Lilith 17: 2008

'The long cumulative labour of transformation': A Response to Margaret Henderson

Zora Simic

Margaret Henderson’s 2007 keynote paper at the Lilith Symposium, ‘Wonders Taken For Signs: The Cultural Activism of the Australian Women’s Movement as Avant-Garde Reformation’ was not my first exposure to her work, and I hope it will not be my last. Henderson is both an advocate and critic of feminist history; she encourages feminist historians to expand the field without falling captive to the legend-making and grand narratives that made feminist history (at least in part) necessary in the first place. Henderson’s scholarship inspires multiple levels of engagement. It begins with the ‘light-bulb’ moment of recognition. Henderson opens us up to feminist scholarship. She does this not only by issuing historiographical challenges, but also through the example of the topics that animate her, most coming under the banner of feminism (at least, so far). Listening to her paper, and aware of the need to ‘respond’, I was inspired to read some of the Australian feminist novels I have been collecting with the intention of first reading them for (anticipated) pleasure, before ‘doing something’ with them. The last part of this response is directed to briefly discussing two works in particular – the ‘novel-without-men’ Remember the Tarantella by Finola Moorhead (1987) and (Kathleen) Mary Fallon’s Working hot (1989). Henderson has already covered some of this ground in her work on feminist cultural memory, but my emphasis here is different: through a brief examination of the texts, and of a subsequent debate between the two authors over the feminist (and literary) credentials of Dorothy Porter’s verse novel The Monkey’s Mask, I want to revisit an old question: what is ‘feminist literature’?

Wonders Taken For Signs

In persuasively making her claims for feminist cultural production as ‘avant-garde’, Margaret Henderson invites not only further engagement with her own examples; she also brings to mind a whole series of others, both historical and contemporary. For instance, between-the-waves feminists in Australia have made various claims for their mode of politics transcending the ‘hat and glove brigade’ stereotype that defines dominant historical representations of the activism of organisations such as the Union of Australian Women, the United Associations of Women and the Australian Federation of Women Voters. Their transcendence of that stereotype rests partly on the basis that they were actively engaged in producing feminist culture. Contemporary feminists are likewise active beyond the ‘hat and glove’ reputation. One of the more obvious contemporary examples of feminist cultural production is the feminist blogosphere, which in its infinite manifestations, succeeds in meeting at least some of the criteria for avant-garde, as outlined by Henderson and others: the breakdown in the distinction between creator and the consumer, the challenge posed to the ‘separation of art from life, art from politics, and life from politics’; the subversion of canonical hierarchies; and a radical transformation in the relations of cultural production.2

This response is not designed to extend these examples, nor to labour their possibly limited utility as ‘avant-garde’ expressions. As part of their emphatic pursuit of feminist tradition and political legitimacy, members of the post-suffrage Australian women’s movement did write songs, stage plays and produce magazines, but with the possible exception of magazines, this sort of work was only ever auxiliary and it would be audacious to make the case for a ‘cultural renaissance’ (let alone avant-gardism). Meanwhile, at any given moment, somewhere in the relatively privileged feminist blogosphere, some of its members are debating the form’s efficacy as art and politics. Such discussions often begin with the thorny questions of who gets to speak why, where, for whom, on what basis and for whose benefit. Participants usually agree that technology and globalisation both aid and hinder feminism, but beyond that, consensus is understandably hard to reach.

The examples I will use here are directly drawn from my own feminist research (post-suffrage feminisms) and my own feminist practice (if my addiction to feminist websites can be recast in such a fashion). I flag them here to illustrate how Margaret Henderson’s work gets me thinking. In the case of ‘Wonders Taken for Signs’, I concur with Henderson’s assessment that a ‘broad-ranging cultural history of the Australian women’s movement remains to be written’.3 I do so as a feminist historian who has written Australian feminist cultural history in an episodic fashion.4 I also respond as someone whose feminism was formed through cultural consumption: as a teenager and later as an undergraduate I read feminist novelists Lisa Alther, Erica Jong and Marge Piercy; I subscribed to BUST and BITCH magazines; I made mixed tapes of the music of Le Tigre, Sleater Kinney, Hole and the Indigo Girls; and I stuck reproductions of the art of Cindy Sherman and the Guerilla Girls on my wall. (Reading over that list I suspect I also turned to Australian feminist history to atone for the stark American focus of my early feminism). If some of the feminism I consumed was of the mass-produced, domesticated sort, taken as an eclectic whole, the feminism I was most drawn to also insisted on the connection between feminism and art.

