Search results for ""spinifex press""

The Abbotsford Convent becomes more than the setting, 'the grey mince-meat walls', of this collection. It emerges as presence, intimate and familiar as well as constraining and forbidding. But it is childhood itself which becomes the subterranean geography and pulse. Subject to an overworld of lay and religious adults, 'the razor of power having such adult force', the voices in these poems create multiple pathways through memory and time as they map and navigate the many-stranded mysteries of their institutionalised lives.

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Girls are portrayed as sexual at younger ages, pressured to conform to a 'thin, hot, sexy' norm. Clothing, music, magazines, toys and games send girls the message that they are merely the sum of their body parts. The effects of prematurely sexualising girls are borne out in their bodies and minds, with a rise in self-destructive behaviours such as eating disorders and self-harm, along with anxiety, depression and low self-esteem.

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A sister volume to the internationally successful A Girl’s Best Friend, this book explores the relationships between women and their cats - or more aptly, cats and their women. There are cats of all colours and sizes - from the city, the farm, the bush; cats who can open fridges, sign contracts, and cats-in-drag. They get stuck in strange places and survive amazing ordeals. Some disappear only to return mysteriously; others live on as most treasured memories. They entertain, amuse, frustrate and delight us; they tug at our hearts and offer insight into our lives. A delightful collection of writing from women and girls all around the world, accompanied by beautiful photographs of their feline friends.

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What does a place mean? An old kauri villa with a one-roomed school attached is the place that has sustained a writer, Beryl Fletcher, through turbulent years and an obsessive love. Sent away at the age of six for a few months to the house at Karamu, she discovered books and spent many nights reading by candlelight, listening to the call of the moreporks. Karamu became a symbolic landscape of safety that helped her to survive.

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A story of one girl 's struggle with herself, her life and her family. And the story of a family's struggle with a daughter/sister they can never hope to understand. She lies in the bed and she is sick. Sicker than she's ever been before. But with the sickness comes a pain and in that pain she finds a glory. And it's the glory that gets her through. When her body heals and she is out of the hospital and home with her family, she finds she needs to seek out a new glory, a stronger glory. She finds it in starvation. But her family, her friends, and her teachers intrude, and she decides she needs a different life, one where her glory is truly safe. A story of one girl's struggle with herself, her life and her family. And the story of a family's struggle with a daughter/sister they can never hope to understand. An impressive new voice in youth literature, Sarah Brill's novel Glory tells the powerful story of a fifteen-year-old girl, who has just woken up in a hospital after an unsuccessful suicide attempt. Sarah Brill began writing for the theatre at the age of 15. She attended four National Young Playwrights Workshops before graduating to the National Playwrights Conference.Since then she has had several plays produced and broadcast on the ABC. Glory is her first novel.

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How do you decide to live? Or do others make that decision for you? In this lyrical novel, Beryl Fletcher explores the paradoxes of modern life. As a new academic, Julia finds her beliefs challenged by her students, reinforced by her friend’s mistreatment and dismissed by her family. Just as her mother sought freedom from her family’s rural poverty, Julia and her sister Isobel, search for their own solace finding it in different and disparate places.

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Naryshkin Park is a place where lovers once walked. On 2 October 1941, it became the site of a mass grave. Rose Zwi deftly weaves together clues from survivors’ accounts, old photographs, official documents and archival research to form a many-layered account of the proud history and tragic destruction of the Jews of Lithuania.

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An international anthology of writings on cyberculture and feminist interventions. A diverse and at times fractious discussion of issues raised by these new forms of cultural expression. The contributors engage with a range of questions including: What is cyberfeminism? How does feminism influence multimedia production? What are the possibilities for feminist activism and research on the internet? How are colonisation, cybersex and virtuality to be theorised? How do these technologies affect our theories about bodies and minds? And what are the implications for creative artists?

