Critiquing Australian arts and culture cannot be a privilege that is afforded to just one community in a country that is home to people who identify with more than 270 ancestries.

What keeps you going? The idea that you have a kinship with earlier creatives, and, if you’ve got that novel in a drawer, that you might one day join their celebrated ranks? There’s a lot of people, wrestling with some echt-Williamsburg cutely miniaturist novel, who, if they were honest, have some image of themselves taking martinis on the terrace sometime with Gertrude Stein, Papa Hemingway, Jack Kerouac and Lena Dunham.

As I experienced adolescence and early adulthood, I learned to think that women should be ashamed of their bodies. I also garnered the idea that sex was an act women engaged in for the specific aim of pleasing men. Worse still, I believed that getting married and having babies was not only important and necessary for me because of my assigned gender, but also that it was actually what I wanted.

Elizabeth Kadetsky continues our series of regular cross-posts from international writers or journals with similar political or aesthetic sensibilities to Overland. Elizabeth Kadetsky’s short stories have been chosen for a Puschart Prize, Best New American Voices and Best American Short Stories notable stories of 2009, and her personal essays have appeared in the New York […]

Not a fan of media theorist Marshall ‘the medium is the message’ McLuhan? Okay, I don’t go in for the technological determinism either, but you can’t deny that the man was uncannily prescient when it came to predicting how our culture would develop – a ‘global village’, electric technology ‘reshaping and restructuring patterns of social […]