:: penelly ::

Touched that two of the lovely Australian femmo women I met when I went to the big UK conference have both contacted me to catch up while they're in Syd for AWGSA and CSAA.

One said "it wasn't as fun without you", the other said I was sorely missed at the conf. Awww. Big loves. I've only met them both a couple of times, really.

Caught up with Erica last week. Brief but lovely. Trying to catch up with Juliet this week, by going on campus for the CSAA conf. There are heaps of talks I'd love to be able to go to. eg. One of the plenary talks is given by a woman who writes about postfeminism. Ros Gill. And there's Bev Skeggs.

But I kinda have different priorities now. My school pal, Peggy, is coming over on Wed morning because she's expecting a baby soon and I have some books she might like.

Anyway, I'm going to try and get to Usyd for afternoon tea. Not sure if I really wanna gatecrash the conference as such, (particularly as conf is being organised by certain academics who have treated me like shit in the past) but at least I have an excuse to be heading in there now... catching up with Juliet. :D

Now I just have to get over my fear of public transport with pram. Actually, maybe I'll take Ev in the carrier. I was carrying her around the house in it today facing outwards and she quite liked it. So much easier having both arms free to do stuff. :)

This is who does the ironing in my house!

Django's expression sums up exactly how I feel about Tony Abbott and his fucked up comments about what "Australian housewives have to understand".

I want to turn this into a LOLCAT image. Is there a way to do this easily?

This week is Hottest 100 Week!

On Monday when I got home, suzysiu's mixtape of her Hottest 100 Women results was under my front door. Yay! Thanks Suzy! :)

On Sunday night the countdown of Naomi's Hottest 100 began, on her blog. I think she got over 7000 votes in the end. Fantastic! Go and check it out: she's put a youtube clip up for every song. :)

I am happy with the number one song: Aretha Franklin, Respect.


Here were my top ten votes, in no particular order:

Clouds - Red Serenade
Fiona Apple - Paper Bag
Bertie Blackman - Fast Bitch
Veruca Salt - Seether
Charlotte Hatherley - Bastardo
Aretha Franklin - Respect
Emiliana Torrini - Jungle Drum
The Grates - Trampoline
Portishead - All Mine
Sarah Blasko - Explain


Under the cut is my Hottest 100 Women songs of all time. I have been compiling for a while and it has been lots of fun.

( Hottest 100 Women )

The conference is really good so far. I'm having a great time. There are quite a few Australian delegates and so we've naturally clumped together. I've made some new pals and had dinner with some of them last night.

I was also pleased when two different people remembered me from previous conferences. Fun!

The keynote speeches have been interesting too, even if the two big drawcards (Angela McRobbie and Judith Halberstram) both pulled out. Boo.

It's pretty amazing to be at a conference where the sessions and the paper topics are all so closely related to my thesis. Sitting in a room of people talking about 2nd and 3rd wave feminism and postfeminism and generationalism and popular culture is very exciting. I'm very glad I came along.

My presentation is today. Starting to get a bit nervous now. I'll be glad when it's out of the way. I have some pretty pictures from Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives so that should keep everyone entertained. :)

http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/english/FWSA/index.htm

Germaine Greer was delightful. She received a massive cheer when the audience spotted her on the sidelines and she got a standing ovation at the end. It was all rather exciting.

She gave a very interesting lecture based on her latest book about Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare's Wife. She said it was the sort of book she couldn't have written while in academia, because it's unfashionable now to do a social history of women - to hunt through the evidence and make us aware of women about whom we know very little.

She made a wonderful case for Anne Hathaway, arguing that she must have been a strong, capable and very important woman in Stratford and that she was a devoted and loving wife. Apparently her arguments fly in the face of most other research - well, actually, there isn't much other research - most other hearsay about the sort of woman she was. Usually she's thought of as a strumpet, a bad wife and someone who was hated by Shakespeare. Greer paints a very different portrait of her.

As well as her book, she discussed Australia's treatment of indigenous people, feminism and misogyny, her rainforest regeneration work in queensland, and a bunch of other things.

I am not familiar with all of Greer's work and I certainly don't agree with everything she has to say. But wow, it was amazing to see her. She's such an icon! She's a feminist before my time, but you could tell last night the sort of lasting impact she has had. There were women in that audience whose lives were changed by The Female Eunuch. You could feel it.

She was articulate and intelligent - of course - but she was also passionate, engaging, charming and funny. I'm very glad I had the chance to see her. Afterwards I got my book signed! :)

Now I'm going to listen to her being interviewed by Margaret Throsby - you can download it here. I suggest also downloading the interview with Kath Albury who no doubt talks about her research into Australia's relationship with pornography. Interesting stuff.


( Some grainy photos of Germaine  )

I just read this cool entry on BitchPhD - it's a talk she gave recently. I think it's a good summary of why I really like her blog.

She mingles personal stories with her politics and I think, in a lot of ways, that is what feminism is all about. I like to think that it's what I do with my blog, although I am aware I don't do it anywhere near as eloquently as Bitch does it.

"The personal is political", the much quoted slogan of second wave feminism still has so much relevance. Feminism is about breaking down the binaries: public/private, male/female, poltical/personal.