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The first book to be published anywhere in the world to provide women with an introduction to the Internet. The authors explore the role of gender, anonymity, privacy, pornography, harassment and security. It is a straightforward guide to the use of electronic systems, as well as a brief history of women and computers including Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper. This book is a collector’s item, a book of and for its time.

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Cathie Dunsford's much-loved Cowrie returns. The Journey Home follows her through her passions for life, love, food and challenge. Peopled by a diverse array of characters: Benny, the outrageous film-maker; Peta, who Cowrie falls in love with; and the student DK, who has a few things to learn. Torn between her newly-made friendships in California and her roots in her homeland, Cowrie discovers that there is a price to pay for exile even when it's voluntary.

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They came from the stetl to a new land, to a new life. Another year in Africa, they said, another year in exile. Old bonds break as they adjust from the old world of pogroms to their new life in Africa. Six-year-old Ruth is haunted by memories of tragedy and persecution that are not even hers. Award-winning author, Rose Zwi, evokes with tenderness the 1930s and 40s with a tale of loss of innocence alongside the stirrings of Apartheid.

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Alix Clemeger, sophisticate and internationally famous composer and concert pianist, is the toast of high society. A succession of momentous milestones has determined her life and career. The last is when she meets Tansie Landon. Tansie, beautiful, enigmatic, fragile, is – although not yet successful – an exceptional sculptor. But Tansie’s childhood of abuse and neglect has left her so emotionally scarred that love has become a source of embattlement.When Tansie begins to display towards Alix the same harshness and indifference she knew as a child, she tests Alix’s love to the limit and pushes herself to the edge of destruction. In the end Tansie’s gift to Alix is a lesson in the possibilities and limitations of love.

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An award-winning joint volume of poetry, Sandy Jeffs invites the readers into the world of schizophrenia in Poems from the Madhouse, while Deborah Staines presents vivid images that evoke the mythic past and the technological future in Now Millennium. Staines' sequence, Venus Port, explores the destruction of the social fabric set alongside poems of love and loss, images of video worlds as well as words that catch moments on the cusp of millennium. Poems from the Madhouse invites readers into the paradoxical world of insanity: the confusion and clarity, the courage and fear, the bleak despair and the black comedy. You will emerge sadder, wiser, but also exultant in the spirit she shares with us.

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Following Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, writers rework images of the body, resisting those wanting to create monsters and angels.

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Most everything has dried up: water, the womb, even the love among lovers. Hunger is rife, exceptacross the border. One night, a village is bombed after its men attempt to cross the border.Nine-year old Amedea is buried underground and sleeps to survive. Ten years later, she wakes with a locust embedded in her brow. This political fable is a girl’s magical journey through the border. The border has cut the human heart. Can she repair it with the story of a small life? This is the Locus Girl’s dream, her lovesong—For those walking to the border for dear life And those guarding the border for dear life

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A scathing analysis of high-tech biomedical reproductive techniques. Women as Wombs provides groundbreaking insights into the debate over reproductive technology and its ethical, legal, and political implications.

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Celebrity couple Kim Kardashian and Kanye West and their sweet new baby Chicago. Tom Daley and Dustin Lance Black and their cute little baby Robert. And thousands of other couples and single people around the world who obtain babies through surrogacy arrangements. The general public is compassionate to their plight and supportive of their 'right' to a baby. But who are the faceless, nameless women who nurture and give birth to these babies? These women who are left with empty arms and leaking breasts after delivery? Surrogacy-dealing companies call them ‘special angels’ who ‘make miracles possible’, giving ‘an extraordinary gift’. IVF clinics call them ‘gestational surrogates’. The intended parents have promised them healthcare, full reimbursement, and ongoing contact with the baby. What could possibly go wrong? Everything. Because surrogacy violates the human rights of the women whose bodies are used, and the children who are born. Because it is a fundamentally flawed and misogynist concept to imagine that women are interchangeable. And it is wishful thinking that watertight legal contracts and counselling can fix this. In this book, strong and courageous women from the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia, India, Austria and Russia share their true stories of becoming 'surrogate' mothers out of kindness and compassion (or need for money), only to be deceived, neglected, abused, harassed, or abandoned by ‘baby buyers’, clinics, and lawyers. Their stories are tragic, shocking, and revelatory of a profit-driven industry that preys on desperation and women’s compassion. It becomes clear that it is not the occasional dysfunctional relationship or unreasonable surrogate causing problems in the surrogacy industry. Rather, it is the very nature of surrogacy as well as the surrogacy industry to use and abuse and discard. This book throws down a challenge to Big Fertility and its minions: women are not ovens or suitcases, babies are not products. Love is not to be bought.

