AustLit

'As the world watches the horrifying spectacle of Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine and confronts the possibility of a third world war, we find ourselves entangled in what Slavoj Žižek in his book Violence: Six Sideways Reflections has called “the fascinating lure of … directly visible ‘subjective’ violence, violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent”. Anne Brewster and Sue Kossew’s book, Rethinking the Victim: Gender and Violence in Contemporary Australian Women’s Writing, is particularly timely because it directs our attention to the everyday, intimate violence that befalls women and children, as represented in Australian literature. Brewster and Kossew note “the linking of intersubjective and intimate violence with global violence” (229) in contemporary discussions of gendered violence. The searing accounts of such violence that they unearth in Australian women’s literature, particularly in the work of Indigenous and minoritised women writers, reveals something symptomatic of the machismo that fuels the violence of strongmen such as Putin.' (Introduction)