Abstract: This paper explores feminist practice in South Korea on the basis of a case study on a feminist-run sexual assault centre (SAC). Feminism has been regarded as Western culture' in most parts of Asia. Feminists in Asian countries have been criticised in relation to the introduction of feminism into their countries and the application of 'Western thought' to their local contexts. However, some Asian countries such as Korea have developed their own feminist practice rooted in their specific sociopolitical and cultural context. Through an analysis of development of the first SAC in Korea, this paper shows how the Korean activists have operated SAC as a site of a broader feminist movement even though the idea of the SAC was introduced from Western countries. This paper concludes that feminist practices can be a dynamic process, constituted by social contexts and feminist activists in their local situation. Introduction This paper traces how sexual violence became an issue for the women's movement in the midst of the political and social transformation of Korean society from the late 1980s to the early 1990s. First, the paper investigates how approaches to the issue of sexual violence have shifted as the direction of the women's movement has been modified according to the political context. Second, significant sexual violence cases, and the role of feminist scholars and of women's studies, which contributed to the emergence of the anti-sexual violence movement, are examined. Last, this paper is also concerned with feminist practice as discursive politics. Thus, the ways in which the SAC has challenged traditional values and raised awareness of sexual violence issues among Korean women are explored. This examination is based on interviews with women's movement activists involved in the anti-sexual assault movement in Korea (June-July z998, December 1999-January 2000), along with other documents and publications. Although the vigorous activities of the Korean women's movement over the past twenty years have been regarded as exemplary in terms of women's activism in both Western and non-Western countries, (1) research on the Korean women's movement has been scarce, both nationally and internationally. This movement has evolved in relation to the political and social context in Korea, as with women's movements elsewhere. The historical context that includes the partition of the Korean peninsula after the Korean War (1950-1953), state-led rapid economic growth and industrialisation, and political insecurity has contributed to the specific nature of the women's movement in Korea, which has participated in the movement for national liberation, and the modernisation, re-unification, and democratisation of Korean society. (2) Following political turmoil from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, the women's movement experienced a dramatic change in its direction and strategy. A typical example of developments was the women's movement against sexual violence. In the 1990s, sexual assault issues appeared as a focus of public debate, and the women's movement's fight to raise awareness of these has played a vital role in bringing women's issues onto the public agenda in Korean society for the first time. Considering the seriousness of sexual assault issues in Korean women's lives, the anti-sexual violence movement in Korea has been claimed as the kernel of the women's movement. (3) This has also resulted from the emergence of the first SAC which has been credited with raising awareness of sexual assault issues, and making them more visible and public. Through media presentations and counselling services, these exploded onto Korea's socio-political scene in the early 90s. (4) In addition, women's movement organisations such as the SAC have become one of the leading social forces in Korea since the early 1990s. (5) The Socio-political Context in Korea In 1950, the Korean War broke out between domestic forces in the north and the south. …

Abstract: Now it will be a case of, is that a kilo of C-4 in your pants or are you pleased to see me?1 The debate about how Islam situates women's rights has proven to be an enduring one2 The struggle of women within Islamic societies, notably the theocratic realisations of the Taliban and the Wahhabi sect, has generated heroic representatives of feminist emancipation, notably the Revolutionary Afghani Women's Association But the debate from the other side - the discourse of Islam and gender rights within Western societies - also deserves close attention Liberal democracies are avowedly open to the expression of choice and the toleration of religious freedoms, but these notions have been

Abstract: This paper emerges from my on-going research into birth experience and lay support people in the birth room, and presents findings from two recent projects interviewing birthing women and midwives. In the contemporary health experience of individuals in developed countries, individual responsibility for health outcomes has become an increasingly prevalent aspect of public health discourse. The proliferation of information sources for health information, for example, in programmes such as Good Medicine and magazines such as Good Health, as well as via the Internet, has also led to an increasing expectation of individual serf-surveillance. In response to these trends, general understandings and definitions of health have become increasingly medicalised. I contend that the 'healthy body' has become synonymous with the 'managed body', where discourses of control drawn from biomedical certainties are emphasised and privileged. I am specifically interested in how this may impact on women's birth experiences where accurate and plentiful medical information cannot prepare women for the psychical or affective aspects of giving birth. Recent Australian research indicates that women's dissatisfaction with birth 'service delivery' is increasing. In this paper I consider what role the internalisation of medicalised frames for corporeal experience may play in this marked dissatisfaction level. I ask whether feminist theories of embodiment can be usefully used to contest prevailing models for understanding women's experiences of birth. Susan Johnson's A Better Woman published in 1999 offers a graphic account of postnatal damage and comes with an important and I think symptomatic inscription on its cover: Some of my close friends will be learning for the first time in these pages the full story of what happened to me after the birth of my sons. I did not wilfully deceive them. It was that I could hardly bear to have been such a failure at having a baby. (1) Johnson is indicating here that the medical and physiological story to be revealed between those covers is one that she has not told her friends; that they will be learning of the extent of her physical trauma for the first time in the published form. While A Better Woman does go on to detail some of those pains, and in quite graphic detail, the inscription implies that medical stories of birth, as well as cultural ones, are not easily told, and not easily heard; an argument that has also been posited by Della Pollock (2) and by Tess Cosslett. (3) In this paper, I focus on the operation of medical narratives in birth experience. In particular, I talk about how women's 'medical' knowledge might impact on their physiological experiences. This paper is a speculative one--I am conducting a study in which I interview women about what they knew and what difference they think it made to their birth experience. This paper explores the various cultural and ideological configurations that I think are at stake in the prevalence of medical definitions of birthing. It has been well established by feminist activists and scholars that such models impact on women in the delivery of services, the cascade of intervention and in their satisfaction. But I am interested in considering whether these knowledges, with their expanding reach, become part of embodied experience and thus have material physiological effects in birthing. I look at this proposition through two different, interrelated lenses; the first is the increased expectation that we perform, as good 'health consumers' which I speculate has very particular effects on how women view birth. The second is the pre-eminence of biomedical information that women use as preparation for birth in the contemporary Australian context. In this paper, I draw on two research projects I conducted with Dr Kay Souter from La Trobe University that explored birth experience; one gathered midwife accounts of birthing experience and antenatal preparation; and one gathered women's accounts of postpartum health and what information relied upon. …

Abstract: Trends are, by nature, fleeting but sometimes they reflect a more important change in the Zeitgeist. As we enter a new century, fashion and interior designers, cosmetic companies, the media and women themselves are expressing a new new interest in all things feminine. Perhaps the decade of 2000-2010 will be one where we celebrate womanhood. The signs seems to indicate that we are about to witness a paradigm shift in our collective expression and understanding about femininity.

