News and Events in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies
Gender and Modernity Group wins funding for international events
The Gender and Modernity Group has won a Humanities and Creative Arts International Science Linkage grant to bring Professor Tani Barlow to Sydney in December 2010. Professor Barlow is T.T. and W.F. Chao Professor of History and Director, Chao Center for Asian Studies at Rice University (U.S.A.). She is a renowned scholar of gender, culture and history in South East Asia and while based at Usyd she will lead a range of research activities around the theme of "Modernity and Gender in the Asia-Pacific Region". These will include a masterclass for postgraduate students and a symposium featuring other international visiting academics.
The Gender and Modernity Group has also received an Academy of the Humanities Science Linkage grant to run an international roundtable on gender, modernity, technology and labour to be held at the University in December. This will bring together speakers from Europe, North America and the Asia-Pacific to create an international research network to understand international chains of dependence on women’s labour. Confirmed speakers include professors Marian Baird, Leopoldina Fortunati, Rosalind Gill, Meaghan Morris, Lisa McLaughlin, Vicki Mayer, Pun Ngai and Judy Wajcman.
Welcome to new Master of Cultural Studies students and congratulations to Scholarship holders
2010 sees students from ten countries (and every continent apart from Antarctica) enrolled in the department’s Master of Cultural Studies by coursework. We extend a warm welcome to those who have travelled to study with us, as we do also to our new Australian students. In particular congratulations are in order for Roberto Castillo Bautista and Jacinthe Flore who are both recipients of Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences International Postgraduate Coursework Scholarships worth $23,500 over the year.
New book by Dr Jennifer Germon
Gender: A Genealogy of an Idea
Gender stands as one of the great conceptual devices of the twentieth century. It has become such a part of the English language that it seems indispensable and even ahistorical today. Yet until the 1950s, gender in English marked relations between words rather than people. Gender: A Genealogy of an Idea represents a critical intervention into the concept of gender. It traces gender’s historical specificity from its mid-twentieth century origins in sexology through the present and demonstrates the complex relation that the intersexed have to the concept. In doing so, this text applies a fresh approach to the study of gender as an object of knowledge and embodied experience.
New book by Associate Professor Catherine Driscoll
Modernist Cultural Studies
"A timely reassessment of the fraught relationship cultural studies has had with the term ‘modernism’ amounting to a reevaluation of the place that both can occupy in discussions of cultural modernity, resting on a commonality or refrain of innovation, relativity, contingency, critique, and a pluralistic disciplinary methodology."–Peter Childs, University of Gloucestershire
For many scholars, cultural studies is viewed as a product of postmodern criticism and as the antithesis of modernism. In Modernist Cultural Studies, Catherine Driscoll argues persuasively that we must view what we call cultural studies as a direct continuation of the innovations and concerns of modernism and the modernists.
In making her case, Driscoll provides a fresh take on arguments–some seemingly unresolvable–that pivot on modernism’s desire for novelty. Defining modernity as a critical attitude rather than a time period, she describes the many things these ostensibly different fields of inquiry have in common and reveals why cultural studies must be viewed as a fundamentally modernist project.
Casting a wide net across the shared interests of modernism and cultural studies, including cinema, fiction, fashion, art, and popular music, Driscoll explores such themes as love and work, adolescence and everyday life, the significance of the everyday, the popular as a field of power, and the importance of representation to identity and experience in modernity.
Be at the Crossroads, reflecting on the ‘State of the Industry’
2010 sees the return of the Association for Cultural Studies’ major biannual conference, Crossroads. The academic director of next year’s event – which is at Lingnan University in Hong Kong from 17-21 June – is Sydney Gender and Cultural Studies professor Meaghan Morris. Professor Morris is also immediate past president of the Association. Crossroads is already considered one of the key international conference in the field, the local link will see a bumper crop of GCS staff and postgraduates at the 2010 meeting. Click here for more information.
