Gender and sexuality

For me birth was illustrative of how becoming parents pegs you to a whole new set of heterosexual gender expectations: there I was, the new mother, left alone to cope through pain and fear; my partner, the father, sent to another room with no information; us now understood to be husband and wife.

Like many of the memoirs, essays and novels concerning motherhood that have been published in the last decade, Bad Art Mother reaches beyond the reductive ideals of good and bad mothering that have, I imagine, always plagued mothers.

It’s in my nature to be uncomfortable with the very idea of nature, the distinctions the term creates between acceptable and unacceptable behaviours and desires, the value systems it imposes and disguises. For me, nature and gender are both trouble.

Irigaray’s postulation of non-hierarchical sexual difference does not abolish the dominant western model of kinship. It does, however, profoundly modify its structuration so that the exchange of women would no longer be possible.

Borderless is not ‘Australian’ or even ‘Australian Feminist Poetry’ – it’s transnational. Not international. Transnational – borderless. Most of these poets live on this continent, but not all. I should probably relax and let myself be confused about definitions for now. Because a poetry anthology is full of poems, poems with their own confusions, pains and delights. Time to talk about the poems, and then return to what brings the poems together, hopefully I’ll be less confused.

A number of recent feminist books examine the concept of consent, some of them mining a rich feminist canon, from Beauvoir to Butler, via Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Angela Davis, and Andrea Dworkin, to grapple with contemporary versions of very old problems.

Wordiness, perhaps even more than visual cultural forms, can prolong and extend the suspension of knowledge about gender identity, in ways that makes it possible to glimpse how gender identity of the binary kind is a kind of shortcut, and even a forfeiture in the face of gender’s multiple possibilities.

In a colony where blatant police brutality against Indigenous people is the norm, where we suffer the continued desecration of sacred land, live within a health and mortality gap, and a government that seeks to undermine sovereignty in all its forms, we need poets that can see all this – and still celebrate the joy, resilience and love of our community.

New knowledge in creative Writing may only be formed by rejecting established silos of identity, by being attuned to that which is embryonic, that which is pre-conscious and permeable, by reaching for floating, fluid entanglement.

The words are imperfect, flawed approximations of the knowledges we seek to share. But on a good day, with the wind blowing in the right direction, those words might nudge someone to listen to their own gut. Those words might be sparks that help fuel other gender insurrections. I await those fires with glee. For each time someone burns their gender script, and writes a new story for themselves, we all taste a little more freedom.