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An intriguing approach to the rewriting of myth, this book takes the reader on a journey through the history of languages and symbolic traditions. Through a main character, Queenie, a cow of many abilities and a history that takes in the creation of the universe, readers come to see the world in new ways. Cow leaps and flies into imaginative realms carrying mythology and language. Cow creates the universe and travels through the sky as a herd of stars.

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Kath Williams was a trade unionist, and a communist, before taking on the mantle of feminist after World War II. With a trade unionist ex-husband who was elected to Federal Politics opposing her left wing campaigns, Kath emerged as a feisty and quietly determined woman. Her campaign of conviction was the major force behind the achievement of equal pay for women.

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There was once a man who thought he could do anything, even be a woman. So he acquired a baby, changed its diapers and fed the damn thing three times a night. He did all the housework, was deferential to men, and got worn out. But he had a brother, Jack Cleverfellow, who hired a wife and got it all done.

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In Gardasil: Fast-Tracked and Fatal, the author argues that there is no evidence of how much cervical cancer the HPV vaccine will prevent. What is emerging, however, is evidence of its harmful effects. In the nine years since the experimental HPV vaccination program began, there have been 255 deaths worldwide and 43,000 adverse events.Gardasil was fast-tracked through the FDA, a process usually reserved for serious diseases where a new drug is required to fill an unmet and urgent medical need. Yet the incidence of cervical cancer had been markedly in decline due to Pap smear programs.

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In Not Sacred, Not Squaws, Cherry Smiley analyses colonization and proposes a decolonized feminism enlivened by Indigenous feminist theory. Building on the work of grassroots radical feminist theorists, Cherry Smiley outlines a female-centered theory of colonization and describes the historical and contemporary landscape in which male violence against Indigenous women in Canada and New Zealand is the norm. She calls out ‘sex work’ as a patriarchal colonizing practice and a form of male violence against women. Questioning her own uncritical acceptance of the historical social and political status of Indigenous women in Canada – which she now recognizes as male-centred Indigenous theorizing – she examines the roles of culture and tradition in the oppression of Indigenous women and constructs an alternative decolonizing feminist methodology. This book is a refreshing feminist contemporary challenge to the patriarchal ideology that governs our world and a vigorous and irreverent defence against the attempts to silence Indigenous radical feminists.

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Body Shell Girl is a memoir in verse about the first two years of a decade that Rose Hunter spent in the sex industry in Canada. When Rose walked into a massage parlour in Toronto in 1997, she was looking for a temporary fix to pay rent and avoid having to go back to her home country of Australia. Awkward, shy and looking for a place to belong, she found herself in a strange world she understood little about, other than here she could make more than rent. She planned to use her earnings to buy herself an education that would secure the career of her dreams. Naively believing she could do only what was required of her, without trauma or side effects and leave the industry on her own terms, she was shattered by what unfolded. This is her story. It is also a searing portrayal of this dehumanising industry in all its destructive power.

