feminism
Gillard and cultural narrative: the bride
It begins: the media making sense of our first female Prime Minister on the hustings, cycling through cultural narratives, understanding Gillard through particular narratives of the feminine. I remember reading at one point a series of academic articles around the narrative framing of Pauline Hanson within the context of symbols of feminine power; the idea being that at times of crisis, a strong feminine figure comes to the fore, embodying the ‘traditional’ cultural values under threat, in the manner of Boadiccea or perhaps Thatcher or Indira Ghandi or Aung Sun Suu Kyi. This figure speaks out to protect her ‘children’, the disenfranchised, in Hanson’s case the ‘Aussie Battler’ or whatever. This was a way of making sense of the transgressive female figure in the public domain; the idea that this happens only when mother-love, a force of nature not understood in the domain of men but experienced as very powerful and pure, overwhelms and the invader must be stopped. Culturally we recognise this as an appropriate narrative of feminine power.
This, though, is not that. Gillard has to some degree positioned herself within ‘traditional’ values with her reactionary comments on gay marriage and asylum seekers, but there’s no real sense that she’s more representative of the battlers than Abbott, particularly since today’s announcement that he’ll be dropping WorkChoices as a policy. There’s some value perhaps in exploring the idea that Gillard represents a kind of protestant work ethic and mainstream and Abbott a more marginalised and subversive Catholicism, echoing older debates in Australian social and political history, but by and large, that is not what I see happening here.
Instead, when I look at this photo, what I see is the unmarried older Gillard going to the altar, so to speak; Gillard as Australia’s Bride, visiting the Governor General to get permission to marry. We’re already engaged to her, but she hasn’t moved into the Lodge yet, and she’s decided that she won’t until we walk her down the aisle and go through the formalities. This is the path she must take before we can make sense of her as a wife/mother of the nation.
cross-posted at terriblefabulous
Julie Bishop #3
Thankyou Annabel Crabb for this article, which contains a fantastic description of Bishop frantically hunting down her supposedly secret ballot paper to prove that she didn’t vote for the man she’s now standing behind, and also this:
“People are calling her The Cockroach,” one MP told ABC Online.
“She’d survive anything.”
Mr Abbott defended his new deputy during their joint press conference on Tuesday, declaring “She’s a loyal girl!” and patting her.
Liberal Stoush: Bishop Fail
I like the Liberal rumble that’s going on at the moment; I enjoy the thought of Malcolm Turnbull privately comparing himself to Alexander the Great as he tackles the Gordian Knot (“familiar as his garter”).
A generally problematic aspect of the Liberal leadership issue, however, is Julie Bishop. Where is she in all this? I mean, supposedly she’s the deputy leader of the Opposition, which believe it or not could be quite a powerful position. Not so powerful as if Bishop had actually stood up and taken the shadow treasury portfolio as was her right, but certainly, on paper, the deputy should be regarded as a natural contender for succession in such a situation as the Opposition currently finds itself. And so I ask, where is she?
It always seemed clear that Bishop’s inclusion in the Opposition lineup was sadly a token gesture, designed to mirror the Labor situation and spin spin spin to counter the clear fact that the Liberal party is a dinosaur of the patriarchy. But I have some sympathy with opinion that regardless of how you get somewhere, what you do when you get there is the important thing. I mean, ideally one would get to the deputy leadership of a major political party on merit alone, but this has never ever been the case in tweedy Liberal land – witness the career trajectory of Alexander Downer - and when you’re contending with a patriarchal right-wing structure operating mostly through cronyism, you surely take your token appointment as part of that structure and run with it as best you can.
Sadly it seems clear that the Liberals have promoted somebody who is apparently unable to take advantage of the current chaos to announce a leadership bid or at least to make some undergroundy rumbling noises of interest in pursuing the leadership in the future. I mean, if Bishop didn’t have leadership ambitions, surely she wouldn’t have accepted a leadership role in the first place? And given this, now is the time to do something with that ambition, surely?
