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This paper considers the location of Masculinity Studies within the Gender/Sexuality field. Such a location offers possibilities and problems for theorising and coalition, as well as for policy and curriculum development. Importantly, the three major subfields of Gender/Sexuality—Feminist, Sexuality and Masculinity Studies—are not simply commensurable bits that fit together neatly like pieces of a jigsaw. This paper concentrates upon potentially dissonant theoretical directions between the subfields with the aim of clarifying the issues at stake. The implications of this dissonance are of particular significance for the present positioning and future directions of Masculinity Studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Laws and regulatory guidelines dealing with assisted reproductive technology in Australia and elsewhere typically operate on the principle that the physical and psychological well-being of the person who might be created using the technology must be an active consideration. An ethical/legal problem arises when future persons are protected at the expense of existing persons. This occurs when women, who create and gestate these future persons, are socially, legally and medically positioned as transgenerational vectors of harm, and are subject to pressure to act for the benefit of people who do not yet and may never come to exist. This paper explores the way women are understood, in science and law, as subject to situational and environmental harms as well as constituting a (prenatal) environment for the perpetuation of those harms. Finally, recognising that harm is itself actively gendered, this paper also explores how gendered assumptions are smuggled into legal explanations of disease and its causes and how this might impact regulatory responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interviews Moira Gates about feminism twenty years since the publication of "A Critique of the Sex/Gender Distinction." The interview details Gates's original intention for publishing the paper, her criticism of the distinction between sex and gender, and the development of views on sex and gender.

