Gender and sexuality

What are the stakes of literary biography? Sam Twyford-Moore poses this question in reviewing two recent books on Frank Moorhouse, addressing issues ranging from the ethics of disclosure to the intersections between biography and cultural history.

What do Barbie and the Oxford English Dictionary have in common? In this review of Pip Williams’ fiction, Catriona Menzies-Pike catalogues the tropes by which popular feminism sells women short.

Astrid Lorange reflects on what it might take – conceptually and politically – to rewrite gender as a practice of liberation rather than capture.

Jeanine Leane gets under the skin of the diversity and inclusion mythscape in creative writing programs.

Fire dragon feminist Quah Ee Ling dissects the banalization of gender equity and diversity initiatives in academic and corporate spaces – initiatives that often fail to break out of a pernicious binary logic.

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.