Kim, to the dark visions of films such as The Boys and Animal Kingdom (Craven; Turnbull). Much as we may feel that the diagnosis of suburban life as a kind of neurotic condition had gone the way of the concept album or the tie-dye shirt, newspaper feature writers such as Catherine Deveny, writing in The Age, have offered the following as a description of the Chadstone shopping centre in Melbourne’s eastern suburbChadstone is a metastasised tumour of offensive proportions that's easy to find. You simply follow the line of dead-eyed wage slaves attracted to this cynical, hermetically sealed weatherless biosphere by the promise a new phone will fix their punctured soul and homewares and jumbo caramel mugachinos will fill their gaping cavern of disappointment … No one looks happy. Everyone looks anaesthetised. A day spent at Chadstone made me understand why they call these shopping centres complexes. Complex as in a psychological problem that's difficult to analyse, understand or solve. (Deveny) Suburbanism has been actively promoted throughout Australia’s history since European settlement. Graeme Davison has observed that “Australia’s founders anticipated a sprawl of homes and gardens rather than a clumping of terraces and alleys,” and quotes Governor Arthur Phillip’s instructions to the first urban developers of the Sydney Cove colony in 1790 that streets shall be “laid out in such a manner as to afford free circulation of air, and where the houses are built … the land will be granted with a clause that will prevent more than one house being built on the allotment” (Davison 43). Louise Johnson (2006) argued that the main features of 20th century Australian suburbanisation were very much in place by the 1920s, particularly land-based capitalism and the bucolic ideal of home as a retreat from the dirt, dangers and density of the city. At the same time, anti-suburbanism has been a significant influence in Australian public thought. Alan Gilbert (1988) drew attention to the argument that Australia’s suburbs combined the worst elements of the city and country, with the absence of both the grounded community associated with small towns, and the mental stimuli and personal freedom associated with the city. Australian suburbs have been associated with spiritual emptiness, the promotion of an ersatz, one-dimensional consumer culture, the embourgeoisment of the working-class, and more generally criticised for being “too pleasant, too trivial, too domestic and far too insulated from … ‘real’ life” (Gilbert 41). There is also an extensive feminist literature critiquing suburbanization, seeing it as promoting the alienation of women and the unequal sexual division of labour (Game and Pringle). More recently, critiques of suburbanization have focused on the large outer-suburban homes developed on new housing estates—colloquially known as McMansions—that are seen as being environmentally unsustainable and emblematic of middle-class over-consumption. Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss’s Affluenza (2005) is a locus classicus of this type of argument, and organizations such as the Australia Institute—which Hamilton and Denniss have both headed—have regularly published papers making such arguments. Can the Suburbs Make You Creative?In such a context, championing the Australian suburb can feel somewhat like being an advocate for Dan Brown novels, David Williamson plays, Will Ferrell comedies, or TV shows such as Two and a Half Men. While it may put you on the side of majority opinion, you can certainly hear the critical axe grinding and possibly aimed at your head, not least because of the association of such cultural forms with mass popular culture, or the pseudo-life of an alienated existence. The art of a program such as Kath and Kim is that, as Sue Turnbull so astutely notes, it walks both sides of the street, both laughing with and laughing at Australian suburban culture, with its celebrity gossip magazines, gourmet butcher shops, McManisons and sales at Officeworks. Gina Riley and Jane Turner’s inspirations for the show can be seen with the presence of such suburban icons as Shane Warne, Kylie Minogue and Barry Humphries as guests on the program. Others are less nuanced in their satire. The website Things Bogans Like relentlessly pillories those who live in McMansions, wear Ed Hardy t-shirts and watch early evening current affairs television, making much of the lack of self-awareness of those who would simultaneously acquire Buddhist statues for their homes and take budget holidays in Bali and Phuket while denouncing immigration and multiculturalism. It also jokes about the propensity of “bogans” to loudly proclaim that those who question their views on such matters are demonstrating “political correctness gone mad,” appealing to the intellectual and moral authority of writers such as the Melbourne Herald-Sun columnist Andrew Bolt. There is also the “company you keep” question. Critics of over-consuming middle-class suburbia such as Clive Hamilton are strongly associated with the Greens, whose political stocks have been soaring in Australia’s inner cities, where the majority of Australia’s cultural and intellectual critics live and work. By contrast, the Liberal party under John Howard and now Tony Abbott has taken strongly to what could be termed suburban realism over the 1990s and 2000s. Examples of suburban realism during the Howard years included the former Member for Lindsay Jackie Kelly proclaiming that the voters of her electorate were not concerned with funding for their local university (University of Western Sydney) as the electorate was “pram city” and “no one in my electorate goes to uni” (Gibson and Brennan-Horley), and the former Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Garry Hardgrave, holding citizenship ceremonies at Bunnings hardware stores, so that allegiance to the Australian nation could co-exist with a sausage sizzle (Gleeson). Academically, a focus on the suburbs is at odds with Richard Florida’s highly influential creative class thesis, which stresses inner urban cultural amenity and “buzz” as the drivers of a creative economy. Unfortunately, it is also at odds with many of Florida’s critics, who champion inner city activism as the antidote to the ersatz culture of “hipsterisation” that they associate with Florida (Peck; Slater). A championing of suburban life and culture is associated with writers such as Joel Kotkin and the New Geography group, who also tend to be suspicious of claims made about the creative industries and the creative economy. It is worth noting, however, that there has been a rich vein of work on Australian suburbs among cultural geographers, that has got past urban/suburban binaries and considered the extent to which critiques of suburban Australia are filtered through pre-existing discursive categories rather than empirical research findings (Dowling and Mee; McGuirk and Dowling; Davies (this volume). I have been part of a team engaged in a three-year study of creative industries workers in outer suburban areas, known as the Creative Suburbia project.[i] The project sought to understand how those working in creative industries who lived and worked in the outer suburbs maintained networks, interacted with clients and their peers, and made a success of their creative occupations: it focused on six suburbs in the cities of Brisbane (Redcliffe, Springfield, Forest Lake) and Melbourne (Frankston, Dandenong, Caroline Springs). It was premised upon what has been an inescapable empirical fact: however much talk there is about the “return to the city,” the fastest rates of population growth are in the outer suburbs of Australia’s major cities (Infrastructure Australia), and this is as true for those working in creative industries occupations as it is for those in virtually all other industry and occupational sectors (Flew; Gibson and Brennan-Horley; Davies). While there is a much rehearsed imagined geography of the creative industries that points to creative talents clustering in dense, highly agglomerated inner city precincts, incubating their unique networks of trust and sociality through random encounters in the city, it is actually at odds with the reality of where people in these sectors choose to live and work, which is as often as not in the suburbs, where the citizenry are as likely to meet in their cars at traffic intersections than walking in city boulevards.There is of course a “yes, but” response that one could have to such empirical findings, which is to accept that the creative workforce is more suburbanised than is commonly acknowledged, but to attribute this to people being driven out of the inner city by high house prices and rents, which may or may not be by-products of a Richard Florida-style strategy to attract the creative class. In other words, people live in the outer suburbs because they are driven out of the inner city. From our interviews with 130 people across these six suburban locations, the unequivocal finding was that this was not the case. While a fair number of our respondents had indeed moved from the inner city, just as many would—if given the choice—move even further away from the city towards a more rural setting as they would move closer to it. While there are clearly differences between suburbs, with creative people in Redcliffe being generally happier than those in Springfield, for example, it was quite clear that for many of these people a suburban location helped them in their creative practice, in ways that included: the aesthetic qualities of the location; the availability of “headspace” arising from having more time to devote to creative work rather than other activities such as travelling and meeting people; less pressure to conform to a stereotyped image of how one should look and act; financial savings from having access to lower-cost locations; and time saved by less commuting between locations.These creative workers generally did not see having access to the “buzz” associated with the inner city as being essential for pursuing work in their creative field, and they were just as likely to establish hardware stores and shopping centres as networking hubs as they were cafes and bars. While being located in the suburbs was disadvantageous in terms of access to markets and clients, but this was often seen in terms of a trade-off for better quality of life. Indeed, contrary to the presumptions of those such as Clive Hamilton and Catherine Deveny, they could draw creative inspiration from creative locations themselves, without feeling subjected to “pacification by cappuccino.” The bigger problem was that so many of the professional associations they dealt with would hold events in the inner city in the late afternoon or early evening, presuming people living close by and/or not having domestic or family responsibilities at such times. The role played by suburban locales such as hardware stores as sites for professional networking and as elements of creative industries value chains has also been documented in studies undertaken of Darwin as a creative city in Australia’s tropical north (Brennan-Horley and Gibson; Brennan-Horley et al.). Such a revised sequence in the cultural geography of the creative industries has potentially great implications for how urban cultural policy is being approached. The assumption that the creative industries are best developed in cities by investing heavily in inner urban cultural amenity runs the risk of simply bypassing those areas where the bulk of the nation’s artists, musicians, filmmakers and other cultural workers actually are, which is in the suburbs. Moreover, by further concentrating resources among already culturally rich sections of the urban population, such policies run the risk of further accentuating spatial inequalities in the cultural realm, and achieving the opposite of what is sought by those seeking spatial justice or the right to the city. An interest in broadband infrastructure or suburban university campuses is certainly far more prosaic than a battle for control of the nation’s cultural institutions or guerilla actions to reclaim the city’s streets. Indeed, it may suggest aspirations no higher than those displayed by Kath and Kim or by the characters of Barry Humphries’ satirical comedy. But however modest or utilitarian a focus on developing cultural resources in Australian suburbs may seem, it is in fact the most effective way of enabling the forms of spatial justice in the cultural sphere that many progressive people seek. ReferencesBrennan-Horley, Chris, and Chris Gibson. “Where Is Creativity in the City? Integrating Qualitative and GIS Methods.” Environment and Planning A 41.11 (2009): 2595–614. Brennan-Horley, Chris, Susan Luckman, Chris Gibson, and J. Willoughby-Smith. “GIS, Ethnography and Cultural Research: Putting Maps Back into Ethnographic Mapping.” The Information Society: An International Journal 26.2 (2010): 92–103.Collis, Christy, Emma Felton, and Phil Graham. “Beyond the Inner City: Real and Imagined Places in Creative Place Policy and Practice.” The Information Society: An International Journal 26.2 (2010): 104–12.Cox, Wendell. “The Still Elusive ‘Return to the City’.” New Geography 28 February 2011. < http://www.newgeography.com/content/002070-the-still-elusive-return-city >.Craven, Ian. “Cinema, Postcolonialism and Australian Suburbia.” Australian Studies 1995: 45-69. Davies, Alan. “Are the Suburbs Dormitories?” The Melbourne Urbanist 21 Sep. 2010. < http://melbourneurbanist.wordpress.com/2010/09/21/are-the-suburbs-dormitories/ >.Davison, Graeme. "Australia: The First Suburban Nation?” Journal of Urban History 22.1 (1995): 40-75. Deveny, Catherine. “No One Out Alive.” The Age 29 Oct. 2009. < http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/no-one-gets-out-alive-20091020-h6yh.html >.Dowling, Robyn, and K. Mee. “Tales of the City: Western Sydney at the End of the Millennium.” Sydney: The Emergence of World City. Ed. John Connell. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 2000. 244–72.Flew, Terry. “Economic Prosperity, Suburbanization and the Creative Workforce: Findings from Australian Suburban Communities.” Spaces and Flows: Journal of Urban and Extra-Urban Studies 1.1 (2011, forthcoming).Game, Ann, and Rosemary Pringle. “Sexuality and the Suburban Dream.” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology 15.2 (1979): 4–15.Gibson, Chris, and Chris Brennan-Horley. “Goodbye Pram City: Beyond Inner/Outer Zone Binaries in Creative City Research.” Urban Policy and Research 24.4 (2006): 455–71. Gilbert, A. “The Roots of Australian Anti-Suburbanism.” Australian Cultural History. Ed. S. I. Goldberg and F. B. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. 33–39. Gleeson, Brendan. Australian Heartlands: Making Space for Hope in the Suburbs. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2006.Hamilton, Clive, and Richard Denniss. Affluenza. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005.Harvey, David. “The Right to the City.” New Left Review 53 (2008): 23–40.Infrastructure Australia. State of Australian Cities 2010. Infrastructure Australia Major Cities Unit. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. 2010.Johnson, Lesley. “Style Wars: Revolution in the Suburbs?” Australian Geographer 37.2 (2006): 259–77. Kirsner, Douglas. “Domination and the Flight from Being.” Australian Capitalism: Towards a Socialist Critique. Eds. J. Playford and D. Kirsner. Melbourne: Penguin, 1972. 9–31.Kotkin, Joel. “Urban Legends.” Foreign Policy 181 (2010): 128–34. Lee, Terence. “The Singaporean Creative Suburb of Perth: Rethinking Cultural Globalization.” Globalization and Its Counter-Forces in South-East Asia. Ed. T. Chong. Singapore: Institute for Southeast Asian Studies, 2008. 359–78. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.McGuirk, P., and Robyn Dowling. “Understanding Master-Planned Estates in Australian Cities: A Framework for Research.” Urban Policy and Research 25.1 (2007): 21–38Peck, Jamie. “Struggling with the Creative Class.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29.4 (2005): 740–70. Slater, Tom. “The Eviction of Critical Perspectives from Gentrification Research.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30.4 (2006): 737–57. Soja, Ed. Seeking Spatial Justice. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010.Stretton, Hugh. Ideas for Australian Cities. Melbourne: Penguin, 1970.Turnbull, Sue. “Mapping the Vast Suburban Tundra: Australian Comedy from Dame Edna to Kath and Kim.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 11.1 (2008): 15–32.