To reiterate: these are not examples drawn directly from Henderson’s work, nor are they advanced as an accommodating fit for her thesis (in ‘Wonders for Signs’ she is more interested in feminists who produce art, rather than those who read Erica Jong in high school – though Henderson’s work leaves the impression that her analytical gambit is as wide as it is exacting). I offer them as examples of the recognition that is my first response.

What makes us think further than those moments of recognition is that Henderson’s discussion of feminist culture as avant-garde is rigorously historical, while also vigilant to the constraints of dominant historical narratives and their corrosive effects. She dates the Australian women’s movement as a ‘late modern avant-garde’ with the capacity to challenge contemporaneous ‘histories and understandings of Australian culture in the 1970s and 1980s’.5 The historical analysis proceeds on multiple fronts: Henderson is adding specifically feminist criteria to influential definitions of the avant-garde; she is recuperating the Australian women’s movement of this period for a history of the avant-garde, while also expanding Australian feminist history to give due consideration to the hitherto suppressed history of the women’s movement’s cultural activism. Further, as in her earlier scholarship, Henderson takes to task ‘mainstream and radical histories’ and other ‘discipline-based analyses’ that have thus far been unable or unwilling to move beyond their disciplinary constraints and preoccupations to ‘make space for radical culture on the national historical record’.6 And finally, as also demonstrated in her other work (most of it collected in or reworked for Henderson’s 2006 book Marking Feminist Times: Remembering the Longest Revolution in Australia7 ), the arguments made in ‘Wonders For Signs’ never appear provocative or paradigm-shifting for mere scholarly effect or advancement: Henderson’s work is clearly infused with a strong feminist politics and animated by a lively intellectual curiosity. She makes big claims for the feminist avant-garde (namely that they were genuinely avant-garde in a period – broadly defined as post-modern – in which this was considered impossible), but she convincingly backs up her claims and in doing so demands a critical (though optimistic) rather than complacent (and pessimistic) feminist politics.

Henderson’s critical rigour opens up, rather than closes off feminism and feminist analysis. ‘Wonders For Signs’ is the next instalment, rather than the culmination, in Henderson’s consistently insightful engagement with feminisms past and present, including the ‘anti’ and ‘post’ versions. Meaghan Morris, a feminist cultural critic Henderson admires, has described her own feminism in terms many feminist scholars would probably recognise: ‘Feminism for me has been as much about sporadic bursts of energy, interrupted projects, blocked paths, stretches of lassitude, and invaluably prolonged digressions as it has been about a long, cumulative labour of transformation’.8 This statement - as much a declaration of the rights of the politically engaged scholar as a confession - does not so much describe the published results of Henderson’s thinking, as suggest some of its possible pains, pleasures and goals. Morris’ statement is offered here as a compliment to Henderson, who always reads as though she has thought long and hard about what she is writing about, partly in the service of feminist ‘transformation’, but also because she appears to enjoy herself.

