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THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY WOMEN’S COLLECTIVE PRESENTS:

WOMEN’S HONI W E E K N I N E, SE M E S T E R T WO, 2 019

ANU RESIDENTIAL COLLEGES STRIKE

S O W E ’ V E DE C R I M I NA L I Z E D A B O RT I O N. N OW W H AT ?

Residential colleges are historically ridden with epidemics of rape culture and hazing, with one in fifteen Australian university students having reported being sexually assaulted at least once in 2015 and 2016. It isn’t news that colleges are broadly unsafe for the students that they house. The Australian National University (ANU) is Australia’s top-ranked university, but it falls horrifically short of protecting the students on its campus.

Internally-conducted reports reveal that eight out of the ten of the ANU’s undergraduate residential halls have been slammed with the lowest rating possible for their management of sexual assault. The halls were judged on both their policies regarding sexual misconduct and the effectiveness of their application, and were found to be desperately wanting. FULL ARTICLE ON PAGE 6

so hard for will be tenuous and uncertain. The pro-choice movement must therefore harness the momentum derived from its success and keep pushing for substantive choice, which lies in designated public services, coverage under Medicare and the removal of heavy restrictions around GPs and pharmacies who can provide abortions. FULL ARTICLE ON PAGE 21

AC K N OW L E D G E M E N T O F C O U N T RY The University of Sydney’s Wom*n’s Collective meets and organises on the unceded land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. We would like to pay our respects to Elders, past, present and emerging, and acknowledge that sovereignty was never ceded. As a feminist collective, USyd WoCo stands against the colonial violence that began with European invasion and exists to this very day. Colonisation brought with it dispossession, destruction of culture and language, abduction, rape, exploitation and murder, and in 2019 we acknowledge that the effects of these actions have transcended time. In 2007 Kevin Rudd said “sorry” for the Stolen Generations, and yet since then the rates of Indigenous child removal have risen over 400%. It was only at the end of 2018 that the Liberal Coalition government and the complicit Labor Party put through a law that allows for the adoption of thousands of children from the state’s foster care system, without parental consent. Indigenous children and young people already make up over 40% of those in the out-of-home care system. It is these racist laws and useless apologies that demonstrate the ongoing effects of the colonisation of Indigenous people. As intersectional feminists, USyd WoCo understands the need to prioritise the voices of Indigenous women and gender non-conforming people in our activism. There is no justice or liberation without resisting against colonisation and dismantling the oppressive structures it has created. There is no justice or liberation without supporting and uplifting Indigenous peoples’ voices. There is no justice until we are all liberated. This land always was, and always will be, Aboriginal land.

CONTENTS ANU Residential Colleges Strike against Sexual Violence Mismanagement Vivienne Guo - Page 6

Excerpts From “A Field Guid To My Pelvic Nerve” Savannah Stimson - Page 16 Time, Ancestry, And Toni Morrison’s Guiding Light Kiki Amberber - Page 17

The (Self-)Surveillance of Womanhood Kowther Qashou - Page 7

Why It’s Okay To Watch The Bachelor Ellie Stephenson - Page 18

The Japanese Domestic Space Momoko Metham - Page 8 Milk Creates > Women Nicole Dallis - Page 10

Women And Healthcare Klementine Burrell-Sander - Page 19

How Am I To Love My Country Misbah Ansari - Page 11

Public Displays of (Dis)affection Shani Patel - Page 19

Artwork Amelia Mertha - Page 12

Ecofeminism Alex Mcleay - Page 20

Poetry - Iced tea, The Space Around These Words, My Mother Says Raz Badiyan, Clair Ollivain - Page 13

So We’ve Decriminalized Abortion. What Now? Ziyn (Nina) Qiu - Page 21

My Abortion Steff Leinasars - Page 14

木秀于林，风必摧之 Cathy Li - Page 21

Fucked If We Do, And Fucked If We Don’t Anie Kandya - Page 14

Less is More: A Wom*n of Colour’s Experience of Space Vivienne Guo, Art by Ellie Zheng - Page 22

Censor*d Shania O’Brien - 15

Portrait Of A Daydream Laura de Feyter - page 23

“Do My Tits Bother You?” Donnalyn Xu - Page 15

The Missing Nuance Of The Modernist Canon Ranuka Tandan - Page 24

Editors In Chief: Layla Mkh and Jazzlyn Breen Editors: Alex Mcleay, Amelia Mertha, Ellie Wilson, Ellie Zheng, Kimmy Dibben, Klementine Burrell-Sander, Kowther Qashou, Priya Gupta, Ranuka Tandan, Vivienne Guo

EDITORIAL 2019 has been both an incredible and extremely difficult year for the University of Sydney Women’s Collective. This year was the first year in over 20 years that the Women’s Officers of the Student Representative Council were not those chosen by the Women’s Collective. Instead, a conservative majority rolled the collective, subsequently cutting thousands of dollars of pay and funding from the Women’s Collective. This has meant that we have had to navigate the fight against misogyny on and off campus as unpaid organisers. For us, it means we have: endured ongoing battles with university admin, campus security, Young Liberals, “independents”, and pro-lifers. We have been gaslit by corporate feminists, have been doxxed by well-known right-wing media personalities, been called terrorists online, received death threats and even struggled to gain editorship over this paper. We are beyond exhausted, but we also wouldn’t have traded this year for the world. 2019 was the year that NSW decriminalised abortion. 2019 was the year of the Climate Strike, the largest protest we’ve had since the 2004 protests against the Iraq War.

