Publications

Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-garde (London: I B Tauris)

Susan Best (School of Art History and Art Education)

Is late modern art 'anti-aesthetic'? What does it mean to label a piece of art 'affectless'? These traditional characterisations of 1960s and 1970s art are radically challenged in this subversive art history. By introducing feeling the analysis of this period, Susan Best acknowledges the radical and exploratory nature of art in late modernism. The book focuses on four highly influential female artists: Eva Hesse, Lygia Clark, Ana Mendieta and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and it explores how their art transformed established avant-garde protocols by introducing an affective dimension. This aspect of their work, while often noted, has never before been analysed in detail. "Visualizing Feeling" also addresses a methodological blind spot in art history: the interpretation of feeling, emotion and affect. It demonstrates that the affective dimension, alongside other materials and methods of art, is part of the artistic means of production and innovation. This is the first thorough re-appraisal of aesthetic engagement with affect in post-1960s art.

Sex as Crime? (Routledge, 2008)

Philip Birch (School of Social Sciences)

This book brings together chapters by academics, researchers and practitioners to analyse how crimes such as sex work, domestic violence and rape and sexual assault have risen up the Government agenda in recent years. For example, the 'Paying the Price' consultation exercise on sex work in 2004, and recent legislation around sex crimes, including the Sex Offences Act (2003). This is a multi-disciplinary, social scientific, pro-feminist collection, which draws upon practice, empirical research, documentary analysis and overviews of research in the areas of sex work and sexual violence. Within Sex as Crime there are two distinct sub-sections: 'Sex for Sale' and 'Sex as Violence', but the broader and overriding link of sex as crime remains a paramount theme that spans the collection.

Chapters include discussions of the impact of new regulations on street sex workers, and of street sex work on community residents, the use of the internet by men who pay for sex and men who sell it, sexual violence and identity, sex crimes against children and protecting children online and working with sex offenders. Other chapters explore reasons for such offending behaviour.

SCEPTICAL HISTORY
Feminist and Postmodern Approaches in Practice (Routledge, 2007)

Hélène Bowen Raddeker (School of Humanities)

Sceptical History familiarises readers with the postmodern critique of history whilst also focusing on the question of how to practise postmodernist feminist (sceptical) history.

A highly original work, this book considers major themes including cultural, class and sexual identity and ‘difference’, weaving them into debates on the nature and methods of history. In so doing it arrives at new ways of doing ‘history and theory’ that do not exclude feminist approaches nor attention to non-Western history.

Anne Brewster, Angeline O'Neill and Rosemary van den Berg (eds), Those who remain will always remember: an anthology of Aboriginal Writing, Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2001

Anne Brewster (School of Arts and Media)

This major collection of indigenous writing  includes a range of work - poetry, essays, testimonials, songs and legends -  by  established and emerging  women writers, including Doris Pilkington Garimara, Pat Mamajun Torres, Charmaine Papertalk-Green, Glenyse Ward, Jennifer Sabbioni, Denise Groves and Pat Dudgeon. It has a substantial Introduction which examines how these writers use various literary and non-literary genres and also the central function of memory in indigenous and white Australia.

Gendering the World Bank: Neoliberalism and the Gendered Foundations of Global Governance (Palgrave, 2009)

Penny Griffin (School of Social Sciences)

Winner of the BISA International Political Economy Group (IPEG) Book Prize, 2010, Gendering the World Bank breaks truly new ground in traversing debates on gender, queer theory, development studies, and political economy

Gendering the World Bank offers a fresh and innovative analysis of the gendered foundations of neoliberal development strategy, revealing the normative articulations of gender and heterosexuality that are so central to the formation of social identities and economic behaviour in the global political economy.

Judith Butler: Live Theory (Continuum, 2006)

Vicki Kirby (School of Social Sciences)

Judith Butler: Live Theory is an invaluable introduction to one of the most influential thinkers in contemporary culture. Concise, accessible and comprehensive, the book explores Butler's ongoing contributions to gender theory, offers new insights into the central themes of her work, and considers the extent of her impact on how the discipline of gender studies has been shaped.

Writing Woman, Writing Place: contemporary Australian and South African Fiction (Routledge, London and New York, 2004)

Sue Kossew (School of Arts and Media)

Writing Woman, Writing Place analyses the ways in which contemporary women writers in the two "settler' colonies of Australia and South Africa explore notions of self, identity and place in their fiction.
Both societies are coming to terms with their often violent colonial pasts and also re-evaluating and re-examining the history of white privilege and Indigenous dispossession.
Three main strands run through the readings offered in this book - the theme of violence and the violence of representational practice itself, the revisioning of history, and the writers' consciousness of their own paradoxical subject-position within the nation as both privileged and excluded.

God’s Willing Workers: Women and Religion in Australia (UNSW Press, Sydney, 2005)

Anne O’Brien (School of Humanties)

God’s Willing Workers examines the ways religious values, beliefs and institutions have shaped and been shaped by the lives of women in Australia over 200 years. It explores the various and contradictory ways laywomen, nuns, missionaries and deaconesses grappled with church teachings on sexuality, marriage and family, gender roles, work and education.

Women Making Time (UWA Press, 2006)

Elizabeth McMahon (School of Arts and Media) &
Brigitta Olubas (School of Arts and Media)

How do women experience time in the modern world? What connections can be drawn between time, action and ethical human relations? From vantage points across the humanities and social sciences, Women Making Time looks at how women fashion understandings of the past, present and future.

Sex Trafficking (Willan, 2011)

Sanja Milivojevic (School of Social Sciences)

Trafficking in persons, particularly the trafficking of women into sexual servitude (sex trafficking) has generated much attention over the past decade. This book provides a critical examination of the international and national frameworks developed to respond to this issue - focused both on the design of policy responses and their implementation. Uniquely it brings together, and brings to life, the voices of policymakers, non-government agencies and trafficked women. The analysis is grounded in rich empirical work and research in Europe, Asia, Australia and North America.

This book examines how sex trafficking has been mobilized within anti-trafficking policies across the globe and offers a close examination of the dominant international framework, drawing upon a rich and diverse set of case studies: Australia, Serbia and Thailand. This analysis draws upon over 100 interviews with trafficking 'experts' across the three nations-including policymakers, police, immigration authorities, socialworkers, lawyers, UN agencies, local and international NGOs, activists. Critically, it also draws upon the voices of women who have been trafficked.