For Henderson, part of the ‘long, cumulative labour’, is evidently thrashing out how feminism came to be represented in such bleak terms, when experientially (and indeed empirically) it had been a movement with more than a fair share of ‘wonders’. In Marking Feminist Times, Henderson sought to understand the ephemeral edifice that is feminist cultural memory. As she became aware of the pessimistic turn in feminist representation in the 1990s, Henderson, at first, ‘hardly recognised the strange tales they told about the movement: often pessimistic, defeated and punishing’. These were ‘tales’ that emerged from the women’s movement and beyond it, and collectively they suggested that ‘the Australian women’s movement was finally gaining a belated past’. This past was not less traditionally archival, and more dispersed across a range of sites that privilege certain kinds of memory, whether that of the individual femocrat or a lone father in the throes of a masculinity crisis. This was also a past that was being remembered and represented in the context of the ‘end of history.’ While critical of the conservative politics that triumphed ‘post-history’ and post-modernity, Henderson does take seriously the ‘process of mourning and the pain of melancholia’ that infuse cultural memory of feminism produced in this historical moment. To do so is to recognise that for some ‘the women’s movement was the bearer of hope for fundamental social transformation in late twentieth century Australia’.9 Also, and more importantly, the strange, pessimistic tales of the 1990s are also part of a wider ongoing feminist struggle with temporality or what Henderson calls ‘revolutionary times’: she reminds us that feminism has always been somewhat conflicted or divided about how to mark feminist time, simultaneously manifesting a longing for a utopian past and a ‘revolutionary impulse to shatter the continuum of (patriarchal) history and to move into the future’.10

Read in the context of this earlier work, ‘Wonders Taken for Signs’ is not Henderson in resolution mode (having addressed the ‘emotions still aroused by feminism’ in Marking Feminist Times). The long, cumulative labour of transformation continues. Melancholia or catharsis cannot be the default setting for representing feminisms of the past, present or future. As she argues, by refiguring of the Australian women’s movement as avant-garde and ‘wondrous’, there are ‘implications for feminism’s self-understanding’ that would not only challenge pessimistic representations of feminism, but also a whole series of inter-related radical cultural histories: ‘maps, timelines, and genealogies will have to be redrawn’.11 Feminist historians have a lot of work to do. I offer a minor contribution here by revisiting a feminist debate in Australian literary circles in the late 1980s: can literature and politics mix? Or to put it another way, is there such a thing as feminist art or literature?

What is Feminist Literature? Spirals and Orgasms

In Elizabeth Webby’s entry on ‘Gender, representation and national identity’ in Australian Feminism: a companion (1998), the ‘rapid generic switching of Mary Fallon’s Working hot (1989), with its orgasmic fusions of language and desire’, and Finona Moorhead’s Still Murder (1991) and Remember the Tarantella (1987), are noted as ‘recent attempts by writers to represent lesbian sexuality’. Tarantella is also cited as having ‘been written to prove it was possible for an Australian novel to include no male characters’.12 This brief history from Webby somewhat reflects (and may indeed have informed) my sketchy prior knowledge of Working hot and Tarantella: the first had a reputation as a saucy read with feminist credibility that in key ways pre-figured Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask (1994) – the book my feminist book-club universally adored when we read it sometime in the mid-1990s. Tarantella I dimly recall was first given to me by my friend Lou about a decade after it was published: she felt it was important we both owned and one day read the feminist novel with no men in it. I found the original 1989 edition Working hot in a second-hand bookshop in Fitzroy, the suburb that was home to Fallon’s first publishers, in 2006.

By that stage, Working hot, with the author’s full name Kathleen Mary Fallon on the cover, had been published a second time by Vintage. As Alison Ravenscroft, one of the collective for the book’s original publisher feminist Sybylla Press, has since noted, the second edition of the text, released in 2000, is ‘in many ways a very different version to the first’. She elaborates:

Different discourses now circulate about desire, gender and textuality, which opens this text to new readings. … When the original typescript of Working hot arrived at Sybylla Press it 1986 it was read within a heady mix of materialist, poststructuralist, psychoanalytic and ‘postmodern’ feminisms’. … It seems that in the eyes of Working hot’s new publishers, this text is [in the millennium] best read as a naughty novel about sex.13

There is a whole history to be unpacked here about the ‘wonders’ that captivated some feminists in Australia in the 1980s (including those attracted to the sex-and-theory feminims: note, for instance that between its first and second publications parts of Working hot were excerpted in Grosz and Probyn’s 1995 anthology Sexy Bodies: The strange carnalities of feminism14 ). There is also more to unpack about the commodification of female desire (including the diffusion or recasting of same sex desire).