However. 2019 was also the year of the Christchurch massacre. It was the year that over 40 women were murdered as a result of gendered violence. It was the year over 100 Palestinian people were murdered by the apartheid Israeli state. It was the year that we fought until our voices became hoarse, but also mourned until our eyes ran dry and our hearts ached so painfully we wanted to rip them out of our chests. Feminist activism is not just as simple as “women’s rights”. It needs to transcend Westerncentric discourse. It needs to prioritise the voices of First Nations women and gender non-conforming people. It needs to recognise that race and class are at the centre of all liberation movements. It needs to be global, anticapitalist, and intersectional or frankly, it is bullshit. Liberation for all, or liberation for none. In love, hope, exhaustion, and rage, Layla and Jazzlyn

Cover: Ranuka Tandan

PAY THE RENT - YOU ARE ON STOLEN LAND A water crisis has unfolded in north-west NSW in towns like Collarenebri and Walgett, with residents drinking bore water that has been deemed unsafe by public health experts. Groups like Fighting In Resistance Equally (FIRE), Indigenous Social Justice Association (ISJA), and Dignity Water have been delivering water for months on end, and are still in need of further resources and money to assist local, majority First Nations communities. Please consider donating if you can. SAWC Sydney - BSB 633 000 - Acct 150 758 621 - Please write * Walgett * in the description Disclaimer: Honi Soit is published by the Directors of Student Publications (DSPs), who are elected by the Students’ Representative Council (SRC). The SRC provides space and administrative support only, and is financed by the University of Sydney. The current DSPs - Laura Glase, Brandon Hale, Jinwei Luan, Kedar Maddali, Sean Perry and Jiaqi Shi - are the publisher of the print editions and online materials of Honi Soit. All expressions on Honi Soit are not to be regarded as those of the SRC, unless specifically stated. The SRC accepts no responsibility for the accuracy of any of the opinions or information

contained in Honi Soit, nor does it endorse any of the advertisements and insertions. Please direct all advertising inquiries to publications.manager@src.usyd.edu.au.

W H AT I S T H E WO M E N ’S COLLECTIVE? The University of Sydney Women’s Collective (WoCo) is an intersectional, feminist, activist group who are most active around issues of sexual assault on campus and abortion rights. We have existed for over 50 years on campus and are committed to continually improving the lives of women and non-binary students. We recognise that all oppression is interconnected and stems from a place of exploitation under an unfair capitalist system. We strive to work with, and uplift the voices of all intersections of persecuted identities in order to create a better world in which equality is achieved. We are an inclusive and welcoming space and encourage all feminist students to get involved with our collective. We meet weekly to discuss activism, current events, feminist theory, and other related topics. We hold protests, reading groups, social events, talks, film screenings, and more. To get involved, visit our Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, or send us an email! Facebook: University of Sydney Women’s Collective Twitter: @USydWoCo Instagram: @USydWoCo Email: usydwomenscollective@gmail.com

I N M E M O RY O F content warning: murder, sexual assault, domestic violence In Australia, one woman dies every week at the hands of male violence. While the murder of women in any case is horrific and is deeply traumatic for the community at large, it is important to recognise the dire need for intersectionality even - and especially - in the most painful of discussions around gendered violence. Intersectionality is the notion that oppression is defined by overlapping lines of race, ability, gender, accessibility, sexuality, class etcetera, which cannot be divided and therefore result in unique forms of oppression. The fact remains that women of colour, First Nations women, disabled women, gender non-conforming people, trans people, sex workers, and women from rural communities are disproportionately erased in the national outcry of grief for these murdered women. The powers of race, heteronormativity and privilege are still at play here. Remember these names. Say these names.

Samah Baker (30) Aya Masarwe (21) Unnamed (31) Julie Rush (49) Darshika Withana (40s) Unnamed (63) Megan Kirley (40) Tamara Farrell (31) Marjorie Welsh (92) Unnamed (76) Qin Wang (57) Unnamed (74) Preethi Reddy (32) Gabriella Thompson (27) Vicki Ramadan (77) Caris Dann (30) Syeda Hossain (33) Natalina Angok (32) Unnamed (87) Gihan Kerollos (47) Courtney Herron (25) Jelagat Cheruiyot (34) Shuyu Zhou (23) Unnamed (28) Cait Oâ€™ Brien (31) Unnamed (27) Unnamed (54) Rita Camilleri (57) Unnamed (82) Sabrina Lekaj (20) Unnamed (34) Diana Reid (71) Michaela Dunn (24) Kayla Rose Halnan (26) Danielle Easey (29) Ioli Hadjilyra (26) Ivona Jovanovic (27) Unnamed (36) Jessica Bairnsfather-Scott (32) Kim Chau (39) Selma Adem Ibrahim (24) Trudy Dreyer (49) Helena Broadbent (32) Mhelody Polan Bruno (25) 4

