Search

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia, as governments urged citizens to limit their movements and socially isolate as a protective strategy, the home became a place layered with new meanings. Feminists have long challenged characterisations of the home as a sanctuary. Such characterisations and feminist claims against them took on new complexity and significance during the pandemic. This article investigates access to abortion care in South Australia under COVID-19 restrictions, as a case study of the contest over the safety of the home. It examines the pre-existing legislative requirements placed on those in need of abortion that, in the context of the pandemic and newly available access to telehealth medicine, both illuminated and increased the exceptional status of abortion as a form of healthcare and complicated the gendered meanings of safety and home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Co‐produced research holds enormous value within the health sciences. Yet, there can be a heavy focus on what research participants think, do and know; while the researcher's responsibility to explore and re/work their own knowledge or praxis tends to escape from view. This is reflected in the limited use of co‐production to explore broad structural distributions of health and risk(s). We argue this missed opportunity has the potential to unfold as what Berlant calls a 'cruel optimism', where something desirable becomes an obstacle to flourishing and/or produces harm. We explore challenges to involving lay populations meaningfully in health research amidst a neoliberal cultural landscape that tends to responsibilise people with problems they cannot solve. Methods and Findings: Drawing together principles from hermeneutic and feminist philosophy, we develop a novel methodology for co‐producing research about determinants of health and health risk (using a case study of alcohol consumption as an example) that centres on what researchers do, know and think during research: Women's Thought Collectives. Discussion: Keeping the constructed nature of social systems—because they shape ideas of value, expertise and knowledge—in view during co‐produced research illuminates the potential for cruel optimisms within it. Such reflexive awareness carves out starting points for researchers to engage with how social hierarchies might (tacitly) operate during the co‐production of knowledge. Our work has broad utility for diverse population groups and provides important considerations around the roles and responsibilities for reflexive co‐production of knowledge at all levels of health systems. Patient or Public Contribution: The development of these ideas was sparked by working with lay participants during the Women's Thought Collectives for Kristen Foley's doctoral research 2021–2023, but undertaken without their direct involvement—in accordance with the responsibilities of researchers in the reflexive co‐production of knowledge. Forthcoming publications will address the outcomes and processes of this work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the end of World War Two 1.2 million people were officially labelled Displaced Persons (DPs). Stateless, or refusing to return home, the majority were resettled in other countries including Australia which, like most receiving nations, saw these refugees primarily as a labour force for post-war economic recovery and expansion. However, unlike other nations, DPs destined for Australia signed a work contract which committed them to two years of assigned labour after arrival. This paper considers two specific subsets of these DPs, the 'unsupported mothers' (single, widowed, and divorced mothers with young children) and female unaccompanied teenagers. It illuminates the intersections of gender and displacement on the labour status of female DPs in post-war Australia and traces the continuities of coerced labour in their experiences of war and migration. We argue that the early life of female DPs in Australia provides an example of a continuum of forced and coerced labour which had begun under the shadow of war in Nazi Germany and continued after migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In March 2020, when emergency powers legislation was invoked in South Australia to manage COVID-19, the South Australian Abortion Action Coalition (saaac) had been campaigning to decriminalise abortion since 2015. The group quickly realised that COVID-19 restrictions would amplify pre-existing difficulties for abortion providers and their patients and focused its efforts on persuading members of the government and the Chief Public Health Officer to use emergency powers to suspend aspects of abortion law to enable better and safer access to abortion services, specifically medical abortion via telehealth. This article offers an account of saaac's 2020 campaign and asks why the needs of abortion patients and their healthcare providers were sidelined at the height of the COVID-19 lockdown in SA in early 2020. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pinker's 2018 work Enlightenment Now maintains his earlier commitment to Norbert Elias' sanguine reading of post-Enlightenment human history. It replicates the problems that historians identified with his 2011 work, The Better Angels of Our Nature. Moving past Pinker's theory does not, however, necessitate a rejection of theoretical or meta-historical approaches to the history of violence. Other recent works concerned with the history of violence offer rival theoretical positions and insights that are central to their success as works of history. Pushing past Pinker's claim that Elias' work is 'the only theory left standing' for historians of violence, this article demonstrates how theory has been used successfully by other historians. It interrogates the characteristic theoretical claims and concerns of four major approaches: new imperial history, comparative genocide studies, histories of war and society, and the history of gendered violence, and negates Pinker's claim that no other theoretical tradition is appropriate for the study of the history of violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1986 and 1990, three pioneering histories of domestic violence in the United States and Australia appeared. Their publication coincided with a verdant period in the generation of historical accounts