Abstract: The term Orchestral conductor' seems to evoke images of greatness, divinity, authority, power and tyranny. In the conducting profession those who have had the power to create this role have been men and, thus, through weight of historical and societal precedence masculine leadership is largely unchallenged as the norm on the podium. Renowned for their mythical status, visual prominence, high paying rank, and commanding relationship with the orchestra, conductors have visibly embodied a gendered form of leadership. Up until recently, the only way that women have been able successfully to negotiate these powerfully gendered constructs has been by desexualising themselves and conforming to a male-oriented paradigm in their dress, gestures, behaviour, leadership styles, and familial commitments.1 In this paper I will limit the discussion to issues relating to power and leadership. Women conductors have had to mould their behaviour in ways that have often been contradictory to what society expects of them as 'normal' females. They have had to find a subtle balance between the authoritative leadership that the conducting profession demands and the more collaborative approach to leadership that they are often socialised to follow. In this paper I will use narrative descriptions to explore the tensions that a number of the world's renowned female conductors have faced in negotiating their way into this leadership position. I will also examine how feminine approaches to this role have the potential to work with the changing dynamics of orchestras today to redefine a number of the role's masculine power constructs. Fitting Into the Cult of the Male Virtuosic Conductor Over the last century and a half the orchestral profession has been witness, as never before, to the glorification of the conductor. According to Lebrecht the modern virtuosic conductor is a mythical hero, artificially created for a non-musical purpose and sustained by commercial necessity.'2 Schonberg, along with many others,3 has also described the 'super-human,' qualities of the role: Above all, he is a leader of men. His subjects look to him for guidance. he is at once a father image, the great provider, the fount of inspiration, the Teacher who knows all. To call him a great moral force might not be an overstatement. Perhaps he is half divine; certainly he works under the shadow of divinity. He has to be a strong man; and the stronger he is, the more dictatorial he is called by those he governs. he has to but stretch out his hand and he is obeyed. he tolerates no opposition. His will, his word, his very glance, are law.4 Such a statement shows how his 'divine' eminence appears to transcend human flaws and the earthly nature of the body. As his 'godly stretched out hand' lays down the 'law' his role can be viewed as the incarnation of power itself, s A womanly body on the podium obviously challenges this 'father image' and brings into question a number of issues for women in the conducting profession, in particular those relating to power and leadership. As has been shown by many feminist writers, masculine concepts of power and authority can be very intimidating for women.6 According to Sinclair, women often feel uncomfortable labelling themselves as die leader. ? This unease does not come from their lack of ability or even confidence, but rather the perception that leadership requires ambition, single-mindedness and ruthlessness.8 Cox contends that feeling and possessing power are not experiences many women share or find familiar.^ Furthermore, Cox argues that a major barrier that has typified women's experiences in leadership is that when they adopt such aspects of power and influence they can only be unfeminine.10 A number of the women conductors I interviewed recounted experiences of trying to emulate a masculine sort of leadership so that they would be taken seriously early in their careers. Kate Tamarkin, Music Director of the Monterey Symphony Orchestra, spoke of her experiences with this issue: What had been going on before was people were saying, "you really need to be more business-like, men conduct business in a business-like manner. …

Abstract: The sphere of language has become a privileged domain in which to interrogate the causes and effects of social injustice. (1) What is the right language to resist rape? Why is the language women use during rape frequently considered to be the wrong language? Such questions have a particular urgency in the context of women who have been raped by a man that they know. Why is their language the subject of particular scrutiny when they come before the law? How is it that the things these women say during rape can be used to turn violence into consensual sex? What relation between rape and language subtends the possibility of this transformation? Sharon Marcus, in the most influential reflection on the relation between rape and language, characterises feminist engagements with this question in the following manner: Whose words count in a rape trial? Whose 'no' can ever mean 'no'? How do rape trials condone men's misinterpretations of women's words? How do rape trials consolidate men's subjective accounts in objective 'norms of truth' and deprive women's subject accounts of cognitive value? Feminists have also insisted on the importance of naming rape as violence and of collectively narrating stories of rape. (2) This passage offers the central coordinates of the conventional feminist understanding of language in the context of rape. In particular, the primary coordinate here is words: words in general, which can count or not count, specific words like 'no' and category words which have the power to name. On this view, the problem with language in the context of rape is a problem of words, which are deprived of their power to designate the world according to women's experience. Australian criminologist Patricia Easteal articulates this position as she reflects on the relation between rape and language. After attending a meeting with other legal officers, she remarks that: [E]verytime ... anyone present mentioned a judge or a lawyer, the pronouns 'he' and 'him' were used. I would contend that the use of masculine language accurately reflects the reality that men continue to hold most of these positions in the criminal justice system. It goes deeper though. It mirrors the power that males have and use to maintain a stranglehold on the institutions and structures of Australian culture. And, the masculine language in turn affects or even directs how we see the rest of our reality, including sexual assault and the law. (3) In this passage the problem of language is presented through a problem with words: words as a general category and specific grammatical categories like pronouns (4) which accumulate into the broad concept of "masculine language". Here, language is understood as an aggregate of words (lexical items) which contain a self-evident signifying power. That is, words (connoting a masculine reality) emit and effect their meanings, in a manner shorn of grammar, genre or context. (5) In other words, language is presented here in a theological formation: that is, in terms of its powers of naming. One of those things that language names (from a masculine view) is sexual assault, and this act of masculine naming will have a determining effect. Strategies for contesting this effect of words are not offered here, but would presumably include the use of non-gender specific pronouns and words that would reflect realities distinct to those inscribed by male power. (6) Dale Spender offers a famous solution to this linguistic-political problem when she argues that: 'Women need a word which renames male violence and misogyny and which asserts their blameless nature, a word which places the responsibility for rape where it belongs--on the dominant group'. (7) Spender's conclusion here implies that words can function as the symbols of political arguments: in this instance, new words about rape, invented by women, could (through condensation) denote already completed argumentative positions that clearly designate responsibility for sexual violence. …