Over the past decade, a dominant figure in Australian sociocultural constructions has been that of ‘the bogan’, which, although capricious, has typically been deployed as a negative descriptor of the white working-class poor. In this paper, we examine media representations of this ubiquitous figure from 2009 to 2012 through a gender lens. In the texts, ‘the bogan’ is implicitly and explicitly rendered masculine, with the feminised archetype, the ‘female bogan’ (or ‘boganette’) as supplement or ‘other’. Drawing on feminist cultural theory of class, we examine depictions of the female bogan that invoke her identity-as-mother as a source of scorn while affording considerable attention that disparages her embodied self. Following this, we explore how the chosen media texts position the bogan and the female bogan in relation to feminism and the sexualisation of culture. Collectively, these texts demonstrate both shifts and continuities in what are powerfully fused gender and class discourses of the female working class. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Australia's prosperity in the twentieth century relied on economic growth to lift incomes, and a tax and welfare state to share the wealth. Australians became rich, and social expenditures equalised wealth and income. This success also relied fundamentally on a gender-unequal care economy, primarily focused on care of children by women. Wage growth accrued to men, while women bore the economic cost of care. Since the 1960s, prosperity led to increased longevity and a population boom. Fertility gradually declined as women pursued education and work during second wave feminism, yet gender inequality in income and wealth persists. Today, in Australia's long-lived and ageing population, economic growth has slowed, wages have stagnated and wealth inequality has increased. As demographic and economic conditions become increasingly unlike the conditions of the mid-twentieth century, tensions in the gendered distribution of wealth and care have come to the fore. This article explores Australia's gendered wealth inequality and considers what should be done to re-orient policies to ensure a gender-equal and sustainable sharing of the wealth in future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although wealth concentration and large fortunes have attracted increased scholarly attention in recent decades, this work has been largely gender-blind. This study examines changes in the gender composition of global billionaires over the last 14 years (Forbes world's billionaires list, 2010 – 2023) and asks how male and female billionaires differ in their likelihood to perpetuate their billionaire status. Between 2010 and 2023, we find a modest increase in the percentage share of female billionaires, from 9.0 to 12.8 percent. While the share of female self-made billionaires more than doubled, the share of female billionaire heirs increased only by 43 percent during the observed period, highlighting the importance to differentiate between the source of billionaires' wealth when studying gender differences. To examine differences in the long-term perpetuation of billionaire fortunes by gender and source of wealth of billionaires, we apply survival analyses. We find that men stay on the Forbes list significantly longer than women. Overall, this study contributes to the literature on gender wealth inequalities by showing how billionaires' wealth is structured by gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of this special issue on Wealth, Australian Feminist Studies Co-Editor Lisa Adkins met with Céline Bessière and Sibylle Gollac to discuss their book, The Gender of Capital: How Families Perpetuate Wealth Inequality (2023). Published by Harvard University Press and translated by Juliette Rogers, The Gender of Capital was first published in French as Le Genre du Capital: Comment la Famille Reproduit les Inégalités (2020, La Découverte). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia is unique among Western nations in that it does not have a national bill of rights; in lieu, rights protections have proceeded in a piecemeal fashion, with some jurisdictions developing their own systems for rights protection. These systems involve parliaments 'scrutinising' proposed new laws for their compatibility with rights. These processes are sometimes theorised as constitutive, capable of bringing various material-discursive effects into being. For instance, whilst problems such as family and sexualised violence are said to pre-exist legislative and policy practices designed to combat them, alternative approaches can draw our attention to the way these phenomena are made in and through such processes themselves. Drawing on work from Moya Lloyd ("(Women's) Human Rights: Paradoxes and Possibilities." Review of International Studies 33 (1): 91–103) and Karen Zivi (Zivi, K. 2019. "Human Dignity and Human Rights: Lessons from the Fight for Marriage Equality in the United State"s." In Critical Perspectives on Human Rights, edited by B. Schippers, 103–119. London: Rowman and Littlefield International, Zivi, K. 2012. Making Rights Claims: A Practice of Democratic Citizenship. Oxford: Oxford University Press.) on human rights as constituting norms, rules, conventions, and worlds, Law's (Law, J. 2011. "Collateral Realities." In The Politics of Knowledge, edited by F. Rubio, and P. Baert, 156–178. London: Routledge) work on collateral realities, and interviews (N = 30) conducted with key stakeholders involved in Australian rights scrutiny processes, we explore how articulations about human rights might shape connections between alcohol, other drugs, gender and social problems. Using a case-based approach, we focus on three accounts that generate relations between alcohol, drugs, gender, and bodies, and consider the possible implications for affected populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the complex emotional geography of contemporary domestic spaces and invisible forms of care during periods of working and caring from home (WCFH) during the COVID-19 pandemic. During the pandemic lockdowns and restrictions carers and creatives were disproportionally impacted. In June 2020 we developed an open call for creative responses under the title of 'Work, Care and Creativity Study (WCCS): value and visibility'. Our study sought to explore the lived experiences of creatives working at a university who were also carers WCFH and to capture the complexity of care responsibilities, their affects and effects on wellbeing, mental health and career disruptions. Through cultural probes our study sought to render visible some of the overlooked emotions, perceptions and practices that were emerging for carers during the pandemic. We were interested in how playful approaches to cultural probes could invite creative workers and carers to 'map' the materialities of the home as a way of expressing the relational, emotional, and material entanglements of WCFH. Our research illustrates the value of creative prompt techniques for articulating the constant (re)negotiation of the relational intensities and compressions of work, care and creativity at a time of COVID-19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the significance of language in both the perpetration of gender violence and in interventions to address its impacts. The author uses maternal alienation as an example. The author explains that maternal alienation is when a mother is alienated from their children in a context of violence against them. The author addresses the ways in which familial dynamics between men and women, fathers and mothers, are employed to increase the power of abusive perpetrators within families. The article also discusses similar alienating strategies found in domestic violence and child sexual abuse cases.