N E W S

FAMILIES OF BOWRAVILLE MURDER VICTIMS DEMAND JUSTICE NOW

RECLAIM THE NIGHT 2019

Anie Kandya reports

Mikaela Pappou reports

Crowds gathered outside Sydney Town Hall in the afternoon of Sunday the 29TH of september, demanding justice for the three First Nations victims of the Bowraville murders and their families, 29 years after the murders occurred. Protesters’ cries of, “Mark Speakman hear us loud, we demand justice now!” rang through the streets of Sydney CBD, in a plea to urge the NSW Attorney General to act on the recommendations of a recent NSW Upper House inquiry quickly, and push for legislation that would allow for a retrial of the cases of the Bowraville murders. Evelyn Greenup (4), Clinton Speedy-Duroux (16) and Colleen Walker (16) all disappeared from their hometown of Bowraville in northern NSW within a five-month period in 1990. While Clinton and Evelyn’s remains were later found in the area, Colleen remains missing. The sole suspect of the crimes, a non-Indigenous man, was acquitted of both Clinton and Evelyn’s murders in 1994 and 2006, and the families have spent years fighting for the man to be retried, even taking the cases to the High Court, all to no avail. Photo of the protest going along George Street Speakers addressed the failure of the justice system and the mistreatment of the victims’ families throughout the process of seeking justice for their loved ones. Colleen Walker’s nephew spoke of how Colleen’s mother was told by police that Colleen

was “too lightskin” to be her daughter when she reported her as missing. Given how little help the police were, families and communities were forced to go out in search for their own missing children. The speeches also highlighted the clear racial discrimination present in the treatment of these cases, with First Nations activist Gavin Stanbrook pointing out, “if [the victims] had been three white children in the northern suburbs of Sydney, justice would have been swift and would have been served within days.” Later, protesters’ cries of “black lives matter” would echo this sentiment, reinforcing how little concern First Nations people’s deaths are regarded with by the Australian justice system. It was evident that the treatment of these victims and their families is a signifier of a broader problem within Australia, regarding First Nations deaths remaining under-investigated and under-reported on, especially when compared to their non-Indigenous counterparts. Attendees of the rally were encouraged to remedy this discrepancy by posting their support with ‘#JusticeForBowraville’ on social media. The hashtag was trending on Twitter following the event. The rally was clear in its message – the injustices faced by the victims of the Bowraville murders and their families will only be remedied if community members and activists continue to put pressure on politicians, and our legal systems.

Reclaim the Night was born as a radical action against gendered violence. Sydney’s first Reclaim the Night was held in 1978 and since then has become a yearly rally for all people to protest the issues that have affected and continue to affect women, non-binary people and people with uteruses. Reclaim the Night was created by the Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group in 1977 and rapidly spread across Europe, eventually making its way to Australia. Reclaim marches yearly for the rights of all people to feel safe, for all people to have control over their own bodies, and for all people to live free from violence. This year as we build up to our march we’re holding our annual art fundraising night at Freda’s Chippendale, on October 17th, themed ‘Still We Rise’ after Maya Angelou’s poem. We ask that you please come along and support our upcoming rally and fundraising efforts! Scan the QR cde bellow for a link to the facebook event.

NSW FINALLY DECRIMINALISES ABORTION! Klementine Burrell-Sander and Vivienne Guo report Two weeks ago on September 26, the Reproductive Health Reform Bill cleared the final hurdle in New South Wales Parliament, making NSW the last state in Australia to remove abortion from the Criminal Code. Previously, people accessing abortions in NSW could be arrested, as could the doctors performing the procedure. The decriminalisation of abortion in NSW was first brought to the parliamentary table by Mehreen Faruqi in 2017. The issue was re-introduced to Parliament by Independent MP Alex Greenwich this year, and was fiercely debated in the Lower House, with voting on the bill being postponed numerous times. Cosponsors of the Bill came from across the political spectrum, including Labor, the Greens, the Nationals and the Animal Justice Party. With 15 co-sponsors in total, the Bill had more co-sponsors than any other legislation in NSW parliament’s history. During the Bill’s passage through the Lower House, multiple protests were held outside NSW Parliament by both the pro-life movement and pro-choice activists. Once the Bill reached the Upper House on August 8, it was once again debated by MPs on both sides of the political divide, with MP Tanya Davies, the former

Minister for Women, arguing against the Bill, while current NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian, and current Health Minister Brad Hazzard spoke in support of it. The contention over the Bill resulted in near leadership spill in the NSW State Government, currently under Liberal management, as the Liberal Party found themselves divided by the conscience vote. Conscience votes, by definition, allow legislators to vote according to their conscience free from the Party that they belong to. The Bill was passed with 26 votes to 14 on September 25, and passed a final Lower House vote to approve the amendments the following morning. The passing of the Bill legislates the removal of pregnancy terminations from the criminal code and makes it legal for anyone to access a termination up to 22 weeks. Terminations after this point will require two doctors to sign off on the procedure. After decades of struggle, abortion was officially decriminalised in NSW on October 2 2019. The Abortion Law Reform Act 2019 takes another much-needed step towards removing matters of bodily autonomy from the hands of the state.