Abstract: Taslima Nasrin is arguably South Asia's most controversial writer, perhaps even more so than Salman Rushdie, to whom she has often been compared: a comparison unfair to both, for this forcible yoking together at once flattens their very different aims and achievements into Western stereotypes about Islam and South Asia and, like the colonial discourses on sati (the practice of Hindu widows burning themselves to death on their husbands' funeral pyres) that had ignored what women themselves thought, deprives Nasrin of the legitimacy to speak in her own voice. Certainly, of course, both Rushdie and Nasrin are South Asian Muslim in origin, live in the West, and have had to face death threats and Islamic fatwas. But the similarities end there. Not only did Rushdie recant, no matter how fleetingly, his apparently anti-Islamic stance, which Nasrin never did; he writes, for what Nasrin has somewhat dismissively described as 'aesthetic' reasons, from the safety nets of State protection and a self-chosen geographical and temporal distance from his attackers, while she has dared to speak out against the oppressiveness of the patriarchal system while living in that society itself, and without State or institutional sympathy. Indeed, Nasrin prefers to think of herself primarily as a social activist, not simply a writer, who has been driven out of her country because of her continuing protest against the exploitation of women in contemporary patriarchal society: her homepage on the Web quotes her as declaring: 'Come what may, I will continue my fight for equality and justice without any compromise until my death. Come what may, I will never be silenced. My pen is my weapon.' Perhaps she is the only South Asian whose strongly and unambiguously expressed views on unequal gender relationships in society have exiled her from her homeland; certainly she is the only contemporary writer anywhere in the world whose autobiography, the two-volume Amar Meyebela ('My Girlhood', with Utol Hawa, 'The Wild Wind', being the title of the second), (1) has been banned in her own country, on grounds of blasphemy and pornography. I believe that the violence of the response to Nasrin's autobiography is due not so much to its perceived attacks upon Islam but, rather, to the discomfort and the fear caused by the way she asserts her right to construct her selfhood herself, by her refusal to accept the patriarchal norms of a society unable and unwilling to accept a woman who with searing honesty exposes male exploitation and oppression in everyday familial relationships in her own life. Other Bangladeshi Muslim writers within and outside the country have also been vocal about the way religion, and Islam in particular, have been used to reinforce the power divide in society, especially in gender relationships; although their opinions have been attacked they themselves have not been subjected to the same kind of personal abuse and vilification, nor have they had to flee the land for personal safety. When her opponents (almost always men) vehemently reject her views about the way the women in Bangladesh (and in Islamic societies) are abused, instead of answering her arguments they assault her personally as 'shameless', her three failed marriages as proof of her 'unwomanliness', and her writing as market-driven soft-pornography. Nasrin herself says she is a 'fallen' woman ('nashta meye') because she is unfeminine enough to claim her rights as a human being, to reject male protection as oppressive and exploitative, and to demand social transformation: 'Unless a woman becomes 'fallen' there is no way she can liberate herself from the dutch of this society.' (2) Nasrin does not in fact blaspheme Islam, because she does not believe. Neither does she write pornography; she merely articulates what convention dictates modest women should hide. What she has done in her autobiography is to transgress the norms of expression and representation that the Bengali bhadralok tradition--that of the educated Bengali middle class with its strongly held beliefs in 'gentility' and decorum in everyday social relationships--has always upheld, by revealing what lies beneath the family values so clear to the South Asian patriarchal, patrilineal, patrilocal ethos: the subterranean and ambiguous sexual experiences and feelings, mostly violent and abusive, that permeates the apparently solid edifice of the South Asian family. …

Abstract: When initially researching this article, I intended to examine the myth of female masochism and how this is employed, problematised and reinvented in female Gothic and feminist detective fiction. But as I began the research I realised that this myth was inseparably paired with another -- the myth of male sadism; and together they form what I have termed the `heterosexuality' of masochism and sadism. My contention is that our notions of heterosexuality have a sedimented association with the binary of the beater and the beaten: traditional concepts of heterosexuality, in so far as they involve the roles of domination and submission, are dramatically re-enacted in texts which show a woman victimised at the hands of a man. This is part of a larger project that argues that feminist detective fiction and the female Gothic share a narrative structure that pursues a woman's detection of patriarchal crime.This article will not detail in detail with aspects of female Gothic fiction. Suffice to say that female Gothic employs a fantasy that could traditionally be called `masochistic', in pairing a victimised woman (the heroine) with a sadistic man (the villain). The dramatic scenario of victim/villain is repeatedly redeployed in the hundreds of texts that make up the female Gothic genre of the eighteenth century. The authors and readers of these works were typically women. Two centuries on, feminist detective fiction largely deconstructs the myth of female masochism, but continues to employ the construct of woman-as-victim, usually at the hands of a patriarchal sadist. In both genres the problem of `masochism' is arguably located at the readerly level, where the reader takes pleasure in a genre that repetitively murders or victimises women in order to both right and write their wrongs.The Beating DramaI frame my essay with a discussion of Michelle A. Masse's study of women, masochism and the Gothic.(1) Masse argues that the female Gothic can be interpreted using the psychoanalytic paradigm of the beating fantasy in which a spectator watches someone being hurt by a dominant other. This triadic drama occurs in two possible combinations. Textually, the scenario is held amongst three characters -- for example, a Gothic heroine may hold the spectator position, watching the villain subjugate, even kill another woman, until she decides to take up an active role as either as beater or beaten. Extra-textually, the reader is automatically located in the spectator position, but may vicariously assume any role in the beating scenario (usually following the protagonist). Masse defines this beating drama as a purely pathological, albeit normalised system of gendered socialisation, arguing that `we must consider "normal" feminine development as a form of culturally induced trauma (i.e. masochism) and the Gothic novel its repetition'.(2)What I intend to do in my analysis is to lever Masse's concept of the beating scenario to demonstrate the ways in which it is used as a heterosexual binary that informs notions of gender and patriarchy. I will also be arguing the inverse of this: that the key tenets of heterosexuality have become problematically linked to a sexualised binary of sadism and masochism. To do this, it is necessary to trace the ways in which the terms `sadism' and `masochism' have been deployed, pathologised and normalised from the late eighteenth century onwards.Heterosexual PathologiesTo a large extent my thinking on the terms of masochism and sadism is framed by Foucault's History of Sexuality -- Volume 1. Here Foucault argues that our modern concepts of sexuality were deployed in a discursive explosion of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (of which the texts of the female Gothic formed a significant part) and, in particular, in the discursive appearance of medicalised and pathologised sexualities. In Foucault's work, this deployment involves the invention and incorporation of a new specification or classification of individuals. …