Photo by Waranont (Joe) on Unsplash INTRODUCTION The age-adjusted COVID-19 mortality rate among Black Americans is twice as high as White Americans.[1] This shocking evidence of health disparities, coincident to a public reckoning with the history of racism in the US, highlights the inverse relationship between race and health. Public sentiment may now favor addressing these pressing public health issues, but the sprawling healthcare system largely focuses on clinical care; it lacks tools to influence the social determinants of health at the point of the healthcare institution. Reinvigorating organizational ethics, sometimes called institutional ethics, may provide such a tool. BACKGROUND Organizational ethics became part of the healthcare system during the upheavals in financing and organization of health care in the 1990s. Yet organizational ethics in a medical setting must be more than simple business ethics.[2] Just as health care professionals are granted special privileges in society in exchange for adherence to a code of medical ethics and duties, healthcare organizations and systems also must now adhere to ethical requirements in exchange for their privileged position that includes the right to provide, and be reimbursed for, health care.[3] In the 1990s, ethicists began to discuss how clinical ethics committees might develop an understanding of business ethics in order to provide comprehensive organizational ethics reviews.[4] Some bioethicists even believed that the challenges of integrating business and medical care would compel ethics committees to look outward, engaging in public advocacy around ethical issues in health care.[5] To fulfill the mission of maintaining organizational ethics standards within the healthcare system, ethics committees would need to advocate for patients in the public sphere. Ethics committees might even take positions at odds with those of the healthcare institutions in which they work. Organizational ethics committees might have served as watchdogs, ensuring that healthcare organizations fulfill their fiduciary duties to their patients and communities. Bioethicists soon realized that the vision of a robust ethics committee involving administrators, bioethicists, and medical staff advising multiple divisions of large organizations and policy makers would fall short.[6] The two ethical systems remained separate: most organizations developed a combination of a clinical ethics committee adjunct to the medical staff with a compliance department to oversee organizational ethics. However, organizational ethics really goes beyond compliance; it “cannot be addressed by focusing narrowly on business matters or by quasi-legal mechanisms to assure that behavior conforms to pre-established codes or rules.”[7] As a result, there is no centralized entity with power in each healthcare institution that can treat healthcare inequities as an institutional ethical failure that must be addressed. Current research on specific inequitable outcomes due to bias in clinical care includes specialties such as maternal care,[8]cardiac care,[9] pain management, and technology.[10] Implicit bias and racist clinical interactions, once identified, may be addressed through staff training and other interventions. Yet the ethics of clinical care requires little attention to the social determinants of health such as high levels of police surveillance in the community which may cause increased rates of hypertension,[11] pre-term birth,[12] and may affect mental health. Leaving these problems to the public health realm disconnects health practitioners and institutions from the ability to remedy some of the causes of health problems in their patients. Simply treating the effects of racism in the practice of medicine is not curative – it is really palliative care.[13] ANALYSIS The term “organizational ethics” is too limited to encompass the scope of change needed to address structural racism and the social determinants of health in today’s healthcare institutions. Structural Justice Ethics[14] better describes a plan and a process that requires the healthcare system and professionals to look both inward and outward to take on the structural causes of racism and health disparities. Building on organizational and clinical ethics, Structural Justice Ethics could amplify the research on systemic issues such as the effects of social determinants of health, racism in clinical care, and necessary advocacy with the local community. To be effective and complete, organizations should recognize duties to patients that arrive at their doorstep, damaged by generations of subordination and racism. To ethically treat patients who have experienced racism, the system and health practitioners must acknowledge and work to reduce the inequities in society that cause harm to their health in the clinical setting. Accreditation companies such as The Joint Commission could amend their standards to require top-rated healthcare organizations to form new Structural Justice Ethics committees in their organizations, taking affirmative steps to acknowledge the ethical implications of racism and the social determinants of health. Many bioethicists have already called for the field of bioethics to address racism as an ethical issue in healthcare, some even calling for a new Black Bioethics.[15] This frustration with the profession of bioethics has developed in other areas, such as disability ethics and feminist ethics, and reflects a belief that mainstream bioethics is a rigidly principlist endeavor. The education of new bioethicists is grounded in practical philosophy graduate programs, entwined with academia’s history of exclusivity. As a relatively young academic subject, bioethics has the potential to expand and grow into a more practical and justice-oriented tool, learning how to counter the overly individualistic bioethics that has roots in our racist and Protestant-dominant history.[16] Expanding organizational ethics into Structural Justice Ethics in health care could bring Black bioethicists into the center of healthcare ethics and provide the tools to implement changes needed to address racism in health care. Healthcare organizations should not expect Black healthcare practitioners to take on these Structural Justice Ethics roles as “extra” work. Too often, people of color are expected to bear the burden of explaining racism and working to eradicate it.[17]The Structural Justice Ethics committee should be a new model, centered in ethics and policy, with professional-level staffing that reflects the racial and ethnic makeup of the community it serves. Calling on bioethicists as moral agents in the world, and particularly within the medical system, to act as social justice advocates against systemic injustice in a system where they have privilege and power seems logical and surprisingly necessary. “Going forward, bioethics needs to engage with the nuances of race with the same vigor that it has approached discussions of moral theories and biotechnologies.”[18] Graduate-level bioethics programs have expanded significantly in recent years, with 45 current master’s level programs,[19] and there should be a wealth of professionals ready to oversee the role of encouraging and monitoring justice in the system. These programs focus primarily if not exclusively on the dominant paradigm of bioethics, yet as ethics programs, they should be able to course-correct and embrace greater diversity in people and thought. Structural Justice Ethicists can guide healthcare organizations to become learning institutions open to the idea that bias and inequity are ethical harms that they can and should address. Some may question whether such close attention to Black health care needs amounts to reparations or “reverse” discrimination, a controversial topic in our political discussions. However, when posed as an ethical duty of health care, there is no option to continue to treat Black people unethically. Of course, healthcare systems will have to balance competing budgetary interests; even with unlimited funding, disparities in health care would not disappear overnight.[20] In a fair process where decisionmakers must weigh the demands of stakeholders, the ethical obligation to address the social determinants of health must have an advocate. Moreover, setting high ethical standards is not the same as government spending to make reparations for past harms. In fact, Structural Justice Ethics does not look to the past at all but looks to the needs of subordinated communities of patients as they exist today. Any community that is harmed by structural injustice in health care can be the focus of a Structural Justice Ethics review. The Joint Commission and other accrediting organizations can require healthcare organizations to meet the challenges of health inequities by adopting new Structural Justice Ethics committees, just as The Joint Commission added organizational ethics to its requirements in 1995. Admittedly, Structural Justice Ethics is an amorphous concept and its role within healthcare institutions needs to be refined and assigned specific tasks. However, there is substantial research on the social determinants of health; the challenge for the Structural Justice Ethics is to recommend systemic changes from within, rather than beginning this research anew. The Joint Commission’s Center for Transforming Healthcare, as a data-driven and process-oriented patient safety organization, is well-primed to take on this task. The Center can collaborate with existing academic and governmental health equity researchers to set short- and long-term goals for Structural Justice Ethics committees. To begin with, a Structural Justice Ethics committee can pose the question of “how is racism operating here” and: a. connect with current research on specific inequitable outcomes due to bias in medicine and bring best practices to the attention of medical staff. b. work with human resources and medical staff to support and increase diverse populations in the workforce. c. ensure that implicit bias and other trainings are properly provided to all staff, as well as expanding the scope of such trainings to address developing areas such as epistemic harm, or the harm of one’s own physical experience being discounted by medical professionals.[21] The health care workforce should also be trained in Title VI law.[22] d. evaluate research data on the organization’s own potential disparate outcomes due to race, to determine areas for improvement both within and outside of the organization. e. invite the local community to come in for listening and learning sessions, to better understand the community’s concerns and perspective on health equity. f. improve advocacy on behalf of community members to state and local authorities, effectively taking a stand for health care equity for local stakeholders. Dr. Camara P. Jones describes a collaborative endeavor like this as critical to anti-racist work and likens it to adopting a community health center model where the health facility takes responsibility for the health and well-being of the local community.[23] AMA policy already encourages this type of effort in opinion 8.11 of the AMA Code, which states that, alongside diagnosis and treatment, “physicians also have a professional commitment to prevent disease and promote health and well-being for their patients and the community.”[24] A theoretical framework and concrete plan for radical improvement in the ethics of the healthcare system will help all healthcare professionals. Some healthcare practitioners may not recognize their own biases and need training to meet best practices standards in light of health inequities. Other healthcare practitioners may feel disillusioned because they know they face individual patients suffering the effects of structural racism, yet they can treat only the illness.[25] The scope of the problem may overwhelm practitioners, and without a belief that the system is committed to improvement, practitioners may become numb to the suffering, a trauma reaction that affects both the practitioners and their patients. Unfortunately, when current medical students ask the question, “what can I do to fight systemic racism?” the answer is usually “call it out.” But putting the onus on newly minted individual practitioners to call out racism in an established structure is unrealistic, unfair, and destined to be unsuccessful. Just as we should not expect subordinated individuals to “overcome” their social determinants of health, we should not expect health professionals to make this change individually. Addressing injustices in the institution and adjusting medical ethics accordingly can alleviate the burden of these ethical dilemmas. CONCLUSION Structural Justice Ethics must be woven into the ethics committees at the institutional level. Organizational ethics committees can evaluate healthcare organizations by their integrity, i.e., how well their actions fulfill the moral obligations they have undertaken.[26] Our healthcare system has avoided the moral obligation to address racism and the social determinants of health by focusing on clinical ethics, leaving public health to academics and the government. Expanding organizational ethics to take on the issues of structural injustice within each healthcare institution will help organizations better measure, change, and ultimately fulfill their moral obligations to their patients and communities. [1] “Color of Coronavirus: COVID-19 Deaths Analyzed by Race and Ethnicity,” APM Research Lab, accessed June 1, 2021, https://www.apmresearchlab.org/covid/deaths-by-race. [2] M. Constantinescu, “Seeing the Forest beyond the Trees: A Holistic Approach to Health-Care Organizational Ethics,” in Contemporary Debates in Bioethics: European Perspectives, 2018, 86–96, https://doi.org/10.2478/9783110571219-009. [3] See Norman Daniels, Just Health: Meeting Health Needs Fairly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) at 219. [4] Elizabeth Heitman and Ruth Ellen Bulger, “The Healthcare Ethics Committee in the Structural Transformation of Health Care: Administrative and Organizational Ethics in Changing Times,” HEC Forum 10, no. 2 (June 1, 1998): 152–76, 162, https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008865603499. [5] Cohen, Cynthia B. "Ethics Committees as Corporate and Public Policy Advocates." The Hastings Center Report 20, no. 5 (1990): 36+. Gale Academic OneFile (accessed May 6, 2021). https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A8998890/AONE?u=nysl_oweb&sid=AONE&xid=84a1cade. [6] Linda L. Emanuel, “Ethics and the Structures of Healthcare Special Section: Issues in Organization Ethics and Healthcare,” Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 9, no. 2 (2000): 151–68, 166. [7] George Khushf and Rosemarie Tong, “Setting Organizational Ethics within a Broader Social and Legal Context,” HEC Forum 14, no. 2 (June 2002): 77–85, 78. [8] Olivia Pham, Usha Ranji Published: Nov 10, and 2020, “Racial Disparities in Maternal and Infant Health: An Overview - Issue Brief,” KFF (blog), November 10, 2020, https://www.kff.org/report-section/racial-disparities-in-maternal-and-infant-health-an-overview-issue-brief/. [9] Eberly Lauren A. et al., “Identification of Racial Inequities in Access to Specialized Inpatient Heart Failure Care at an Academic Medical Center,” Circulation: Heart Failure 12, no. 11 (November 1, 2019): e006214, https://doi.org/10.1161/CIRCHEARTFAILURE.119.006214. [10] Michael W. Sjoding et al., “Racial Bias in Pulse Oximetry Measurement,” New England Journal of Medicine 383, no. 25 (December 17, 2020): 2477–78, https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMc2029240. [11] Alyasah Ali Sewell et al., “Illness Spillovers of Lethal Police Violence: The Significance of Gendered Marginalization,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 44, no. 7 (July 22, 2020): 1–26, https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2020.1781913. [12] Brad N. Greenwood et al., “Physician–Patient Racial Concordance and Disparities in Birthing Mortality for Newborns,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117, no. 35 (September 1, 2020): 21194–200, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1913405117. [13] The term “palliative care” as applied to patients suffering from the social determinants of health was used by Dr. Michelle Morse at a webinar entitled “Medical Stereotypes: Confronting Racism and Disparities in US Health Care: A Health Policy and Bioethics Consortium” presented by the Harvard Petrie-Flom Center on February 12, 2021. [14] Linda L. Emanuel coined the term “Structural Ethics” in 2000. This term did not seem to generate much interest from the bioethics community at the time. Her explanation of this term is consistent with my thinking, although I expand it to address the health system as an entity, and focus on improving health equity. [15] Keisha Shantel Ray, “Black Bioethics and How the Failures of the Profession Paved the Way for Its Existence | Bioethics.Net,” www.bioethics.net, August 6, 2020, http://www.bioethics.net/2020/08/black-bioethics-and-how-the-failures-of-the-profession-paved-the-way-for-its-existence/; Yolonda Y. Wilson, “Racial Injustice and Meaning Well: A Challenge for Bioethics,” The American Journal of Bioethics 21, no. 2 (February 1, 2021): 1–3, https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2020.1866875. [16] See Catherine Myser, “Differences from Somewhere: The Normativity of Whiteness in Bioethics in the United States,” The American Journal of Bioethics 3, no. 2 (May 2003): 1–11, https://doi.org/10.1162/152651603766436072. [17] Ushe Blackstock, “Why Black Doctors like Me Are Leaving Academic Medicine,” STAT (blog), January 16, 2020, https://www.statnews.com/2020/01/16/black-doctors-leaving-faculty-positions-academic-medical-centers/. [18] Zamina Mithani, Jane Cooper, and Boyd J. Wesley, “Race, Power, and COVID-19: A Call for Advocacy within Bioethics,” The American Journal of Bioethics21, no. 2 (2021): 11–18, 13 https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2020.1851810. [19] “Graduate Programs,” The Hastings Center, accessed 2 June, 2021, https://www.thehastingscenter.org/publications-resources/bioethics-careers-education/graduate-programs-2/. [20] Norman Daniels, Just Health: Meeting Health Needs Fairly, at 299. [21] Ian James Kidd and Havi Carel, “Epistemic Injustice and Illness,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 34, no. 2 (2017): 172–90, https://doi.org/10.1111/japp.12172. [22] Ruqaiijah Yearby, “Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired: Putting an End to Separate and Unequal Health Care in the United States 50 Years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” Health Matrix 25, no. 1 (January 1, 2015): 1–33, at 11. [23] Jones CP, Maybank A, Nolen L, Fields N, Ogunwole M, Onuoha C, Williams J, Tsai J, Paul D, Essien UR, Khazanchi, R. “Episode 5: Racism, Power, and Policy: Building the Antiracist Health Systems of the Future.” The Clinical Problem Solvers Podcast. https://clinicalproblemsolving.com/episodes. January 19, 2021. [24] Sienna Moriarty, “AMA Policies and Code of Medical Ethics’ Opinions Related to Health Promotion and Community Development,” AMA Journal of Ethics 21, no. 3 (March 1, 2019): 259–61, https://doi.org/10.1001/amajethics.2019.259. [25] Constantinescu, “Seeing the Forest beyond the Trees,” at 92. [26] Ana Smith Iltis, “Organizational Ethics: Moral Obligation and Integrity,” in Institutional Integrity in Health Care, ed. Ana Smith Iltis, Philosophy and Medicine (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2003), 175–82, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0153-2_10.