ANU RESIDENTIAL COLLEGES S T R I K E AGA I N S T S E X UA L V IOL E NC E M I SM A NAGE M E N T Vivienne Guo reports

“The halls were judged on both their policies regarding sexual misconduct and the effectiveness of their application, and were found to be desperately wanting.” been slammed with the lowest rating possible for their management of sexual assault. The halls were judged on both their policies regarding sexual misconduct and the effectiveness of their application, and were found to be desperately wanting. The failures of the ANU’s avenues for dealing with sexual misconduct are reflected in the general lack of faith in the system that seems to be common across the board; undergraduate students gave all but one of their residential halls the lowest rating in regard to their level of confidence in the University’s response systems and reporting procedures for sexual violence. In these reports, the colleges performed deceptively well in regard to security, despite the fact that a student had been assaulted and robbed in their own home in late September of this year – a fresh horror at time of writing. When asked if there would be an increase in security measures at the University, the spokesperson said that ANU “maintains its comprehensive security”, and that any staff or students who are feeling distressed “can access the University’s support services through the normal mechanisms”. But what if these support services are also crucially inadequate? Recently, the ANU also came under fire for its removal of deputy heads at Bruce Hall, Wright Hall and Fenner Hall. Students at these colleges were left to report incidents of sexual violence to their fellow student residents. This removal of support staff makes a mockery of the recommendations of previous reviews into sexual violence on campus (which the University agreed to implement). Above all, it reflects an institutional amnesia that seems to plague universities across Australia when it comes to sexual violence in student communities; students

are left feeling less safe, and with less access to reporting avenues. To be sure, ANU has made no improvements to the woeful sexual violence reporting procedures that govern its residences. During their Open Day in August, students at ANU went on strike to protest their university’s treatment of sexual violence, amongst other student issues like mismanagement of student resident money and pastoral care. In particular, students said that the removal of support staff in the ANU’s residential halls placed the onus of managing sexual assault and mental health issues on senior students. The strike was organised by several parties on campus, notably including the Women’s Department, who laid emphasis on the university’s slow response to sexual violence. The ANU responded to the Open Day strike, claiming that it “is committed to giving all its students the highestquality campus experience.” It continued to claim that “ANU residences found a strong and positive culture in residential halls” with “most students [having] a high level of satisfaction with residential life.” If the Open Day strike tells us anything, it’s that this claim is untrue. Time and time again, we have seen universities across Australia scramble to save face instead of protecting their students. Strikes like this hold universities to account because they force them to listen by taking

“Time and time again, we have seen universities across Australia scramble to save face instead of protecting their students.” the only thing that they cannot function without: their public image. For the students in these colleges, ANU’s inability to ensure their safety is a deep betrayal of trust. Yet, residential colleges across Australia – including at the University of Sydney – are enshrined by legislation and protected by powerful people with a vested interest in keeping the most abhorrent parts of college culture alive. The colour pink flooded the campus on Open Day in solidarity with the residential halls, chosen because it wasn’t the official colour of any of the residential halls. The last time that the residential halls held a strike on Open Day was in 2014, over similar mismanagement issues. If you have been affected by sexual violence or have been distressed by this article, please consult NSW Rape Crisis – a 24/7 telephone and online crisis counselling service for anyone in NSW, available at 1800 424 017.

T H E ( S E L F - ) S U RV E I L L A N C E OF WOMANHOOD Kowther Qashou thinks it’s about time we address the social pressures put on women to express femininity From the moment we are born, our bodies are assigned a set of gender roles. This impacts everything from how we look, dress, and style ourselves to how we act and behave. This is especially true for women.

that you are not too loud, too forward, and don’t take up space in any setting. Gender essentially becomes a ‘performance’ and women who fail to meet the standards are punished or regarded as ‘unnatural’.

As women, our bodies are heavily policed, including by our own selves. From a young age, we are taught that our bodies are not ours and do not belong to us. It is, therefore, easy to feel like we exist outside of our bodies. Some might even say this contributes to the "Other"-isation of women in a patriarchal society.

It is worth examining how market ideologies capitalise on the surveillance of womanhood to sell femininity to women. Consumer culture often relies on constructing and reinforcing particular narratives. There is no doubt that fashion, beauty, and makeup are heavily marketed towards women. In a sense, women’s bodies become commodified. To be a woman the ‘right way’ you must watch and continuously assess yourself. Then you must constantly sell yourself both literally and figuratively.

In this age of individualism and liberalism, it is easy to believe that the choices we make are our own. However, our choices do not exist in a vacuum. They are most often dictated or influenced by the societies and environments we live in. In “Ways of Seeing”, art critic John Berger wrote “A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. [...] And so she comes to consider herself the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet distinct elements of her identity as a woman.” Several gender theorists have further analysed this idea through closely linking it to Foucault’s work on power, subjectivity, and surveillance in society. Although Foucault’s analysis was genderless, feminist scholars have looked at it through a feminist lens. Feminist scholars argue that the body acts as a form of social control through gendered discipline (in this case, femininity). In other words, how we discipline our own bodies is heavily impacted by the male gaze. Critical theorist Angela King argues that women’s often posited as “inferior” yet also threatening in to men. It is then that the category of ‘woman’ is to be condemned, and therefore controlled and

bodies are comparison constructed disciplined.

