Gender and sexuality

Ghosts, which takes the form of a video essay-poem, takes the binary bomb gender reveal as a point of departure.

These books lay bare the exhaustion occasioned by capitalism’s resource extraction, the unyielding walls of our workplaces and institutions, and the misogyny, latent or overt, of medical practice. In writing of their chronic and mental illnesses, the authors rupture the narrative that a successful body is a well body, and open a space for new and original accounts of how those bodies mediate the world.

Whilst both Kent’s and Keating’s books will satisfy their very different readerships, there remains a largely unmet need for feminist histories that bridge academic and popular audiences. In this moment of renewed feminist activism, when hard-won feminist gains are under threat from the economic fallout of Covid and the ideological warfare of conservative governments, it’s more vital than ever to cultivate widespread understanding of the complex histories of this movement.

The novel’s central love arc (between a two-party leftist and a ‘radical’), and the centrist protagonist’s personal chem-sexual odyssey towards a revolutionary politics, sketches out an account of what a Marxist, or communist, sexuality could be like in pretty specific terms.

The appearance of Evie Wyld’s novel in Anne Brontë’s bicentennial year prompts thoughts about the relation between the writings of these two angry women. The continuities are striking. Deeply religious, Anne used the back of her prayer book to record, in tiny letters, her response to all she had witnessed: ‘sick of mankind | And their disgusting ways’. We can’t know for certain whether, when she wrote ‘mankind’, she had the human species or the male sex in mind, but I lean towards the latter. Now, reading The Bass Rock, I feel as if Wyld had written boldly underneath Anne’s words: ‘Me Too’.

What becomes evident is not so much a portrait of Daylight as a reader, but her skill as a critic, her ability to distill enough detail from a work to understand – and convey something of – its essence, to trace the author’s thinking and engagement with the world.

His characters are men I have known, men with whom I have lived, hooked-up, been frustrated. They skirt around what they ought to say and try to reinvent themselves and downplay their opportunities and make geographical excuses for their oddities.

Science thrives when it is open to anyone who has the talent for it, and the taste for the hard work involved. And society thrives when our institutions are seen to be fair. But my argument is that the case for diversity is epistemic as well as moral. I’ve never heard a scientist say, Yeah, it’s really great that the feminists pointed this out because once we understood the epistemic benefits of diversity, we realized that we could do better science.” My goal is that, in the future, scientists will say that.

Lou never got to help physically rebuild his personal world after the peak of the AIDS crisis in the US, but in many ways he helped to rebuild the worlds of countless people who came after him. Early on in his diaries, Lou says, ‘My problem is that I can’t accept life for what it is…like it is presented to me. I feel there is something deep and wonderful underneath it that no one has found.’ I wonder what messages the dead have for us now.

Lately, I have been asking myself why it is that Black Feminist study is so central to my understanding of how to live a political life. Why, as a Brown settler also shaped by colonialism and living on Indigenous land in the place often referred to as Australia, do I find myself reading and re-reading Saidiya Hartman’s work? What is it that Black study offers?