Over the past two decades in the West, practices of ethical consumption have become increasingly visible within mainstream consumer culture (Lewis and Potter). While they manifest in a variety of forms, such practices are frequently articulated to politics of anti-consumerism, environmentalism, and sustainable consumption through which lifestyle choices are conceived as methods for investing in—and articulating—ethical and social concerns. Such practices are typically understood as both a reflection of the increasing global influence of neoliberal, consumer-oriented modes of citizenship and a response to the destabilisation of capitalism’s certainties in the wake of ongoing climate change and the global financial crisis (Castells et al.; Miller). Consume less, consume differently, recycle, do-it-yourself: activities that have historically been associated with explicitly activist movements (see Bryner) are now increasingly accessible and attractive to people for whom these consumption choices might serve as their first introduction to countercultural practices. While the notion of “counterculture” is today a contested concept—one that no longer refers only to “the” (i.e. 1960s) counterculture, but also to a range of radical movements and practices—it is one which is useful for thinking about the ways in which difference from, and resistance to, the “mainstream” can be asserted. Within contemporary consumer culture, resistance is now often articulated in ways which suggests that the lines between the “countercultural” and the “mainstream” are no longer clear cut (Desmond, McDonagh and O’Donohue 263). For Castells et al. (12), this is especially the case when the structures of capitalism are under strain, as this is when alternative and countercultural ways of living increasingly enter the mainstream. The concept of counterculture, then, is useful for understanding the ways in which progressive political values may be reimagined, rearticulated and represented within the mainstream, thereby offering access points to political participation for people who may not necessarily describe their activities as resistant or even as politically engaged (Barnett et al. 45). One of the most interesting aspects of this phenomenon is how a progressive politics of consumption is expressed through images and aesthetics that are culturally coded as conservative. Across a range of contemporary media and popular cultural forms, notions of ethical consumption are often paralleled by resurgences in practices associated with domesticity and traditional femininities. From retro fashions referencing 1940s and 1950s femininity to the growing popularisation of crafting and cooking, many of the “old-fashioned” practices of domesticity that had been critiqued and rejected by second wave feminism (see Brunsdon The Feminist 216), are being reimagined as simultaneously nostalgic and politically progressive choices for women (and, sometimes, for men). This paper explores how the contemporary mobilisation of traditional femininities can activate progressive, countercultural politics of gender and consumption. Specifically, it will examine the popularisation of the “nanna” as a countercultural icon that exemplifies the contemporary politics of retro femininities. Drawing upon data from our larger, more comprehensive studies, this paper uses two case studies—the rise of “nanna-style” cookbooks and the “nanna culture” of indie lifestyle magazine Frankie—to explore the ways that traditional femininities can be reworked to prompt a rethinking of current consumption practices, foster connection (in the case of nanna-style cookbooks) and challenge the limitations of contemporary gender norms (in the case of Frankie). While we are not suggesting that these politics are necessarily deliberately encoded in the texts (although sometimes they may be) or that these texts are inevitably interpreted in the way that we are suggesting, this paper offers preliminary textual “readings” (Kellner 12) of the ways that countercultural values can be uncovered within mainstream cultural forms. Nanna-style cookbooks and Frankie magazine are each examples of a broader resignification of the nanna that has been occurring across a number of sites of contemporary popular culture. Previous associations of the nanna as old, conservative or uncool are being replaced with new images of nannas as active, skilled, funky women. For example, this is evident in the recent resurgences of craft cultures, which reshape the meanings of contemporary knitting as being “not your grandma’s knitting” (Fields 150), but as a “fun, hip, and political” new hobby (Groeneveld 260). Such craft activities have been described using discourses of “revolution and reclamation” (Groeneveld 266) to mobilise countercultural practices ranging from explicitly activist “craftivism” (Corbett and Housley) to more ordinary, everyday politics of consumption and time management. Through activities such as “knit ins”, yarn bombing, and Stitch “N” Bitch circles, contemporary craft practices can be seen as an expression of the “historically reflexive and community minded new amateur”, whose craft practices facilitate new connections between amateurs to enable “alternative values and ways of living” and reject negative aspects of modern consumer society (Hackney 187). Even for women with less explicit activist commitments, an investment in the practices of retro femininities can provide opportunities for community-building, including across generations, in which participants are offered not only a “welcome respite from the rush and hurry of everyday life”, but also access to a suite of activities through which they can resist dominant approaches to consumption (Nathanson 119). Consequently, nostalgic images of grandmotherly practices need not signal only a conservative marketing strategy or desire to return to a (patriarchal, pre-feminist) past as they are sometimes interpreted (see Trussler), but a means through which images of the past can be resignified and reinterpreted in the context of contemporary needs and politics. Cooking Nanna-Style Nanna-style cookbooks are an example of “emergent uses of the past” (Bramall 15) for present purposes. “Nanna-style” is a currently popular category within the cookbook publishing and retailing industries that, for many critics, has been understood as an essentially conservative response to the financial uncertainties of the economic downturn (Orr). Certainly, nanna-style cookbooks are, on one level at least, uncritically and unreflexively nostalgic for a time when women’s cooking was central to providing the comforts of home. In Nonna to Nana: Stories of Food and Family, grandmothers are presented as part of a “fast-disappearing generation of matriarchs” whose recipes must be preserved so that “we [can] honour the love and dedication [they] give through the simple gift of making and sharing their food” (DiBlasi and DiBlasi, book synopsis). Merle’s Kitchen, written by 79-year-old author and Country Women’s Association (CWA) judge, Merle Parrish, is littered with reminisces about what life was like “in those days” when the “kitchen was the heart of the home” and women prepared baked treats each week for their children and husbands (Parrish vii). Sweet Paul Eat & Make: Charming Recipes and Kitchen Crafts You Will Love is filled with the recipes and stories of author Paul Lowe’s grandmother, Mormor, who doted on her family with delicious pancakes cooked at any time of the day. Such images of the grandmother’s selfless dedication to her family deploy the romance of what Jean Duruz (58) has called “Cooking Woman,” a figure whose entire identity is subsumed within the pleasure and comfort that she provides to others. Through the medium of the cookbook, Cooking Woman serves the fantasies of the “nostalgic cosmopolitan” (Duruz 61) for whom the pleasures of the nanna reflect an essentially (albeit unacknowledged) conservative impulse. However, for others, the nostalgia of Cooking Woman need not necessarily involve endorsement of her domestic servitude, but instead evoke images of an (imagined, utopian) past as a means of exploring the pleasures and contradictions of contemporary femininities and consumption practices (see Hollows 190). Such texts are part of a broader set of practices associated with what Bramall (21) calls “austerity chic.” Austerity chic’s full political potential is evident in explicitly countercultural cookbooks like Heidi Minx’s Home Rockanomics, which invokes the DIY spirit of punk to present recycling, cooking and craft making as methods for investing in an anti-corporate, vegan activist politics. But for Bramall (31), even less challenging texts featuring nostalgic images of nannas can activate progressive demands about the need to consume more sustainably in ways that make these ideas more accessible to a broader range of constituencies. In particular, such texts offer forms of “alternative hedonism” through which practices of ethical consumption need not be characterised by experiences of self-denial but by a reconceptualisation of what constitutes the “good life” (Soper 211). In the practices of austerity chic as they are presented in nanna-style cookbooks, grandmotherly practices of baking and cooking are presented as frugal and self-sufficient, but also as granting access to experiences of pleasure, including the pleasures of familial warmth, cohesion and connection. Specifically, these books emphasise the ways in which cooking, and baking in particular, helps to forge connections between generations. For the authors of Pass It Down and Keep Baking, the recipes of grandmothers and great-aunts are described as “treasures” to be “cherished and passed on to future generations” (Wilkinson and Wilkinson 2). For the authors of Nonna to Nana, the food of the authors’ own grandmother is described as the “thread that bound our family together” (DiBlasi and DiBlasi 2). In contrast to some of the more explicitly political retro-inspired movements, which often construct the new formations of these practices as distinct from those of older women (e.g. “not your grandma’s knitting”), these more mainstream texts celebrate generational cohesion. Given the ways in which feminist histories have tended to discursively pit the various “waves” of feminism in opposition to that which came before, the celebration of the grandmother as a unifying figure becomes a means through which connections can be forged between past and present subjectivities (see Bramall 134). Such intergenerational connections—and the notion that grandmotherly practices are treasures to be preserved—also serve as a way of reimagining and reinterpreting (often devalued) feminine domestic activities as alternative sources of pleasure and of the “good life” at a time when reducing consumption and adopting more sustainable lifestyle practices is becoming increasingly urgent (see Bramall; Soper). While this might nonetheless be interpreted as compliant with contemporary patriarchal and capitalist structures—indeed, there is nothing inherently countercultural about conceiving the domestic as a site of pleasure—the potential radicalism of these texts lies in the ways that they highlight how investment in the fantasies, pleasures and activities of domesticity are not available only to women, nor are they associated only with the reproduction of traditional gender roles. For example in Sweet Paul Eat & Make, Lowe’s adoption of many of Mormor’s culinary and craft practices highlights the symbolic work that the nanna performs to enable his own commitment to forms of traditionally feminine domesticity. The fact that he is also large, hairy, heavily tattooed and pictured with a cute little French bulldog constructs Lowe as a simultaneously masculine and “camp” figure who, much like the playful and excessive femininity of well-known figures like Nigella Lawson (Brunsdon “Martha” 51), highlights the inherent performativity of both gendered and domestic subjectivities, and hence challenges any uncritical investment in these traditional roles. The countercultural potential of nanna-style cookbooks, then, lies not necessarily in an explicitly activist politics, but in a politics of the everyday. This is a politics in which seemingly conservative, nostalgic images of the nanna can make available new forms of identity, including those that emerge between generations, between the masculine and the feminine, and between imagined utopias of domesticity and the economic and environmental realities of contemporary consumer culture. Frankie’s Indie Nanna The countercultural potential of the nanna is also mobilised in fashion and lifestyle publications, including Frankie magazine, which is described as part of a “world where nanna culture is revered” (“Frankie Magazine Beats the Odds”). Frankie exemplifies both a reaction against a particular brand of femininity, and an invitation to consume more sustainably as part of the indie youth trend. Indie, as it manifests in Frankie, blends retro aesthetics with progressive politics in ways that present countercultural practices not as explicitly oppositional, but as access points to inclusive, empowering and pleasurable femininities. Frankie’s version of nanna culture can be found throughout the magazine, particularly in its focus on retro styles. The nanna is invoked in instructions for making nanna-style items, such as issue 46’s call to “Pop on a Cuppa: How to Make Your Own Nanna-Style Tea Cosy” (Lincolne 92-93), and in the retro aesthetics found throughout the magazine, including recipes depicting baked goods served on old-fashioned crockery and features on homes designed with a vintage theme (see Nov.-Dec. 2012 and Mar.-Apr. 2013). Much like nanna-style cookbooks, Frankie’s celebration of nanna culture offers readers alternative ways of thinking about consumption, inviting them to imagine the “satisfactions to be had from consuming differently” (Soper 222) and to construct ethical consumption as both expressions of alternative critical consumer culture and as practices of “cool” consumer connoisseurship (Franklin 165). Here, making your own items, purchasing second-hand items, or repurposing old wares, are presented not as forms of sacrifice, but as pleasurable and fashionable choices for young women. This contrasts with the consumption practices typically promoted in other contemporary women’s magazines. Most clearly, Frankie’s promotion of nanna chic stands in opposition to the models of desirable femininity characteristic of glossies like Cosmopolitan. The archetypal “Cosmo Girl” is represented as a woman seeking to achieve social mobility and desirability through consumption of cosmetics, fashion and sexual relationships (Oullette 366-367). In contrast, the nanna, with her lack of overt sexuality, older age, and conservative approach to consumption, invites identification with forms of feminine subjectivity that resist the patriarchal ideologies that are seen as typical of mainstream women’s magazines (see Gill 217). Frankie’s cover artwork demonstrates its constructed difference from modes of desirable femininity promoted by its glossy counterparts. The cover of the magazine’s 50th issue, for example, featured a embroidered collage depicting a range of objects including a sewing machine, teapot, retro glasses, flowers and a bicycle. This cover, which looks handcrafted and features items that evoke both nanna culture and indie style, offers forms of feminine style and desirability based on homecrafts, domestic self-sufficiency and do-it-yourself sustainability. The nanna herself is directly referenced on the cover of issue 52, which features an illustration of a woman in an armchair, seated in front of vintage-style floral wallpaper, a cup of tea in her hand, and her hair in a bun. While she does not possess physical features that signify old age such as grey hair or wrinkles, her location and style choices can each be read as signifiers of the nanna. Yet by featuring her on the cover of a young women’s magazine—and by dressing her in high-heeled boots—the nanna is constructed as subject position available to young, potentially desirable women. In contrast to glossy women’s magazines featuring images of young models or celebrities in sexualised poses (see Gill 184), Frankie offers a progressive politics of gender in which old-fashioned activities can provide means of challenging identities and consumption practices dominant within mainstream cultural industries. As Bramall (121) argues of “retro femininities in austerity,” such representations provide readers access to “subjectivities [that] may incorporate a certain critique of consumer capitalism.” By offering alternative modes of consumption in which women are not necessarily defined by youth and sexual desirability, Frankie’s indie nanna provides an implicit critique of mainstream consumerism’s models of ideal femininity. This gender politics thus relies not simply on an uncritical “gender reversal” (Plumwood 62), but rather reworks and recombines elements of past and present femininities to create new meanings and identities. Much like nanna-style cookbooks’ grandmotherly figures who unite generations, Frankie constructs the nanna as a source of wisdom and a figure to be respected. For example, a two-page spread entitled “Ask a Nanna” featured Polaroid pictures of nannas answering the question: “What would you tell your 20-year-old self?” (Evans 92-93). The magazine also regularly features older women, such as the profile describing Sonia Grevell as “a champion at crochet and living generously” (Corry 107). The editors’ letter of a recent issue describes the issue’s two major themes as “nannas and dirty, dirty rock”, which are described as having a “couple of things in common”: “they’ve been around for a while, you sometimes have to talk loudly in front of them and they rarely take shit from anyone” (Walker and Burke 6). The editors suggest that such “awesomeness” can be emulated by “eating a bikkie while gently moshing around the living room” or “knitting with drum sticks”—both unlikely juxtapositions that represent the unconventional nanna and her incorporation into indie youth culture. This celebration of the nanna stands in contrast to a mainstream media culture that privileges youth, especially for women, and suggests both common interests and learning opportunities between generations. While neither Frankie nor nanna-style cookbooks present themselves as political texts, when they are read within their particular historical and social contexts, they offer new ways of thinking about how countercultural practices are—and could be—mobilised by, and made accessible to, constituencies who may not otherwise identify with an explicitly oppositional politics. These texts sometimes appear to be located within a politically ambiguous nexus of compliance and resistance, but it is in this space of ambiguity that new identities and new commitments to progressive politics can be forged, normalised and made more widely available. These texts may not ultimately challenge capitalist structures of consumption, and they remain commodified products, but by connecting oppositional and mainstream practices, they offer new ways of conceiving the relationships between age, gender, sustainability and pleasure. 