On opposition to Helen Clark’s UN bid

Type
Polemic
Category
Land rights
Racism

I was thirteen years old when Helen Clark pinched my land. She told the country my family were ‘haters and wreckers’. I suppose this is another way of saying, it’s personal. Clark, New Zealand’s second-longest-serving Labour Prime Minister and apparently Australia’s choice for the next United Nations Secretary-General, is at the centre of a national tantrum after Marama Fox, the co-leader of the centrist Māori Party, told media that her party ‘cannot support [Clark’s] nomination [for Secretary-General]’.

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Type
Reflection
Category
Culture
The media

Leakism: a guide

A ‘good caricature, like every work of art,’ said the Italian Baroque painter, Annibale Carracci, ‘is more true to life than reality.’ This is why, I think, Bill Leak’s cartoons are so often failures. Like several pundits that take up column inches at the Australian these days, his views are so out of touch with the majority of the population that they can – in moments of ideologically charged rage – seem almost deranged.

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Type
Reflection
Category
Culture

A compatibility of perversities

The Argonauts came to me at a time when my mind and identity were as thirsty as each other and it resonated with me in the rare way that only words spoken with nakedness can. When your world involves the constant migration from an institutional academic realm to a queer one, as mine does, an insistent tinnitus of rage creeps up on you because you know which one holds the power and which one you care about more.

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Type
Article
Category
Activism
Debate
Politics

Toward a left-wing theory of a post-Brexit world

The Conservatives have not ruled as the Nasty Party, but as the compassionate helping hands whose dedication to austerity is to fulfil its redemptive promise of a utopian society in which everybody pays back their debts. Where Thatcher used austerity policies to divide and rule, today’s Tories instead utilise them to actualise ordinary Britons’ full capitalist potential and even their inner happiness.

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Type
Column
Category
Reading
Writing

On lush comforts

Recently I stumbled on a tweet that claimed to ‘love’ my podcasting appearances because ‘her lush plot summaries save me ever needing to read the book or watch the film’. The accusation of prolixity stung: I’ve always felt ashamed of writing, speaking and being … too much. As I considered the excessive lavishness of my descriptive powers, my blue-grey eyes grew luminous with tears, smearing my eyeliner into wings of woe.

Kupe-piece
Type
Polemic

If you have a racist friend

Some of my friends in Australia consider my regular amount of anger towards the continuous oppression of Black and Brown people ‘a sensitivity’ – as though I enjoy baiting an argument rather than having constructive, helpful conversations about how to be more proactive in the struggle for equality. The friend I argued with, who religiously blasts Lemonade like it isn’t a letter written to Black women telling them that they deserve equal rights but something fun to learn the dance moves to, believes equality has already arrived.

Members of the League of Social Justice who raided Parliament House appear.jpg in the Brisbane Police Court 1939
Type
Article
Category
History
Nationalism

From knuckledusters in Parliament to One Nation

On Friday 4 August 1939, while members of the Queensland State Labor Caucus were having their morning meeting in a room in Parliament House in Brisbane, a group of 37 men, calling themselves the ‘Social Justice League’, entered, making threats, carrying batons, coils of barbed wire, hammers, knuckledusters and other tools. Barricading themselves in, they demanded a 40-hour week, lower taxes and tolls, unemployment relief, cooperative ownership of primary industry, and a ‘stabilised price’ for farmers.

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Type
Article
Category
Brexit
Misogyny
Politics
Violence

The gender politics of assassination

The recent killing of UK MP Jo Cox is one such example. In no major news outlet in the anglophone world was her death labelled an assassination, despite substantial evidence suggesting the attack was ideologically motivated. Cox was allegedly murdered by Thomas Mair, who gave his name in court as ‘Death to traitors, freedom for Britain’ and was reported to have shouted ‘Britain first!’ repeatedly when he stabbed and shot the West Yorkshire politician after a meeting with her constituents. Considering her involvement in the campaign for Britain to remain in the EU, it is no great leap to conclude that her killing was indeed an act of violent political antagonism.

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Type
Review
Category
Cinema

Coming home to No Home Movie

No Home Movie is, at first ironically perhaps, precisely that: a home movie consisting primarily of conversations between Akerman and her mother Natalia (Nelly), recorded in the months before Nelly’s death. Yet this title also contains an important negation of the ‘domesticated’ history of amateur filmmaking traditions when brought into the family home.

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Type
Article
Category
Writing

‘It’s no Hunger Games’

I recently got word from my literary agent that my young adult novel, As Stars Fall, will not be next year’s UK or US smash hit. It’s true. I won’t be an international YA superstar by next Christmas; not a Suzanne Collins, JK Rowling, or Veronica Roth. Despite the novel doing very well here in Australia, getting a gong in the national awards, and despite it being represented overseas by a top-shelf dream agent, those publishers on the top side of the world have turned it down, deeming the book ‘too quiet.’

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Type
Review
Category
Reading

June in fiction

Slavoj Žižek said that this book taught him what kind of person he really wanted to be. This book did not teach me who I want to be – but it did remind me again what literature may be capable of when it is wielded with a hideous, honest brutality, like an executioner’s sword.