This increases twofold when it comes to women who are racialised, transgender, queer, or gender non-conforming. The rules as to what constitutes ‘womanhood’ get tighter and therefore women who may not fit the mold of what the ‘perfect woman’ looks like might feel a particular disconnect to womanhood. Womanhood, particularly in Western societies, is also largely constructed to suit white Western notions of cisgender womanhood. From a young age, women internalise the idea that a woman must be attractive, successful and conventional to be deemed worthy and desirable. This manifests itself through the social pressure to conform to these standards; making sure you look presentable at all times, having something to offer, and on the other side of that self-moderating so

Bodies are also largely manipulated to fit the ‘perfect form’. A woman is taught to believe that her body and skin must be smooth, hairless, and soft, regardless of age. Endless amounts of money are spent on hair and weight loss treatments and cosmetic products trying to gain and maintain this form. Many women also seek out expensive plastic surgery treatments to fit patriarchal beauty standards. In the digital age, we have seen the rise of Influencer culture on platforms such as Instagram. In particular, this has been targeted towards young girls and women. Aesthetics are often repackaged for the consumption of others. More often than not, young girls and women heavily modify themselves in trade for attention and likes. In turn, the capital of the social media economy is then used to sell and endorse products for financial gain in return. It is through campaigns like these that women and their bodies are reduced to a selling point. Capitalism through choice feminism has pushed through the fallacy of ‘empowerment’ – however, individual empowerment has been proven to be nothing more than just a meaningless slogan to sell more beauty products. However, such advertising campaigns are harmful as it is not about who they’re trying to sell to, but also what they are trying to sell. Many influencers often advertise products such as specific weight loss products reinforcing hierarchical notions of beauty. Consumer culture ultimately positions identity – in this case, gender – as something to be consumed, rather than something that simply is. However, gender is deeply complex and everyone has differing individual, social, and cultural understandings of gender. Despite the fact that not all women adhere to feminine ideals, it is very evident that the social pressures of femininity are exerted onto women daily, and often by other women too. Although liberal individualism has room for varying interpretations of womanhood, it is ultimately not sufficient enough in a capitalist and patriarchal society.

T H E J A PA N E S E D O M E S T I C S PA C E A Photo Essay by Momoko Metham Living with my grandparents in Japan could feel like my second home, although at times, I felt more like a voyeur. I’d watch, listen and absorb what happened in our home with an interest in domestic life that my family considered mundane. I was fascinated with every aspect of their daily routine – whether it be hanging the washing, preparing a meal or sorting the rubbish into foils, plastics and polystyrene. Reflecting on this, I’ve tried to understand what the source of this interest is. I’ve decided that these sentiments are most likely affiliated with my biracial being. Despite speaking, listening and comprehending all that occurred around me, I never felt as though I was living as a Japanese person. Annual visits to my second home were not enough to help me assimilate into the Japanese lifestyle, and so I was stuck in an in-between space. Over the Japanese winter last year, I documented these feelings of being a voyeur, navigating the space between belonging and longing in a domestic environment. These photos speak of the invisible and complex barriers I can’t seem to describe articulately in words.

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1. 玄関 – Genkan RMs – a hint of Australia my boyfriend brought with him, an imposter amongst the precise arrangement of Japanese shoes my obāchan spent every morning perfecting. 2. 料理 – Ryōri Chaahan for lunch. 3. 昼寝 – Hirune My ojīchan loves routine. Six o’clock, wake up, seven o’clock, breakfast, eight o’clock, morning walk, ten o’clock, read the paper, 12 o’clock, lunch time, one o’clock, nap time. He goes for two walks a day, one from eight until ten in the morning and then another walk in the afternoon from two. He’s so stubborn about his routine that even when there were typhoons during the summer, he would still go for his walk, whilst my grandma shouted out the door, “idiot! You’ll get yourself killed!” 4. お茶 – Ocha It’s rare to see my obāchan so calm. If she is, it’s most likely because my ojīchan has left the house. They’ve been married for over fifty years, where love equates to bickering and small acts of service. When I visit annually, she loves to sit down, pour me some tea and tell me stories from when she was young. I loved trawling through the many photo albums she kept in the oshiire, flicking through stunning photos of my obāchan in sleek looking western clothes during the 50s. She’d repeatedly tell me, “I didn’t always have such a big belly.” 8 家族 – Kazoku I have three cousins, all of whom are the first generation to pursue further education. The eldest, Miyuki, pictured drinking beer, went to an arts college, specialising in music for two years, before marrying and having a child at 22. The second, Saeka (not pictured), went to university to study art history whilst the youngest (far left) went to an arts college to study voice acting. She’s now moved to Tokyo, claiming “If I don’t make it big in two months, I’ll come back.” It’s now been five months.