This is mildly unfair to Bishop, of course; given how awful the Liberal party really is, it may be impossible for any woman to ever be the leader. But that’s no reason not to try. The fact that she’s not indicated any wish to do anything but use her potentially key position to be a kind of helpmeet to the prating GPS-inbred leader of the day, melding effortlessly into the patriarchal narrative, makes me wonder what on earth she’s doing in politics and why on earth she accepted the position in the first place.
Naturally, given the circumstance of Bishop’s election to the role of deputy, there’s this inherent comparison with Julia Gillard, who, despite the apparent solidity of the Rudd leadership, is constantly being touted as the next Prime Minister. This is a shocking commentary on the Liberal party as an institution that is a) poison to women of talent and b) more willing to promote a person of apparently little talent to what should be a key leadership role than to make a genuine effort to actually recruit women of talent to its ranks.
McKew's Honorary Women In Oscar Wilde's ALP Branches
I know that many feminists are disappointed that a woman is still to be elected as Commander in Chief in the United States… and that 2008 represents for them something of a missed opportunity.
I have a slightly different view. I think the girl won and her name is Obama!
Do not get married.
Otherwise you will have to frequent websites which host horrifying, eye-opening, borderline-illiterate tales of one bride’s quest for perfection as defined by a precisely engineered confluence of capitalism and feudalism masquerading as‘typical’ wedding stories and you will want to kill yourself and also grow your leg and underarm hair very long and then kill yourself again:
We are still tossing up if we should get chair covers from a supplier and put them on ourselves to save a bit of money or to get a company that the Sydney Glass Island uses. It’s double the price but hey- trusting 4 groomsmen to tie over 100 perfect bows - Mmmm I don’t think so!!! Still loving the tiffany green sash- not sure if we go organza or satin yet- May even go pink. The carpet is new on the boat and its bright blue so I have to get something that compliments the royal blue carpet.
and
I also got something else done- something I’ve wanted to do for a while - since they stopped growing. Yes you guessed it. I got a breast augmentation. I went from a B cup to a D cup… My sweetheart neckline is going to look AMAZING!!!
Sarah Palin II
I watched Sarah Palin’s speech to the Republican Convention today, and as I watched it I felt really, really happy. So what if the reason she’s there is because she’s the anti-Hilary? It was an exciting moment, knowing that a female candidate can have access to the same networks of nepotism and fuckwittery that gave America such sterling candidates as George Bush Jr and Ronald Reagan. Despite the sadness I feel when I compare her to Hillary, it is a win for feminism when women are able to be as charismatically mediocre as men in public life - albeit still having to do it backwards and in high heels. Mind you, it’s a loss for public life.
It seems pretty clear that the Palin family weren’t properly briefed on what exactly to do when the cameras were rolling. I guess in the past, Republican candidates’ families didn’t have to be briefed on the done thing; there was that moneyed tradition of public benevolence masking private alcoholism that ensured previous Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates and their families knew with every fibre of their beings that that smiling and waving was the correct way to deal with national attention, rather than adopting the middle class signature move of slouching and rolling one’s eyes in embarrassment which is performed with aplomb by Palin’s prospective son-in-law. My favourite moment is at around 12:40, where Palin’s youngest daughter is caught on camera licking her hand and using it to smooth her baby brother’s hair.
Not Catching the Bouquet Good!
Labor and the Status of Women
One of the things I was specifically watching for in this Ministry Shuffle was the Ministry for the Status of Women. Where would Rudd put this? How would it relate to other portfolios?
Status of Women has been marginalised and diminished throughout the Howard decade-or-so. Whereas during the Hawke-Keating era, Status of Women was a very important base for the women’s lobby (the “femocrats”)and had an important cross-portfolio coordinating role, Howard lost little time in closing off its avenues of influence, merging the important policy units and piddling away decades of expertise, removing its hardcore focus on economic as well as social issues, and appointing the monstrously inept Pru Goward to a variety of influential feministo positions. Somewhere along the line the portfolio lost its “status” and gained some “issues” (perhaps mirroring life or whatever, insert joke here).
