Featured Gender and sexuality essays
Gender and sexuality
You Got This Mama
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.
Unnatural Being
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.
Poems to Paint on a Wall
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.
The Least Bad Standard
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.