School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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Item'Once we had bread here, you gave us stone'. Food as a technology of biopower in the stories of Jack Davis, Ruby Langford Ginibi, and Alexis Wright( 2019)This thesis presents the first comprehensive study of food in the works of Indigenous Australian storytellers. It uses Foucault’s analyses of biopower as a grid of intelligibility through which to describe food’s various functions and effects as they are recorded, reproduced, refracted, and resisted in Jack Davis’s, Ruby Langford Ginibi’s, and Alexis Wright’s storytelling. The thesis reads food as a technology of biopower: a means by which life ‘passe[s] into knowledge's field of control and power's sphere of intervention’ (Foucault 1978, 142). Following a Foucaultian methodology, it presents close and contextualised readings of the ways that food is instrumentalised as a technology of biopower and the functions, effects, and networks of biopower that result in and through the storytellers’ works. The specific topics the thesis engages include accounts of rationing and food-centric resistance in Davis’s plays, food insecurity and obesity discourse in Langford Ginibi’s life stories, and food’s relationship with alcohol and imperilment in Wright’s stories. It traces continuities between the storytellers’ treatment of food as well as identifying the way food generates and is implicated in evolving configurations and networks of biopower. It explores various resistance strategies and their efficacy in and through their stories, as well as the new subjects, hegemonic relations, institutions, forms of government, and fields of power-knowledge that result.
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ItemWomen writing traumatic times( 2014)This thesis is a critical and creative investigation into the literary representation of post-traumatic emergence and proceeds from an examination of recent developments in trauma theory in the context of feminist literary criticism and Australian fiction. The critical enquiry uses a psychoanalytic feminist framework to focus on four novels: Barbara Baynton’s, Human Toll (1907), Sue Woolfe’s, Painted Woman (1990), Morgan Yasbincek’s, liv (2000), and Alexis Wright’s, Carpentaria (2006). I examine the particular generic, narrative and conceptual strategies each writer uses in their work to describe and inscribe creative emergence from the effects of historical, intergenerational and cultural trauma, and the subsequent impact on modalities of subjectivity. Principal themes that are evident from this research are the deployment of generic merging to subvert expectations of power relations and engender the development of new paradigmatic writing forms, and the presence/lack of agency from within the traumatic space. In the varying employment of écriture féminine in these novels, which are examples of Bildungsroman, Künstlerinroman, and parodic epic, respectively, the writers generate radical language through which to testify to trauma and suggest that from abjective experience, empowerment and transformation are not only possible, but also essential. These writers attempt to reframe embodied experience through experimentation with assumptions around signifying practices, as they interrogate their position for its relation to power and feminine subjectivity. The creative project that accompanies this literary-critical dissertation is a novella entitled The Saltbush Thing, which performs many of the literary practices visited in the dissertation in a related thematic narrative exploration. The story centres on the changing relationship between three generations of women of a dysfunctional Australian family, who each enact a creative emergence from trauma that has multiple layers and causes.