Kathleen M Cumiskey's feminist research on gender, mobile media, safety, vulnerability and grief has spanned across the previous two decades. This interview focuses on three of Cumiskey's key texts, and suggests how gendered practices of safety, security and intimacy have changed since the introduction of smartphones. It addresses contemporary changes in mobile and social media practices, and how these influence socio-political smartphone uses. Cumiskey discusses the implications of women's smartphone practices for generating feelings safety and security in public space; how smartphones can both enhance and limit the ways women participate in public space; and how smartphones engender particular expressions of vulnerability, especially in the context of grief and loss. The interview concludes with a discussion of the subversive potential of mobile media and smartphone communications in opening up transformative modes of engaging with others and the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the ceramic artwork produced in the 1940s and 1950s by Viola Edith Downing, also known as Brownie Downing. I focus specifically on representations of Australian Aboriginal children, and also consider how Native American and Native Hawaiian children are portrayed on ceramic plates. These plates were purchased for display in the home often as tourist souvenirs that marked the holiday experience. I argue that representations of Indigenous children function discursively within a gendered white colonising possessive aesthetic whereby childhood innocence and happiness operate to erase colonisation and indigenous sovereignties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this short response to Kate Eichhorn's article, 'Girls in the Public Sphere: Dissent, Consent, and Media Making', I extend her analysis by offering three points of provocation which challenge the idea of the digital sphere as a public sphere. As Eichhorn points out, the digital sphere offers more access and visibility to girls, so that this contemporary version of the public is not characterised by an absence of girls—even if this participation is mined for data for corporations. This is a crucial point, but even within that framework, specific girls continue to be excluded. This is an important difference—between absence and exclusion—that is worth parsing out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The issue of ‘alcohol-fuelled violence’ has been the subject of intense policy debate in Australia. While this debate is warranted, its contours and content have been informed and shaped by a surprisingly narrow range of research resources. Narrow research engagements of this kind warrant scrutiny because they can exclude from consideration crucial issues. In this article we identify one such issue, that of gender. Following a review of the Australian literature on gender, alcohol and violence, our analysis explores four case studies drawn from the Australian research corpus, focusing on large quantitative studies as these tend to receive most attention and citation in policy debate. Such studies consistently erase the contribution of key gender dynamics, namely enactments of particular (often youthful) masculinities, to violence involving alcohol, even where they simultaneously provide strong support in their data for such a conclusion. We show how this research is mobilised specifically in support of claims about the causal role of alcohol in violence and of blanket population-level responses to the problem. There is an urgent need to map the character and scope of the tendency to erase certain gender issues in research on alcohol and violence in order to better inform policy responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is concerned with questions of sexism and misogyny in the context of post-feminism. it examines the particular case of former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard's 'misogyny speech', a rare instance of a woman in high political office directly accusing her opponent of sexism. Through a critical discourse analysis of the coverage of that speech in the Australian print media, the article explores the radical disjuncture between how the speech resonated with women, both in Australia and internationally, and its construction in the print media as an illegitimate and ill-conceived 'playing of the gender card'. In forwarding this analysis, the article highlights how, in a post-feminist media environment, the possibilities for women of naming experiences of sexism are being closed down not least because such naming is positioned as a strategic choice on the part of women deployed only to gain advantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminist scholarship has been central to the success and prominence of the Australian social sciences. The impact and significance of the work of sociologists such as Raewyn Connell and Rosemary Pringle, historians Barbara Caine and Marilyn Lake, philosophers Genevieve Lloyd and Moira Gatens and political scientists Carol Bacchi and Louise Chappell are recognised internationally. But how effective has feminist critique been in reshaping what counts as authoritative knowledge and research excellence in the disciplines? And what is the relationship between the disciplines' varying incorporation of feminist perspectives and their progress towards organisational gender equity goals? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article focuses on recent reconfigurations of the home as a space of financial calculation and speculation that requires new kinds of domestic labour. It considers the 2008 financial crisis, but redirects the analysis towards the ordinary and normalised presence of financial capitalism at the level of domesticity, home-life and the everyday ‘calculative agencies’ which households are now regularly called on to perform. It also examines the constitution of ‘women’ as a target group for personal financial products and services, and addresses the various strategies that promote financial inclusion as a means to secure individual responsibility, autonomy and entrepreneurial consumer participation in a financialised ownership society. The article argues that this feminisation of finance suggests a considerable challenge to received understandings of the relationships between gender and economy, production and reproduction, and life and labour. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The rhetoric of the ‘best interests of the child’ frequently emerges in public and political debates concerning the changing nature of family and society. This article explores how the rhetoric was invoked in recent same-sex marriage debates in Australia. We analyse the public submissions to the 2009 Australian government inquiry into same-sex marriage to reveal the ways in which the abstract figure of ‘the child’ was deployed. It became evident that heteronormativity was privileged and upheld primarily through the discourse of children's best interests. Concern about the well-being of children raised by lesbian and gay parents was the pivotal argument by those who opposed same-sex marriage. Heteronormativity was reproduced through the claim that same-sex parenting is harmful to children and thus heterosexuality was positioned as the only ‘safe’ place for parenting. A small number of the submissions in support of same-sex marriage also based their arguments on the best interests of the child. Typically, these submissions positioned lesbian and gay parents as ‘just like’ heterosexual parents and in doing so they produced an idealised homonormative couple. This unwittingly reinforces heterosexuality through the construction of an ‘acceptable’ domesticated homosexuality, based on adherence to heteronormativity, which effectively marginalises other family forms and sexual behaviours. We argue that the rhetorical power of the ‘best interests’ argument relies on the absence of the voices of actual children raised by lesbian and gay parents and that this silencing has harmful consequences for these children. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article review the article "Gatherers and Grannies: Further Thoughts on the Origins of Gender" by Sandra Bowdler and Jane Balme which is in this issue.

