AustLit

'This article locates a number of 1970s Australian horror films in relation to British and American biomedical horror films featuring characters with disability who are gifted with telekinesis (making them "supercrips") and characters who are in a coma and labeled "vegetables." It employs scholarship by Paul Longmore, Matthew Norden, Angela Smith, Paul Darke, Robert Cettl, Sami Schalk, and others to interrogate how Australian genre film represents disability on-screen. An argument is made that while Ozploitation films like The Cars That Ate Paris (1974) and the first Mad Max film (1979) center on the car and mobility in Australian culture, Richard Franklin's Patrick (1978) draws attention to masculinity, immobility, and disability. Tapping into tropes about "monstrous" disabled others, Franklin creates a memorable disabled protagonist who evokes fear and dread via his telekinetic powers while also drawing attention to the plight of patients who are the victims of medical malpractice. A hyperbolic 2013 remake directed by Mark Hartley also explores the theme of masculinity and mobility and further exploits the Oedipal theme and the cure-or-kill trope. Both the original and the adaptation, this article argues, mine horror stereotypes about disability while also creating a character who is powerful rather than a passive object of pity.' (Publication abstract)

' For fifty years our most powerful popular culture influencers have been the high-powered editors of mass-market women’s magazines like The Australian Women’s Weekly, Woman’s Day, New Idea and the now defunct Dolly, Cleo and Cosmopolitan. It is difficult to overstate the influence that these women have had in shaping popular ideas and attitudes, feminism, and femininity in Australia via the pages of their magazines. In these interviews, they describe their lives and careers in a medium that is part of our publishing heritage.

'Queens of Print is a tribute to the most influential and iconic women in Australian women’s magazines. It is a snapshot of a rapidly changing industry where print is supposedly dead, and media have been disrupted. This book looks back, but also forward to consider what a magazine might be and what a magazine editor might do in future decades.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This article, in the form of a conversation between novelist Justine Ettler and literary and cultural studies scholar Rebecca Johinke, looks back at the reception of the Australian novel The River Ophelia in 1995. It also looks forward to speculate how audiences may read the novel in 2018 and beyond, given that in October 2017 it was re-released in e-book format with a new Author’s Note and Introduction (Ettler 2017a). The River Ophelia was a publishing sensation in Australia in the mid-90s as it describes sadistic and masochistic sex and domestic violence. Due to early reviews and the way it was marketed, it was labelled as ‘dirty realism’ or ‘grunge’. In this article, the authors argue for a re-appraisal of the text as a feminist parody and as a highly intertextual postmodern work. In and through their conversation, Johinke and Ettler reveal the extent to which genre confusion, and the question of what is and isn’t ‘real’ dominated the reception of the text at the time of its initial release, and how the intentional fallacy in cases where an author is conflated with a character can be adopted unselfconsciously, and indeed manipulated by, publishers and critics in the marketplace. In light of recent feminist activism around domestic violence and sexual abuse, such as the #MeToo campaign, the authors also discuss the depiction of domestic violence in The River Ophelia, and how certain representations of sex and female desire might play out in representations of abusive relationships. The question of what is and is not erotic, pornographic, or romantic literature is also discussed, both in relation to The River Ophelia, and in relation to several other controversial texts that have been published since its first release.' (Publication abstract)

'This paper interrogates the links between Nick Cave’s The Death of Bunny Munro and Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto. It starts by situating Cave’s writing in relation to his status as an auteur, examines discourses of rock music and the murder ballad, before providing a close reading of misogynistic scenes in the novel. It offers several ways to read the novel and questions whether it can be labelled a parody, satire, or as scatological rhetoric. It concludes by drawing the discussion back to aesthetics and the intersection of literature and music in the audio book version of Bunny Munro and Cave’s success as a salesman.' (Publication abstract)

'Max Rockatansky is both straight and the best driver on the roads, and the villains in Mad Max and Mad Max 2 are gay motorcyclists. The demonisation of bikies and homosexuals in the two films is an interesting trope—all the more so because it has passed almost without comment or debate. George Miller' pits Max, the heroic heterosexual cop against the homosexual 'baddies' in the Toecutter's gang and Lord Humungus' tribe. After the death of his best friend, wife and son, Max is repeatedly drawn into the unknown and unlawful world ofthe bikies. As agents of death heralding the coming of the apocalypse, the bikies are exiled to the Forbidden Zone and are manifested as both queer and dangerous. Max fords the bikies worthy and proficient rivals who ooze a tough and extremely muscular masculinity. This article examines Max's quest to exterminate the rogue bikies and how Max's body becomes a contested site which both propels the narrative and offers itself up to mutilation and the gaze.'

Source: Abstract.