Abstract: How does one address her - a street walker or an escort woman? Or flying prostitute as she calls herself? Whatever the name, there has been an alarming increase in their numbers in recent times. They can be seen anywhere and anytime in the metropolis.1 Most of them are not permanent dwellers of the city. Unlike brothel prostitutes they keep plying from the rural home to the urban workplace, acquiring the position of a housewife and a whore by turn. The flying woman's belongingness to this grey and blurred area shapes her being. Instead of loyally subscribing to a specified identity assigned to a prostitute or a housewife, she inhabits a volatile domain that involves quick flights from one position to another. This is what makes her woman position phenomenal and projects her as a subject of unique interest. Here we explore those dimensions of a flying woman's multiple identities that are directly in conflict and over-determine each other, thus explicating the implications of belonging to an (im)possible domain. We present a feminist analysis of class in a theoretical framework uncoupled from the gender and sexual identities of a prostitute woman. The aspects of economic exploitation and gender oppression constituting the flying woman are addressed in relation to identity, power and subjectivity. The labour process - loosened from the processes of power and gender and realigned later at the specific site of analysis - has been used as a theoretical tool to decipher the complications of the subject.2 The language of class that renders economic identity open, multiple and contingent as different from the traditional notion of class as a social group within power or property relations, has constituted the discursive space of this analysis. A gendered reading of the contested identities is then proposed to understand the unintelligibility of the flying woman. Fusion of Roles A flying woman is a housewife and a whore in one integrated self. She is a housewife who undertakes part-time prostitution under economic compulsion and is also a (sex-) worker who has a family to tend and a house to keep. She is a housewife and a breadwinner for the family; a workingwoman. A workingwoman with a difference. Her work imbibes her sexuality - selling sexual services for money. She keeps plying between the home and the street, from one woman-position to another, within the zone of social sanction and illegality. For her it is a tightrope walking along the trajectory connecting the two socially distanced sites of homemaking and sex-work. The flying prostitute performs a private act in a public place such that the public-private binary becomes redundant. In fact, binaries such as moral-immoral, pleasure-procreation, affective-licentious lose their usual connotations with respect to her. She flies at ease through the narrow alleys of rigorous domestic norms in the forbidden land of sexual pleasure with remarkable agility, ceaseless. Within domesticity the role of the housewife is constituted by child-care and housework, whereas at work she is a pleasure-giver, perfecting a job-profile that possesses the 'dangerous sexuality of the non-mother'. Yet she does not belong to the brothel. She is an independent streetwalker whose career is marked off with queuing up in the lines of the red light zone and she is no rival to the prostitute. She stands in line waiting for customers in the tropical mid-day sun when the line girls doze off after a busy night and a lousy morning. She is spotted at weird, urban arcana of the city where line girls would not prefer to visit. She operates in the in-between spaces left out by the brothel girls at a price they would hate to accept. For the flying woman, her work-shifts are closely followed by home-shifts. As a housewife, situated within the bonds of marriage and family, she performs the household chores of cleaning, cooking and looking after children. This daily running of the household is managed single-handedly, with little or no help from her spouse. …

Abstract: In keeping with the rhetoric of technology as a dehumanizing force, the participant in communication technologies has often been interpreted as passive in the information network. In this context, engagements with electronic forms of communication signal a loss of agency and the erasure of the body and identity. Through the analysis of an image from the 'Evolve to TDK' advertising campaign, this article reconsiders such understandings of the subject in the media by conceiving of the body as an interface. Figuring subjecthood in contemporary mass media as an interface serves to undermine a myth of origins predicated upon oppositional thinking, which positions subject and object, technology and nature, as irrevocably and diametrically opposed. This in turn destabilizes a fixed locus of bodily identification, and the codes surrounding just what a body might be within contemporary culture. The interface thus offers a strategy by which feminism may negotiate the question of disembodiment in electronic networks. As bodies interface with electronic media, distinctions between subject and object, spectator and scene collapse. What ensues is a transformation in how the body and the subject are constructed and understood. I ask for bodies to be revisioned as part of a circuit of communications that productively collapse a dialectical economy, so that bodily experience is not denied, but conceived of as an interface. The chubby mite in the TDK poster is depicted in a portrait pose, naked from the chest up. Wisps of baby blonde hair frame a face that radiates an ecstatic smile, stark and solitary against a white background. The viewer is left to wonder whether the baby is a boy or girl, or where the parents of this, vulnerable child might be. It is, however, apparent that the image has been digitally altered. The baby is a simulation. No child in the 'real' world could possibly be born with the square eyes and oversized ears of the TDK baby. Or could they? It appears as though defining the child's gender is of less concern than the question of whether 'it' is human at all. Post-gender and post-material, the TDK baby is emblematic of a posthuman condition that sees the breakdown between biological and information systems. (1) The ambiguous and uncertain space that the posthuman occupies challenges fundamental assumptions regarding nature and artifice, man and woman, organism and machine. As electronic networks corrupt the biological system, the TV eyes of the infant resonate with a Baudrillardian notion of the body as a non-reflecting screen in an auto-referential circuit of communication. (2) In 'The Ecstasy of Communication' Jean Baudrillard speaks of a subject in a 'universe of communication' which sees 'our own body and the whole surrounding universe become a control screen.' (3) Subjectivity in the context of electronic communications, as espoused by Baudrillard, contests a psychoanalytic subject model predicated upon the hierarchical mirror relationship between subject and object, which privileges the subject. Instead, in the flows of media and communication, Baudrillard claims that one no longer identifies or projects the self onto representations or objects. Rather: In place of the reflexive transcendence of the mirror and scene, there is a nonreflecting surface, an immanent surface where operations unfold--the smooth operational surface of communication. (4) Baudrillard's displacement of a psychoanalytic model of subject constitution proves immensely significant for forging alternative understandings of subjectivity in contemporary life. In a context where the real gives way to the hyperreal, Baudrillard seeks to put an end to dialectics, to a value system by which identity is forged through differentiation from the Other. For Baudrillard, the alienation of the subject is surpassed by the ecstasy of communication of the object. This ecstasy results from the proliferation of meaning within a context of the hyperreal that liberates meaning from its object-referent. …

