AustLit

'An apparent resurgence in gender-specific marketing of products for children has been linked to post-millennial anxieties about the destabilizing of categories such as gender and nationality. Although links can be traced to past patterns of gender segregation in print culture for children, in this paper we are interested in tracking incongruities in texts in the present context. In this paper we analyze critically the franchise anchored around Andrea J. Buchanan and Miriam Peskowitz's The Daring Book for Girls, which was a publishing sensation in the USA and which led to an Australian edition as well as several follow-up texts. The inspiration for these books came from The Dangerous Book for Boys, originally published in the UK in 2006 by brothers Conn and Hal Iggulden, one of whom had been a teacher, and the Daring books for girls were a direct response to the success of the book for boys. Buchanan and Peskowitz, two American authors of mothering books, approached Iggulden and Iggulden seeking permission to use their design and concept to write a version for girls.'  (Introduction)

'Tom Zubrycki's documentary film Molly and Mobarak (2003) and John Doyle's television mini-series Marking Time (2003) were both released during the most vehement anti-refugee governmental regime of contemporary Australian history. Whilst the Howard government and the Ruddock and Vanstone ministries were intent on dehumanizing refugees, these film-makers - amongst other Australian artists - were intent on humanizing them. Afghani refugees were portrayed in these films attempting to create viable lives in rural Australia, as thousands of Afghani asylum seekers were detained by government policy in remote and offshore detention centres. This article considers Zubrycki's and Doyle's portrayals of Afghani refugees as political and aesthetic interventions into official discourses distancing the interests of 'Australians' from those of the refugee 'others' (Gannon and Saltmarsh 2006, 2007). At the same time as applauding these interventions, this article also attempts to map their limits by asking in particular whether the conventions of film narrative inevitably contain and tame. Does narrative carry with it, in these instances at least, a conservatism where empathy becomes most possible when the other is made over to become like 'us'?' (Publisher's abstract)