of women's experiences and debates about the linguistic turn, histories of masculinity and race that were transforming the field of feminist history and of history more broadly. While these books established the field of domestic violence history, in their writing and their reception they also raised issues of representation at the heart of these broader debates. I trace these histories and their reverberations with an emphasis on Australian feminist historiography, and examine closely the important legacy of Judith A. Allen's early historical work in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women who began their lives as ‘New Australians’ in migrant centres, arriving from refugee camps and war-ravaged homelands, brought with them a range of interpretations of good health and its management. In post-WWII Australia, the medicalisation of maternity and infant welfare intensified in the context of a renewed anxiety about population and recent medical developments. This article investigates the systems and quality of care given to pregnant women, infants and new mothers in government funded accommodation centres. This care was delivered in the highly politicised context of a mass migration scheme sold to the host population as coming at minimum social and economic cost. We assess the impact of this political context on the care that was provided and reveal health care settings to be crucial sites for the examination of the complex biopolitics of gendered citizenship within the mass migration scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In September and October 2015, the story of detained Somali refugee ‘Abyan’ unfolded in the Australian media. A victim of rape on Nauru and seeking an abortion that could not be obtained on the island nation, Abyan was escorted to Sydney where she was to attend an abortion clinic. She was ultimately returned to Nauru without having had an abortion. This paper situates Abyan’s story alongside other stories from Nauru and in a longer history of reproductive coercion in Australian Immigration Department accommodation since the Second World War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article historicises the meaning of miscarriage in twentieth century Australia. It identifies a number of crucial turning points in scientific interpretations of the causes and treatments of miscarriage that produced shifts in the communication of responsibility to women for their own pregnancy losses. It also describes the changes that a number of medical technologies, including pregnancy detection, foetal visualisation and assisted conception, have brought to bear on the pregnant and prepregnant body. These technologies proliferated a variety of forms of reproductive loss during a period in which women experienced enhanced prospects of conception, as well as foetal, infant and maternal survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1940s and fifties, wealthy woolgrowers in and around the rural southern New South Wales town of Yass gave generously to Charles Chauvel to enable the making ofJedda (1955). These same farmers employed members of the local Ngunnawal community in domestic and rural labour. The issues of segregation, assimilation, child removal and Aboriginal employment that are represented inJeddaresonate in the histories of communities in this region. When the film was released some watched it at a glamorous official opening in Sydney while others attended the local, segregated cinema. This article places oral history accounts of seeingJedda (at the time of its release) alongside the archive, to explore the nature of the intersections and segregations that shaped relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous residents of this area. It also explores the complex subject positions articulated in these memories that attempt to come to terms with personal histories of segregation in an era of revisionist histories and reconciliation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay is presented which examines 21st-century discourses of miscarriage as related to political, legal, and historic discourses of abortion and personhood. Particular focus is given to miscarriages occurring within the first 20 weeks of pregnancy. According to the author, medical discourses do not speak to these early miscarriages and are centered around the fetus, thus limiting women's ability to express their losses. It is suggested that discourses should emphasize the legal personhood and personal subjectivity of the women involved in miscarriages rather than those of the fetuses. Other topics include feelings of failure and guilt experienced by some women after miscarriage, in-vitro fertilization (IVF), and laws concerning violence which results in miscarriage.

This article examines the depiction of Jedda's Sarah McMann and Australia's English-born Sarah Ashley. In each character there is a maternal desire that drives the plot to which responsibility for the children's fate is attributed. National assimilation policies are expressed emphatically through Sarah McMann's desires for the aboriginal child, Jedda, and the failures of assimilation are played out in the child's tragic fate. In Australia the plot is resolved by returning the Aboriginal child, Nullah, to his grandfather. This only becomes possible because Sarah Ashley's agenda for intervening in the removal of Nullah by the state, in the hope of raising him as her own child, is realized. Within the logic of the narrative, the outsider status of the recent immigrant Sarah Ashley enables her to become a clear-sighted agent in the return of the child to his family. This article considers the significance of these two representations of the white maternal in the context of the history of child removal policies, Bringing Them Home and the National Apology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article asserts that women's liberation produced a number of texts that sought to disentangle female identity from motherhood. It describes how these texts, which developed ideas about women's freedom and individuality, have been crucial to the substantial material changes that became possible for many Australian women. Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex" is one of these texts that has become vital to women's studies and has influenced many other texts of the women's liberation movement.