Birds of Prey (and the fantabulous emancipation of the female gaze)
The production of a film with a predominant and overarching (but not controlling) female gaze takes us one step closer to making the male gaze strange, gendered and escapable.
Progressive culture since 1954
What happened to Richard Dawkins?
Richard Dawkins is not a fascist, nor even a supporter of the alt-right. He’s better understood as an extraordinarily entitled member of the political class, who happens to possess a huge platform through which he can express that entitlement. Nevertheless, with the far right making increasing inroads into the mainstream, it’s important to remember the role that Dawkins and his friends have made and continue to make in popularising its ideas.
How do you solve a problem like the climate trolls?
Who are the ‘climate trolls’, exactly? How do we best to respond to them? Will not feeding them really do the trick?
Black Stump Beach
These days the hippies aren’t so hopeful; they’re asking: now that hope and confidence are insufficient to the task at hand, how do we live with integrity?
Only the lonely
When the public hearings for the NSW Special Commission of Inquiry into the Drug ‘Ice’ began in May this year, my brother Mitchell had just been released from prison for the eighth time.
FAP winner – Cartoon: All the way with O’Shea
Winner of the 2019 Fair Australia Prize – Cartoon, Adam Adelpour, on the 1969 general strike and work of Clarrie O’Shea.
In this letter, i can finally grammar yourself into a poem
dear Quang,
don’t forget you
are already here,
Twitch.tv and the work of watching
Twitch is an exemplary case of how audience activities continue to be commodified in the context of online digital media. Unlike with traditional televisual media, a key way that this value is generated is through the interactivity performed by viewers, enabled by the platform. The work of watching is the work that these audiences do in creating and sustaining captivating structures of feeling.
Naming the racism that spreads along with Coronavirus
We shouldn’t need to prove to the colonial state that we’re ‘civilised’ or that Wuhan is a beautiful, vibrant, cultured city. Instead, we should become stauncher allies to First Nations people and other people of colour who face damaging stereotypes and harassment every day. When the Coronavirus outbreak is over, racism won’t go away. It will seek a different target and will always be ready to rear its head unless if we dismantle the structures that perpetuate it.
The government: defunds the arts. The arts: fund government services.
But as the past few months have demonstrated, there is nobody more equipped to jump into action in a crisis than independent artists, a group who’ve become expert at making do with rapidly dwindling resources, turning sawdust into glitter.
The names of women like my mother
My mother loves her family’s name. Who wouldn’t, with all that pride and power emblazoned on it? It reels off her tongue like fire and warms her face with a smile every time she says it, a reminder that she is still her father’s daughter. During the sparse, brief disagreements she had with my father when he was alive, she would slap her chest and say in Igbo, ‘Me? Me, the daughter of Agbasiere?’. But she still had to abandon this name she is so proud of and take up a new name when she got married to him.
‘His dean is making him hire a person of colour’: counter-storytelling and the law
Counter-storytelling is a vital strategy for resistance. Storytelling not only reveals the inherent subjectivity of the legal system, but it provides an avenue for recognition and affirmation of experiences that may otherwise by denied in a normative legal system.
Are Australian universities fighting climate change or fuelling it?
In the wake of Australia’s most devastating bushfire season and the governments continued inaction, the pressure is mounting for Australian universities to take initiative in the fight against climate change.
What I hear when you tell me I am brave
I am writing to you because I know in my bones there will come a moment when I will feel vulnerable again. In that moment, I want someone to reassure me that we all forget useful things like phone chargers sometimes, and to tell me, only partly joking, that one hasn’t truly been exploring till they’ve stood alone at night in an unfamiliar, deserted town path with no back-up plan.
The outrage on Hosier Lane and who has the right to the city
The recent ‘painting over’ the large mural-esque images that make up much of Hosier Lane’s artwork was an important critique of the co-option of street art and a commentary on who ascribes value. Its point was missed by the very people it sought to critique. That Melbourne City Council is now seeking to criminalise those artists demonstrates that their appreciation of street art dissipates when it presents a challenge to their authority.
Fines: designed to crush
Fine-related offences serve only to subject a person to police interference, surveillance and, as they are drawn into the criminal justice system when they can’t pay their fines, to disciplinary control and attempts at normalisation. These are symptoms of the punitive management of poverty.
Being aro
Aromanticism is a way of describing people who experience little or no romantic attraction. For me, this means I don’t feel or understand such feelings the way others do. Actually, I find traditional ideas of romance – like dates, chivalry, flowers and chocolates, holding hands, getting married; that kind of thing – pretty repulsive.
All hole and no plot: fixing Australia’s literary sector
‘Simultaneously thriving and tenuous, Australia’s literary ecosystem is the ultimate alignment of ‘unmet need’ and ‘unfunded excellence’ … We are all gaps and all excellence. We are all hole and no plot.’
Unions, Aboriginal rights and the climate movement
The success of the climate movement is going to depend on its ability to connect with Aboriginal communities on one hand and the union movement on the other. Aboriginal leadership of the climate justice fight is vital not only because Aboriginal communities are the most marginalised in Australia, but because they have the values and the knowledge that the rest of the country needs to build a sustainable and fair society in this place.
Beyond the trees: last summer in Auschwitz
Nazism, and this place above all, operates a double annihilation. Firstly, the crime is committed. People are violated, undone, with every device that malice can conceive, and then they killed in ways people outside can scarcely imagine.
Then, secondly, one destroys the evidence.
The pseudo-politics of kindness
Kindness has had a makeover. Instrumentalised and monetised, it has been reimagined to align with the dominant cultural narrative of the feeling, individuated self.
Anti-ode to the nineties
To ‘us’, the white, suburban, middle-class, western youth of that era – the mascots of Generation X – the nineties felt like a letdown, a second-rate Elvis impersonation of the 1960s, a commercial pastiche of its iconoclasm.
The Witcher and sword and sorcery: revisiting the history of a reviled genre
Like Xena before it, The Witcher has shown sword and sorcery’s ability to adapt to changing audiences’ taste and expectations by expunging some of the genre’s most problematic characteristics, such as celebration of an omnipotent hypermasculinity.
Why free higher education must be part of a just transition
A just education system must serve the joint purposes of providing the skills needed for a radically different economy, and the knowledges needed to make possible, and to build, another world for us all.
I would rather be a cyborg
It is now twenty years since the first Matrix film was released. Written and directed by the Wachowski sisters, Lilly and Lana, the film became a social phenomenon, transforming science fiction in the process. Inspired by everything from cyberpunk literature to the philosophies of Jean Baudrillard and René Descartes to the Gnostic gospels, the film was a melange of images and ideas that nevertheless found a mass audience.