AustLit

'The COVID-19 pandemic and the resurgence and spread of the #BlackLivesMatter movement and protests within the US and beyond have drawn fresh attention to the usefulness of intersectionality as an analytic and political lens through which to comprehend the world. Intersectionality demands we notice and address structural inequality and its effects on particular groups and individuals and eschews a universalist approach that glosses over—for example—the fact that some people are much more likely to die of disease or at the hands of police or in prison than others, or indeed to protest about it. Its champions argue an intersectional approach should inform everything from humanitarianism to health policy to protest movements to arts funding to domestic violence services, all of which have been recalibrated in 2020 as COVID-19 exacerbates and creates social inequalities. These advocates include intersectionality’s central theorist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, a Professor of Law at Columbia University and UCLA, who through her Intersectionality Matters! podcast and #SayHerName campaign has provided cogent analysis and activism around both the pandemic and #Black Lives Matter.'

'How do we get the measure of the phenomenon that is #MeToo? Both deeply personal and profoundly structural, #MeToo has been described as a movement, a moment, and a reckoning. Some critics have dismissed it as man-hating or anti-sex; sceptics as a misguided millennial distraction from more serious feminist concerns. Others distinguish between a ‘good’ #MeToo (focused on eradicating sexual harassment from the workplace) versus a more capacious #MeToo (aimed at destroying the patriarchy). That #MeToo originated from the activism of African-American civil rights campaigner Tarana Burke in 2006 has not negated representations of #MeToo as White Feminism, but nor have the privileged white women who have been its most high-profile faces been delivered justice either.' (Introduction)

'When Anne Summers first met Germaine Greer at a raucous house party in Balmain in the early 1970s, she threw up in front of her after too many glasses of Jim Beam. Almost fifty years later, she muses that perhaps that early encounter was one of the reasons why they ‘never really connected’. After reading Summers’ latest memoir, Unfettered and Alive, in tandem with Elizabeth Kleinhenz’s Germaine: The life of Germaine Greer, I can think of a few others.'  (Introduction)

'Who would want to be a high-profile feminist in the age of social media? I sometimes find myself thinking this as I scroll through the Facebook and Twitter feeds of well-known feminists that I follow or the comments sections of their columns, awed by both their output (I’m an academic – so my work is slow in comparison) and struck by the high volume of cyber-hate that comes in the wake of even the most benign opinion pieces. Earlier this year, Guardian columnist Jessica Valenti went offline after a troll threatened to rape her young daughter. It’s hardly surprising that she and other ‘professional feminists’, to use Valenti’s own descriptor, sometimes take social media breaks, or that navigating misogyny online is central to the contents of several popular feminist books released in 2016. These include Valenti’s Sex Object, Shrill by Lindy West – and Clementine Ford’s Fight Like a Girl. All of these books are memoirs (more or less), that describe (among many other things) the peculiar experience of being a feminist with a public built online, or as Ford wryly puts it, ‘a man-hating, separatist feminazi hell-bent on installing a matriarchy and imprisoning men as its slaves’.' (Introduction)