Predictably and welcomely, Tanya Plibersek has landed the portfolio after serving it strongly in her Shadow capacity. Her “primary” responsibility is Housing, and one assumes that she will be working closely on that portfolio with Jenny Macklin, who is taking up the cabinet position of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs. This places Status of Women strongly within social and community services portfolio, as opposed to being within a more economically oriented portfolio.
It is a bad omen that this position, which should have a considerable presence across portfolios, statistical analysis and ensuring policy impact statements and moving key initiatives, is allocated outside of the central team. Importantly, Plibersek is not a Cabinet minister. Women is not a Cabinet position. Labor’s women’s budget statement indicated that Status of Women would be a central role in the new Government, so I’m wondering how this will be achieved outside of cabinet.
And how, ghettoised in social services and outside of cabinet, is the Status of Women portfolio going to have alot of input into, say, industrial relations? After all, with high casualisation in low-paid feminised industries, an increasing gap between mens’ and womens’ full-time take home pay, and issues like childcare and maternity pay at the forefront of national debate, IR is a women’s issue and and economic issue.
Anyone who thinks this isn’t a significant portfolio has been fooled by a lack of statistical and policy analysis into thinking Status of Women is not an issue anymore.
O Frabjous Day! Callooh! Callay!
Early this morning I danced the Peter Garrett to the Jackson Five’s “I want you back” (refrain: “We’re coming back”. Yes, yes, I know.).
It was pretty ace, realising suddenly that Tony Abbott and Mal Brough were gone and probably wouldn’t be back. I mean, people around me were fixating on the whole Howard seat loss thing, but for me the most important aspect of The Change really was getting rid of these fanatics and their fringe politics, putting them back in their boxes where they belong. It is highly satisfactory that freak fundo groups like Catch the Fire and Pastor Danny Nalliah will no longer have outrageous access to the highest echelons of power to deliver their messages of support from God. I cannot conceive of what the country would look like in three years’ time, had the Howard Government been re-elected, and this kind of influence continued.
Today, sober, I pause to reflect on the fact that the senior Coalition member in the country may well be Karlene Maywald, a National and Minister for the River Murray, Water Security, Regional Development, Small Business, and the Minister assisting the Minister for Industry and Trade, in the SA State Labor Government. I don’t know what that means, really, but given the shit state of the NSW Labor Government especially, this probably won’t last for long.
I hope that Labor’s Government will do their best to steer Democracy away from the current near dessication brought on by a double house majority, and not be distracted by the plush carpet in the ministerial wing. In the meantime however, I will celebrate the revitalisation of democracy by a Labor Government and a tricky upper house, with a sad note reserved for the loss of Andrew Bartlett. Also, our new Lady Deputy is making history of the kind that we with Lady Parts have hoped for and dreamt of. I ask any male readers to reflect on this especially, because in a time of nominal equality it’s sometimes necessary to ram home the idea that a big part of realising that one can do, is seeing that others have done so first.
Taxi Drivers and Me.
The Tele has undertaken a special investigation into pervy and sexual assaulty taxi drivers, which has elicited this statement from a defensive NSW Taxi Council rep:
“It’s a shame that in this day and age that women have got to do this but they should always sit in the back,” Mr Harrison said.
He conceded that a handful of taxi drivers still took a woman getting in the front as a virtual invitation to sex.
Now, as with many women who regularly catch taxis by themselves, I have my fair share of “sexy” taxi driver stories. Some are hilarious, some are disturbing and border on the violent. I’d like to think that they could be put down to the taxi driver behaving in a completely inappropriate and occasionally illegal manner, and not to any action that I’ve undertaken. It’s a constant struggle to believe this, to reconcile the knowledge that I am not responsible for some gross dude sexually harassing me, with the knowledge that risk minimisation is a legitimate and viable strategy for self preservation. In what other situation would I consider getting into a car with a stranger? Anyway, I choose now to tell one of the worse stories, in which I did indeed sit in the front seat of the taxi.