Lilith 16: 2007

Editorial

Welcome to the sixteenth edition of Lilith, the only Australian journal dedicated to the publication of feminist history. The theme of this issue follows from last year’s symposium, ‘A Feminist History of Violence: History as a Weapon of Liberation?’ The theme was chosen, not because feminist critiques of violence are new, but rather because we believe that feminist critiques of violence remain necessary.

In a way, to say that this theme is particularly relevant at the moment would be to disregard the ongoing violence against women and other disempowered communities both in Australia and out. Nonetheless, we feel that there is a gaping need for a feminist analysis of a number of things happening today. As feminist historians we know that using gender as a category of analysis provides an important perspective, not just on the past, but also on events taking place in the world around us.

The Federal Government’s recent paternalistic intervention into Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory is one such event which we believe merits a feminist analysis. The rhetoric of ‘protection’ used to justify this intervention, and the gendered lines along which the Government’s policies are being justified and implemented, are greatly elucidated by an historical understanding of how gender and power interrelate. This said, feminism’s position in relation to this issue is complicated by its complicity, historically, with the colonising project in Australia.

The relevance of a feminist, postcolonial perspective on current events extends beyond Australia’s borders. Australian troops continue to lend support to the occupation of Iraq. Whilst public scepticism about the occupation grows, it is important to note that critiques of gender inequalities were and continue to be used to justify the invasion of first Afghanistan and then Iraq. What remained unsaid was that a disproportionate number of women experience war in the form of sexual violence. And a hugely disproportionate number of women are forced into sex work as a result of the poverty and community destruction caused by war.

This gendered lens is under threat closer to home with the implementation of the Melbourne Model at Melbourne University, in which gender studies has come under special attack. And, while student protests were initially able to save gender studies from being cut altogether, the attack remains real, with the major being listed as ‘vulnerable’ in the recent Arts curriculum review. The implications of a university without gender studies are profound. In addition to the reduction of classes that explicitly analyse gender, the elimination of gender studies will also impact on the viability of a feminist community within the university that encourages critical thought about gender and, thus about power, and which gives us the theoretical tools to affect change.

We know also that this year, for the first time in decades, Melbourne University’s history department has not offered a single course in Indigenous history. And we know that Indigenous students remain underrepresented at the university. The university is a site of privilege. Whilst we should all have equal ability to voicing our experiences and critiques of the world, we do not. The university also offers a platform from which to speak. The denial of feminists’ and Indigenous peoples’ access to that platform inhibits our ability to speak feminist critiques of violence and to prevent the manipulation of feminism in the interests of colonialism.

In this context, Lilith continues to create a space for dissenting voices. In her Keynote Address, Angela Woollacott provides the broad context for a discussion of feminism’s complex relationship to violence, canvassing the role of violence in patriarchy and gender relations, the relationship between war and citizenship, women’s appropriation of and resistance to violence, and the ways in which history itself can be used as a weapon of liberation. Lee-Ann Monk’s response considers the unsettling complexity that ‘non-heroic’ female perpetrators bring to a discussion of feminism’s relationship to violence.

This theme continues through three articles on women, protest and terrorism. In a nuanced look at representations of Red Army activist Ulrike Meinhoff, Leith Passmore considers the ways in which the violent feminine tends to be stereotyped as ‘unnatural’, and how a recent theatrical production has, by casting terrorism as an essentially performative act, created a space in which to think about female terrorists like Meinhoff as conscious actors in their own lives, discursively constituted and choosing to represent themselves in different ways at different times. Moving from the realm of representations of female protest to that of protest itself, Lindsey Churchill uses the story of women in the Weathermen, an offshoot of the United States campus-based movement Students For a Democratic Society, in the late 1960s and 70s. In this article she shows that widespread misogyny in the organisation, and its commitment to violence as an agent of change produced a range of responses from its female members, which suggest a more complex relationship to political violence than has previously been acknowledged. Continuing the theme of women working for radical social change, Marta Iñiguez de Heredia considers the place of anarcha-feminism to the anarchist movement, arguing not only for its historical importance, but for the continuing relevance of feminism in the anarchist struggle against oppression in both the public and private spheres.

While the complex ways in which violence has been perpetrated, appropriated, or rejected as an agent for social change by women is emerging as an important area of study, it is the continuing sexual, social and symbolic violence against women which continues to present the most urgent challenges to feminists around the world. In her timely critique of the Howard Government’s ‘re-conceptualisation’ of domestic violence, Amy Webster shows how de-gendering acts of violence, and emphasizing the supposed dysfunctionality of families, culture or communities, allows policy makers to avoid acknowledging the broader national social context of violence against women. In her analysis of the Wolfenden Strategy, which currently governs prostitution legislation in the UK and Australia, Kate Gleeson similarly uses historical and contemporary critiques of the strategy to problematise the idea that prostitution is either ‘aberrant’ or ‘inevitable’. Despite its rhetoric of protection, she concludes, the primary motivation of the Wolfenden strategy was, and remains, the desire to conceal, though sanction, the prostitution of women. Moving from legislative to personal constructions of violence against women, Tanya Serisier’s ground-breaking article on rape narratives explores what she calls the foundational mythologies of anti-rape feminism; she argues for the need to critically interrogate teleological narratives based solely on the authority of experience.

Experience is a central aspect of the next three articles. The first two address the role of white activists/agents in both maintaining and disrupting colonial structures which oppress Indigenous peoples, arguing for a greater degree of self-reflexivity as a starting point to actual dialogue between oppressed and oppressors. Using the example of the 2006 Camp Sovereignty protest, Clare Land explores the ways in which, in the absence of substantive equality, relationships between Indigenous activists and the non-Indigenous people who seek to support them can become colonising. And, in an innovative piece which sits in the nexus between creative writing and critical analysis, Kathleen Conellan relates her own experiences growing up in Apartheid South Africa in a powerful critique of the links between women, water and whiteness. Finally, Susannah Thompson explores the lived experiences of stillbirth for twentieth-century Australian women, and the constant cycle of reinterpretation involved in remembering and interpreting these experiences in the context of an oral history project. The diversity of her interviewees’ attitudes towards stillbirth points to a richness of experience and perception which, she argues, is crucial to an understanding of the multiple meanings that perinatal death could have.

In the context of ongoing attacks on women’s rights in the name of neo-liberalism, neo-colonialism, and anti-political correctness, the articles in this year’s edition of Lilith remind us not only of the multiplicity of women’s voices and the diversity of our politics, but also of the enduring importance of gender as a category of analysis. In the face of ongoing violence against women, and an increasing awareness of women’s potential complicity in institutional and state-sanctioned forms of violence, this analytical framework is equally important for engagements with the present as it is for analyses of the past. By problematising both the idea of violence and its historical and ‘natural’ relationship with gender, these articles challenge us to think critically about our pasts. By proposing new ways of seeing and being in the world they show us that history can, indeed, be a weapon of liberation which can help to imagine, and build, new futures.

Lilith Collective 2007: Kelly Butler, Vicki MacKnight, Erica Millar, Carla Pascoe, Amy Webster, Rebecca Carland, Claire McLisky, Katherine Pace and Claire Tanner