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(11) 9 - 新聞 – Shinbun Ten o’clock. Time to read the paper. 10 - 化粧 – Keshō My obāchan made her face every morning, outing or not. She loves wearing bright colours, whether it be fuchsia, deep red or bright purple, despite my mum’s wishes for her to wear more “subtle” clothing. “Reds and pinks look good on me!” she’d exclaim.

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11 - 近所の猫 – Kinjo no neko Our neighbourhood, Minamimachi, Toyonaka, was one of the first to have apartment blocks built in Osaka. Now they’re stained grey from water residue and have cracks like veins that trail up the buildings from past earthquakes. They’re now in the process of demolishing the 32 identical apartment blocks. 12 - 洗濯 – Sentaku (washing) The hues of peach and cream fabrics infused with the sweet scent of laundry detergent made the winter feel just a little warmer. Each morning I’d help my obāchan hang the washing. Her arthritic hands would tense up in the cold, but she never complained. “Hang the undies inside. There’s a few underwear thieves around here!” she’d tell me as we looked out over our second floor balcony. 13 -２０４番 – Nihyaku yon ban My grandparents have lived in this apartment complex for over 50 years. Last year was the first time they ever had to move houses. We moved to number 204 which was the building just adjacent to us. The real estate agents had started moving the elderly out from the apartment complexes to demolish them and rebuild new ones, which the elderly would be moved back into. I asked my grandma how she felt about this,“I’ll probably be dead by the time they’re finished. I’m okay with that” she replied.

M I L K C R AT E S > WOMEN Nicole Dallis on the Australian Media’s Erasure of Sex Workers A systematic pattern of violence against sex workers, perpetrated by men, has led to women working in the sex industry experiencing statistically higher levels of violence than women in any other industry. Violence against sex workers includes physical assault, sexual assault, and psychological trauma - all of which are experienced both inside and outside of work situations at extremely high levels compared to women who do not engage in sex work. There is a myriad of reasons for this exacerbated level of targeted violence, including: a misunderstanding or disregard of what payment entitles clients to, anti-sex worker sentiment, and broader beliefs about gender, sex, race and male entitlement. On August 13, 2019, 24-year old Michaela Dunn became a victim of this systematic violence, after she was killed tragically in Sydney after meeting up with a 20-year old male for what police described as a “business” deal (read: sex work). The Australian media’s response to the crime was mixed, but often favoured reports on the male ‘heroes’ who held the attacker down with milk crates above the discussion regarding the victim. This conjured up countless questions as to how the media should or should not report on sex work, and the incompetencies of the current media landscape in creating a purposeful and restorative discussion concerning sex work and the safety of sex workers. An important distinction to be made before entering into this discourse is that sex work and sex trafficking are entirely different. Sex work is defined as activities engaged in voluntarily, and free from coercion in exchange for payment or reward. Trafficking on the other hand is exploitation involving force, intimidation and/ or deception. The two, despite their innate difference, are often confused and misrepresented (i.e. sex work being deemed as forced). As such, this mispresentation has created a culture surrounding sex work that not only encourages it to be a subject shrouded in shame and perceived illegality, but an industry that women need to be ‘saved’ or rescued from. In New South Wales (where the crime cited above took place) sex work, running a sex industry business (i.e. a brothel) and being a sex worker are all legal, as long as engaged in as per state regulations. Admittedly, in Australia, NSW is the most liberal state in terms of sex work legislation, with many other states still criminalising certain aspects of the industry. However, this case exemplifies the negative discourses surrounding the sex work industry as a result of social and cultural stereotypes, rather than blatant illegality. As such, the Australian media’s bias against sex work, is mostly a reflection on our nation’s stigma surrounding the topic. It was made clear in the wake of Michaela Dunn’s murder that the Australian media fosters a visible disregard of victims of assault, or crime more broadly, due to their status as both women, and as sex workers. In the case of Michaela, this meant a majority of media coverage focused on the men who restrained the perpetrator, rather than the victim herself. She was often, in fact, redacted from the narrative completely or mentioned merely as a footnote. For instance, most of the news stories cite the male perpetrator, or the men who assisted, instead of the victim(s). This point is by no means intended to undermine the heroism of these men, but it is the refusal to acknowledge a sex worker as a murder victim which exemplifies the prejudice and bigotry of the media and community against this topic. It is decades of learned stigma that has led to this point. The aforementioned discourses surrounding sex trafficking, as well as the taboo nature of sex itself and widespread beliefs around gender and female subordination, have all led to a culture – specifically a media culture – that does not work to effectively recognise these women as (1) victims and (2) humans. In the instances when a victim is acknowledged in the media, there is potential for the label of ‘sex worker’ to be overused in reporting, especially by conservative sources, to dehumanise the subject and

