School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemLiterature, culture, mirrors( 1997)John Frow responds to Simon During Simon During proposes – as I read it – six sets of reasons for the shift within departments of English from traditional literary studies towards cultural studies. The first is the academic appropriation of a tradition of Romantic anti-academicism stretching from Wordsworth to Dada. The second is a new mode of subject formation by which students are trained as consumers of cultural goods. The third is the valorization of social identities perceived as marginal within a traditional academic framework. The fourth is the development of new regimes of student choice, reflected in changed patterns of enrolment. The fifth is the emergence of a policy framework designed to enhance national economic competitiveness. The sixth is a regime of training which prepares students for jobs in the cultural sector.
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ItemThe uncanny home: television, transparency and overexposure( 1997)I recently read a description of the house which is currently being built for Microsoft cyber-baron Bill Gates. Gates conceived his new residence as a state of the art merging of computer technology with architecture. At an estimated cost of $50 million, the house will naturally boast all the standard automated functions such as climate control and electronic security systems, as well as a few extras like a hot tub which switches itself on as soon as the master's car enters the grounds.
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ItemIntroduction(Cambridge University Press, 1997)As a collection of British colonies and then a nation, Australia came into existence as a product of both colonialism and modernity; proud of its fancied youth and eager for the fruits of civilisation, enamoured with progress yet yearning for tradition. Historical accounts of Australia have equally been products of colonialism and modernity. More often than not, the mission of history has been to remember the triumph of colonising a continent and forming a modern nation state with destiny on its side. While the historical legacies of colonialism and modernity remain palpable, many of the dreams of colonialism and modernity lie in ruins. This is a book from these 'ruins' in the sense that it discusses both the colonial past of former colonies and the colonising of indigenous people in Australia. But ruins are never simply gone or in the past; ruins are enduring traces; spaces of romantic fancies and forgetfulness where social memories imagine the persistence of time in records of destruction. Thus this book is about the past in the present, it is written from within contemporary cultures of history. It moves from Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal accounts of Captain Cook, jumps to the installation of history in museums and school curricula, glides through the historiography of archetypal historical events. This is a book with strong hopes for history and social memory. My interest is not in hammering home the constructedness of history, nor in the important task of diversifying and proliferating accounts of neglected historical actors but in thinking historically about existing social memory. It is a gesture towards learning to inhabit landscapes of memory which are, in part, landscapes littered with ruins; some archaic and others nightmarish, some quaint simulations and others desperate echoes. I imagine such a landscape of memories not as homeless place for lost souls but a ground from which new flights of historical imagination might depart and to which they might return, differently.
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ItemThe flapper's ontological ambivalence: prosthetic visualities, the feminine and modernity(Department of History, University of Melbourne, 1997)In this article, I want to discuss modernity's particular scopic conditions through the concept of prosthetic visualities – or vision extended through industrialised and popularised communication technologies – and their cultural attachment to the feminine. While these visual forms were characteristic of the shared experiences of modernity throughout Western nations, through both its modes of production and modes of self-representation, I focus on the particular meanings these assumed in Australia – for example with its anxieties about national boundaries projected onto the feminine – while retaining a view of modernity's common perceptual field. I hope to set out the possible relationship of women to the visual conditions as mobile spectacles and as subjects who acted through appearing. My argument is that appearing was constructed as a subject position for some women, particularly young, white women, through the conditions of their visibility in modernity.
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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’.
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ItemKate Fischer, John Howard and shrinking voices in the field of social action(School of English, La Trobe University, 1997)At a public forum hosted by Derryn Hinch for Channel 9, I found myself inadvertently wrestling with Kate Fischer over the role of the public intellectual. Kate was part of a panel which included Sam Newman and the Cappers, called in and dressed up to discuss 'The Battle of the Sexes' with a studio audience, amongst whom were seated various advocates for the feminist and men's movements.
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ItemClass, education, culture( 1997)Initiated in 1992, the Australian Cultural Consumption project is a large, survey-based analysis of cultural taste across a wide range of areas, including not just the obviously 'cultural' ones like consumption of film and television and radio, or concert and museum attendance, but also such things as likes and dislikes in furniture, in cars and in clothing; participation in sports or in gambling or in a large number of formal and informal leisure activities; and the ways in which friendships are formed and maintained.