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I wake up early, questions buzzing through my mind. While I sip my morning cup of tea and read The Guardian online, the writer, restless because I’m ignoring her, walks around firing questions.“Expecting the patriarchy to want to share its enormous wealth and power with women is extremely naïve.”I nod. Outside the window pieces of sky are framed by trees, fluffy white clouds alternate with bright patches of blue. The sweet, heady first wafts of lavender and citrus drift in through the open window. Spring has come to Hvar. Time to get to work.The more I understand about narcissism, the more I understand the world. I didn’t understand before. In the 1990s.“No—you knew, but you didn’t know at the same time.”I kept telling everybody The River Ophelia wasn’t about sex, (or the sex wasn’t about sex), it was about power. Not many people listened or heard, though. Only some readers.I’ve come here to get away. To disappear. To write.I can’t find the essay I want for my article about the 1990s. I consider the novel I’m reading, I Love Dick by Chris Kraus and wonder whether I should write about it instead? It’s just been reprinted, twenty years after its initial release. The back cover boasts, “widely considered to be the most important feminist novel of the past two decades.” It was first published in the 1990s. So far it’s about a woman named Chris who’s addictively obsessed with an unavailable man, though I’m yet to unravel Kraus’s particular brand of feminism—abjection? Maybe, maybe … while I think, I click through my storage folder. Half way through, I find a piece I wrote about Kathy Acker in 1997, a tribute of sorts that was never published. The last I’d heard from Kathy before this had been that she was heading down to Mexico to try shark cartilage for her breast cancer. That was just before she died.When I was first introduced to the work of Foucault and Deleuze, it was very political; it was about what was happening to the economy and about changing the political system. By the time it was taken up by the American academy, the politics had gone to hell. (Acker qtd. in Friedman 20)Looking back, I’d have to say my friendship with Kathy Acker was intense and short-lived.In the original I’d written “was a little off and on.” But I prefer the new version. I first met Kathy in person in Sydney, in 1995. We were at a World Art launch at Ariel bookshop and I remember feeling distinctly nervous. As it turned out, I needn’t have been. Nervous, that is.Reading this now brings it all back: how Kathy and I lost touch in the intervening two years and the sudden fact of her death. I turn to the end and read, “She died tragically, not only because she was much too young, but because American literature seems rather frumpy without her, of cancer on the 30th November 1997, aged 53.”The same age as I am now. (While some believe Kathy was 50 when she died, Kathy told me she lied about her age even to the point of changing her passport. Women who lie about their age tend to want to be younger than they are, so I’m sticking with 53.) This coincidence spooks me a little.I make a cup of tea and eat some chocolate.“This could work …” the writer says. My reasons for feeling nervous were historical. I’d spoken to Kathy once previously (before the publication of The River Ophelia on the phone from Seattle to San Francisco in 1993) and the conversation had ended abruptly. I’d wanted to interview Kathy for my PhD on American fiction but Kathy wouldn’t commit. Now I was meeting her face to face and trying to push the past to the back of my mind.The evening turned out to be a memorable one. A whole bunch of us—a mixture of writers, publishers, academics and literati—went out to dinner and then carried on drinking well into the night. I made plans to see Kathy again. She struck me as a warm, generous, sincere and intensely engaging person. It seemed we might become friends. I hesitated: should I include the rest? Or was that too much?The first thing Kathy had said when we were introduced was, “I loved your book, The River Ophelia. I found it as soon as I arrived. I bought it from the bookshop at the airport. I saw your amazing cover and then I read on the back that it was influenced by the work of Kathy Acker. I was like, wow, no one in America has ever put that on the back cover of a novel. So I read it immediately and I couldn’t put it down. I love the way you’ve deconstructed the canon but still managed to put a compelling narrative to it. I never did that.”Why didn’t I include that? It had given me more satisfaction than anything anyone else had said.I remember how quickly I abandoned my bestselling life in Sydney, sexual harassment had all but ruined my career, and exchanged it for an uncertain future in London. My notoriety as an author was damaging my books and my relationship with my publisher had become toxic. The first thing I did in London was hire a lawyer, break my contract with Picador and take both novels out of print.Reality intrudes in the form of a phone call from my mother. Terminally ill with cancer, she informs me that she’s off her food. For a retired chef, the loss of appetite is not inconsiderable. Her dying is a dull ache, a constant tiredness and sadness in me. She’s just arrived in London. I will go there next week to meet her.(1)I first came across Kathy’s work in 1991. I’d just finished my MA thesis on postmodernism and parody and was rewarding myself with some real reading (i.e. not related to my thesis) when I came across the novel Don Quixote. This novel had a tremendous impact on me. Those familiar with DQ may recall that it begins with an abortion that transforms its female narrator into a knight.When she was finally crazy because she was about to have an abortion, she conceived of the most insane idea that any woman can think of. Which is to love. How can a woman love? By loving someone other than herself. (Acker Quixote 9)Kathy’s opening sentences produced a powerful emotional response in me and her bold confronting account of an abortion both put me in touch with feelings I was trying to avoid and connected these disturbing feelings with a broader political context. Kathy’s technique of linking the personal and emotional with the political changed the way I worked as a writer.I’d submitted the piece as an obituary for publication to an Australian journal; the editor had written suggestions in the margin in red. All about making the piece a more conventional academic essay. I hadn’t been sure that was what I wanted to do. Ambitious, creative, I was trying to put poststructuralist theory into practice, to write theoretical fiction. It’s true, I hadn’t been to the Sorbonne, but so what? What was the point of studying theory if one didn’t put it into practice? I was trying to write like French theorists, not to write about them. The editor’s remarks would have made a better academic essay, it’s just I’m not sure that’s where I wanted to go. I never rewrote it and it was never published.I first encountered I Love Dick (2017) during a film course at the AFTVRS when the lecturer presented a short clip of the adaptation for the class to analyse. When I later saw the novel in a bookshop I bought a copy. Given my discovery of the unpublished obituary it is also a bit spooky that I’m reading this book as both Chris Kraus and Kathy Acker had relationships with academic and Semiotext(e) publisher Sylvère Lotringer. Chris as his wife, Kathy as his lover. Kraus wrote a biography of Acker called After Kathy Acker: A Biography, which seems fairly unsympathetic according to the review I read in The Guardian. (Cooke 2017) Intrigued, I add Kraus’s biography to my growing pile of Acker related reading, the Acker/Wark letters I’m Very Into You and Olivia Laing’s novel, Crudo. While I’ve not read the letters yet, Crudo’s breathless yet rhythmic layering of images and it’s fragmented reflections upon war, women and politics reminded me less of Acker and more of Woolf; Mrs Dalloway, in fact.(2)What most inspired me, and what makes Kathy such a great writer, is her manner of writing politically. For the purposes of this piece, when I say Kathy writes politically, I’m referring to what happens when you read her books. That is, your mind—fuelled by powerful feelings—makes creative leaps that link everyday things and ideas with political discourses and debates (for Kathy, these were usually critiques of bourgeois society, of oedipal culture and of the patriarchy).In the first pages of Don Quixote, for example, an abortion becomes synonymous with the process of becoming a knight. The links Kathy makes between these two seemingly unrelated events yields a political message for the creative reader. There is more at stake than just gender-bending or metamorphoses here: a reversal of power seems to have taken place. A relatively powerless woman (a female victim except for the fact that in having an abortion she’s exerting some measure of control over her life), far from being destroyed by the experience of aborting her foetus, actually gains power—power to become a knight and go about the world fulfilling a quest. In writing about an abortion in this way, Kathy challenges our assumptions about this controversial topic: beyond the moral debate, there are other issues at stake, like identity and power. An abortion becomes a birth, rather than a banal tragedy.When I think about the 1990s, I automatically think of shoulder pads, cocktails and expense accounts (the consumption of the former, in my case, dependent on the latter). But on reflection, I think about the corporatisation of the publishing industry, the Backlash and films like Thelma and Louise, (1991) Basic Instinct (1992) and Single White Female (1992). It occurs to me that the Hollywood movie star glamorous #MeToo has its origin in the turbulent 1990s Backlash. When I first saw each of these films I thought they were exciting, controversial. I loved the provocative stance they took about women. But looking back I can’t help wondering: whose stories were they really, why were we hearing them and what was the political point?It was a confusing time in terms of debates about gender equality.Excluding the premise for Thelma and Louise, all three films present as narrative truth scenarios that ran in stark contrast to reality. When it came to violence and women, most domestic homicide and violence was perpetrated by men. And violence towards women, in the 1990s, was statistically on the rise and there’s little improvement in these statistics today.Utter chaos, having a British passport never feels quite so wonderful as it does in the arrivals hall at Heathrow.“Perhaps these films allow women to fantasise about killing the men who are violent towards them?”Nyah, BI is chick killing chick … and think about the moral to the story. Fantasy OK, concrete action painful, even deadly.“Different story today …”How so?“Violent female protagonists are all the rage and definitely profitable. Killing Eve (2018) and A Simple Favour (2018).”I don’t have an immediate answer here. Killing Eve is a TV series, I think aloud, A Simple Favour structurally similar to Single White Female … “Why don’t you try self-publishing? It’ll be 20 years since you took The River Ophelia out of print, bit of an anniversary, maybe it’s time?”Not a bad idea. I’m now on the tube to meet mum at her bed and breakfast but the writer is impatient to get back to work. Maybe I should just write the screenplay instead?“Try both. If you don’t believe in your writing, who else will?”She has a point. I’m not getting anywhere with my new novel.A message pips through on Facebook. Want to catch up?What? Talk about out of the blue. I haven’t heard from Sade in twenty years … and how on earth did he get through my privacy settings?After meeting mum, the next thing I do is go to the doctor. My old doctor from West Kensington, she asks me how I’m going and I say I’m fine except that mum’s dying and this awful narcissistic ex-partner of mine has contacted me on Facebook. She recommends I read the following article, “The Highly Sensitive Person and the Narcissist” (Psychology Today).“Sometimes being a kind caring person makes you vulnerable to abusers.”After the appointment I can’t get her words out of my head.I dash into a Starbucks, I’m in Notting Hill just near the tube station, and read the article on my laptop on wifi. I highlight various sections. Narcissists “have a complete lack of empathy for others including their own family and friends, so that they will take advantage of people to get their own needs and desires met, even if it hurts someone.” That sounds about right, Sade could always find some way of masking his real motives in charm, or twisting reality around to make it look like things weren’t his fault, they were mine. How cleverly he’d lied! Narcissists, I read, are attracted to kind, compassionate people who they then use and lie to without remorse.But the bit that really makes me sit up is towards the end of the article. “For someone on the outside looking at a relationship between a highly sensitive person and a narcissist, it’s all too easy to blame the HSP. How and why would anyone want to stay in such a relationship?” Narcissists are incredibly good at making you doubt yourself, especially the part of you that says: this has happened before, it’ll happen again. You need to leave.The opening paragraph of the psychology textbook I read next uses Donald Trump as an example. Trump is also Patrick Bateman’s hero, the misogynistic serial killer protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis’s notorious American Psycho. Despite an earlier version that broadly focused on New York fiction of the 1990s, Ellis’s novel and the feminist outcry it provoked became the central topic of my PhD.“Are you alright mum?”I’ve just picked Mum up and I’m driving her to Paris for a night and then on to Switzerland where she’s going to have voluntary euthanasia. Despite the London drizzle and the horrific traffic the whole thing has a Thelma and Louise feel about it. I tell mum and she laughs.“We should watch it again. Have you seen it since it first came out?”“Sounds like a good idea.”Mum, tiny, pointy-kneed and wearing an out-of-character fluoro green beanie given to her at the oncology clinic in Sydney, is being very stoic but I can tell from the way she constantly wrings her hands that she’s actually quite terrified.“OK Louise,” she says as I unfold her Zimmer frame later that evening.“OK Thelma,” I reply as she walks off towards the hotel.Paris is a treat. My brother is waiting inside and we’re hoping to enjoy one last meal together.Mum didn’t want to continue with chemo at 83, but she’s frightened of dying a horrific death. As we approach hotel reception Mum can’t help taking a detour to inspect the dinner menu at the hotel restaurant.“Oysters naturel. That sounds nice.”I smile, wait, and take her by the elbow.I’ve completely forgotten. The interview/review I wrote of Acker’s Pussy, King of the Pirates, in 1995 for Rolling Stone. Where is it? I open my laptop and quickly click through the endless publicity and reviews of The River Ophelia, the interview/review came out around the same time the novel was published, but I can’t find it. I know I had it out just a few months ago, when I was chasing up some freelance book reviews.I make a fresh pot of tea from the mini bar, green, and return to my Acker tribute. Should I try to get it published? Here, or back in Australia? Ever the émigré’s dilemma. I decide I like the Parisian sense of style in this room, especially the cotton-linen sheets.Finally, I find it, it’s in the wrong folder. Printing it out, I remember how Kathy had called her agent and publisher in New York, and her disbelief when I’d told her the book hadn’t been picked up overseas. Kathy’s call resulted in my first New York agent. I scrutinise its pages.Kathy smiles benign childlike creativity in the larger photo, and gestures in passionate exasperation in the smaller group, her baby face framed by countless metal ear piercings. The interview takes place—at Kathy’s insistence—on her futon in her hotel room. My memories clarify. It wasn’t that we drifted apart, or rather we did, but only after men had come between us first. Neither of us had much luck in that department.