Now I'll quote bits from her piece that I liked:

Which I think gets at another important point about feminism. If blending the personal and the political, or the private and the public, is intrinsically feminist (and I think that it is), then the fact that men need to do it too, that male academics also feel this stress about whether or not they belong, whether or not they’re smart enough, whether or not they really want to be doing this, demonstrates the usefulness of feminism within the academy (and by extension, the world outside the academy). This is the kumbaya moment: feminism frees everybody! That’s a little bit of a joke, but I actually do believe it. If the world is divided into binaries, then one set of people might get the shitty end of the stick, but the other set is still holding a stick with shit on it. Maybe we should find another stick to play with.

I love that analogy.

She also discusses some examples of colleagues who have done things that one is not "supposed" to do if they want a career - ie. following their partner somewhere. And then she relates it back to her discussion of the public/private distinctions that go on.

...we talked about the similarity of each of our stories, the way that the job/partner tension always gets framed as a “woman’s problem” (and yet, two of the people at the table were men), and the way that these stories never get told, so that people believe that it’s “career suicide” if you quit a tenure-track job, especially if you do so in order to follow a partner. I’ve had people warn me about this myself; and I’ve worried about it a lot. But after that dinner, I think I can say that, at best, it might be career suicide, but that obviously it isn’t a foregone conclusion. And that men as well as women face this decision. And that this “woman’s problem,” which is a real one, is a feminist problem: that is, it’s a “personal” problem that is created by social structures (“if you quit for your partner, you’re not really serious about your career”; “academic jobs are impossible to get”; “to get an academic job you have to be ready to move wherever the job is, and be happy about it”), social structures that affect both women and men--even if, because of other social structures (“women are private; men are public”) it’s a problem that women are more aware of, and perhaps more affected by, than men are.

She's grappling with some of the ideas I've been mulling over in relation to my own career and my own relationship. Would moving back to Sydney to be with Sasha be disadvantageous in relation to the prospect of getting a "good" university job? Would I be cutting off all my networks and mentors - and friends - by moving away from Newcastle? And so on...

She also talks about the importance of women's caucuses (workshops, I guess) at academic conferences.

They put together workshops that are not on their “real” areas of expertise, but are about academia more generally. They deliberately refuse to pay attention to “who one is,” in the status sense that often goes on at academic conferences, where people will glance at your nametag and institutional affiliation to see if you are someone who is “worth” talking to, or if you’re just nobody. The women in my discipline’s women’s caucus glance at your nametag too--and then they talk to you even if you are nobody. In fact, they remember your name the next year. They sit at your table in the women’s caucus luncheon, solicit your ideas for next year, and put you forward to chair workshops when the idea is approved. And when you, nobody, email some of the most important women in your field to ask them to participate, they agree to do so immediately. And then you are one of them.

And this, I think, is a much better way of doing academic work than the more alienating, hierarchy-driven model that we’re all used to thinking of as "the way academia works." We object to it, but still feel is inevitable. But the point is, it isn’t inevitable: a group of friends who are annoyed by it can form a women’s caucus and start to talk about academia and ignore questions of “who matters” and “who doesn’t,” and listen to each others stories.

And this is why I think I am so interested in joining SWS (Sociologists for Women in Society). A woman talked about SWS at the "women's breakfast" at the TASA conference last year, and I was immediately interested. She wants to start up an Australian chapter of the the society. And now that I've finally posted off my membership application form, I want to email her and get involved with her in starting it up. It's about feminist activism in the community, but also about improving women's position within sociology and the academy more generally.

The patriarchal nature of academia - even within cultural studies! - really struck me on Friday when I went to see Professor Toby Miller's talk. Despite the audience being about 50/50 male/female, the only people who asked questions at the end were men. David, being a good feminist, even mentioned it as chair of the seminar. When soliciting questions from the audience, he tried to encourage the women to ask a question. But none did! And I found myself pondering why this would be. It could have been that most of the women there were postgrads like myself, who didn't feel comfortable asking such a well established academic about his work. The men who did pose questions did tend to be older, so perhaps more experienced and comfortable with coming up with interesting questions at the end.

But therein lies part of the problem, I think. Having to ask an interesting question. These things always end up being about men showing off. It's a competition to demonstrate who knows the most, or who can come up with the best insights. Or who can come up with the most "interesting" or poignant question. And I'm not sure that women (and I hate making generalisations like this) buy into that kind of stuff.**

I had questions I would have liked to have asked Toby, but there was no way in hell I would have put my hand up to ask them in front of that table of people. This is mostly because I'm shy anyway, but it's also because I would feel vulnerable opening myself up to everyone by asking just a simple question. Like, perhaps I wanted him just to clarify one thing. But at these seminars you can't just ask a simple question, you have to pose these big, long-winded, eloquent questions that display your own breadth of knowledge.

I can't think how I want to end this post. I want to make some nice insightful comment to conclude, but I can't think of one right now. Read the BitchPhD post. She says it better than I can. Besides, Sasha and I want to go and have fun and some lunch. So this blog can wait. :)

EDIT: Back now. I can read over this post and see if it makes any sense.

** ok, I will leave that last sentence there because people have responded to it in the comments (hi Nick!) And yeah, because I was writing this quickly, I made a dumb generalisation, and Nick's right, it does weaken the post. I just wanted to finish writing and I hadn't (and probably still haven't) clarified my thoughts on this issue. I am puzzling over why it is that the men ask more questions than women at these things. I guess it depends on lots of things... Ah, I dunno! Perhaps I'm reading too much into it.

I guess I could ask my readers what they think?