Abstract: The notion of the family, like the notion of feminism is supposed to transcend geography and culture. However, each individual or cultural interpretation of the 'family' and of 'feminism' is firmly grounded in a specific geography, history and culture. My linking of family and feminism is deliberate because the disintegration of 'the family' as we know it is often attributed to the rise of feminism. The subjects of my paper - young women and men in Hong Kong and in the US - attribute their anxiety about family-life and family values to feminism. Older women, however perceive the family quite differently. The terms 'Asian values', 'American values' and 'family values' have taken on multiple meanings and have different connotations in different cultural contexts. But do they share any common features? How does the younger generation address these fears? This 'work in progress' presents three anecdotal case studies based on classroom discussions and journals in the University of Hong Kong and an English Language Class at the Women's Centre (Hong Kong), and from similar journal entries and discussions at Yale University. I am not suggesting that these are representative samples but merely that they provide interesting comparative view-points. My interactions cover a ten year span from thei99os to 2003. These specific studies reflect and hope to add to the ongoing discussions about feminisms within women's movements, women's studies centres and the popular media. The comparative framework of studying the women in the English language class at the Women's Centre, Hong Kong, undergraduate students at Hong Kong University, and Yale has allowed me a two-pronged approach to look at feminisms from a cultural and a generational perspective. The questions asked were fairly general and open-ended eliciting student views in relation to definitions of feminism, whether they self-identified as feminists, could men be feminists too, and whether feminism was relevant in their lives. The majority of the students were women although there were some men in the classes at HKU and at Yale. Most students were between the ages of 18 and 22 although there were some mature students - mainly in the HKU group. The English language class was held in a Hong Kong housing estate. It was an all women middle to low-income group where the ages ranged from 30's to about 6o's. all the names in this narrative have been changed to ensure privacy. Definitions of feminism and self-identification Neither the HKU nor Yale students had a clear idea about feminism. But both groups generally agreed that feminism at the most basic level was, as Yale student Ruby said, a theory 'that men and women should be treated equally socially, politically and economically' and to that extent, all the students - male and female, at HKU and at Yale, were willing to call themselves feminists. But both groups had problems with the label 'feminist' and were unsure about self-identifying as feminists. Their views reflect a more general malaise about the connotations evoked by the term 'feminist'. Madhu Kishwar, an Indian feminist activist, for example also feels that the term is an 'avoidable burden1.1 The African American novelist and poet, Alice Walker, refuses the term, preferring to coin the term 'womanist'.2 The fact that feminism has come to be narrowly associated with middle class, white women's struggle for gender equality has alienated many, as has the persistent bad press and stereotypes perpetuated in mainstream media and popular culture of feminists as strident, bra-burning, radical women. This attitude was exemplified by a Yale Asian American male student, who confessed: Did I believe that feminists are radicals who do not believe in the family structure and feel that gender roles are evil and any woman who accepts them is selling out? To that I would have to agree but I say this much in my defence, it was out of ignorance (isn't it always). Culture based resistance to feminisms HKU Perspective: Feminism as a western import conflicting with 'Asian Values' The taint of Westernisation has made feminism especially suspect in Asia. …

Abstract: Feminist Presses In Australia, feminist presses have been clearly distinguished from multinational publishing ventures by their publishing politics and their publishing imperative. In the 1970s and 80s, Australia's feminist presses were politically - or culturally-led rather than market-driven. Some provided the means for feminist and other left-wing publications to be produced without censorship, some sought to shape and reflect the political concerns of the Australian women's liberation movement, while others aimed to encourage women writers and present experimental and potentially transformative women's fiction to their readership. Australia's early feminist presses took the means of production into their own hands. In so doing, they challenged patriarchal domination of the publishing industry and acquired 'the freedom of the press' that 'belongs to those who control the press'.1 The political and literary contributions of their lists, though modest in number, were often cutting-edge. Their feminist practice and their radical and experimental lists yield an important portrait of the historical changes in feminist activism and discourse in the Australian Women's Liberation Movement. More than a dozen feminist presses were founded in Australia in the 1970s and 80s. In 1974, in response to concerns about sexism in children's literature, the Women's Movement Children's Literature Co-operative was established in Melbourne, later adopting the name, Sugar & Snails. Sugar & Snails was responsible for a significant and timely contribution to the emergence of non-sexist children's literature in Australia. In 1975 - International Women's Year - Hecate Press was founded in Brisbane by Carole Ferrier2 with the publication of Hecate, an interdisciplinary journal of women's liberation. Since 1979, while focussing on the publication of its journal, Hecate Press has also published and distributed occasional books. In the same year (1975), Pinchgut Press, initially founded in 1947, emerged from an extended publishing hiatus as the feminist self-publishing venture of Marjorie Pizer and Anne Spencer Parry. Pinchgut Press remains active today.3 In 1976 two feminist printeries were established: Everywoman Press in Sydney, and Sybylla Co-operative Press in Melbourne.4 Each collectively operated its own printing press. Both Sybylla and Everywoman were significant sites of resistance to the dominant hegemony in the late 1970s and provided much-needed printing services to the Women's Liberation Movement and other left-wing groups and organisations.5 In 1978 Sisters Publishing in Melbourne was founded to pursue a feminist vision of publishing women's writing, simultaneously establishing Australia's first feminist bookclub, Sisters Bookclub, which was launched the following year. Sisters Publishing was distinguished by its founders' long and sound publishing experience and its commitment to encouraging women to write. Its bookclub was instrumental in influencing the reading tastes of a generation of Australian feminists. In 1978 the Sydney Women Writers Workshop commenced, publishing its first anthology of feminist writing No Regrets in 1979; the group later adopted No Regrets as its imprint. Also, in 1979, Hecate Press published the anthology Hecate's Daughters, the first book in its list. After operating for six years as a feminist printery, Sybylla Press began to develop a small publishing program and released its first title, Frictions, in 1982. The story of Sybylla Press, Australia's longest-lived feminist press is an extraordinary one of feminist activism and transformation, and of four collectives of women over 26 years. In 1983, influenced by both Sybylla Press and Everywoman Press, Labrys Press was established as a feminist print shop in Hobart, mainly servicing the community sector. In 1983 Women's Redress Press, another feminist publishing cooperative, was established in Sydney. It acquired a membership of over 300 women from the Australiawide women's movement and investigated book packaging6 as well as publishing. …