(4)Kathy’s writing is also political because her characters don’t act or speak the way you’d expect them to. They don’t seem to follow the rules or behave in the way your average fictional character tends to do. From sentence to sentence, Kathy’s characters either change into different people, or live revolutionary lives, or even more radical still, live impossible lives.When the narrator of DQ transforms herself into a knight (and lives an impossible life); she turns a situation in which she is passive and relatively powerless—she is about to be operated on and drugged—into an empowering experience (and lives a creative revolutionary life). Ironically, getting power means she turns herself into a male knight. But Kathy gets around the problem that power is male by not letting things rest there. The female, aborting Kathy isn’t actually replaced by a male knight, bits of him are just grafted onto her. Sure, she sets out on a quest, but the other aspects of her empowerment are pretty superficial: she does adopt a new name (which is more like a disguise), and identity (appearance); and picks up a bad habit or two—a tendency to talk in the language used by knights.“But who’s the father?” the writer wants to know. “I mean isn’t that the real question here?”No, that is exactly not the real question here and not the point. It is not about who the father is—it’s about what happens to a woman who has an unwanted unplanned pregnancy.The phone rings. It’s my brother. Mum’s waiting for me downstairs and the oysters are beckoning.(5)The idea that writing could be political was very appealing. The transformation between my first novel, Marilyn’s Almost Terminal New York Adventure and my second, The River Ophelia (Picador insisted on publishing them in reverse chronology) was partly a result of my discovery of Kathy’s work and the ideas it set off in me. Kathy wasn’t the first novelist to write politically, but she was the first female novelist to do so in a way that had an immediate impact on me at an emotional level. And it was this powerful emotional response that inspired me as a writer—I wanted to affect my readers in a similar way (because reading Kathy’s work, I felt less alone and that my darkest experiences, so long silenced by shame and skirted around in the interests of maintaining appearances, could be given a voice).We’re driving through Switzerland and I’m thinking about narcissism and the way the narcissists in my personal and professional life overshadowed everything else. But now it’s time to give the rest of the world some attention. It’s also one way of pulling back the power from the psychopaths who rule the world.As we approach Zurich, my mother asks to pull over so she can use the ladies. When she comes out I can see she’s been crying. Inside the car, she reaches for my hand and clasps it. “I don’t know if I’m strong enough to say goodbye.”“It’s alright Mum,” I say and hold her while we both cry.A police car drives by and my mother’s eyes snag. Harassed by the police in Australia and unable to obtain Nembutal in the UK, Mum has run out of options.To be a woman in this society is to find oneself living outside the law. Maybe this is what Acker meant when she wrote about becoming a pirate, or a knight?Textual deconstruction can be a risky business and writers like Acker walk a fine line when it comes to the law. Empire of the Senseless ran into a plagiarism suit in the UK and her publishers forced Acker to sign an apology to Harold Robbins (Acker Hannibal Lecter 13). My third novel Dependency similarly fell foul of the law when I discovered that in deconstructing gossip and myths about celebrities, drawing on their lives and then making stuff up, the result proved prophetic. When my publisher, Harper Collins, refused to indemnify me against potential unintended defamation I pulled the book from its contract on the advice of a lawyer. I was worth seven million pounds on paper at that point, the internet travel site my then husband and I had founded with Bob Geldof had taken off, and the novel was a radical hybrid text comprised of Rupert Murdoch’s biography, Shakespeare’s King Lear and Hello Magazine and I was worried that Murdoch might come after me personally. I’d fictionalised him as a King Lear type, writing his Cordelia out of his will and leaving everything to his Goneril and Reagan.Recent theoretical studies argue that Acker’s appropriation and deconstruction constitute a feminist politics as “fragmentation” (June 2) and as “agency” (Pitchford 22). As Acker puts it. “And then it’s like a kid: suddenly a toy shop opens up and the toy shop was called culture.” (Acker Hannibal Lecter 11).We don’t easily fit in a system that wasn’t ever designed to meet our needs.(6)By writing about the most private parts of women’s lives, I’ve tried to show how far there is to go before women and men are equal on a personal level. The River Ophelia is about a young woman whose public life might seem a success from the outside (she is a student doing an honours year at university in receipt of a scholarship), but whose private life is insufferable (she knows nothing about dealing with misogyny on an intimate level and she has no real relationship-survival skills, partly as a result of her family history, partly because the only survival skills she has have been inscribed by patriarchy and leave her vulnerable to more abuse). When Justine-the-character learns how to get around sexism of the personal variety (by re-inventing her life through parodies of classic texts about oedipal society) she not only changes her life, but she passes on her new-found survival skills to the reader.A disturbing tale about a young university student who loses herself in a destructive relationship, The River Ophelia is a postmodern novel about domestic violence and sexual harassment in the academy, contrary to its marketing campaign at the time. It’s protagonist, Justine, loves Sade but Sade is only interested in sex; indeed, he’s a brutish sex addict. Despite this, Justine can’t seem to leave: for all her education, she’s looking for love and commitment in all the wrong places. While the feminist lore of previous generations seems to work well in theory, Justine can’t seem to make it work in practise. Owning her power and experimenting with her own sexuality only leaves her feeling more despairing than before. Unconventional, compelling and controversial, The River Ophelia became an instant best-seller and is credited with beginning the Australian literary movement known as grunge/dirty realism.But there is always the possibility, given the rich intertextuality and self referentiality, that The River Ophelia is Justine’s honours thesis in creative writing. In this case, Sade, Juliette, Ophelia, Hamlet, Bataille, Simone, Marcelle and Leopold become hybrids made up from appropriated canonical characters, fragments of Justine’s turbulent student’s world and invented sections. But The River Ophelia is also a feminist novel that partly began as a dialogue with Ellis whose scandalous American Psycho it parodies even as it reinvents. This creative activity, which also involves the reader by inviting her to participate in the textual play, eventually empowers Justine over the canon and over her perpetrator, Sade.Another hotel room. This one, just out of Zürich, is tiny. I place my suitcase on the rack beneath the window overlooking the narrow street and start to unpack.“Hasn’t this all been said before, about The River Ophelia?” The writer says, trying out the bed. I’m in the middle of an email about self-publishing a new edition of TRO.Some of it. While the grunge label has been refuted, Acker’s influence has been underplayed.Acker often named her protagonists after herself, so losing the Acker part of my textual filiation plays into the whole grunge/dirty realism marketing campaign. I’ve talked about how I always name protagonists after famous women but not linked this to Acker. Bohemia Beach has a protagonist named after Cathy as in Wuthering Heights. Justine of The River Ophelia was doubly an Acker trait: firstly, she was named Justine after De Sade’s character and is a deconstruction of that character, and secondly she was named Justine self-reflexively after me, as a tribute to Kathy as in Kathy Goes to Haiti.The other context for The River Ophelia that has been lost is to do with the early work of Mary Gaitskill, and Catherine Texier. The narcissists were so destructive and so powerful they left no time for the relatively more subtle Gaitskill or Texier. Prototypes for Sex in the City, the 1990s was also a time when Downtown New York women writers explored the idea that gender equality meant women could do anything men did sexually, that they deserved the full gamut of libertine sexual freedoms. Twenty years on it should also be said that women who push the envelope by writing women protagonists who are every bit as sexually transgressive as men, every bit as addictively self-destructive as male protagonists deserve not to be shamed for that experimentation. They deserve to be celebrated and read.AfterwordI’d like to remember Kathy as I knew her briefly in Sydney. A bottle-blonde with a number two haircut, a leopard-skin bikini and a totally tattooed body, she swam a surprisingly genteel breast-stroke in the next lane in one of the world’s most macho lap-swimming pools.ReferencesA Simple Favour. Dir. Paul Feig. Lionsgate, 2018.Acker, Kathy. Don Quixote. London: Collins, 1986.———. Empire of the Senseless. New York: Grove, 1988.———. Hannibal Lecter, My Father. New York: Semiotext(e), 1991.———. Kathy Goes to Haiti. New York: Grove Press/Atlantic Monthly, 1994.——— and McKenzie Wark. I’m Very into You: Correspondence 1995-1996. New York: Semiotext(e), 2015.Basic Instinct. Dir. Paul Verhoeven. TriStar Pictures, 1992.Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. New York: Norton and Co, 2003.Bushnell, Candace. Sex in the City. United States: Grand Central Publishing, 1996.Cooke, Rachel. “Review of After Kathy Acker: A Biography by Chris Kraus—Baffling Life Study.” The Guardian 4 Sep. 2017. 4 Dec. 2018 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/04/after-kathy-acker-a-biography-chris-kraus-review>.Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho. New York: Vintage, 1991.Ettler, Justine. Bohemia Beach. Melbourne: Transit Lounge. 2018.———. “Kathy Acker: King of the Pussies.” Review of Pussy, King of the Pirates, by Kathy Acker. Rolling Stone. Nov. 1995: 60-61.———. Marilyn’s Almost Terminal New York Adventure. Sydney: Picador, 1996.———. “La Trobe University Essay: Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama, and Catherine Texier’s Break Up.” Australian Book Review, 1995.———. The Best Ellis for Business: A Re-Examination of the Mass Media Feminist Critique of “American Psycho.” PhD. Sydney: University of Sydney, 2013.———. The River Ophelia. Sydney: Picador, 1995.Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women. New York: Crown, 1991.Friedman, Ellen G. “A Conversation with Kathy Acker.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 9.3 (Fall 1989): 20-21.Gaitskill, Mary. Bad Behaviour. New York: Random House, 1988.I Love Dick. Dir. Jill Soloway. Amazon Video, 2017.June, Pamela B. The Fragmented Female Body and Identity: The Postmodern Feminist and Multiethnic Writings of Toni Morrison, Therese Huk, Kyung Cha, Phyllis Alesia Perry, Gayl Jones, Emma Perez, Paula Gunn Allen, and Kathy Acker. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2010.Killing Eve. Dir. Phoebe Waller-Bridge. BBC America, 2018.Kraus, Chris. After Kathy Acker: A Biography. London: Penguin, 2017.———. I Love Dick. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2016.Laing, Olivia. Crudo. London: Picador, 2018.Lee, Bandy. The Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. New York: St Martin’s Press. 2017.Lombard, Nancy, and Lesley McMillan. “Introduction.” Violence against Women. Eds. Nancy Lombard and Lesley McMillan. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2013.Pitchford, Nicola. Tactical Readings: Feminist Postmodernism in the Novels of Kathy Acker and Angela Carter. London: Associated Uni Press, 2002.Schiffrin, André. The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read. London and New York: Verso, 2000.Shakespeare, William. King Lear. London: Penguin Classics, 2015.Siegle, Robert. Suburban Ambush: Downtown Writing and the Fiction of Insurgency. United States: John Hopkins Press, 1989.Single White Female. Dir. Barbet Schroeder. Columbia Pictures, 1992.Texier, Catherine. Panic Blood. London: Collins, 1991.Thelma and Louise. Dir. Ridley Scott. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1991.Ward, Deborah. “Sense and Sensitivity: The Highly Sensitive Person and the Narcissist.” Psychology Today (16 Jan. 2012). 4 Dec. 2018 <https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sense-and-sensitivity/201201/the-highly-sensitive-person-and-the-narcissist>.

If Continental social theory emerges from a climate of intensely cold winters and short mild summers, how does Australia (or any nation defined by its large masses of aridity) function as an environment in which to produce critical theory and new knowledge? Climate and weather are intrinsic to ambience, but what impact might they have on the conditions of producing academic work? How is ambience relevant to thinking and writing and research? Is there an ambient epistemology? This paper argues that the ambient is an unacknowledged factor in the production of critical thinking, and draws on examples of academics locating their writing conditions as part of their thinking. This means paying attention to the embodied work of thinking, and so I locate myself in order to explore what it might mean to acknowledge the conditions of intellectual work. Consequently I dwell on the impact of heat and light as qualities specific to where I work, but (following Bolt) I also argue that they are terms that are historically associated with new knowledge. Language, then, is already a factor in shaping the way we can think through such conditions, and the narratives available to write about them. Working these conditions into critical narratives may involve mobilising fictional tropes, and may not always be ambient, but they are potent in the academic imaginary and impact the ways in which we can think through location. Present Tense As I sit in Perth right now in a balmy 27 degrees Celsius with the local afternoon sea-breeze (fondly known as the Fremantle Doctor) clearing the stuffiness and humidity of the day, environmental conditions are near perfect for the end of summer. I barely notice them. Not long ago though, it was over 40 degrees for three days in a row. These were the three days I had set aside to complete an academic paper, the last days available before the university opened and normal work would resume. I’d arranged to have the place to myself, but I hadn’t arranged for cooling technologies. As I immersed myself in photocopies and textbooks the intellectual challenges and excitement were my preoccupation. It was hot, but I was almost unreceptive to recognising the discomforts of the weather until sweat began to drip onto pages and keyboards. A break in the afternoon for a swim at the local beach was an opportunity to clarify and see the bigger picture, and as the temperature began to slide into the evening cool it was easier to stay up late working and then sleep in late. I began to work around the weather. What impact does this have on thinking and writing? I remember it as a haze. The paper though, still seems clear and reasoned. My regimen might be read as working despite the weather, but I wonder if the intensity of the heat extends thinking in different directions—to go places where I wouldn’t have imagined in an ambiently cooled office (if I had one). The conditions of the production of knowledge are often assumed to be static, stable and uninteresting. Even if your work is located in exciting Other places, the ‘writing up’ is expected to happen ‘back home’, after the extra-ordinary places of fieldwork. It can be written in the present tense, for a more immediate reading experience, but the writing cannot always happen at the same time as the events being described, so readers accept the use of present tense as a figment of grammar that cannot accommodate the act of writing. When a writer becomes aware of their surroundings and articulates those conditions into their narrative, the reader is lifted out of the narrative into a metaframe; out of the body of writing and into the extra-diegetic. In her essay “Me and My Shadow” (1987), Jane Tompkins writes as if ‘we’ the reader are in the present with her as she makes connections between books, experiences, memories, feelings, and she also provides us with a writing scene in which to imagine her in the continuous present: It is a beautiful day here in North Carolina. The first day that is both cool and sunny all summer. After a terrible summer, first drought, then heat-wave, then torrential rain, trees down, flooding. Now, finally, beautiful weather. A tree outside my window just brushed by red, with one fully red leaf. (This is what I want you to see. A person sitting in stockinged feet looking out of her window – a floor to ceiling rectangle filled with green, with one red leaf. The season poised, sunny and chill, ready to rush down the incline into autumn. But perfect, and still. Not going yet.) (128)This is a strategy, part of the aesthetics and politics of Tompkins’s paper which argues for the way the personal functions in intellectual thinking and writing even when we don’t recognise or acknowledge it. A little