Margaret Henderson

Anthea Taylor

Postfeminism in Context studies the representation of women in Australian popular culture over the past three decades to locate postfeminism in a specific time and place. Margaret Henderson and Anthea Taylor argue that ‘postfeminism’, as a critical term, has been too often deployed in ways that fail to account for historical and cultural specificity. This book analyses Australian popular culture – chick lit novels; ‘dramedy’ television shows; women’s magazines; YouTube beauty vlogs; self-help manuals; and newspapers – to reveal the tensions, contradictions and ambiguities that have always been constitutive of postfeminism, including in Australia. Examining how these popular forms intervene in dominant conversations about contemporary Australian femininities, Postfeminism in Context maps the ways in which various aspects of Australia’s history and national identity have shaped its postfeminism. While Henderson and Taylor identify some of the limited postfeminist tropes and patterns of representation evident in comparable locales, they also find that Australian popular culture has responded to feminism in a much more hopeful way. Adding some much-needed cultural specificity to the ongoing debate around this loaded term, Postfeminism in Context is essential reading for those interested in Australian popular culture, feminism, and the gendered politics of representation.

Women, Australian Popular Culture, and the Unsettling of Postfeminism

Postfeminism in Context

In 1954 the author, aged 18, spent a year as an “au pair” in a French chateau. From there she went to East Berlin at the height of the Cold War to work for two years as a translator. During these two years she travelled to Moscow and across Siberia and Mongolia to China. In 1958 she spent seven months in South Sudan and from there she travelled to Aswan in Upper Egypt by paddle steamer on the Nile. In Aswan she was arrested, locked up for a few days and returned to Khartoum, Sudan. In 1959 she embarked on a four year course at a Scottish University. There was further travel in East Africa in the 1960s. In later life she spent four years in Tanzania, Bulgaria and Poland. The final chapter tells us something about her childhood during World War II.

Granny's Stories

With its challenge to nearly every facet of Australian society and culture, the Australian women's movement has achieved much in a short period of time. And it has attracted controversy: fiery denunciation and equally passionate loyalty. This book explores how such a revolutionary social movement remembers its past. The women's movement has always recognised the political importance of history, narrative, and language to changing the way we think, and hence to changing the world. How then does feminism mark its own past times, and what stories does it tell of the campaigns, struggles, defeats, victories, and activists? What is remembered and what is forgotten? How do its narratives of its recent history counter those told by the mainstream culture? By reading novels, film, television, autobiographies, newspaper and magazine articles, and academic histories Marking Feminist Times traces the making of a feminist collective memory: the reasons for its emergence, the shapes taken, and the narratives that recur. And in so doing, this book reveals a feminist collective memory haunted by the early loss of an authentically revolutionary movement.

Remembering the Longest Revolution in Australia

Marking Feminist Times

Alison Bartlett

This collection of essays explores objects that changed Australian women’s lives through their association with women’s liberation, the women’s movement, and feminism since 1970. The volume combines personal narrative, historical analysis, and memoir, creating a highly readable collection and a novel way of documenting, historicising, remembering and writing the Australian women’s movement, its affects, and its material culture. The contributors include high profile women and grass roots activists, academics and writers, and everyday women living the ideas of liberation and feminism from a range of locations. They are funny and serious, raw and sophisticated, analytical and emotional. Some are factual, while others delight in gossip. Each essay hinges on a particular object that is remembered for its symbolic value and practical use as an object of liberation, ranging from overalls and Gestetners, to seasponges and kombis. The editors’ introduction canvasses the current fascination with ‘things’, ‘stuff’, ‘objects’ and other material culture that comprises and shapes our lives; with ideas around memory and emotion as increasingly important components of social histories, and about the ways in which the Australian women’s movement is remembered. Combined, this volume of essays presents a fascinating collection of objects, writing, remembrance and the affects of one of the major social movements of the twentieth century. Things that Liberate is an experiment in thinking about the ways in which social movements can be documented and studied through material culture and memory.

An Australian Feminist Wunderkammer

Things That Liberate

This project is a feminist study of the idiosyncratic oeuvre of Kathy Acker and how her unique art and politics, located at the explosive intersection of punk, postmodernism, and feminism, critiques and exemplifies late twentieth-century capitalism. There is no female or feminist writer like Kathy Acker (and probably no male either). Her body of work—nine novels, novellas, essays, reviews, poetry, and film scripts, published in a period spanning the 1970s to the mid 1990s—is the most developed body of contemporary feminist postmodernist work and of the punk aesthetic in a literary form. Some 20 years after her death, Kathy Acker: Punk Writer gives a detailed and comprehensive analysis of how Acker melds the philosophy and poetics of the European avant-garde with the vernacular and ethos of her punk subculture to voice an idiosyncratic feminist radical politics in literary form: a punk feminism. With its aesthetics of shock, transgression, parody, Debordian détournement, caricature, and montage, her oeuvre reimagines the fin-de-siècle United States as a schlock horror film for her punk girl protagonist: Acker’s cipher for herself and other rebellious and nonconformist women. This approach will allow the reader to more fully understand Acker as a writer who inhabits an explosive and creative nexus of contemporary women’s writing, punk culture, and punk feminism’s reimagining of late capitalism. This vital work will be an important text at both undergraduate and graduate levels in gender and women’s studies, postmodern studies, and twentieth-century American literature.

Margaret Henderson

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