Abstract: In her book The Gender of Modernity, Rita Feiski argues for a reassessment of the significance of women and the feminine in the history of modernity. Changes in women's lives--and feminism itself--are manifestations of modernity even though concepts of the modern have been overwhelmingly aligned with masculinity, whether in the writings of Baudelaire or the cultural analysis of industrialized nations. Twentieth century struggles for women's emancipation have moreover been interwoven with modernization in the social sphere as well as with modern aesthetic and cultural projects. But neither feminism nor modernity produce a univocal narrative, or a unified Zeitgeist, since they have been constituted through diverse, sometimes competing, representations that take place in different genres and different locations. Feminism's imbrication with modernism, as Felski points out, also aligns it formatively with other aspects of modernity, in particular colonial narratives and the formation of the nation state. Feminist texts and practices cannot therefore be assumed to equate with a single progressive politics nor a particular mode of aesthetic production. The singularity of white western feminism must now take account of postcolonial criticism and of those bodies, voices and places that have been excluded from modernity. As Felski writes: 'A text which may appear subversive and destabilizing from one political perspective becomes a bearer of dominant ideologies when read in the context of another.' (1) Any specific woman's text (or its representation of the feminine) is not purely descriptive or normative of ideologies, beliefs and fantasies about gender or race in actual social conditions; rather, feminist criticism must become attuned to how women's texts interact with other cultural discourses, images and representations and specific social formations, including those of gender, race, ethnicity and nation. Analysis helps us to understand the ways in which all aesthetic texts through their construction and reception inco rporate the embedded values of particular social formations. In Australian theatrical history, the contribution of women playwrights to modern interpretations of female lives or feminist perspectives on modern society has been relatively limited. Notwithstanding the important feminist work recuperating earlier generations of women writers, it has been only within the last decade that women have entered the theatrical mainstream with more female playwrights presented, more complex female characters and a greater diversity of roles for female actors. (2) This relative success of feminism, particularly for liberal feminist works has, however, been somewhat disengaged from postmodern critiques of representation, such as those of intertextuality or the death of the author, and resistant to the social changes arising from postmodernism, such as the time-space compression of information and capital flows. Indeed, concepts of the modern, particularly the notion of a benevolent progressive culture, still shape feminist theatre practices and most women's involvement in Australia n theatre. Perhaps one of the most striking continuities from earlier notions of modernity is the investment in realist drama as a means of representing or, indeed, describing social life. It is almost as if the intellectual and creative ferment of the early twentieth century modern era in Europe and America passed Australian theatre by until the most recent generation of female playwrights. One of the few established figures in contemporary Australian theatre to have self-consciously experimented with the possibilities that European modernism offers to the female subject is writer-director Jenny Kemp. (3) Her collection of works from 1989 to the present is both modern and feminist in a double sense. First, her plays begin and end in the domestic reality of bourgeois femininity, since they acknowledge the various identities that modern women have as mothers, lovers, housewives and workers, and in this sense they enact themes and perspectives on the social determinants of gender. …

Abstract: Discusses the meaning of the term feminism through the twentieth century. Background on the book "Three Guineas," by Virginia Woolf, which dismissed feminism; Role of the Second Wave feminism in education; Problems posed in writing the history of feminism.

Abstract: One has the imagination of one's century, one's culture, one's generation, one's particular social class, one's decade, and the imagination of what one reads, but above all one has the imagination of one's body and of the sex who inhabits it. (1) Introduction I began to think reflectively about the issue of lesbian culture some years ago when I was writing a series of hypertext poems, 'Unstopped Mouths', (2) about lesbian culture. In the last year or so I have had women ask whether lesbian culture exists. It has made me wonder, why was it that lesbian culture was so hard to see, and why did some people think it did not even exist? The second event was the recent death of Monique Wittig who died in the first week of 2003. I found out through friends on email lists, and there were some obituaries in the US, where she lived, and one in Le Monde, Paris where she had grown up and had won major literary prizes. I was distraught by the news and sent it on to friends all around the world. A day later Morris Gibb died and Australian television reported his death for several days. I have not yet heard a whisper in the Australian media about Wittig. For me and many other feminists and lesbians Monique Wittig changed the way we saw the world. The first novel of hers that I read was The Guerilleres (1969, 1971 in English), a profound meditation on women, war, lesbian culture and a different way of seeing history and imagining the future. Her second with the then controversial title of The Lesbian Body (1973, 1975 in English) once again challenged me as a reader. It was published years before anyone thought of writing about the body as a feminist or cultural studies issue. She also co-wrote Lesbian Peoples: Materials for a Dictionary with her partner Sande Zeig (1975, 1979 in English), a send-up of the dictionary which takes lesbian culture as its centre. And finally there is her novel, Across the Acheron (1985, in English 1987) a rewriting of Dante's Inferno set near San Francisco. In 1964 she won the prestigious Prix Medici with her first novel The Opopanax. In addition to her groundbreaking fiction she was a major contributor to Questions feministes and her essays written between 1976 and 1990 were subsequently collected in a volume entitled The Straight Mind and Other Essays (1992). Those essays challenged just about every assumption contained in heterosexual discourse. Her work is as revolutionary as that of any other iconoclast--think of Martin Luther King, Franz Fanon--take several more steps and you will find Monique Wittig. Although it's not unusual for a farsighted thinker not to be acknowledged in her lifetime, for a writer who has consistently challenged the mainstream for more than thirty years, it is unusual for her not to be recognised by the mainstream yet. I have to ask whether it is because she is a lesbian, and her work therefore is considered to have no cultural significance. For me and for thousands of others around the world, Monique Wittig remains a source of inspiration and an extraordinary contributor to lesbian culture. The Politics of Culture When colonisers conquer a land, their first reports back to the empire usually contain something along the lines of 'the natives possess no culture'. This is a very fine way of excusing themselves for conquering and dispossessing other peoples. It also excuses their future actions of imposing their own culture and their own values on the colonised peoples for their own good. Eventually the colonised begin to believe the lies they are told by the colonisers and take up the imperial culture at which they have to excel in order to get along in the world. Lesbians, in this so-called post-colonial world, remain dispossessed of culture. Many still believe that lesbians have no culture. The dominant heterosexual discourse perpetuates the myth that there is no such thing as lesbian culture. And the mainstream media does not recognise the work of lesbians until they are well and truly entombed and any relatives scared of the repercussions have also died. …