Another conference associated with the department was the State of the Industry (University of New South Wales, 26-27 November 2009). Organised by department member Dr Melissa Gregg, and supported by the Cultural Research Network, the aim of the conference was to gather early-career practitioners of cultural studies in order to reflect upon the institutional conditions that shape cultural research and pedagogy today. GCS colleagues Associate Professor Catherine Driscoll and Dr Kane Race also presented, as did Professor Margaret Sheil (Chief Executive Officer, Australian Research Council) and Professor Graeme Turner (Convenor, ARC Cultural Research Network).
Three 2010 ARC awards for Gender and Cultural Studies
The department is well-represented in Australian Research Council (ARC) awards this year. Dr Natalya Lusty was awarded a four-year discovery grant to support a project she is running jointly with Dr HG Groth: Dreams: A Cultural History, 1840-1940. (Congratulations also to Dr Lusty on her receipt of a University of Sydney Brown Fellowship to undertake a project into feminist manifestos.)
Meanwhile, Professor Meaghan Morris is a co-investigator on Between Film and Art: An International Study of Intermedial Cinema, working with Dr Adrian Martin at Monash University and Professor Nicole Brenez from the Sorbonne/Paris Cinematheque.
Dr Fiona Allon was successful in her application to become an ARC Future Fellow. The new ARC Future Fellowships scheme is aimed at retaining highly qualified mid-career researchers in Australia. Fiona will work for five years on her timely project: The Wealth Effect: A cultural analysis of prosperity, financialisation and everyday life in contemporary Australia.
Gender and Modernity Research Group founded
The Gender and Modernity Group, an inter-disciplinary research cluster based in the Department, was lauched in 2009. GMG promotes research in the humanities and social sciences on gender across the key social, political and historical coordinates of modernity. The inaugural symposium of the group was held in August to commemorate the life and work of the late Eve Sedgwick. ‘Remembering Eve Sedgwick: The beginnings, present and future of queer theory’ featured a morning workshop for local and interstate postgraduates and an afternoon of seminar papers by leading Sedgwick scholars Melissa Hardie (USyd), Anna Gibbs (UWS), Elizabeth Stephens (UQ) and Elizabeth McMahon (UNSW).
The group’s next symposium was Thinking Fashion and Dress, and held on Tuesday 15 December, 2009 at the University of Sydney New Law School, Seminar Room 442, Eastern Avenue, University of Sydney.
It featured talks by:
- Fiona Allon (Sydney),
- Prudence Black and Catherine Driscoll (UTS: Insearch & Sydney),
- Stella North (Sydney) and
- Alison Gill and Abby Lopes (UWS),
with a keynote address from Professor Jennifer Craik (UC).
Department hosts distinguished visitors
The Gender and Modernity Group has also facilitated recent and forthcoming visits by distinguished scholars. In September Professor Sara Ahmed, Professor in Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London presented the paper ‘Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness’. Professor Ahmed suggested that feminist histories might offer an alternative history of happiness, arguing that happiness is what makes some things into goods (happy objects are those that are anticipated to cause happiness). She introduced the concept of “conditional happiness,” when one person’s happiness is made conditional upon another’s, to explore how, for some, happiness means following other people’s goods.
On Monday, December 14, the Gender and Modernity Group is hosting a one-off special summer masterclass with Professor Rosalind Gill (Open University). Professor Gill is a leading feminist scholar in Europe who has written a number of influential books and articles on gender, feminism, the media and creative industries, such as Gender and the Media (2006) and the forthcoming New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Identity (with Christina Scharff). She will lead a workshop about postfeminism for postgraduate students.
The Department has hosted several other visitors through its regular series of Friday afternoon seminars. They included Professor Fernando J. Garc'a Selgas (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) who was also Visiting Scholar in the department from January to July, undertaking work on gender and violence. Professor Garc'a Selgas has previously been a visiting scholar at Cambridge University, UC Berkeley and UCLA. Members of the department also spent periods abroad in 2009. Associate Professor Catherine Driscoll was visiting scholar at the Institute for Research into Women and Gender at Columbia University in New York.