However, what I want to explore briefly (with plans to explore this topic further) is how two very different books – Remember the Tarantella and Working hot – and their authors provide some examples of and arguments for feminist literature. What is feminst literature, and, particularly, what is it since the 1980s? Anna Gibbs and Alison Tilson, the editors of the 1982 anthology Frictions (which was published three times by Sybylla Press in the 1980s, and in which Fallon and Moorhead both featured) gave some indication of the difficulty of defining feminist writing when they lamented in their introduction that the ‘famous formula “by women, about women, for women” lets feminist editors down. … It could just as easily apply to much of the writing that comes out in Cleo or Cosmopolitan’15. Writing in a decade during which the question of what constitutes feminist writing was getting a good work-out in Australian feminist circles, Moorhead and Fallon had much to respond to, including each other. I will explore their divergent notions of feminist literature near the end of this piece through Fallon’s objections to Moorhead’s review of Porter’s Monkey’s Mask in the pages of literary journal Southerly in 1995.

Tarantella: Female truths in feminst words

Moorhead’s novel Remember the Tarantella began as a series of diagrams. The Tarot, astrology, mythology, the double helix and mathematics were each influential. Novelist Christina Stead, writer-in-residence at Monash University in Melbourne when Moorhead was a student in the early 1980s, had noted a mathematical quality to Moorhead’s earlier fiction.16 Stead also posed a challenge to her student: ‘it’s very difficult to make an interesting novel with no men in it at all’. This challenge appealed to Moorhead, who had been developing theories of the feminine aesthetic in literature since 1974.17 (Though this is as good a time as any to mention that Tarantella does contain male characters, just not central ones). In the author’s note to the 1987 publication, and in subsequent interviews and reflections, Moorhead would reiterate these origins as well as stressing the collective labour involved in producing the novel. She dedicated the book to those ‘who helped me write it’; this included twelve women readers, ‘of different star-signs’, who read and contributed to an earlier draft that blew out to the extent Moorhead’s publisher wanted a third of its bulk excised. Yet for the author the three years of collaboration with her women readers was a necessary and fundamental phase: ‘I had to make a great act of faith in women’.18 The back cover blurb of the 1987 Primavera edition, in a similar tone, announces Moorhead as ‘passionately committed to the enduring values of literature’.

The content of Remember the Tarantella continues Moorhead’s interest in the individual woman and her collective (or what she calls the ‘everywoman’). The ‘alphabet’ of main characters (twenty-six of them, one for each letter of the alphabet) consists of a lesbian feminist collective, their lovers and their friends, in Australia and around the world. In historical time the women are situated ‘circa 1980-81’, whilst the motif of the tarantella spider also claims them for mythical or folkloric time. So, the novel opens with the birth of Iona, ‘the queen of heaven’, in the autumn of 1947 in Melbourne and concludes with a coda titled ‘The Dance’ in which ‘fifty women gather for a rite beneath the full moon’ in 4553 B.C. This short description of Remember the Tarantella that I have just provided suggests that the novel is both experimental and formal, combining an interest in genre subversion with an observance of older, perhaps even ancient, tropes. Both of these qualities are extended by Moorhead’s mix of omniscient narration, everyday speech, epistolary communication, time travel, interior stream-of-consciousness prose and migrating first person voice. More than any other organising principle, Moorhead also makes use of the spiral, which as Henderson notes, functions in the novel as a structural device and a metaphor: it ‘symbolises women’s time, energy, global sisterhood (as the spiral is never broken) and an ongoing and inevitably victorious spread of lesbian feminism’. And if the spiral links lesbians in mythical time, then the ‘network’ of feminist politics and especially the network of sexual relationships, link the characters in historical time: the beginning of the 1980s. The novel is arguably as directed towards representing the quotidian details of same-sex desire as it is a mythic lesbian history.19 The personal truths experienced by Moorhead’s characters can be as blunt as they are profound. So Frances learns that ‘There was both male and female sexuality within herself. The real difference was between making love with someone and masturbating’.20