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In this eloquent and blistering rejection of surrogacy, a range of international activists and experts in the field outline the fundamental human rights abuses that occur when surrogacy is legalised and reject neoliberal notions that the commodification of women’s bodies can ever be about the ‘choices’ women make. Yoshie Yanagihara shows how feminist ideas have been twisted to extend men’s freedom and their rights to access surrogacy. Catherine Lynch rails against surrogacy as the creation of babies for the express purpose of removal from their mothers, outlining the tragic outcomes for adopted people. Phyllis Chesler argues that commercial surrogacy is matricidal, “slicing and dicing biological motherhood” into egg donor, ‘gestational’ mother and adoptive mother. Melissa Farley debunks the myth of ‘choice’ in surrogacy, arguing that in a male-dominated and racist system, the exploitative sale of women in surrogacy, like in prostitution, is inherently harmful —rich women do not make the choice to become surrogates or prostitutes. Other contributors to this book, which is published in conjunction with the International Coalition for the Abolition of Surrogate Motherhood, are Gena Corea, Renate Klein, Gary Powell, Rita Banerji, Marie-Josèphe Devillers, Laura Isabel Gómez García, Alexandra Clément-Saby, Taina Bien-Aimé, Silvia Guerini, Laura Nuño Gómez and Eva Maria Bachinger.

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I can see how I carry Yiayia’s war in the ample dunes of my belly, the moment she smelt the guns, she pinched the candle’s wick, gathered the startled shadows of her children, flung my baby-mother onto her back and sprinted towards the neutral moon— Migration and the memories of women’s traditions are woven throughout these poems. Angela Costi brings the world of Cyprus to Australia. Her mother encounters animosity on Melbourne’s trams as Angela learns to thread words in ways that echo her grandmother’s embroidery. Here are poems that sing their way across the seas and map histories.

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Usha Akella pays tribute to the lives of women from cultures across continents, while reflecting on her own life. Her poems are the medium for women who refuse to be silenced. She condenses a calm rage into ferocious words of precision and celebrates the women who have triumphed. All the while a subversive dusting of humour runs through the collection. This is poetry that cannot be ignored. "Rage has no caste, needs no algorithm, light a pyre with it of chopped thumbs and scripted dreams"

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I am in the very fortunate position of having been able to contribute to two waves of feminism: The Women’s Liberation Movement and the new wave that is taking place now. Trigger Warning: My Lesbian Feminist Life is both an engaging autobiography and a fascinating account of feminist history. From the heady days of the Women’s Liberation Movement through to the backlash against radical feminism as neoliberal laissez-faire attitudes took hold. Fast forward to the current re-examination of feminism in light of the #MeToo movement and an emerging new wave of radical feminism. Sheila Jeffreys' bold account makes it clear that the feminism and lesbianism she has championed for decades is needed more than ever. With honesty and frankness, she tells of victories and setbacks in her unrelenting commitment to women’s freedom from men’s violence, especially the violence inherent in pornography and prostitution. We also learn what her steadfastness has cost her in terms of personal and professional rewards. Trigger Warning places radical feminism within a cultural, social and intellectual context while also taking us on a personal journey. Sheila Jeffreys has tirelessly crossed the globe to advance radical feminist theory and practice and we are invited to share in the intellectual and political crossroads she has encountered during her life. Accessible yet detailed and rigorous, this landmark volume is essential reading for everyone who has ever wondered what radical feminism really is.

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Pregnant, abandoned and homeless, Maureen battles to survive a Swedish winter until help arrives in the form of a mysterious woman with a veiled past. With the prospect of being deported, Maureen learns who her real friends are, especially when she faces investigations due to her links to a suspected criminal. Meanwhile in Australia, Maureen’s family is scrambling to support her when the health of her unscrupulous father declines and he depends on the clever intervention of his estranged family members to salvage both his dignity and finances. In this engaging, rollicking yet poignant sequel to Lillian’s Eden, we see Maureen’s ambition to explore the world encounter its harsh realities, and her mother Lillian using her resourcefulness and intelligence to tackle the ongoing family dramas at home. This is a novel about women in the world in the 1960s, both in Australia and abroad, and their resilience and capacity to manage their lives at a time when others want to take that independence and decision-making from them.