Abstract: Some months ago I gave a paper on a postmodern work by a female author and, during the subsequent discussion, several people took issue with the ways in which the author portrayed female characters Their implication was that these portraits of characters and their narrative destinies were in themselves sufficient to dismiss the author as conservative and anti-feminist (I apologise to the participants for oversimplifying these comments) The discussion made me question how we locate feminism -- and anti-feminism -- in fictional texts, especially texts by womenIn 1929 Virginia Woolf noted the importance of breaking the expected sequence of events in a text; she saw conventional narrative expectations as shaped by the patriarchal order(1) In the late twentieth century, feminist theorists such as Lute Irigaray and Helene Cixous speculated on ways in which particular formal strategies can represent phallogocentricity or enact an ecriture feminine;(2) in this period a number of scholarly articles were themselves written in forms intended to represent the feminine(3) But even in the blossoming feminist studies of Woolf's own writing, for example, the post-1970s assessment of her political agenda has been accompanied by diminishing attention to the forms of her fictions, although both are acknowledged to be radical(4) Novelist AS Byatt has said that we think in narratives, not -- or not only -- in the `moments' described by Modernists(5) Her claim resonates with contemporary developments in psychology and sociology; narrative itself is thus identified as a particularly important object of study In this article I consider how formal narrative elements can shape not only the content of fictional works, as they inevitably do, but the polities of the text as a wholeIn many postmodern texts, patterns of allusions act as genre encodings: they invite us to look for, and more especially at, the structure belonging to the work, or works, to which they allude Recognizing its play with that structure is crucial to an understanding of the postmodern text and its meaning Feminist values are encoded in different ways at these structural levels of postmodern fictional texts I examine here two works -- Janette Turner Hospital's novel Charades (1988) and AS Byatt's novella `The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye' (1994) -- that allude, among other works, to The Thousand and One Nights Both works generate structures derived in part from their source-text that provide, I would argue, a shared message about features of female lives and storytelling that goes beyond messages derivable directly from their very different plotsTo begin with the content of Charades Its opening chapter provides us with a vision of the woman as Other, when a strange girl appears late at night in a Nobel-winning physicist's office at MIT in Boston The perspective of this opening, as of much pre-postmodern fiction, is a masculine one: although both figures are described in the third person, the `girl' (as she is called here) is seen from the outside -- `"And the connecting link is Katherine Sussex," she says, quite cool and businesslike' -- while the man's perceptions and internal responses are provided to the reader, `He has a sense of her jotting down data in a logbook somewhere' (p7)(6) Moreover, her sudden appearance and disappearance are presented almost supernaturally, preparing the man, and the reader, to see her stereotypically, as a male construction: `When he shakes himself clear of shock and looks again, the girl has vanished Of course he is certain he has invented her Or that he has fallen asleep at the desk and Rachel, his ex-wife, has spooked another dream' (p 7)Although the reference to the girl's mental `logbook' may make her seem an unusually rational image of the female, the conjunction with her vanishing may make her seem a version of the recording angel, `spooking' the physicist Koenig's guilt This beginning, then, sets us up for a conventionally male-focused narrative …

Abstract: Christina Stead's fifteen major works of fiction show a genius for recreating the times and the places in which she lived - especially in Sydney, London, Paris and New York Her multi-charactered novels give us a panoply of men and women interacting in their societies Her voluminous personal writings - letters, notes, drafts - sometimes reveal Stead's observations and ideas of female/male relationships even more pointedly and connectedly1 In 1982 I met Christina Stead at a ceremony I helped to organise when she was awarded Honorary Membership of the American Academy of Arts and Letters - a very rare honour for non-American writers From the friendship that developed, she came to live with me in the New Year of 1983 for a few months before her death at Easter, aged eighty Knowing Christina Stead has meant that whenever I read any of her writings I can't help imbuing the words with her own voice and tone and the personal certitude with which she expressed her ideas I am left with a strong memory of her pain when talking about her formative years with her family This surfaces again and again in her writing And I always found her wisely understanding of women when talking about herself, myself, her friends or female family members Christina Stead was a feminist, but she disliked being called one, disliked labels of any kind Throughout her life, however, she observed the varying roles of women in society and wrote this into her books in acerbic prose showing the female characters' and their struggles for autonomy She lived the life of a feminist in a time when this was extremely difficult to do, setting out on her own from Sydney to Europe, penniless, at the age of twenty-five to see the world, to assert her independence and realise her destiny Her novels intersect with Marxist and feminist perceptions that recognise the oppression of women by men possessing wealth and class power, and the patriarchal family The strength of her belief in herself somehow managed to survive the excoriating life she lived in her childhood - painfully detailed in her masterpiece, The Man Who Loved Children - and even more tellingly, as a young woman in the early chapters of For Love Alone Here we see an entire household, especially the girls, dominated by the father who, no matter how misguidedly well-meaning he may have been, relentlessly crushed and mocked his children The seven Stead children rebelled against their father in their young adulthood, each in their own way leaving home as soon as they could Gilbert, the youngest, ran away to sea at the age of fourteen and was missing for a year Many of these episodes are written into her fiction Stead is undeniably an autobiographical writer When I asked her one day if she ever thought of writing her autobiography, she replied that she already had - it was all there, in her books She said this many times, to many people Escaping from her father's egomania, Christina said she never wanted to see him again She never did Having left the family home for good in 1928, she vowed never to go home again Even though she was in Sydney for a short time in 1969, and returned for good in 1974, she did not go back despite being invited to by the members of her family still living at 'Boongarre' When a photographer for the New York Times coaxed her to pose on the jetty in front of the Watsons Bay house with its magnificent views of Sydney Harbour, she walked right past her former family home through the garden to reach the waterfront She told me that if she had gone inside that house again she would have felt as though she had never left it, negating everything that had followed The bogey of her long-dead father had not faded In her late seventies, Stead wrote to her long-time friend, the American poet, critic and publisher Stanley Burnshaw She recalls a sickening scene in The Man Who Loved Children Here the father - a naturalist, as was David Stead - tells his young children how birds feed their young …

Abstract: Jordan discusses editor Nettie Palmer's contribution to the Centenary Gift Book, noting that much of Palmer's writing sought to bring about a wider recognition of Australia's colonial status, of the effects of British cultural imperialism, and the need to find ways to move beyond it. She points out that Palmer's Centenary Gift Book is an important contribution in refuting the equation of motherhood with citizenship, and a real achievement in the process of laying out and breaking up the changing outlines of the colonizing and colonized discursive being.