With her abiding interest in how feminists ‘mark time’ Henderson reads Remember the Tarantella as productive nostalgia: if there is a ‘strong undercurrent of mourning’ for ‘ended relationships [and] for failed political experiments … the spiral shape [also] mitigates against melancholia’ and promises renewal.21 Without labouring the point here, we may also entertain the idea that the novel itself is the end product of an experiment in feminist literature: Moorhead abandoned the draft informed by her twelve female readers, but she nevertheless reinforced that the book ‘was written out of the pronoun ‘we’ [whereas] the ‘I’ book is what most first novels are. Me me me’.22 Before the publication of Tarantella, Moorhead was already developing her definition of literature informed by feminist politics. In 1985, she wrote that women writers are forced to compromise because they are ‘aware of the power of the unsung [but] are prepared to explain in male language the small parts of it we comprehend’.23 Tarantella, with its bold and sometimes earnest inventiveness, can perhaps be read as an attempt to foreground what it is that women comprehend in their own words. This is in tandem to Moorhead’s expressed commitment to her version of fictional truth: the ‘fine line of tension between your known truth (what you want to say) with the structures and details of invention’.24

Working hot: Sex, language and subversion

In conversation with Maryanne Lynch in 2000, Fallon rejected the suggestion that her work could escape the ‘history of writing’. She harboured no such ‘utopian or originary delusions’. She reinforced the point she had made in the programme to her opera Matricide – the Musical (1998): ‘there’s no hope for a New Age Matriarchal Salvation nor an Ecstatic Lesbian Conversion moment in the piece, just the sound (perhaps the ‘old language’) of the gendered subject relentlessly attempting to reconceive herself to a full humanity within the massive cultural machine in which she is so thoroughly misconceived already’. Then she quoted Teresa de Lauretis: ‘The representation of gender is its reconstruction’.25 Without unfairly consigning Moorhead to the annals of utopian radical feminism, Fallon is speaking in what Lynch calls ‘another register’. So what sort of feminist literature is Working hot?

Ravenscroft remembered being struck by the ‘strange beauty’ of the opening passages: ‘It was like a joke with a sob in its heart’.26 What could she mean? E.C.R. SAIDTHANDONE solos in the Opera ‘The Wound and the Message’, the third section of Working hot: ‘life could have been a great thing/ with wings/ instead of a small thing with mouths’.27 In section one ‘Milieu’, the ‘reader meets most of the important characters’ - One Iota and Kinky Trinkets, the older and the younger, and Freda Peach and Toto, the lovers who exchange love-notes that mix up words and deeds in ‘Sextec’, the second section (sample: ‘inside you (as far as I went that is) was that wet cave/ was that grotto and there was moisture running down….does it/ frighten you that I let words wank do my dirty work for me’.28 ). In ‘Milieu’, the women trade secrets about what they’ve discovered in life while they experiment with how to express it:

I am very lazy at telling stories because I’ve noticed That often the first or last lines are all that are really necessary or interesting … after their first night together (to-get-her) he put her hand on his penis and said ‘I’d like you to meet a friend of mine’ and eighteen months later at his farewell party he said ‘well thanks for the good times’.29

The women watch and touch each other, and watch as others watch and touch them. They pick up ‘curse[d]evidence’ everywhere: ‘lads just remember if women didn’t have cunts we’d be throwing rocks at them’.30 Snatches of running commentary on women, from the wise to the dubious to the appreciative to the downright vile, are overhead on buses, in bars, read in magazines, over the radio and on television. They’re also lifted from books, put to music and attributed to ‘Inside Information’. ‘Foucault Foocolt Foocoat’ is quoted: ‘power twists itself into the subject/ through the subject’s pain and/ pleasure’.31 Feminism features as politics, as portraiture, as obstacle to and conduit for sex, as theory, as something that was in the air ‘back in the seventies’ and into the eighties. In section five, ‘Which Craft?’, ‘TEN male writers’ on the BBC or ‘The Great Male Writers of Western Culture/ …standing close and clammy on the shelves’ suggest:

…in my father’s house there are many mansions but not one room for me thank god.32

Ravenscroft explains that for feminists like herself in the late 1980s (and Grosz who wrote the blurb on the back cover of the first edition) Working hot was read foremost ‘in terms of debates current at the time concerning language and desire, power and representation, the possibilities of resistance, transgression and subversion’.33 The text certainly invites it, and thus Ravenscroft resists the ‘re-packaging’ of the novel as a book about sex (though it is an astonishing book about sex). Her point of course is that Working hot is not just about sex. Yet as the 1995 skirmish between Fallon and Moorhead over Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask indicates, by the middle of the next decade – and certainly by the time Working hot was massaged insofar as possible (which is still not that far) into the conventions of a ‘book about sex’ in 2000 – ‘feminist literature’ or ‘writing’ had been refigured or reinvented or ‘queered’ by writers such as kathy acker.

Fallon and Moorhead debate the ‘wonders’ in The Monkey’s Mask

In 1989, Moorhead and Fallon were both published in a collection of feminist erotica tiled Moments of Desire: Sex and Sensuality by Australian feminist writers, published by mainstream publisher Penguin.34 Moorhead then was not averse to the erotic in feminist literature (indeed Tarantella was full of it), but she objected to what she called the ‘woman-hating’ sort: ‘The Monkey’s Mask, like the work of kathy acker, indulges in woman-hatred, and because it does this very cleverly it will receive critical acclaim’. In this 1995 review of the book in Southerly, she questioned the practice of ‘strangulation orgasm’ represented ‘between girls’ in the book: ‘I find it hard to envisage how a woman can come while strangling another’. She read into the sadomasochism a rejection of ‘lesbian feminists like me’. For Moorhead, The Monkey’s Mask ‘takes the lesbian feeling and turns it into a tool to inflict pain’. Dorothy Porter also failed, in Moorhead’s view, to properly resolve the ‘crime’ at the heart of the detective story.35

In the spring issue of Southerly in that same year, Fallon responded to what she called ‘Moorhead’s breathtakingly literal and moralist reading’ of The Monkey’s Mask. Where Moorhead read ‘woman-hatred’, Fallon found ‘ethics and morality, sexual, erotic and otherwise’. In retort to ‘the Right Reverend F. Moorhead’s’ review, Fallon gave in to her urge ‘to write in bold capital letters – FINOLA! THEY ARE FICTIONAL CHARACTERS. PORTER MADE THEM UP. DON’T GO TO THE COPS. NOONE WAS REALLY KILLED.’ For Fallon, Moorhead’s critique was obviously indebted to an outmoded lesbian separatist feminism and its ‘assumptions and presumptions about representation, literature, politics and how they function and interact’ rather than to the ‘sophisticated textual strategies’ that have proliferated in an increasingly mediated world. To finish, Fallon rejected Moorhead’s criticisms of Porter’s ‘marketing’ skills by holding out Porter’s involvement in the holistic production of her book, from inception to design to publicity, ‘as a precedent’.36

Moorhead and Fallon were both key figures in the development of an identifiable feminist literary culture in Australia in the 1980s. They published material in the same anthologies, sometimes worked with the same publishers and presumably read each other’s work (we know Fallon read Moorhead’s: she found Tarantella a ‘dreary puppet show’ and recalled ‘one laugh on page 140 of Still Murder’36 ). Neither writer shied away from feminism or literary representations of lesbian sexuality. Both contemplated the relationship between feminist politics and literature. Both authors produced ambitious, experimental fiction that resisted classification or genre. Yet one of them hated The Monkey’s Mask and the other loved it. This brief excursion into their key works of this period provides some clues and answers to why, as well as a historical snapshot of shifting feminisms and debates that still resonate today (Moorhead, for instance, raised her reviewer eyebrows at the idea S&M can be construed as ‘empowering’). It hopefully also conveyed some sense of the ‘wonders’ and the ‘signs’ of feminist cultural production that await further examination in the broad culture history of the Australian women’s movement that Henderson’s work encourages and anticipates.