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Gurindji country is located in the southern Victoria River in the Northern Territory of Australia. Gurindji people became well known in the 1960s and 1970s due to their influence on Australian politics and the Indigenous land rights movement. They were instrumental in gaining equal wages for Aboriginal cattle station employees and they were also the first Aboriginal group to recover control of their traditional lands. In Karu, Gurindji women describe their child-rearing practices. Some have a spiritual basis, while others are highly practical in nature, such as the use of bush medicines. Many Gurindji ways of raising children contrast with non-Indigenous practices because they are deeply embedded in an understanding of country and family connections. This book celebrates children growing up Gurindji and honours those Gurindji mothers, grandmothers, assistant teachers and health workers who dedicate their lives to making that possible.

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between wind and water, is to be in a vulnerable place, the place where people and planet are. When industrial wind arrives in the neighbourhood, some locals find that living with their new neighbour has brought a whirlwind of troubles. Their health and that of the community take a nosedive. Their complaints are filed into obscurity, their stories dismissed and their voices disparaged. What sort of world do we want? We ask how can we have a better world if people and planet are not equally respected? These poems speak the stories of people who have been denied a voice.

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Cyclonic storms inform the still eye of Earth's Breath. It's an eye that radiates out from the personal to the communal, tracking its subject matter through the lenses of history and myth. Susan Hawthorne's poetry shifts with seismic intensity, from tranquility to roar, bureaucratic inertia to survival, and the slow recovery from destruction to regeneration.

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Are you tired of finding towels on the bathroom floor? Have you ever walked through a supermarket with a thirty-five-year-old child who wants only the most expensive things on the shelves? How do you go about making men understand the difference between helping out with the housework and doing it? And what about violence? Help! I'm Living with a Man Boy has forty-one practical scenarios that many women will identify with immediately, plus suggestions for dealing with these situations.Others, she admits, have a long way to go.

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As I stepped over smashed crockery, broken glass, pools of milk, juice and water in my kitchen, I felt a surge of anger and recalled the pain of the many black eyes, cut lips, and broken bones that Michael had inflicted on me, and I thought, ENOUGH. So many of us ask, How can this be happening? How did love turn into abuse and violence? These are the questions that Patricia Hughes, renowned author of Daughters of Nazareth, continually asked herself. Like so many women, she stayed in an abusive relationship. Convinced that she somehow was responsible. She writes powerfully of being pulled into the cycle of fear, abuse, giving in, forgiving. Enough is a story rarely told, and she tells it without self-pity, sentimentality or blind anger. Overcoming huge hurdles Patricia Hughes provides the reader with an honest account of all the ups and downs she encountered.Enough is both an inspirational story and a first hand guide for any woman in an abusive relationship.

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Unity Dow’s third novel, Juggling Truths portrays the childhood of Monei Ntuka in the Botswanan village of Mochudi in Africa. Go to the past with me, so you can take the past to the future, asks her Nkoko. Nei takes us on an extraordinary journey through the many truths that shape her life; the truths of the colonisers and their churches and of her own people. We travel with her through dreams and share the wisdom of her grandmother as she lets the never-ending stories weave their own reality in face of a universe of conflicting truths. Unity Dow recreates with telling insight and gentle humour a world where the truths of the missionaries and the witchdoctors jostle with those of the generations of women.

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Julie's youthful concerns are swept aside by a tragedy that splits her family. She begins a new life in a city that is sometimes exciting, often overwhelming, always different to the only home she has ever known. At first, it seems the turmoil will never cease. And then, just as Julie begins to make some sense of what has happened, there are further surprising developments.

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A moving journey through the experience of breast cancer, and the many different approaches and treatments. Evelyne Accad presents a rare insight into cross-cultural understandings of illness. Multi-layered and in many voices, it is as important a book for medical practitioners as it is for people touched by cancer.