attach the stigma concerning their line of work. This potentially places these individuals in a position of lesser-respect from the public, as ‘whores’, or ‘sluts’, who undertake a job that is not only ‘immoral’, but actively dangerous. This focused media coverage allows audiences who maintain these views to justify to themselves the abuse or murder of sex workers, because they were, or should have been, aware that their profession was ‘dangerous.’ Rose Harper, a sex worker herself, explains, “When sex workers experience violence or sexual assault, there’s still a widely spread view that by being a sex worker we’ve somehow offered ourselves up to be the punching bag of men who are sexually or physically violent.” Harper describes how Australians believe that the violence within the industry is merely an unfortunate side effect. But this danger associated with the industry is not, or should not be, innate to the acts involved with the job – rather it a culture of misogynistic and violent men who have the potential to instil violence into the industry. This can be through anti-sex worker sentiments, misogyny, generally aggressive behaviour, social isolation, disregard of consent etc. Violence can be particularly apparent for POC and LGBTQ+ sex workers. As intersections between male violence against women, racial violence and fetishization, and anti-queer sentiments become apparent. Although a stigmatised focus on sex work induces prejudice, failure to recognise sex work within the media at all also feeds into a larger problem becoming more obvious in Australia. We don't like talking about sex work or the dangers that stem from the profession. Media reports that redact women like Michaela from their narrative, or critiques that call on sources to not mention the role of sex work in crimes/assaults both work to limit an understanding of the dangers violent men can bring to the industry, and subsequently make it more difficult for processes of increased safety for workers to be implemented. As such, we must actively engage in conversation around sex work, not to bring ‘shame,’ but to educate audiences on the fact that sex work itself should not be dangerous. It is the gendered culture surrounding the job, and the clientele, which make it a potentially dangerous industry. As we continue to see dialogue proposing that sex workers are offered to violent/incel/misogynistic men to ‘control their urges’ and ensure they don't commit crimes against ‘regular’ women, it is extremely necessary to publicise the role of sex workers and the need for them to be ensured safety in their job. It is important to publicly discuss the role of constant and renegotiated consent in circumstances of sex work – to protect both clients and the (often neglected) worker. Additionally, we must not ignore the high levels of violence sex workers experience outside of their work environment due, in part, to the continued stigma and anti-sex worker sentiment that exists within our society. We must also confront instances of racial fetishization and subsequent violence that women of colour (WoC) experience in the industry – both physically and through online forums which house disgusting threats and affirmations of violence against WoC sex workers. Michaela Dunn was killed by a violent man specifically because she was a sex worker. That is a fact that cannot continually be ignored by the media, or Australia more broadly. If so, it will continue to harm the industry and construct a culture by which sex workers are never able to be guaranteed safety from misogynists, racists, homophobes, violent and anti-sex worker men, in their job. Everyone wants to be safe at their place of work, and if the Australian media publicise conversations like this, we may be able to ensure sex workers can be too. In memory of Michaela Dunn, Wom*n’s Honi offers our respect and condolences to her family, friends, and fellow members of the SW community. USYD WOCO offers both support and solidarity.

H OW A M I T O L OV E M Y C O U N T RY ? A gendered perspective on forced nationalism, thoughts by Misbah Ansari As I write this piece, I am agonized and angry. I am frustrated at the years of toxic societal conditioning and observation that has made me who I am today. “I sometimes wonder if I can be thirteen again, and love my country with my own heart. Not a heart that was forcibly transplanted into my body when it started transitioning to that of a woman, not the heart that does not have my beats.” I reflect on this angsty piece of poetry that I wrote two years ago. I probably wrote this after my mother decided that I should not wear Western clothing again, for my father had declared that it was wrong to do so. My anger knows no bounds, and I go on to argue, but it is then announced that I should no longer dress myself in clothing that does not belong to our culture. There are not enough experiences to tell you how many women fall prey to this forced nationalism. The romantic essence of nationalism is to behold a pride in the history, culture, traditions, and ethics of your nation. An understanding of your nation comes with the vivid processes of: Exposure – Learning basic facts and information about your national identity as a child. For instance national anthem, songs, flag, etc. Learning – The next process is that of formal education, which includes learning the national history, culture, demographics, people, basic laws, etc. Social learning – The learning that takes place at home and within society in general, where we are taught the proper way to conduct ourselves within the nation, respect the people, and respect different diversities. Forced nationalism happens at a microscopic level so that certain cultural ethics and practices (including clothing) are forced onto people, and thus a certain archetype of national identity is created. There is no objective transfer of knowledge; a constricted manual produced for the sake of following is given to us. My particular observation is that forced nationalism manifests itself greatly in the form of body policing, and that this body policing is highly gendered. “How easy is it for you to say my women should not carry any form of colonial relic in what they wear, when I see men twirling their mustache clad in crisp, white shirts and pants tucked in with the comfort of a colonial royalty. How is it that your gender lets you hug something with an ease, that we are being burnt for, stopped for, silenced for, buried for, how?” The act of being told to adorn myself in only a certain type of clothing is camouflaged under proud tradition and nationalism, but holds the latent presence of rape culture, misogyny, female submission, and body policing under it. Men go on to wear Western clothing without any restrictions or question of culture. Is nationalism the duty of a particular gender? It is like a woman's body and choices need to be emotionally and physically policed to be respected and considered valid. Women are covertly told to cover themselves up and in several cases to cease wearing any revealing clothing after a certain age to ‘protect’ their modesty, their respect, and their familial values. The effects of such policing are both psychological and physical. I have observed this as I have been subject to this policing too. While becoming more aware of this, I started to grow more aversive to my nation. I hail from an Indian Muslim family residing in a metropolitan city,

