AustLit

'This paper demonstrates the historical importance of a notorious Australian child murder to developing research on cultural factors influencing public understanding of family violence. It shows how the 1997 disappearance of 13-month-old Jaidyn Leskie from his babysitter's house in a downcast regional Australian town still matters in media and cultural explanations of child murder as an extreme end point of such violence. The scene set is of a haunted postcolonial imaginary moving subjects through media cultural space as failures of class and gender performance. Its tableau of "freaks" forms when the child murder story is written and read from a late-twentieth-century aspirational vista, and its key subjects underperform, in neoliberal terms, their class and gender roles. I observe them as prototypes for more likely subjects in contemporary media attempts to explain violence against children, and family violence more broadly, as a problem of role performance in Australia's haunted media culture. I suggest deconstructive engagement with texts that capture this process, but also invoke particular ghosts as they strive to explain a tragic crime.'  (Publication abstract)

The proposals below offer some possibilities that challenge the very powerful assumption that our work time is valued only in areas that attract income, and even then, any tasks that are unpaid or related to the domestic are valued less. There are already indications that there will be solid opposition to such changes. First, they offend assumptions, albeit unfounded, that a heavily means tested system is fairer as it only assists those in need and does not require extra taxation. This set of views comes from both progressives and conservatives. Second, the widespread beliefs in the virtues of hard work and the benefits of the status of having a paid job are often taken on by the left and unions, that see the paid "working man" as the source of future revolutions and change. The history of this bias towards paid work is included below to refute these claims. Women need a Universal Social Dividend. This could become a feminised power shift change to welfare payments policies and it should recognise the value of unpaid and underpaid contributions made mainly by women. It would also allow for changing the future income growth policies by reducing the need to retain and grow damaging production, by cutting working hours and jobs in these areas, and replacing income. The USD is designed to redistribute resources so those in unpaid roles have dignity and agency and are not being stigmatised and others can reduce paid working hours. The levels of payment will need discussion, but this paper assumes they would be set at pension levels as a starting point. It should be taxable, but not means tested, so those who are wellpaid are unlikely to keep much.

'Germaine Greer is a feminist iconoclast frequently misread, misunderstood and maligned. Her most recent book On Rape was unanimously panned in media reviews by feminists. This article argues that third and fourth wave feminist readings of On Rape-and of Greer more broadly-fail to grasp the book as part of her oeuvre. I note that Greer is making two related arguments in On Rape, both of which have been overlooked or underplayed in media reviews. The first concerns what she calls "everyday rape" or the unwanted, sometimes forced, sex that women routinely experience, and occasionally consent to, in long-term heterosexual relationships; the second concerns women's loss of sexual pleasure associated with this. Against the prevailing view that Greer has transmogrified into a "rape apologist," I read the book as part of an ongoing conversation that Greer has been having with the culture, with herself and with women for fifty years. Greer has not changed her position, rather she is looking at another angle of her long-standing argument that the sexually autonomous woman has the right to determine her own boundaries and experience and, moreover, that "bad sex" is emotionally and spiritually destructive. Greer hasn't changed, feminism has. I then return to the reception of the book and consider what distinguishes Greer's style and politics identifying her left libertarian radicalism as anathema to contemporary progressive politics.' (Publication abstract)