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This is a book for anyone who has ever shopped – or worked in shops. But whether you find yourself wincing or laughing could depend on which side of the shop counter you’re on at the time. Find out what it’s like to be a young shopgirl, vent your frustrations with today’s supermarket society and the advertising and media industries, take a nostalgic trip back to the days of the corner shop. Using consumerism as a platform, Two Lips Went Shopping follows the thread down laneways where the baby trade and Female Genital Mutilation flourish passing protests of women against war and violence.

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Circus as drama and risk, as exuberance and irrepressible spirit, is the central metaphor Patricia Sykes uses to open a world where public and private share the same tightrope. The poems speak of women searching for footholds along the spectrums of politics, power, history, culture and relationships.Theirs are performances of celebration and hope as they wire dance through circumcision and incest, madness and suicide, genocide and war. There is passion and resistance, hot comedy and fire in the belly. Falling is the first victory, balance is the ultimate skill.

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When Doris Kartinyeri was a month old, her mother died. The family gathered to mourn their loss and welcome the new baby home. But Doris never arrived to live with her family – she was stolen from the hospital and placed in Colebrook Home, where she stayed for the next fourteen years. The legacy of being a member of the Stolen Generations continued for Doris as she was placed in white homes as a virtual slave, struggled through relationships and suffered with anxiety and mental illness.

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From the author of the acclaimed 'Godmothers' comes a new and startling novel. Beginning in the South Pacific and stretching back to a Mediterranean past, Sandi Hall explores a friendship that could affect the history of the world. When Dory Previn asked Did Jesus have a sister? Sandi Hall discovered that he did.

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What drives young women and what drives them mad? Twenty-something women talk about living their feminism. What they do, how they do it and why they choose to do it as feminists. The private collides with the public, anger with humour, desire with ideals. Writing themselves into the debate, these young women are talking up.

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Have you ever wanted to join the circus? Wondered what goes on behind the scenes? What trapeze artists think about as they swing through the air? How fit you have to be to be a performer? Reading this book lets you become an armchair acrobat. Established in 1991 as a community theatre project to work with survivors of sexual assault, the Women’s Circus has gone on to create innovative shows, toured to China in 1995 and has maintained a training program for women of all shapes and sizes, backgrounds, ages and abilities for fifteen years.

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From the Palaeolithic to the present, Chinese women have held up half the sky. Today they work as architects, soldiers, physicians and fruit growers, and some have travelled the Yangzi rapids in a rubber raft. China for Women is the perfect guide for tourist or armchair travellers. It neatly bridges past and present and brings to life the complex culture and history of China.

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First there was the detective novel with its stubble-chinned PI. Then came the feminist super-sleuths. Feisty, fierce and real. Now there’s Figments of a Murder. And Babes. Babes is about lust. Babes is about power. But what else is she up to? In her world women are torn asunder by love and lust, by murder and menace. Babes says she calls the shots. But does she?

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In this one-of-a-kind anthology, lesbian sisters from several countries explore their relationships with one another. Through their words and photographs, both well-known and less-famous siblings reveal the many faces of lesbian sisterhood. Here is a fascinating chronicle of what it is like to grow up, come out, laugh, cry, work and live together, as sisters in a family and as lesbians in a world.

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Australia is a land full of opportunities, but where can you go to find the things that matter to women? This book is a guide to the land as well as the diverse culture of women. Women's culture in Australia goes back more than 40,000 years and is a rich mosaic of story, art and music. On the top of this has come the culture of the past 200 years: from the British convicts, from China, from the Pacific, from the newer waves of migration and from the women's movement. This is reflected in literature, theatre, the visual arts, music, circuses and dance. Rural and urban women describe the places they know and love, they also describe their histories and show something of what lies behind a first impression.Contributors featured include: Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Faith Bandler, Portia Robinson, Elizabeth Jolley, Sara Dowse, Janine Haines, Dale Spender, Ruby Langford Ginibi, Kate Llewellyn, and Finola Moorhead.

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