Doing theory or using theory: Australian feminist/women's history in the 1990s

Matthews, Jill Julius

doi:10.1080/10314619608595997

Cited by 5 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…In her explorations of contemporary feminist theory, she refers to what Meaghan Morris and Stephen Muecke have called 'a moralising genre of "theory"-socially groundless, history-free, weighed down by a mass of references to a "world" composed of other theoretical writings'. 34 Matthews argues:…”

Section: Want To Take Up Jean Curthoys' Notion Of Feminist Amnesia mentioning

confidence: 99%

Historicising feminist knowledge: Notes toward a genealogy of academic feminism of the 1970s

Jones

1998

Australian Feminist Studies

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Section: Want To Take Up Jean Curthoys' Notion Of Feminist Amnesia mentioning

confidence: 99%

Historicising feminist knowledge: Notes toward a genealogy of academic feminism of the 1970s

Jones

1998

Australian Feminist Studies

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“…As yet, Australian feminist academia has not experienced high profile repudiations from within (as with Daphne Patai in the United States for instance), though Indigenous scholars such as Jackie Huggins and Aileen Moreton-Robinson have directed much of their negative (and persuasive) critique of feminism towards the academy (Huggins, 1998; Moreton-Robinson, 2000). There have been retreats or returns to disciplines or origin (Curthoys, 2000), renewed commitments to scholarly projects informed by feminist theory though not bound by it or necessarily originating from it (Matthews, 1996) and depressing assessments of the limited impact of feminist scholarship on established disciplines such as history (Damousi, 1999). Feminist scholars who have ventured outside of the academy – into the media, for example – have expressed mixed feelings about the experience.…”

Section: Defining Academic Feminismmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As yet, Australian feminist academia has not experienced high profile repudiations from within (as with Daphne Patai in the United States for instance), though Indigenous scholars such as Jackie Huggins and Aileen Moreton-Robinson have directed much of their negative (and persuasive) critique of feminism towards the academy (Huggins, 1998;Moreton-Robinson, 2000). There have been retreats or returns to disciplines or origin (Curthoys, 2000), renewed commitments to scholarly projects informed by feminist theory though not bound by it or necessarily originating from it (Matthews, 1996) and 7 The term 'femocrat', denoting a feminist bureaucrat, is 'exclusively Australian [and] reflects the significance of Australian feminist engagement with government bureaucracies' (Watson, 1998: 420). Both the 'femocracy' and feminist academia emerged in the 1970s, with the former's peak influence in the 1980s and the latter, the 1990s.…”

Section: Defining Academic Feminismmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There have been retreats or returns to disciplines or origin (Curthoys, 2000), renewed commitments to scholarly projects informed by feminist theory though not bound by it or necessarily originating from it (Matthews, 1996) and 7 The term 'femocrat', denoting a feminist bureaucrat, is 'exclusively Australian [and] reflects the significance of Australian feminist engagement with government bureaucracies' (Watson, 1998: 420). Both the 'femocracy' and feminist academia emerged in the 1970s, with the former's peak influence in the 1980s and the latter, the 1990s.…”

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confidence: 99%

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‘Door Bitches of Club Feminism’?: Academia and Feminist Competency

Simic¹

2010

Feminist Review

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‘Feminist competency’ is a nascent term that has been identified in three general critiques of contemporary feminism that emerged in the course of research for The Great Feminist Denial (2008), a book on feminist debates in Australia that I co-authored with Monica Dux. The first critique highlights the importance of feminist knowledge, typically generated through the academy, to feminist identification. The second posits a perceived lack of feminist competency as an obstacle to feminist affiliation. The third assessment insists that spokespeople for feminism should be sufficiently competent. Using these responses to feminism as a starting point, combined with a reflection on my own framing as an academic feminist in the public sphere, I make a case for the potential value of ‘feminist competency’ as a means to assess the impact of academic feminism, in Australia and elsewhere.

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“…Jill Matthews estimated that in the period between 1991 and 1995, there had been almost forty books published in the field of Australian feminist history, as well as a substantial number of articles. 17 But paradoxically, despite this flurry of publishing, 'gender' has not always been considered as an interactive, relational category, or as having relevance to a range of categories and situations. This is not to say that gender has been entirely ignored by non-feminist historians.…”

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confidence: 99%

Writing Gender into History and History in Gender: Creating A Nation and Australian Historiography

Damousi

1999

Gender & History

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The creation of nations has traditionally been seen as men's business', write the authors of Creating A Nation. 'We wish to challenge this view of history', they state boldly, 'by asserting the agency and creativity of women in the process of national generation'. 1 By declaring this aim of interrogating the frameworks within which national history has been understood and women's role within it, Patricia Grimshaw, Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath and Marian Quartly were breaking new ground in writing Australian national history.While previous works had questioned the absence of women in the national landscape, this project sought to rewrite the enterprise of national history itself: This book starts from the premise that gender is integral to the processes that comprise the history of Australia -that political and economic as well as social and cultural history are constituted in gendered terms … It explores the appropriation of women's procreative powers by men in their assertion that they gave birth to the nation … It also considers the difficulty encountered by women who attempted to carve a place for non-party women's interests in a political system organised around the conflict between capital and labour, between employers and workers. 2 This approach signified an important departure point from national histories written before or since, because it not only diverged from existing accounts of adding 'women to Australian history', but, more boldly, unsettled received notions of how national histories could be imagined. Women's agency is situated at the centre of a range of contexts and situations. The process of nation building is examined, whether 'giving birth to babies, or in refusing to do so, in sustaining families and multi-cultural communities, creating wealth, shaping a maternalist welfare state or in inscribing the meanings of our experience in culture '. 3

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Doing theory or using theory: Australian feminist/women's history in the 1990s

Cited by 5 publications

References 3 publications

Historicising feminist knowledge: Notes toward a genealogy of academic feminism of the 1970s

Historicising feminist knowledge: Notes toward a genealogy of academic feminism of the 1970s

‘Door Bitches of Club Feminism’?: Academia and Feminist Competency

Writing Gender into History and History in Gender: Creating A Nation and Australian Historiography

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