School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 2 of 2
-
ItemGreat white noise(Melbourne University Publishing, 2004)The yawning gulf that everyone talks about isn’t between so-called elites and the mainstream, or even between the city and the bush. The big gap in Australian politics is between cleverly deployed political stereotypes and the realities of growing inequality and widespread dissatisfaction with economic ‘reform’. Elites, in other words, have been made targets of the same strategy of demonising the ‘other’ that has been used on asylum-seekers, Aboriginal land rights campaigners, ethnic youth gangs, ‘welfare mothers’, and so on. On the face of it, the current demonisation of elites is as irrational as it is clever. It is irrational because it shows contempt for the views of the thousands of Australians who wrote letters to newspapers, signed petitions and started community groups to show their outrage at the Howard government’s policies on reconciliation, on the Wik 10-point plan, on saying sorry to the stolen generations, on the treatment of refugees and asylum-seekers, and so on. Were all those who came from far and wide to march for reconciliation and plant seas of hands in capital cities, or who protested against the war in Iraq, really just part of an ‘elite’? The attack is clever because it helps to mask the fact that those who attack elites are themselves part of an elite. How many ‘ordinary people’ have a radio show or a newspaper column? How many ‘ordinary people’ have the opportunity to vet the appointment of a government minister, as radio talkback host Alan Jones did in late 2001 before the instalment of a new police minister in New South Wales?
-
ItemCrying in public places: neoconservatism and victim panic(Random House, 1997)Being a self-professed feminist heretic is big business these days. It’s certainly where the kudos is in mainstream journalistic writing about feminism. As the successes of writers such as Helen Garner and Katie Roiphe have shown, it’s possible to maintain a strong media presence through attacking feminisms. So formulaic has the business become, that lately, touching base with feminist commentators in the media has been like listening to a bad commercial radio station. You keep hearing the same old song over and over again, like a ‘classic rock’ hit from the seventies, repeated ad nauseam. It’s either a tune about ‘victim feminism’ or ‘puritan feminism’, and it’s played mainly by feminists who were around then. Beatrice Faust, for example, calls ‘victim feminism’ ‘wimp feminism’, and says: ‘Wimp victims believe that they will be victims for the rest of their lives’, and that it is ‘revolutionary feminism gone to seed’. Susan Mitchell asks ‘was it for this that feminists had fought so hard’, lamenting what she sees as the new scourge of ‘victimhood’ among young feminists on campus. Bettina Arndt worries that sexual harassment legislation and amendments to the Victorian Domestic Violence Act potentially usher in a new era of punitiveness and retribution by feminist ideologues with a victim mentality and a taste for ‘vengeance’. Helen Garner speaks of ‘this determination to cling to victimhood at any cost, which seems to have become the loudest voice of feminism today’.