AustLit

'I’ve been in therapy for nearly half a decade and I’m only now re-connecting with aspects of myself that I tried to leave behind. Still, now, in my late thirties, I find myself too embarrassed to look back. From where I stand, it is heroic to relive the emotional and physical experience of being teenage again and braver still to write and publish a memoir about it. And so, despite being a teenager clearly in thrall to shame and confusion, Miro Bilbrough’s memoir goes back and fearlessly recounts some of the intense, awkward, difficult and beautiful details that mark her transition to adulthood.' (Introduction)

'This article critiques Donna Haraway’s slogan ‘make kin not babies’ via a reading of her SF tale ‘The Camille Stories’. It does so by considering the relationship between the care labour practices involved in making both kin and babies. The article has two central operations. It is an explicitly eco-social feminist argument against the use of making kin as an uncomplicated theoretical standpoint in the environmental humanities. At the same time, it deconstructs the iconic feminist ambit to be liberated from housework. These parallel operations emerge by characterising making kin as a kind of housework, which is a deeply ironic evaluation of Haraway’s slogan. Overall the article is a response to the question: how is the work involved in making kin both the same as and different to the labour of making babies? The answer is constructed through the method of literary close reading, paying attention to genre and plot of ‘The Camille Stories’ alongside Fiona McGregor’s novel Indelible Ink [2010. Melbourne: Scribe Publications] and Quinn Eades’s all the beginnings: a queer autobiography of the body [2015. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing]. These comparative readings enable a reckoning with the gnarly and contradictory implications of ‘making kin’ across contemporary environmental humanities and feminisms.' (Publication abstract)

'One morning I listened to Fiona McGregor talk about her writing on a podcast as I washed a dusty pink cashmere sweater I bought from an op shop for five dollars. Although it was before nine and I was still at home, I had started work for the day. Multitasking by doing laundry and listening to a podcast felt legitimate to classify as ‘on the clock’ because of several factors: the time and day of the week (Monday, 8.45am), the match between the manual activity and a key theme in my current research (housework) and, primarily, the direct relationship between the podcast and my task for the morning (drafting this review of McGregor’s A Novel Idea). While a complicated, informal, internal algorithm determined the legitimacy of this action, I felt justified nonetheless. Even if the difference between work and life is only ever one of degree, I won’t tell HR.'  (Introduction)

'If it is the job of a phenomenologist to describe conscious experience, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology does so in a way that collapses the distinction between one’s psychic life and one’s material situation. Its author, Astrida Neimanis, challenges us to reimagine how individual human bodies — constituted of approximately 70 per cent water — are thoroughly implicated in the planetary hydrocommons.' (Introduction)