The article focuses on lesbian identity, lesbian migration in the context of sexuality and transnational networks, and lesbians' travel experiences between 1935 and 1975. The discussion is based on personal narratives from the British Hall Carpenter Archive, the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives, and the author's interviews with lesbians living in New South Wales. The experiences of British lesbian Barbara Bell and Australian lesbian Margaret Jones are examined from the perspective that experiences are shaped by a merger of gender, historical location, and sexuality.

This article discusses gender as it relates to the social capital debate. Theoretical literature determines social capital to be a concept which promotes well-being but there is an absence in the social capital debate on the role of gender. Women, as natural carers, are often overlooked in terms of their contributions to social capital and do not have adequate access to networks which provide economic advantage. When stocks of social capital are high there are usually happier and healthier individuals with a low level of social problems like child abuse.

This article discusses the emergence of Australian corporeal feminism as hybrid feminism. It mentions several Australian feminists who experienced the changes from structuralism to post-structuralism, gender to sexuality, and performativity to corporeality. It relates that educational experience of these feminist which developed their capacity to cross knowledge and genealogies. It discusses the association of Australian corporeal feminists to philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. It also explores the concept of feminism being a philosophy without organs and the becoming-woman of Deleuze and Guattari. It also relates that feminism has not surpassed the issues of gender and resolves that hybrid feminism takes beyond familial frameworks of desire.

This article presents an analysis and interpretation of the motion picture "The Piano." The film features American actors and actress including Holly Hunter, Sam Neill, and Harvey Keitel along with Australian actors Tungia Baker and Anna Paquin. The story revolves on the life of Ada McGrath, played by Hunter. Ada is a lonely woman who chose to be mute after the death of her daughter's father and have her daughter and her piano speaks for her emotion. The film portrays Ada as an unwed mother, a woman committed in an arranged marriage and a woman who suffers from male dominance. It also explores the issues such as gender, sexuality, and race, which are implicated in the motion picture and reviews cultural and feminist studies that reviewed the film

This article presents a discussion of childhood innocence and the way that it is conceptualised and represented within the media texts "Painted Babies" and "Little Miss Sunshine." It examines the relations of gender, sexuality, power, and agency in the children's lives. The relationship of the worlds between children and adults, the recognition of childhood as a discursive and material socio-cultural construction, and the understanding of childhood innocence as a part of developmental psychology are also addressed in the article.

The author reflects on thesis writing as a feminist project and the relationship between the supervisor and the thesis writer. It is argued that the supervisory role is particularly important in working with higher degree students who are involved in producing a well-developed theoretical position. The authors investigated and commented on the connection of schools in the gendering of young people. They also gave examples of written feminist narratives and accounts on their rationalizations.

This article reflects on sexuality, race and women doing men's work. The atuhor comments on the representation of women found dressed in male working attire from 1890s to around 1920 and focuses on the collection of stories that indicate broader cultural tensions surrounding women's workforce participation and cross-dressing.

The author reflects on the construction of fat female body. The author commented on the position that a fat woman is a moral failure and is a diseased body consisting of unmanaged desires. He argues that the Western culture's panic over obesity is corroborated with a moral anxiety about the preservation of fixed gender identities and normative female sexuality and embodiment.

This article discusses some of the contradictory ways in which Australian male and female political figures have been reported with regard to their family responsibilities. The article is comprised of three parts. The first investigates the ways in which fatherhood is deployed, both by the media and politicians themselves, to humanize public figures. The second considers Australian Labor Party leader Mark Latham's use of his role as an actively engaged father of two young sons to construct a political identity that sharply contrasts with that of the Prime Minister, John Howard. The third part of the article contrasts the media coverage of Latham's promotion of parental responsibilities and his frequent references to family care in his policy speeches.