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Type
Reflection
Category
Activism
History
Reading

Where is the Australian Corbyn?

As the dust settles on another Australian election campaign, in which the population resoundingly supported no party, no program, no leader, British Politics is undergoing a sea change. Thrust into the centre – almost like a feat of the imagination, some flight of fancy recalling A Very British Coup – came Jeremy Corbyn, a social-democrat in the old style. For the first time in decades, there is a national leader in the anglophone world arguing against neoliberalism in Old Left terms.

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Type
Article
Category
Activism
Culture
Racism

A short history of rocking against racism

If nothing else, the incident showed just how normalised Islamophobia has become in Australia. Had Kruger called to ban Jewish immigration, her TV career would (quite rightly) have come to an abrupt end – and no mainstream broadcaster would have dared pipe up on her behalf.

But Aly’s intervention was especially odd given that Kruger had shown no sign of wanting forgiveness.

catfish
Type
Article
Category
The internet

Cooked catfish

On the chat forums I frequented, the interactions were businesslike. People would ask me my age, my clothing size, my bra size, and details about my genitalia. I would lie, of course. After some time, they would be satisfied and suggest we meet up to have sex. At this point I would reject them. Apoplectic rage and any amount of slurs would follow and I would get my thrills watching them blow a fuse.

grief
Type
Reflection
Category
The internet
The media

Precarious lives and public grief

Under what conditions, other than renown, is it possible for the media to provoke displays of global empathy or mourning for people we have never met? The question is an especially fraught one at a time when mainstream media has lost much of its authority, and the prevalence of social media platforms has created new ways in which public grief can be expressed and policed.

hillary
Type
Article
Category
Feminism
Politics
United States

Feminists #notwithher

It may surprise some to know that feminists do not stand unified behind the woman who is frequently portrayed as a feminist icon and the presidential candidate of choice for all women. The dominant narrative of monolithic feminist support for Clinton has drowned out dissenting voices, instead focusing on the significant number of well-known feminists who publicly support her. Opposition to Clinton’s feminist status and suitability as the US President, whether coming from the political left or right, is commonly dismissed as nothing more than sexism.

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Type
Reflection
Category
Culture

The new wave of transgender texts

It is in this textual tradition that Transparent unfortunately falls, with its lead character Maura, a trans woman played by a man, Jeffrey Tambor, an actor best known for playing the patriarch on Arrested Development. Queer theorist Judith Butler has recently cogently pointed out that Transparent, while very good on representing Judaism, harks back to The Birdcage in its level of cliched representation of transness.

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Type
Polemic
Category
Racism

The violence of forgiveness

In calling on the outraged to employ laudable virtues such as empathy, patience, and understanding towards those seeking to harm them, Aly performs an act typical of mainstream liberalism. That is, to obscure systemic injustices and destructive political realities in preference of a terse symbolism that fails to address those material realities. In this case, an orchestrated appeal to an abstract forgiveness that does nothing to alleviate the suffering already felt by those on the receiving end of Australia’s many violent practices.

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Type
Article
Category
Gender

Ten years of Corporate Paedophilia

The stereotype of the innocent, asexual child is crude, antiquated – and dangerous. As Steven Angelides has persuasively argued, linking childhood with asexuality ‘misrepresents and simplifies child sexuality, sending children the message that sexual behaviour, for them, is dangerous and wrong’. This link makes it more difficult for children to discuss sex and sexuality, and to report sexual abuse.

carriago-of-own
Type
Article
Category
Misogyny
public transport

A carriage of one’s own

I’d never experienced women-only passenger cars before, though they are regularly proposed for Australian cities for the same purpose they have in Mexico, along with many other countries such as Israel, Japan, India, Egypt, Brazil and Malaysia – that is, to reduce the incidence of sexual assault and other violence against women occurring in public spaces by physically distancing men. Women-only sections on public transport are intended to keep us free from violent behaviours such as catcalls, groping, stalking, bashing and rape simply by segregating men.

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Type
Essay
Category
Activism
Inequality
Racism

End of the rainbow

In October 2015, thousands of South African students took to the streets, bringing their country to a virtual standstill. Mobilising under two interlinked movements – #RhodesMustFall (RMF) and #FeesMustFall (FMF) – the students organised a campaign that shut down the nation’s twenty-six universities. They were protesting an 11.5 per cent tuition hike that was to be introduced for the 2016 academic year. Just weeks after their protests began, the students had won: President Jacob Zuma announced there would be no fee increase.

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Type
Essay
Category
Culture
Violence

The gun

So I applied to join the police academy and in due course took my place alongside two dozen other fresh-faced hopefuls. For six long months we studied laws and memorised regulations; we clambered over obstacle courses, practised combat techniques and marched aimlessly around a parade ground, withering under a barrage of hollered commands, until at last our inculcation was assumed complete and we were ready to be sent out into the world. Our graduation ceremony took place on the same Friday that we received our firearms.