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This paper critically examines competing media discourses about women's alcohol consumption as spectators at the Melbourne Cup, a historically prestigious annual Australian horse race. Taking a feminist poststructural lens, this paper identifies how print media representations of the female drinking subject can provide a multitude of subject positions that can be contradictory and subversive, offering possibilities for resistance to idealised middle-class gendered norms about women and drinking. This paper provides new insights into print media portrayals of "unruly" female spectators and their alcohol consumption at public events such as the Melbourne Cup. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Australia, the rise of the #MeToo movement coincided with a major public reckoning with sexual and family violence, through two royal commissions. Across #MeToo and the royal commissions, a common picture emerged whereby the mutually reinforcing role of institutions such as the media and law was considered central to the production of problems such as sexual assault. Drawing on insights from feminist science and technology studies on the constitution of realities, this paper examines how the role of institutions has been constructed in public debate since, through an analysis of Australian newspaper accounts of #MeToo from 2017–2020. Some accounts materialise #MeToo problems as the product of mutually reinforcing institutional dynamics. More commonly, these problems are constituted as the product of "institutional exceptionalism": rare features of particular institutions, not commonly replicated. We consider the implications of these media constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes up Chris Beasley and Carol Bacchi notion of "fleshy citizenship" to examine media texts of two instances in which Australian politicians breastfed in parliament. We identify the predominance of trivialising and sexualising discourses in the media texts about the breastfeeding women which worked to constrain maternal subjectivities and knowledges in legislative space. Following this, we illustrate how the presence of breastfeeding bodies debunks the myth of the citizen as a disembodied individual. In conclusion, we argue that by placing bodies at the centre of citizenship theorising, the social, material, historical and embodied specificities of knowledge production, and the consequences of exclusion for policy making, are highlighted. In summary, our application of Beasley and Bacchi conceptualisation of "fleshy citizenship" reveals that the presence or absence of different bodies matters for legislative agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]