Abstract: During the winter and spring of 2002 I taught at Grand Valley State University in West Michigan It was a strange period for me for a number of reasons I had just returned from the University of Pretoria and couldn't get free of the South African spell there; owing to American politics in the Middle East and the monolithic white, Christian, under-educated and over-religious student body, I was seen in the classroom as a 'Muslim outsider' Moreover, the war in the West Bank awoke in me still fresh wounds and memories of the Bosnian war and the first cases of the Palestinian girls suicide-bombers paralysed me with pain Teaching, among other courses, World Mythologies, I devoted considerable time to the play and character of Antigone The usual demarcation of her, as a bride of death, was too close to my years of writing about raped Bosnian girls who later committed suicide, usually hanging themselves; and the 'return of the repressed,' the other name for symptom in modern psychoanalysis, turns the border between law and terror into a fragile sign that resists interpretation In the midst of my thinking about the topic, I received an email message from an unknown person, a writer, who had read one of my older texts in a Finnish journal of theory and criticism As the subject of her message, she wrote the words: 'Thank you for your article,' in the content she talked about the pain caused her by the sights of destroyed Jenin and her inability as a writer to act, and ended her message with the words: 'I am happy that you exist' I still don't know to what extent her letter helped me, but her words moved me; I forwarded to her some pamphlets about Palestine that I had received from some Universities in New York and South Africa and we have remained in touch I was thinking at the same time about Murray Krieger, one of the most decent intellectuals I have met, Jewish, who told me upon my coming to America that although he had lectured many times in Israel, he 'never accepted an offer to live and teach there'--finding it 'impossible to work in a country that is grounded in one nation', even his own, 'and that builds itself in such a fashion' These words well echoed in me my own inability to live, and to teach about the Bosnian Holocaust, within the borders of Bosnia involved in painful attempts at its own rebuilding Later, while working with the Palestinian Edward Said, I learned that it was Murray Krieger who contributed to the promotion of Said's enormous scholarly and teaching talent That is, I thought, what physical distancing from a conflict makes possible It saves our capacities to rationalize and sets the distinction between an intellectual and a soldier Yet what happens when the border is blurred or destroyed, when compassion becomes transgression, when there is no ground for grace, only for murder, when a girl chooses death rather than life and her fiance (like Antigone, the Palestinian girl I will be talking about was engaged)--when all symbolic protection from the traumatic Real is destroyed? That is the point that must be addressed--the loss of the symbolic protection, the hazardous abyss of sinking into nothingness with no prospect of getting out Yet what has the symbolic protection consisted of when it so easily gets dissolved? Neither nor Talking about Antigone, one might first connect her to a culture of opposition, see in her 'a figure of defiance that legalizes suspended subjects', in the words of Judith Butler, 'an alternate legality that haunts the conscious public sphere as its scandalous future' (1) From a contemporary Western perspective we cannot neglect the human rights discourse and the issues of conflicting rights at its heart, neither we can ignore the revival of tragedy and 'Gods' in our times Political philosophy (here I have in mind Benhabib and Kymlicka) that determines culture as 'an arena of intense political controversy, and as constituted through contested practices' (2) can reframe the classic psychoanaytic insistence on Antigona's incestuous blockage as well as Zizek's insistence on her monstrous totalitarianism …

Abstract: Introduction Lesbians and gay male communities' relationship with the New Zealand Census sounds a somewhat dry topic, but I had a lot of fun writing this paper. Looking at the ways in which the statistical bureaucrats have phrased questions about 'marital status' and relationships between members of families and households over time says much about social change, including our increased acceptance - at least if we live in tidy couples in the same dwelling. Lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender/intersex/takatapui/fa'afine/queer/homosexual/heterosexual/all of the above? The New Zealand Census does not (yet, anyway) have to face the issue of how to phrase questions about sexual Orientation' or 'identity' or 'behaviour'. So far, no such question is asked, although the Managing Editor of Express (an Auckland fortnightly paper) Victor van Wettering, and others, were campaigning when I began writing this article to change things for 2006. But in 1996 and 2001 the only people in our communities to be counted in the Census of Population and Dwellings1 were those who decided to indicate that they were a 'same-sex' couple living together. How did they do this? Question 19 in (2001), asked us all to list 'all the people who live in the same household as you' (question 16 in 1996 was similar), and included the option 'my partner or de facto, boyfriend or girlfriend'. Nothing there to indicate clearly whether or not this is meant to be inclusive of those of us living with partners, although the wording seems more so than earlier versions such as 'my de facto spouse'. But the help note to question 19 asks: 'My partner is the same sex as me - should I mark 'partner'?' and answers: Yes, If you live with a partner as a gay or lesbian couple, mark 'my partner or de facto, boyfriend or girlfriend'. So those couples living together and accepting the wording lesbian or gay know what they're meant to do - if they read the help notes, which I suspect few do. But some would no doubt want to identify as couples to reflect reality, and perhaps for emotional and/or political reasons. Of course in the question itself, being part of a 'same-sex couple' does not show up, but the mysterious coding processes of Statistics New Zealand (SNZ) will see it emerge. This occurs because first, question 2 asks us to say (unequivocally!) whether each of us is male or female and, second, the person who fills in the dwelling form has the responsibility of listing the others in the dwelling who are filling in individual forms. Further, that person must state how each other person is related to them, this time with the option 'my wife/husband/partner/de facto'. Still attending? Putting all that together can yield two men or two women ticking that they are partners. What does SNZ do if one of them ticks partner and the other flatmate has not been revealed! 'Same sex couple' is the term which SNZ uses, often in tables giving comparisons of characteristics of same sex and opposite sex couples. Sometimes there is also a breakdown into female couples and male couples - in this paper I will use the terms lesbian and gay couples. However, how people think of themselves when ticking the box to show they live with a partner and it emerges from the other questions that that partner is the same sex, is unknowable and doubtless highly variable in a postmodern world of fluid, changing identities - and the other groups mentioned early in this paper disappear without trace. So what matters about all this? Quite a lot, in my view. This paper will examine three aspects of our engagement or otherwise with the New Zealand Census. First, it will look at the arguments over whether we should be involved with the Census and whether we should demand visibility. second, it will look at the changing social construction of relationships within households as evidenced by SNZ through their collection of statistics between 1971 and 2001. Finally, some statistics on same gender/same household partnerships will be presented and discussed for the last two Census years, 1996 being the first one for which they were released. …

Abstract: In a social culture that institutionally endorses Breast is Best policy, and yet commonly refers to the nation’s breastfeeding support agency as the nipple nazis or breastfeeding police, breastfeeding ‘culture’ is at best ambivalent in contemporary Australia. There have been numerous studies on what influences women’s choice to breastfeed or not, but most of them see breastfeeding as a personal choice and a personal practice which has varying levels of success or failure. Failure to breastfeed (through choice or practice) is interpreted as a personal failing of the mother. But neither choice nor practice is a simple concept, being contingent on at least our education, suburbs, peers, race, corporeality and personal histories. In this article, I follow through some of the consequences of breastfeeding as ‘choice’ and then propose some discursive options which might shift the direction of advocacy rhetoric.