earlier she characterises herself as vulnerable because of the personal/professional nexus: I don’t know how to enter the debate [over epistemology] without leaving everything else behind – the birds outside my window, my grief over Janice, just myself as a person sitting here in stockinged feet, a little bit chilly because the windows are open, and thinking about going to the bathroom. But not going yet. (126)The deferral of autumn and going to the bathroom is linked through the final phrase, “not going yet”. This is a kind of refrain that draws attention to the aesthetic architecture of locating the self, and yet the reference to an impending toilet trip raised many eyebrows. Nancy Millar comments that “these passages invoke that moment in writing when everything comes together in a fraction of poise; that fragile moment the writing in turn attempts to capture; and that going to the bathroom precisely, will end” (6). It spoils the moment. The aesthetic green scene with one red leaf is ruptured by the impending toilet scene. Or perhaps it is the intimacy of bodily function that disrupts the ambient. And yet the moment is fictional anyway. There must surely always be some fiction involved when writing about the scene of writing, as writing usually takes more than one take. Gina Mercer takes advantage of this fictional function in a review of a collection of women’s poetry. Noting the striking discursive differences between the editor’s introduction and the poetry collected in the volume, she suggestively accounts for this by imagining the conditions under which the editor might have been working: I suddenly begin to imagine that she wrote the introduction sitting at her desk in twin-set and pearls, her feet constricted by court shoes – but that the selection took place at home with her lying on a large beautifully-linened bed bestrewn by a cat and the poems… (4)These imaginary conditions, Mercer implies, impact on the ways we do our intellectual work, or perhaps different kinds of work require different conditions. Mercer not only imagines the editor at work, but also suggests her own preferred workspace when she mentions that “the other issue I’ve been pondering as I lay on my bed in a sarong (yes it’s hot here already) reading this anthology, has been the question of who reads love poetry these days?” (4). Placing herself as reader (of an anthology of love poetry) on the bed in a sarong in a hot climate partially accounts for the production of the thinking around this review, but probably doesn’t include the writing process. Mercer’s review is written in epistolary form, signaling an engagement with ‘the personal’, and yet that awareness of form and setting performs a doubling function in which scenes are set and imagination is engaged and yet their veracity doesn’t seem important, and may even be part of the fiction of form. It’s the idea of working leisurely that gains traction in this review. Despite the capacity for fiction, I want to believe that Jane Tompkins was writing in her study in North Carolina next to a full-length window looking out onto a tree. I’m willing to suspend my disbelief and imagine her writing in this place and time. Scenes of Writing Physical conditions are often part of mythologising a writer. Sylvia Plath wrote the extraordinary collection of poems that became Ariel during the 1962/63 London winter, reputed to have been the coldest for over a hundred years (Gifford 15). The cold weather is given a significant narrative role in the intensity of her writing and her emotional desperation during that period. Sigmund Freud’s writing desk was populated with figurines from his collection of antiquities looking down on his writing, a scene carefully replicated in the Freud Museum in London and reproduced in postcards as a potent staging of association between mythology, writing and psychoanalysis (see Burke 2006). Writer’s retreats at the former residences of writers (like Varuna at the former home of Eleanor Dark in the Blue Mountains, and the Katherine Susannah Pritchard Centre in the hills outside of Perth) memorialise the material conditions in which writers wrote. So too do pilgrimages to the homes of famous writers and the tourism they produce in which we may gaze in wonder at the ordinary places of such extraordinary writing. The ambience of location is one facet of the conditions of writing. When I was a doctoral student reading Continental feminist philosophy, I used anything at hand to transport myself into their world. I wrote my dissertation mostly in Townsville in tropical Queensland (and partly in Cairns, even more tropical), where winter is blue skies and mid-twenties in temperature but summers are subject to frequent build-ups in pressure systems, high humidity, no breeze and some cyclones. There was no doubt that studying habits were affected by the weather for a student, if not for all the academics who live there. Workplaces were icily air-conditioned (is this ambient?) but outside was redolent with steamy tropical evenings, hot humid days, torrential downpours. When the weather breaks there is release in blood pressure accompanying barometer pressure. I was reading contemporary Australian literature alongside French feminist theories of subjectivity and their relation through écriture féminine. The European philosophical and psychoanalytic tradition and its exquisitely radical anti-logical writing of Irigaray, Cixous and Kristeva seemed alien to my tropical environs but perversely seductive. In order to get ‘inside’ the theoretical arguments, my strategy was to interpolate myself into their imagined world of writing, to emulate their imagined conditions. Whenever my friend went on a trip, I caretook her 1940s unit that sat on a bluff and looked out over the Coral Sea, all whitewashed and thick stone, and transformed it into a French salon for my intellectual productivity. I played Edith Piaf and Grace Jones, went to the grocer at the bottom of the hill every day for fresh food and the French patisserie for baguettes and croissants. I’d have coffee brewing frequently, and ate copious amounts of camembert and chocolate. The Townsville flat was a Parisian salon with French philosophers conversing in my head and between the piles of book lying on the table. These binges of writing were extraordinarily productive. It may have been because of the imagined Francophile habitus (as Bourdieu understands it); or it may have been because I prepared for the anticipated period of time writing in a privileged space. There was something about adopting the fictional romance of Parisian culture though that appealed to the juxtaposition of doing French theory in Townsville. It intensified the difference but interpolated me into an intellectual imaginary. Derrida’s essay, “Freud and the Scene of Writing”, promises to shed light on Freud’s conditions of writing, and yet it is concerned moreover with the metaphoric or rather intellectual ‘scene’ of Freudian ideas that form the groundwork of Derrida’s own corpus. Scenic, or staged, like Tompkins’s framed window of leaves, it looks upon the past as a ‘moment’ of intellectual ferment in language. Peggy Kamuf suggests that the translation of this piece of Derrida’s writing works to cover over the corporeal banishment from the scene of writing, in a move that privileges the written trace. In commenting, Kamuf translates Derrida herself: ‘to put outside and below [metre dehors et en bas] the body of the written trace [le corps de la trace écrite].’ Notice also the latter phrase, which says not the trace of the body but the body of the trace. The trace, what Derrida but before him also Freud has called trace or Spur, is or has a body. (23)This body, however, is excised, removed from the philosophical and psychoanalytic imaginary Kamuf argues. Australian philosopher Elizabeth Grosz contends that the body is “understood in terms that attempt to minimize or ignore altogether its formative role in the production of philosophical values – truth, knowledge, justice” (Volatile 4): Philosophy has always considered itself a discipline concerned primarily or exclusively with ideas, concepts, reason, judgment – that is, with terms clearly framed by the concept of mind, terms which marginalize or exclude considerations of the body. As soon as knowledge is seen as purely conceptual, its relation to bodies, the corporeality of both knowers and texts, and the ways these materialities interact, must become obscure. (Volatile 4)In the production of knowledge then, the corporeal knowing writing body can be expected to interact with place, with the ambience or otherwise in which we work. “Writing is a physical effort,” notes Cixous, and “this is not said often enough” (40). The Tense Present Conditions have changed here in Perth since the last draft. A late summer high pressure system is sitting in the Great Australian Bite pushing hot air across the desert and an equally insistent ridge of low pressure sits off the Indian Ocean, so the two systems are working against each other, keeping the weather hot, still, tense, taut against the competing forces. It has been nudging forty degrees for a week. The air conditioning at work has overloaded and has been set to priority cooling; offices are the lowest priority. A fan blasts its way across to me, thrumming as it waves its head from one side to the other as if tut-tutting. I’m not consumed with intellectual curiosity the way I was in the previous heatwave; I’m feeling tired, and wondering if I should just give up on this paper. It will wait for another time and journal. There’s a tension with chronology here, with what’s happening in the present, but then Rachel Blau DuPlessis argues that the act of placing ideas into language inevitably produces that tension: Chronology is time depicted as travelling (more or less) in a (more or less) forward direction. Yet one can hardly write a single sentence straight; it all rebounds. Even its most innocent first words – A, The, I, She, It – teem with heteroglossias. (16)“Sentences structure” DuPlessis points out, and grammar necessitates development, chronological linearity, which affects the possibilities for narrative. “Cause and effect affect” DuPlessis notes (16), as do Cixous and Irigaray before her. Nevertheless we must press on. And so I leave work and go for a swim, bring my core body temperature down, and order a pot of tea from the beach café while I read Barbara Bolt in the bright afternoon light. Bolt is a landscape painter who has spent some time in Kalgoorlie, a mining town 800km east of Perth, and notes the ways light is used as a metaphor for visual illumination, for enlightening, and yet in Kalgoorlie light is a glare which, far from illuminating, blinds. In Kalgoorlie the light is dangerous to the body, causing cancers and cataracts but also making it difficult to see because of its sheer intensity. Bolt makes an argument for the Australian light rupturing European thinking about light: Visual practice may be inconceivable without a consideration of light, but, I will argue, it is equally ‘inconceivable’ to practice under European notions of light in the ‘glare’ of the Australian sun. Too much light on matter sheds no light on the matter. (204)Bolt frequently equates the European notions of visual art practice that, she claims, Australians still operate under, with concomitant concepts of European philosophy, aesthetics and, I want to add, epistemology. She is particularly adept at noting the material impact of Australian conditions on the body, arguing that, the ‘glare’ takes apart the Enlightenment triangulation of light, knowledge, and form. In fact, light becomes implicated bodily, in the facts of the matter. My pterygiums and sun-beaten skin, my mother and father’s melanomas, and the incidence of glaucoma implicate the sun in a very different set of processes. From my optic, light can no longer be postulated as the catalyst that joins objects while itself remaining unbent and unimplicated … (206).If new understandings of light are generated in Australian conditions of working, surely heat is capable of refiguring dominant European notions as well. Heat is commonly associated with emotions and erotics, even through ideas: heated debate, hot topics and burning issues imply the very latest and most provocative discussions, sizzling and mercurial. Heat has a material affect on corporeality also: dehydrating, disorienting, dizzying and burning. Fuzzy logic and bent horizons may emerge. Studies show that students learn best in ambient temperatures (Pilman; Graetz), but I want to argue that thought and writing can bend in other dimensions with heat. Tensions build in blood pressure alongside isometric bars. Emotional and intellectual intensities merge. Embodiment meets epistemology. This is not a new idea; feminist philosophers like Donna Haraway have been emphasizing the importance of situated knowledge and partial perspective for decades as a methodology that challenges universalism and creates a more ethical form of objectivity. In 1987 Haraway was arguing for politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims. These are claims on people’s lives. I am arguing for the view from a body, always a complex contradictory structuring and structured body versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity. (Haraway 588)Working in intellectual conditions when the specificities of ambience is ignored, is also, I suggest, to work in a privileged space, in which there are no distractions like the weather. It is also to work ‘from nowhere, from simplicity’ in Haraway’s words. It is to write from within the pure imaginary space of the intellect. But to write in, and from, weather conditions no matter what they might be is to acknowledge the affect of being-in-the-world, to recognise an ontological debt that is embodied and through which we think. I want to make a claim for the radical conditions under which writing can occur outside of the ambient, as I sit here sweating over theory again. Drawing attention to the corporeal conditions of the scene of writing is a way of situating knowledge and partial perspective: if I were in Hobart where snow still lies on Mount Wellington I may well have a different perspective, but the metaphors of ice and cold also need transforming into productive and generative conditions of particularised knowledge. To acknowledge the location of knowledge production suggests more of the forces at work in particular thinking, as a bibliography indicates the shelf of books that have inflected the written product. This becomes a relation of immanence rather than transcendence between the subject and thought, whereby thinking can be understood as an act, an activity, or even activism of an agent. This is proposed by Elizabeth Grosz in her later work where she yokes together the “jagged edges” (Time 165) of Deleuze and Irigaray’s work in order to reconsider the “future of thought”. She calls for a revision of meaning, as Bolt does, but this time in regard to thought itself—and the task of philosophy—asking whether it is possible to develop an understanding of thought that refuses to see thought as passivity, reflection, contemplation, or representation, and instead stresses its activity, how and what it performs […] can we deromanticize the construction of knowledges and discourses to see them as labor, production, doing? (Time 158)If writing is to be understood as a form of activism it seems fitting to conclude here with one final image: of Gloria Anzaldua’s computer, at which she invites us to imagine her writing her book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), a radical Chicana vision for postcolonial theory. Like Grosz, Anzaldua is intent on undoing the mind/body split and the language through which the labour of thinking can be articulated. This is where she writes her manifesto: I sit here before my computer, Amiguita, my altar on top of the monitor with the Virgen de Coatalopeuh candle and copal incense burning. My companion, a wooden serpent staff with feathers, is to my right while I ponder the ways metaphor and symbol concretize the spirit and etherealize the body. (75) References Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Bolt, Barbara. “Shedding Light for the Matter.” Hypatia 15.2 (2000): 202-216. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity, 1990. [1980 Les Edition de Minuit] Burke, Janine. The Gods of Freud: Sigmund Freud’s Art Collection. Milsons Point: Knopf, 2006. Cixous, Hélène, and Mireille Calle-Gruber. Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing. London: Routledge, 1997. [1994 Photos de Racine]. Derrida, Jacques, and Jeffrey Mehlman. "Freud and the Scene of Writing." Yale French Studies 48 (1972): 74-117. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work. Tuscaloosa: Alabama UP, 2006. Gifford, Terry. Ted Hughes. Abingdon: Routledge, 2009. Graetz, Ken A. “The Psychology of Learning Environments.” Educause Review 41.6 (2006): 60-75. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1994. Grosz, Elizabeth. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 2005. Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14.3 (1988): 575-99. Kamuf, Peggy. “Outside in Analysis.” Mosaic 42.4 (2009): 19-34. Mercer, Gina. “The Days of Love Are Lettered.” Review of The Oxford Book of Australian Love Poems, ed. Jennifer Strauss. LiNQ 22.1 (1995): 135-40. Miller, Nancy K. Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts. New York: Routledge, 1991. Pilman, Mary S. “The Effects of Air Temperature Variance on Memory Ability.” Loyola University Clearinghouse, 2001. ‹http://clearinghouse.missouriwestern.edu/manuscripts/306.php›. Tompkins, Jane. “Me and My Shadow.” New Literary History 19.1 (1987): 169-78.

Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto (2005) reconceives transience and domesticity together. This queer Irish road film collapses opposition between mobility and home by uncoupling them from heteronormative structures of gender, desire, and space—male/female, public/private. The film’s protagonist, Patrick “Kitten” Braden (Cillian Murphy), wanders in search of a loved one without whom she does not feel at home. Along the way, the film exposes and exploits the doubleness of both “mobility” and “home” in the traditional road narrative, queering the conventions of the road film to convey the desire and possibilities for an alternative domesticity. In its rerouting of the traditional road plot, Breakfast on Pluto does not follow a hero escaping the obligations of home and family to find autonomy on the road. Instead, the film charts Kitten’s quest to realise a sense of home through trans-domesticity—that is, to find shelter in non-heteronormative, mutual care while in both transient and public spaces.I affix “trans-” to “domesticity” to signal both the queerness and mobility that transform understandings of domestic spaces and practices in Breakfast on Pluto. To clarify, trans-domesticity is not queer assimilation to heteronormative domesticity, nor is it a relegation of queer culture to privatised and demobilised spaces. Rather, trans-domesticity challenges the assumption that all forms of domesticity are inherently normalising and demobilising. In other words, trans-domesticity uncovers tensions and violence swept under the rugs of hegemonic domesticity. Moreover, this alternative domesticity moves between and beyond the terms of gender and spatial oppositions that delimit the normative home.Specifically, “trans-domesticity” names non-normative homemaking practices that arise out of the “desire to feel at home”, a desire that Anne-Marie Fortier identifies in queer diasporic narratives (1890-90). Accordingly, “trans-domesticity” also registers the affective processes that foster the connectedness and belonging of “home” away from private domestic spaces and places of origin, a “rethinking of the concept of home”, which Ed Madden traces in lesbian and gay migrant narratives (175-77). Building on the assumption of queer diaspora theorists “that not only can one be at home in movement, but that movement can be one’s very own home” (Rapport and Dawson 27), trans-domesticity focuses critical attention on the everyday practices and emotional labour that create a home in transience.As Breakfast on Pluto tracks its transgender protagonist’s movement between a small Irish border town, Northern Ireland, and London, the film invokes both a specifically Irish migration and the broader queer diaspora of which it is a part. While trans-domesticity is a recurring theme across a wide range of queer diasporic narratives, in Breakfast on Pluto it also simultaneously drives the plot and functions as a narrative frame. The film begins and ends with Kitten telling her story as she wanders through the streets of Soho and cares for a member of her made family, her friend Charlie’s baby.Although I am concerned with the film adaptation, Patrick McCabe’s “Prelude” to his novel, Breakfast on Pluto (1998), offers a useful point of departure: Patrick “Pussy” Braden’s dream, “as he negotiates the minefields of this world”, is “ending, once and for all, this ugly state of perpetual limbo” and “finding a map which might lead to that place called home” (McCabe x). In such a place, McCabe’s hero might lay “his head beneath a flower-bordered print that bears the words at last ‘You’re home’”(McCabe xi). By contrast, the film posits that “home” is never a “place” apart from “the minefields of this world”, and that while being in transit and in limbo might be a perpetual state, it is not necessarily an ugly one.Jordan’s film thus addresses the same questions as does Susan Fraiman in her book Extreme Domesticity: “But what about those for whom dislocation is not back story but main event? Those who, having pulled themselves apart, realize no timely arrival at a place of their own, so that being not-unpacked is an ongoing condition?” (155). Through her trans-domestic shelter-making and caregiving practices, Kitten enacts “home” in motion and in public spaces, and thereby realises the elision in the flower-bordered print in McCabe’s “Prelude” (xi), which does not assure “You are at home” but, rather, “You are home”.From Housed to Trans-Domestic SubjectivitySelf and home are equated in the dominant cultural narratives of Western modernity, but “home” in such formulations is assumed to be a self-owned, self-contained space. Psychoanalytic theorist Carl Jung describes this Ur-house as “a concretization of the individuation process, […] a symbol of psychic wholeness” (225). Philosopher Gaston Bachelard sees in the home “the topography of our intimate being”, a structure that “concentrates being within limits that protect” (xxxii). However, as historian Carolyn Steedman suggests, the mythic house that has become “the stuff of our ‘cultural psychology,’ the system of everyday metaphors by which we see ourselves”, is far from universal; rather, it reflects “the topography of the houses” of those who stand “in a central relationship to the dominant culture” (75, 17).For others, the lack of such housing correlates with political marginalisation, as the house functions as both a metaphor and material marker for culturally-recognised selfhood. As cultural geographer John Agnew argues, in capitalist societies the self-owned home is both a sign of autonomous individuality and a prerequisite for full political subjectivity (60). Philosopher Rosi Braidotti asserts that this figuration of subjectivity in “the phallo-Eurocentric master code” treats as “disposable” the “bodies of women, youth, and others who are racialised or marked off by age, gender, sexuality, and income” (6). These bodies are “reduced to marginality” and subsequently “experience dispossession of their embodied and embedded selves, in a political economy of repeated and structurally enforced eviction” (Braidotti 6).To shift the meaning of “home” and the intimately-linked “self” from a privately-owned, autonomous structure to trans-domesticity, to an ethos of care enacted even, and especially in, transient and public spaces, is not to romanticise homelessness or to deny the urgent necessity of material shelter. Breakfast on Pluto certainly does not allow viewers to do either. Rather, the figure of a trans-domestic self, like Braidotti’s “nomadic subject”, has the potential to challenge and transform the terms of power relations. Those now on the margins might then be seen as equally-embodied selves and full political subjects with the right to shelter and care.Such a political project also entails recognising and revaluing—without appropriating and demobilising—existing trans-domesticity. As Fraiman argues, “domesticity” must be “map[ped] from the margins” in order to include the homemaking practices of gender rebels and the precariously housed, of castaways and outcasts (4-5). This alternative map would allow “outsiders to normative domesticity” to “claim domesticity while wrenching it away from such things as compulsory heterosexuality […] and the illusion of a safely barricaded life” (Fraiman 4-5). Breakfast on Pluto shares in this re-mapping work by exposing the violence embedded in heteronormative domestic structures, and by charting the radical political potential of trans-domesticity.Unsettling HousesIn the traditional road narrative, “home” tends to be a static, confining structure from which the protagonist escapes, a space that then functions as “a structuring absence” on the road (Robertson 271). Bachelard describes this normative structure as a “dream house” that constitutes “a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability” (17); the house functions, Henri Lefebvre argues, as “the epitome of immobility” (92). Whether the dream is to escape and/or to return, “to write of houses”, as Adam Hanna asserts, “is to raise ideas of shelters that are fixed and secure” (113).Breakfast on Pluto quickly gives lie to those expectations. Kitten is adopted by Ma Braden (Ruth McCabe), a single woman who raises Kitten and her adopted sister in domestic space that is connected to, and part of, a public house. That spatial contiguity undermines any illusion of privacy and security, as is evident in the scene in which a school-aged Kitten, who thought herself safely home alone and thus able to dress in her mother’s and sister’s clothes, is discovered in the act by her mother and sister from the pub’s street entrance. Further, the film lays bare the built-in mechanisms of surveillance and violence that reinforce heteronormative, patriarchal structures. After discovering Kitten in women’s clothes, Ma Braden violently scrubs her clean and whacks her with a brush until Kitten says, “I’m a boy, not a girl”. The public/house space facilitates Ma Braden’s close monitoring of Kitten thereafter.As a young writer in secondary school, Kitten satirises the violence within the hegemonic home by narrating the story of the rape of her biological mother, Eily Bergin (Eva Birthistle), by Kitten’s father, Father Liam (Liam Neeson) in a scene of hyper-domesticity set in the rectory kitchen. As Patrick Mullen notes, “the rendition of the event follows the bubble-gum logic and tone of 1950s Hollywood culture” (130). The relationship between the ideal domesticity thereby invoked and the rape then depicted exposes the sexual violence for what it is: not an external violation of the double sanctity of church and home space, but rather an internal and even intrinsic violence that reinforces and is shielded by the power structures from which normative domesticity is never separate.The only sense of home that seems to bind Kitten to her place of origin is based in her affective bonds to friends Charlie (Ruth Negga) and Lawrence (Seamus Reilly). When Lawrence is killed by a bomb, Kitten is no longer at home, and she leaves town to search for the “phantom” mother she never knew. The impetus for Kitten’s wandering, then, is connection rather than autonomy, and neither the home she leaves, nor the sense of home she seeks, are fixed structures.Mobile Homes and Queering of the Western RoadBreakfast on Pluto tracks how the oppositions that seem to structure traditional road films—such as that between home and mobility, and between domestic and open spaces—continually collapse. The film invokes the “cowboy and Indian” mythology from which the Western road narrative descends (Boyle 19), but to different ends: to capture a desire for non-heteronormative affective bonds rather than “lone ranger” autonomy, and to convey a longing for domesticity on the trail, for a home that is both mobile and open. Across the past century of Irish fiction and film, “cowboy and Indian” mythology has often intersected with queer wandering, from James Joyce’s Dubliners story “An Encounter” (1914) to Lenny Abrahamson’s film Adam & Paul (2004). In this tradition, Breakfast on Pluto queers “cowboy and Indian” iconography to convey an alternative conception of domesticity and home. The prevailing ethos in the film’s queered Western scenes is of trans-domesticity—of inclusion and care during transience and in open spaces. After bar bouncers exclude Kitten and friends because of her transgenderism and Lawrence’s Down syndrome, “The Border Knights” (hippie-bikers-cum-cowboys) ride to their rescue and bring them to their temporary home under the stars. Once settled around the campfire, the first biker shares his philosophy with a cuddled-up Kitten: “When I’m riding my hog, you think I’m riding the road? No way, man. I’m travelling from the past into the future with a druid at my back”. “Druid man or woman?” Kitten asks. “That doesn’t matter”, the biker clarifies, “What matters is the journey”. What matters is not place as fixed destination or gender as static difference, but rather the practice of travelling with open relationships to space, to time, and to others. The bikers welcome all to their fire and include both Kitten and Lawrence in their sharing of jokes and joints. The only exclusion is of reference to political violence, which Charlie’s boyfriend, Irwin (Laurence Kinlan), tries to bring into the conversation.Further, Kitten uses domesticity to try to establish a place for herself while on the road with “Billy Hatchett and The Mohawks”, the touring band that picks her up when she leaves Ma Braden’s. As Mullen notes, “Kitten literally works herself into the band by hand sewing a ‘squaw’ outfit to complement the group’s glam-rock Native American image” (Mullen 141). The duet that Kitten performs with Billy (Gavin Friday), a song about a woman inviting “a wandering man” to share the temporary shelter of her campfire, invokes trans-domesticity. But the film intercuts their performance with scenes of violent border-policing: first, by British soldiers at a checkpoint who threaten the group and boast about the “13 less to deal with” in Derry, and then by members of the Republican Prisoners Welfare Association, who throw cans at the group and yell them off stage. A number of critics have noted the postcolonial implications of Breakfast on Pluto’s use of Native American iconography, which in these intercut scenes clearly raises the national stakes of constructions of domestic belonging (see, for instance, Winston 153-71). In complementary ways, the film queers “cowboy and Indian” mythology to reimagine “mobility” and “home” together.After Kitten is forced out by the rest of the band, Billy sets her up in a caravan, a mobile home left to him by his mother. Though Billy “wouldn’t exactly call it a house”, Kitten sees in it her first chance at a Bachelardian “dream house”: she calls it a “house of dreams and longing” and cries, “Oh, to have a little house, to own the hearth, stool, and all”. Kitten ecstatically begins to tidy the place, performing what Fraiman terms a “hyper-investment in homemaking” that functions “as compensation for domestic deprivation” (20).Aisling Cormack suggests that Kitten’s hyper-investment in homemaking signals the film’s “radical disengagement with politics” to a “femininity that is inherently apolitical” (169-70). But that reading holds only if viewers assume a gendered, spatial divide between public and private, and between the political and the domestic. As Fraiman asserts, “the political meaning of fixating on domestic arrangements is more complex […] For the poor or transgendered person, the placeless immigrant or the woman on her own, aspiring to a safe, affirming home doesn’t reinforce hierarchical social relations but is pitched, precisely, against them” (20).Trans-Domesticity as Political ActEven as Kitten invokes the idea of a Bachelardian dream house, she performs a trans-domesticity that exposes the falseness of the gendered, spatial oppositions assumed to structure the normative home. Her domesticity is not an apolitical retreat; rather, it is pitched, precisely, against the violence that public/private and political/domestic oppositions enable within the house, as well as beyond it. As she cleans, Kitten discovers that violence is literally embedded in her caravan home when she finds a cache of Irish Republican Army (IRA) guns under the floor. After a bomb kills Lawrence, Kitten throws the guns into a reservoir, a defiant act that she describes to the IRA paramilitaries who come looking for the guns as “spring cleaning”. Cormack asserts that Kitten “describing her perilous destruction of the guns in terms of domestic labor” strips it “of all political significance” (179). I argue instead that it demonstrates the radical potential of trans-domesticity, of an ethos of care-taking and shelter-making asserted in public and political spaces. Kitten’s act is not apolitical, though it is decidedly anti-violence.From the beginning of Breakfast on Pluto, Kitten’s trans-domesticity exposes the violence structurally embedded in heteronormative domestic ideology. Additionally, the film’s regular juxtaposition of scenes of Kitten’s homemaking practices with scenes of political violence demonstrates that no form of domesticity functions as a private, apolitical retreat from “the minefields of this world” (McCabe x). This latter counterpoint throws into relief the political significance of Kitten’s trans-domesticity. Her domestic practices are her means of resisting and transforming the structural violence that poses an existential threat to marginalised and dispossessed people.After Kitten is accused of being responsible for an IRA bombing in London, the ruthless, violent interrogation of Kitten by British police officers begins to break down her sense of self. Throughout this brutal scene, Kitten compulsively straightens the chairs and tidies the room, and she responds to her interrogators with kindness and even affection. Fraiman’s theorisation of “extreme domesticity” helps to articulate how Kitten’s homemaking in carceral space—she calls it “My Sweet Little Cell”—is an “urgent” act that, “in the wake of dislocation”, can mean “safety, sanity, and self-expression; survival in the most basic sense” (25). Cormack reads Kitten’s reactions in this scene as “masochistic” and the male police officers’ nurturing response as of a piece with the film’s “more-feminine-than-feminine disengagement from political realities” (185-89). However, I disagree: Kitten’s trans-domesticity is a political act that both sustains her within structures that would erase her and converts officers of the state to an ethos of care and shelter. Inspector Routledge, for example, gently carries Kitten back to her cell, and after her release, PC Wallis ensures that she is safely (if not privately) housed with a cooperatively-run peep show, the address at which an atoning Father Liam locates her in London.After Kitten and a pregnant Charlie are burned out of the refuge that they temporarily find with Father Liam, Kitten and Charlie return to London, where Charlie’s baby is born soon after into the trans-domesticity that opens the film. Rejoining the story’s frame, Breakfast on Pluto ends close to where it begins: Kitten and the baby meet Charlie outside a London hospital, where Kitten sees Eily Bergin with her new son, Patrick. Instead of meeting where their paths intersect, the two families pass each other and turn in opposite directions. Kitten now knows that hers is both a different road and a different kind of home. “Home”, then, is not a place gained once and for all. Rather, home is a perpetual practice that does not separate one from the world, but can create the shelter of mutual care as one wanders through it.The Radical Potential and Structural Limits of Trans-DomesticityBreakfast on Pluto demonstrates the agency that trans-domesticity can afford in the lives of marginalised and dispossessed individuals, as well as the power of the structures that militate against its broader realisation. The radical political potential of trans-domesticity manifests in the transformation in the two police officers’ relational practices. Kitten’s trans-domesticity also inspires a reformation in Father Liam, the film’s representative of the Catholic Church and a man whose relationship to others transmutes from sexual violence and repressive secrecy to mutual nurturance and inclusive love. Although these individual conversions do not signify changes in structures of power, they do allow viewers to imagine the possibility of a state and a church that cherish, shelter, and care for all people equally. The film’s ending conveys this sense of fairy-tale-like possibility through its Disney-esque chattering birds and the bubble-gum pop song, “Sugar Baby Love”.In the end, the sense of hopefulness that closes Breakfast on Pluto coexists with the reality that dominant power structures will not recognise Kitten’s trans-domestic subjectivity and family, and that those structures will work to contain any perceived threat, just as the Catholic Church banishes the converted Father Liam to Kilburn Parish. That Kitten and Charlie nevertheless realise a clear contentment in themselves and in their made family demonstrates the vital importance of trans-domesticity and other forms of “extreme domesticity” in the lives of those who wander.ReferencesAgnew, John. “Home Ownership and Identity in Capitalist Societies.” Housing and Identity: Cross Cultural Perspectives. Ed. James S. Duncan. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982. 60–97.Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. 1957. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.Boyle, Kevin Jon, ed. Rear View Mirror: Automobile Images and American Identities. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.Breakfast on Pluto. Dir. Neil Jordan. Pathé Pictures International, 2005.Cormack, Aisling B. “Toward a ‘Post-Troubles’ Cinema? The Troubled Intersection of Political Violence and Gender in Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game and Breakfast on Pluto.” Éire-Ireland 49.1–2 (2014): 164–92.Fortier, Anne-Marie. “Queer Diaspora.” Handbook of Lesbian and Gay Studies. Eds. Diane Richardson and Steven Seidman. London: Sage Publishing, 2002. 183–97.Fraiman, Susan. Extreme Domesticity: A View from the Margins. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.Hanna, Adam. Northern Irish Poetry and Domestic Space. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Jung, Carl. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. 1957. Ed. Aniela Jaffe. Trans. Clara Winston and Richard Winston. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Social Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.Madden, Ed. “Queering the Irish Diaspora: David Rees and Padraig Rooney.” Éire-Ireland 47.1–2 (2012): 172–200.McCabe, Patrick. Breakfast on Pluto. London: Picador, 1998.Mullen, Patrick R. The Poor Bugger’s Tool: Irish Modernism, Queer Labor, and Postcolonial History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.Rapport, Nigel, and Andrew Dawson. Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of ‘Home’ in a World of Movement. Oxford: Berg, 1998.Robertson, Pamela. “Home and Away: Friends of Dorothy on the Road in Oz.” The Road Movie Book. Eds. Steven Cohen and Ina Rae Hark. London: Routledge, 1997. 271–306.Steedman, Carolyn. Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987.Winston, Greg. “‘Reluctant Indians’: Irish Identity and Racial Masquerade.” Irish Modernism and the Global Primitive. Eds. Maria McGarrity and Claire A. Culleton. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 153–71.