Zora Simic

Zora Simic is a Lecturer in History at the Australian National University

Endnotes

1. Meaghan Morris, ‘Preface’, Too Soon, Too Late: History in Popular Culture, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), xiii.
2. Margaret Henderson, ‘Wonders Taken for Signs: The Cultural Activism of the Australian Women’s Movement as Avant-Garde Reformation’, Lilith, 17 (2008).
3. Henderson, iIbid., p. 1.
4. Two examples of my own work on feminist culture can be found in past issues of Lilith: ‘On Reading The First Stone Ten Years Later’, Lilith, 15 (2006), 18-31; ‘A Hall of Selective Mirrors: Feminism and the Work of History’, Lilith,10 (2001), 1-17.
5. Henderson, Ibid.,14-15.
6. Henderson, Ibid.,15.
7. Margaret Henderson, Marking Feminist Times: Remembering the Longest Revolution in Australia, (Bern: Peter Lang, 2006).
8. Morris, iIbid., xiii.
9. Henderson, ‘Introduction: The Making and Meaning of Feminist Cultural Memory’, Marking Feminist Times, 13-26.
10. Henderson, ‘Conclusion: The Dilemmas of Revolutionary Time (s)’. 239-244.
11. Henderson, ‘Wonders’, 16.
12. Elizabeth Webby, ‘Gender, representation and national identity’, Australian Feminism: a companion, general editor Barbara Caine, (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998), 115-123.
13. Alison Ravenscroft, ‘Working Hot: A Book, its Publishers, The Author and Her Reader’, Meanjin, 2, (2001), 74-82.
14. Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn, Sexy Bodies: The strange carnalities of feminism, (London: Routledge, 1995).
15. Anna Gibbs and Alison Tilson (eds.), Frictions: An Anthology of Fiction by Women, 3rd edn. (Fitzroy, Vic: Sybylla Co-Operative Press, 1987), 1-2.
16. Kate Grenville and Sue Woolfe, Making Stories: How ten Australian novels were written, (St Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1993), 208.
17. Finola Moorhead, ‘Author’s Note’, Remember the Tarantella, (Leichardt, NSW: Primavera Press, 1987), ix.
18. Grenville and Woolfe, Making Stories, 220.
19. Henderson, Marking Feminist Times, 114.
20. Moorhead, Tarantella, 139.
21. Henderson, Marking Feminist Times, 121.
22. Grenville and Woolfe, Making Stories, 222.
23. Finola Moorhead, Quilt: A Collection of Prose, (FitzroyMelbourne: Sybylla Co-Operative Press and Publications, 1985).
24. Moorhead, Quilt, 4.
25. Maryanne Lynch, ‘Another Register: A Conversation with Mary Fallon’, Meanjin, 2, (2000), 95-108, 99.
26. Ravenscroft, Working Hot, 75.
27. Mary Fallon, Working hot, (Fitzroy: Melbourne: Sybylla Co-Operative Press and Publications Ltd.,1989), 131
28. Ibid., 45.
29. Ibid.,15
30. Ibid.,201
31. Ibid.,131
32. Ibid.,223
33. Ravenscroft, Working Hot, 80.
34. Susan Hawthorne and Jenny Pausacker (eds), Moments of Desire: Sex and sensuality by Australian feminist writers, (Ringwood, Vic: Penguin,1989).
35. Finola Moorhead, ‘She Doesn’t Prove Who Did It, Anyway’, Southerly, 5, no. 1, (Autumn 1995), 177-192.
36. Kathleen Mary Fallon, ‘Ham-Fists in Those ‘Male-Sized Golf Gloves’, Southerly, 5, no. 3, (Spring 1995), 191-197.
37. Ibid., 197.