School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemGlory boxes: femininity, domestic consumption and material culture in Australia, 1930-1960( 2009)This thesis investigates glory boxes as cultural sites of consumption, production, femininity, sexuality, economy and transnationalism between 1930 and 1960 in Australia, a period of considerable economic and social change. Glory boxes were the containers and collections kept and accumulated by many young single women in anticipation of their future married and domestic lives. The nature and manifestations of the glory box tradition have uniquely Australian qualities, which had its roots in many European and British customs of marriage preparation and female property. This study explores a number of facets of women's industrial, communal, creative and sexual lives within Australian and international historical contexts. These contexts influenced glory box traditions in terms of industrialisation, changing consumer practices, the economics of depression and war, and evolving social definitions of femininity and female sexuality. Glory boxes provide an effective prism through which to scrutinise these broad social and economic developments during a thirty year period, and to highlight the participation of young women in cultural practices relating to glory box production in preparation for marriage. Oral testimony from migrant and Australian-born women, the material culture of glory boxes and the objects collected, and popular contemporary magazines and newspapers provide important documentation of the significance of glory box practices for many Australian women in the mid-twentieth century. Glory boxes track twentieth-century shifts in Australia in terms of a producer and consumer economy at both collective and individual levels. They reveal the enduring social expectations until at least the 1960s that the role of women was seen as primarily that of wives, mothers and domestic household managers. Nonetheless, a close investigation of the meanings of glory box collections for women has uncovered simultaneous and contradictory social values that recognised the sexual potential of women, while shrouding their bodies in secrecy. This thesis suggests that a community of glory box practitioners worked through a variety of collective female environments which crossed time, place, generation and culture. It demonstrates the impact of the act of migrating on glory box practices which were brought in the luggage and memories of many post-war migrant women to Australia. These practices were maintained, adapted and lost through the pragmatics of separation, relocation and acts of cultural integration. This research has identified the experiences of young single women as critical to expanding understandings of the history of domestic consumption in Australia, and the gendered associations it was accorded within popular culture. It has also repositioned the glory box tradition as an important, widely practised female activity within feminist historiography, by recognising its legitimacy as female experience, and as a complex and ambivalent symbol which defies simplistic interpretations.
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ItemTheatre of body in Japan: Ankoku Butoh (Dance of Darkness)- Gekidan Kaitaisha (Theatre of Deconstruction)( 2004)This thesis is an analysis of two Japanese theatres of body; Ankoku Butoh (Dance of Darkness) and Gekidan Kaitaisha (Theatre of Deconstruction), and a practical and theoretical investigation of the possibilities for an embodied political philosophy. It is divided into two chapters. The first identifies the genesis and development of the philosophy and methodology of Hijikata Tatsumi's Ankoku Butoh in a chronological analysis beginning in late 1950s Japan. Apart from introducing some new material to the study of Ankoku Butoh and analyzing Hijikata's concepts, the first chapter serves as a genealogical source for the examination of the theatre of body of Gekidan Kaitaisha in the second chapter: the practice, philosophy, and productions within the social and political context. Flowing on from Hijikata's radically subjective work born from and profoundly rooted in an ethos and socio-political context of rebellion, Kaitaisha's theatre responds to 'what is' and refuses to accept it is all there is. Both Ankoku Butoh and Gekidan Kaitaisha are designed to actually deconstruct physical and perceptual codes integrated in the body to create the conditions for the body to become itself. While implicitly showing how one has informed the other, debate is focused on their distinct methods of embodied resistance to social conformity and on interpretations in relation to the political environment. The methods of Kaitaisha described in this thesis are generally based on the principle of 'moving the inside out to allow the outside in'. In tracing the evolution of two theatres of body in Japan) parallels are made with the conditions of the period, beginning with the transformations of late 1950s modernity, through the 1970s and the birth of post-modernity to its results being carried from the twentieth into the twenty-first century in the bodies of Kaitaisha.