Pat Buchanan’s infamous speech to the 1992 Republican convention (Buchanan), has often been understood as a defining moment in the US culture wars (Hartman). The speech’s central claim that “there is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America” oriented around the idea that the US was a nation divided between two opposing values systems. On one side were Democrat defenders of “abortion on demand” and “homosexual rights” and on the other those who, like then Republican presidential candidate George Bush, stood by the “Judeo-Christian values and beliefs upon which this nation was built.”Buchanan’s speech helped popularise the idea that the US was riven by fundamental cultural divides, an idea that became a media staple but was hotly contested by scholars.The year before Buchanan’s speech, James Davison Hunter’s Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America advanced a “culture wars thesis” based in claims of a growing “political and social hostility rooted in different systems of moral understanding” (Hunter 42). Hunter cited increasing polarisation in debates on “abortion, child care, funding for the arts, affirmative action and quotas, gay rights, values in public education, or multiculturalism” (Hunter 42) and claimed that the defining religious divides in the US were no longer between religions but within them. In the intense scholarly debate that followed its publication, as Irene Taviss Thomson has summarised, little empirical evidence emerged of any real divide.Yet this lack of empirical evidence does not mean that talk of culture wars can be easily dismissed. The culture wars, as I have argued elsewhere (Davis), were and are a media product designed to sharpen social divides for electoral gain. No doubt because of the usefulness of this product, culture wars discourse remains a persistent feature of public debate across the west. The symbolic discourse that positions the culture wars and its supposedly intractable differences as real, I argue, deserves consideration in its own right.In what follows, I analyse the use of culture wars discourse in two defining documents. The first, Pat Buchanan’s 1992 “culture wars” speech, reputedly put the culture wars front and centre of US politics. The second, Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos’s 2016 article in Breitbart News, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right” (Bokhari and Yiannopoulos), sought to define its moment by affirming the arrival of a new political movement, the “alt-right”, as a force in US politics. With its homage to Buchanan and written in the belief that “politics is downstream from culture” the article sought to position the alt-right as an inheritor of Buchanan’s legacy and to mark a new defining moment in an ongoing culture war.This self-referential framing, I argue, belies deep differences between Buchanan’s rhetoric and that of Bokhari and Yiannopoulos. Buchanan’s defence of American values, while spectacularly adversarial, is at base democratic, whereas, despite its culturalist posturing, one project of “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right” is to reinstate biological notions of race and gender difference in the political agenda.Culture Wars ThenBuchanan’s speech came after decades of sniping. The emergence of the “counterculture” of the 1960s helped create a basis for the idea that US politics was defined by an irreducible clash of values (Thomson). Buchanan played a direct role in fostering such divides. As he famously wrote in a 1971 memo to then President Richard Nixon in which he suggested exploiting racial divides, if we “cut … the country in half, my view is that we would have far the larger half.” But the language of Buchanan’s 1992 speech, while incendiary, is nevertheless democratic in its emphasis on delineating rival political platforms. Much culture wars discourse focuses on the embodied politics of gender, sexuality and race. A principal target of Buchanan’s speech was abortion, which since the Roe versus Wade judgement of 1973 that legalised part-term abortion in the US has been a defining culture wars issue. At the “top” of Democrat candidate Bill Clinton’s agenda, Buchanan claimed, is “unrestricted abortion on demand.” Buchanan singled out Hillary Clinton for special attack:friends, this is radical feminism. The agenda Clinton & Clinton would impose on America–abortion on demand … homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat … is not the kind of change America wants.Buchanan then pledges to support George Bush, who had beaten him for the Republican nomination, and Bush’s stance “against the amoral idea that gay and lesbian couples should have the same standing in law as married men and women.” He also supports Bush on “right-to-life, and for voluntary prayer in the public schools.” Buchanan’s language here references essentialist ideas of morality and contrasts them against the supposed immorality of his opponents but is ultimately predicated in the democratic languages of law-making and rights and the adversarial language of electoral politics. Through these contrasts the speech builds to its famous centrepiece:my friends, this election is about much more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe. It is about what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.Buchanan, here, sharpens and maps the contrasts he has been working with onto differences in identity. Politics, here, is not about the distribution of resources but is about identity, values and a commensurate difference in belief systems. On one side are righteous Americans, on the other a culture of immorality that threatens the proper religious basis of the nation. Notably, the speech makes no direct mention of race. It instead uses code. Evoking the LA riots that took place earlier that year, Buchanan sides with the troopers who broke up the riots.they walked up a dark street, where the mob had looted and burned every building but one, a convalescent home for the aged. The mob was heading in, to ransack and loot the apartments of the terrified old men and women. When the troopers arrived, M-16s at the ready, the mob threatened and cursed, but the mob retreated. It had met the one thing that could stop it: force, rooted in justice, backed by courage … and as they took back the streets of LA, block by block, so we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country. God bless you, and God bless America.Unsaid here is that the “mob” were black and reacting against the injustice of the beating of a black man, Rodney King, by police. The implication is that to “take back our culture … take back our country” is to vanquish the restive black enemy within. By using code Buchanan is able to avoid possible charges of racism, positioning the rioters not as racially different but as culturally different; their deficit is not genetic but patriotic.Culture Wars NowSince the 1990s culture wars discourse has become entrenched as a media staple. Supposedly intractable values divides between “conservatives” and “liberals” play out incessantly across a conservative media sphere that spans outlets (Fox News), platforms (Breitbart News), broadcasters (Rush Limbaugh), and commentators such as Ann Coulter, in debate over issues ranging from gun control, LGBTQI rights, American history and sex education and prayer in schools. This discourse, crystalised in divisive terms such as “cultural Marxist,” “social justice warrior” and “snowflake”, is increasingly generated by online bulletin boards such as the 4chan/pol/(politically incorrect) and /b/-Random boards, which function as a crucible for trolling and meme-making (Phillips) that routinely targets minorities, women and especially feminists. As Angela Nagle has said (24), Gamergate, the 2014 episode in which female game reviewers and designers critical of sexism in the gaming industry were targeted with organised trolling, played a pivotal role in “uniting different online groups and spreading the tactics of chan culture to the broad online right.” Other conduits for extremist discourse to the mainstream include sites such as the white supremacist Daily Stormer, alt-right sites, and “men’s rights” sites such as Return of Kings. The self-described aim of this discourse, as the white nationalist Jared Swift has said, has been to move the “Overton window” of what constitutes acceptable public discourse far to the right (in Daniels).The emergence of this diverse conservative media sphere provided opportunities for new celebrities willing to parse older forms of culture wars discourse with new forms of online extremism and to announce themselves as ringmasters of whatever circus might result. One such person is Milo Yiannopoulos. Quick to read the opportunities in Gamergate, he announced himself a sudden convert to the gaming cause (which he had previously dismissed) and helped turn the controversy into a rallying point for a nascent alt-right (Yiannopoulos). In 2014 Yiannopoulos was recruited by Breitbart News as a senior editor. Breitbart’s founder, Andrew Breitbart, is perhaps most famous for his dictum that “politics is downstream from culture”, an apt motto for a culture war.In 2016 Yiannopoulos, working with Bokhari, another Breitbart staffer, published, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right”, which, written with Andrew Breitbart’s dictum in mind, sought to announce the radicalism of a new antiestablishment conservative political force and yet to make it palatable for a mainstream audience. The article claims the “paleoconservative movement that rallied around the presidential campaigns of Pat Buchanan” as one of the origins of the alt-right. Donald Trump is praised as “perhaps the first truly cultural candidate for President since Buchanan.” The rest, they argue, is little more than harmless online mischief. The alt-right, they claim, is a fun-loving “movement born out of the youthful, subversive, underground edges of the internet,” made up of people who are “dangerously bright.” Similarly, the “manosphere” of “men’s rights” sites, infamous for misogyny, are praised as “one of the alt-right’s most distinctive constituencies” and positioned as harmless alongside an endorsement of masculinist author Jack Donovan’s “wistful” laments for “the loss of manliness that accompanies modern, globalized societies.” Mass trolling and the harassment of opponents by “the alt-right’s meme team” is characterised as “undeniably hysterical” and justifiable in pursuit of lulz.The sexism and racism found on bulletin boards such as 4 chan, for Bokhari and Yiannopoulos, is no less harmless. Young people, they claim, are drawn to the alt right not because of ideology but because “it seems fresh, daring and funny” contrasted against the “authoritarian instincts of the progressive left. With no personal memories or experience of racism, they “have trouble believing it’s actually real … they don’t believe that the memes they post on/pol/ are actually racist. In fact, they know they’re not—they do it because it gets a reaction.”For all these efforts to style the alt-right as mere carnivalesque paleoconservatism, though, there is a fundamental difference between Buchanan’s speech and “An Establishment Conservative’s guide to the Alt-Right.” Certainly, Bokhari and Yiannopoulos hit the same culture wars touchstones as Buchanan: race, sexuality and gender issues. But whereas Buchanan’s speech instances the “new racism” (Ansell) in its use of code to avoid charges of biological racism, Yiannopoulos and Bokhari are more direct. The article presents as an exemplary instance of how to fight a culture war but epitomises a new turn in the culture wars from culture to biologism. The alt-right is positioned as unashamedly Eurocentric and having little to do with racism. Yiannopoulos and Bokhari also seek to distance the alt-right from the “Stormfront set” and “1488ers” (“1488” is code for neo-Nazi). Yet even as they do so, they embrace “human biodiversity” ideology (biological racism), ethnic separatism and the building of walls to keep different racial groups apart. “An Establishment Conservative’s guide to the alt-right” was written in secret consultation with leading white supremacist figures (Bernstein) and namechecks the openly white supremacist Richard Spencer who is given credit for helping found “the media empire of the modern-day alternative right.”Spencer has argued that “Race is something between a breed and an actual species” and a process of “peaceful ethnic cleansing” should take place by which non-white Americans leave (Nagle 59). He is an admirer of the Italian ‘superfascist’ and notorious racist Julius Evola, who Yiannopoulos and Bokhari also namecheck. They also excuse race hate sites such as VDARE and American Renaissance as home to “an eclectic mix of renegades who objected to the established political consensus in some form or another.” It is mere happenstance, according to Yiannopoulos and Bokhari, that the “natural conservatives” drawn to the alt-right are “mostly white, mostly male middle-American radicals, who are unapologetically embracing a new identity politics that prioritises the interests of their own demographic.” Yet as they also say,while eschewing bigotry on a personal level, the movement is frightened by the prospect of demographic displacement represented by immigration. Border walls are a much safer option. The alt-right’s intellectuals would also argue that culture is inseparable from race. The alt-right believe that some degree of separation between peoples is necessary for a culture to be preserved.“Demographic displacement” here is code for “white genocide” a meme assiduously promoted over many years by the US white supremacist Bob Whitaker, now deceased, who believed that immigration, interracial marriage, and multiculturalism dilute white influence and will drive the white population to extinction (Daniels). The idea that “culture is inseparable from race” and that “some degree of separation between peoples is necessary for a culture to be preserved” echo white supremacist calls for a white “ethno-state.”“An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right” also namechecks so-called “neoreactionaries” such as Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin, who according to Yiannopoulos and Bokhari regard egalitarianism as an affront to “every piece of research on hereditary intelligence” and see liberalism, democracy and egalitarianism as having “no better a historical track record than monarchy.” Land and Yarvin, according to Yiannopoulos and Bokhari, offer a welcome vision of the conservative future:asking people to see each other as human beings rather than members of a demographic in-group, meanwhile, ignored every piece of research on tribal psychology … these were the first shoots of a new conservative ideology—one that many were waiting for.Culture Wars FuturesAs the culture wars have turned biological so they have become entrenched ever more firmly in mainstream politics. The “new conservative ideology” Yiannopoulos and Bokhari mention reeks of much older forms of conservative ideology currently being taken up in the US and elsewhere, based in naturalised gender hierarchies and racialised difference. This return to the past is fast becoming institutionalised. One of the stakes in the bitter 2018 dispute over the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court was the prospect that Kavanaugh’s vote will create a conservative majority in the court that will enable the revisiting of a talismanic moment in the culture wars by overturning the Roe versus Wade judgement. Alt-right calls for a white ethno-state find an analogue in political attacks on asylum seekers, the reinforcement of racialised differential citizenship regimes around the globe, the building of walls to keep out criminalised Others, and anti-Islamic immigration measures. The mainstreaming of hate can be seen in the willingness of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate and as president to retweet the white supremacist tweets of @WhiteGenocideTM, his hesitation to repudiate a campaign endorsement by Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, his retweeting of bogus black crime statistics, his accusations that illegal Mexican immigrants are criminals, drug dealers and rapists, and his anti-Islamic immigration stance. It can be seen, too, in the recent electoral successes of white nationalist parties across Europe.For all their embrace of Eurocentrism and “the preservation of western culture” the alt-right revisiting of issues of race and gender in terms that seek to reinstate biological hierarchy undermines the Enlightenment ethics of equality and universalism that underpin western human rights conventions and democratic processes. The “Overton window” of acceptable public debate has moved far to the right and long taboo forms of race and gender-based hate have returned to the public agenda. Buchanan’s 1992 Republican convention speech, by contrast, for all its incendiary rhetoric, toxic homophobia, sneering anti-feminism, and coded racism, somehow manages to look like a relic from a kinder, gentler age.ReferencesAnsell, Amy Elizabeth. New Right, New Racism: Race and Reaction in the United States and Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, 1997.Bernstein, Joseph. “Here’s How Breitbart and Milo Smuggled Nazi and White Nationalist Ideas into the Mainstream.” BuzzFeed News, 10 May 2017. 4 Dec. 2018 <https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/heres-how-breitbart-and-milo-smuggled-white-nationalism>.Bokhari, Allum, and Milo Yiannopoulos. “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right.” Breitbart, 29 Mar. 2016. 4 Dec. 2018 <http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-conservatives-guide-to-the-alt-right/>.Buchanan, Pat. “1992 Republican National Convention Speech.” Patrick J. Buchanan - Official Website, 17 Aug. 1992. 4 Dec. 2018 <http://buchanan.org/blog/1992-republican-national-convention-speech-148>.Daniels, Jessie. “Twitter and White Supremacy, A Love Story.” Dame Magazine, 19 Oct. 2017. 4 Dec. 2018 <https://www.damemagazine.com/2017/10/19/twitter-and-white-supremacy-love-story/>.Davis, Mark. “Neoliberalism, the Culture Wars and Public Policy.” Australian Public Policy: Progressive Ideas in the Neoliberal Ascendency. Eds. Chris Miller and Lionel Orchard. Policy Press, 2014. 27–42.Hartman, Andrew. A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars. University of Chicago Press, 2015.Hunter, James Davison. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Control the Family, Art, Education, Law, and Politics in America. Basic Books, 1991.Nagle, Angela. Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right. Zero Books, 2017.Phillips, Whitney. 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