In January 2010 two eminent guests will arrive to become visiting scholars in the department. Professor Koichi Iwabuchi (Waseda University) will undertake work on his forthcoming book, Undoing Cool Japan: Culture and Dialogue in the age of brand nationalism (tentative title). Professor Iwabuchi is an expert in media, culture and transnationalism.
Lyndsey Stonebridge, Professor of Literature and Critical Theory at the University of East Anglia, will also be a Visiting Professor in the department. Lyndsey works on war, anxiety, and psychoanalysis in modernity and is currently completing a book, Writing After Nuremburg. She has been a Visiting Fellow at Cornell University and worked with eminent scholars and writers including Dominick LaCapra, Jacqueline Rose and W.G Sebald.
Recent books by GCS staff: property, performance, pleasure
Renovation Nation: Our obsession with home
Fiona Allon, Renovation Nation: Our obsession with home (UNSW Press).
Renovation Nation asks why we have become so wrapped up in our homes. It explores the ways we are distorting our lives in the pursuit of prestige and tax-free capital gains as we play the real estate game with mindless passion. Is our anxiety about safety and security, about keeping the ‘wrong’ people out of Australia, or off ‘our’ beaches, the flipside of this obsession?
Unimaginable Bodies: Intellectual Disability, Performance and Becomings
Anna Hickey-Moody, Unimaginable Bodies: Intellectual Disability, Performance and Becomings (Sense).
Unimaginable Bodies radically resituates academic discussions of intellectual disability. Through building relationships between philosophy, cultural studies and communities of integrated dance theatre practice, Anna Hickey-Moody argues that dance theatre devised with and performed by young people with and without intellectual disability, can reframe the ways in which bodies with intellectual disability are known.
Pleasure Consuming Medicine: The Queer Politics of Drugs
Kane Race, Pleasure Consuming Medicine: The Queer Politics of Drugs (Duke University Press).
In Pleasure Consuming Medicine, Kane Race argues that official discourses about drug use conjure a space where the neoliberal state can be seen to be policing the "excesses" of the amoral market. He explores this normative investment in drug regimes and some "counterpublic health" measures that have emerged in response. These measures, which Race finds in certain pragmatic gay men's health and HIV prevention practices, are not cloaked in moralistic language, and they do not cast health as antithetical to pleasure.
Congratulations to the authors!
New appointments
The Department extends a warm welcome to colleagues that were appointed in 2009 – Dr Fiona Allon, Dr Melissa Gregg, Dr Anna Hickey-Moody and Professor Meaghan Morris. Professor Morris is joining Gender and Cultural Studies in order to teach on the new Master of Cultural Studies by coursework and to provide mentoring for postgraduate research students. She is immediate past president of the Association for Cultural Studies and a leading figure in the field internationally. Drs Allon, Gregg, and Hickey-Moody bring a range of qualities to the department including specialisations in finance and everyday life, cultural labour and cultures of disability, respectively. Dr Shé Hawke, poet and PhD graduate of Gender and Cultural Studies, was appointed an Honorary Associate of the Department. Her book Depot Girl was nominated for several literary awards, including the Miles Franklin Award, and was shortlisted for the Colin Roderick Award for best book published on an Australian topic in 2008.
Glocalising Sex and Gender
To mark the beginning of the academic year 2009, the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, together with the CRN’s Identities and Communities node ran a two-day workshop: Glocalising Sex & Gender: Consumption, Culture, Practice. Held on Thursday 26th – Friday 27th February, the conference was convened by Professor Elspeth Probyn. In the vein of transnational study, it focussed on the concrete ways in which glocalised gendered and sexual effects are produced. Members of Gender and Cultural Studies presented a number of papers and were joined by speakers from other areas of Australia and beyond. Our international visitors were: Dr. Ulrika Dahl (Södertörn University, Sweden), who ran a workshop on feminist methodologies, representation, and research within communities; and Professor Chengzhou He (Nanjing University, China), who gave a plenary on feminism and the Chinese context, which he considered through the film Farewell My Concubine.