and being constantly surrounded by such teachings has intensified this. Furthermore, as someone who has grown up with a body that was considered larger than average, it was imbued that I should switch to Indian clothing for it hides my flaws, is modest, and was wrapped in the paper of ‘Indian Culture’. Seeing people around me from comparatively progressive backgrounds dressed in clothes that were deemed a part of ‘Western fashion’, imbued me with a suffocating hatred towards my country. I did not care for its historical essence, its beauty, the culture, nothing. There was hardly any space for my opinions to grow, and the lack of independence to experiment with fashion made me feel further unable to be opinionated. This is the case of one urban Indian girl, who had so many complex ideas revolving around her body, leaving her with nothing but shame and an unconscious need to conceal it. I look at other women like me who were told to conceal their bodies in the name culture, and know that when they see the mirror, all they think of is shame. They think of a country which is asphyxiating, orthodox, and cannot hold their love handles. These girls are like me, and I know that we have grown up not only body conscious, but wary of taking up space. Even as of now, there is no concrete and expansive research about how many women suffer from eating disorders in the Indian subcontinent. Disordered eating has been seen a predominantly Western phenomenon, while it is a known and under researched fact that women of colour are more susceptible to it. This forced nationalism has also led to a certain hatred towards traditional clothing among Indian youth. People who choose to dress up in traditional clothing are seen as an anomaly and backward. Imagine being taught to hate your country so much that you think what people traditionally wear is something exotic and a deviance? Those who are forced into wearing traditional clothing face a double distress of being oppressed and derided, and those who wear clothing with choice are placed into a certain mould and called derogatory names. The current youth exoticize Indian clothing in a plethora of ways, primarily through social media. When a particular privileged, conventionally good looking Indian woman who usually dresses in Western clothing uploads a picture in a saree, with a caption saying ‘Desi girl slaying’, her look is applauded and revered. She is seen as a Desi icon for doing so. At the same time, women who dress traditionally on a regular basis are marginalized for the normalcy. Even the posts on social media are supposed to have a sense of Western, modern aesthetic to it. A particular college background, adorned makeup, or urbanity is expected to elude from it. Or in the cases of the diaspora, where women in non-Indian countries who wear Indian clothing in a more western way are applauded, I wonder how much of this appreciation comes for women who choose to adorn themselves in an Indian clothing on a day to day basis. How is it that their normalcy is not celebrated? We have created this archetype that whenever we dress in our traditional clothing, we have to justify it, provide a hint of westernization to it, compulsorily add an explanation, or wear a full face of makeup to uphold a certain stereotype for that. “How easy is it for us to give a woman a dupatta to cover her heaving bosom, And every time she looks at it, She does not see the beauty of her country in it, She sees a well of agony and the nation is the demon, wanting to kill her, Catch her breathe in a deadly mutter, And she never looks at the nation with lovelorn eyes again.”

Art by Amelia Mertha

ICED TEA Nothing screams ‘yearning’ like a half finished cup of tea left for the morning. Staring at curtains and blank walls until it got cold. Too cold to drink. A cup half full with mind empty of everything but you; a soft silhouette hovering above my head. I can’t help but cry.

THE SPACE AROUND THESE WORDS

-Raz Badiyan @rbwords

is where you’ll find me, quiet. I am the air and you do not see me; I am the roots of your lungs, giving you the redness of blood, and the green veins of leaves. I am liquid, and bleed past borders; those wounds you call reason. Words that mean nothing without the space in-between. No photograph could pin down the air that ‘great’ men breathed – & even I Could not see nor hear myself in the mirror they called I if it meant I’d become a letter too. There’s no translating the howl of ancient wind; her anger and irrational power you tried to make still. She will haunt you, return your last breath back to air, back to the space around these words – -Claire Ollivain

MY MOTHER SAYS ‫خود جوانی خوشگل‬ My mother says “youth, in itself, is beauty” at the time of day where the sun does not cast its shadow. She does not see the creases in my eyes; There is more dark than light on either side, The folds in my heart and the holes in the sky. They pile up like clothes on chairs and dust on my bed And I circle around them like I have nothing to hide. I hide my face behind my hands until they say, “Give us a smile”, and after I tell you what I do To be beautiful I won’t be smiling and neither will you. -Raz Badiyan @rbwords 13

MY ABORTION Steff Leinasars on their experience with unwanted pregnancy I’m 21 and I find myself pregnant but I don't want to be. My body feels wrong and I can't remember when my last period was. Is it late? I'm not sure. But I feel a change in my body, so I take a pregnancy test. I stare down at the piss-ridden stick which holds so much power over me at that moment. Two lines. Two little blue lines stretching themselves across and onto me, wrapping themselves around my body. Your body isn't yours anymore, they scream. But society never taught me any different. I take another test which tells me I'm 3+ weeks, which means little to nothing. I sigh heavily, knowing I don't want this but knowing how hard that will be to change. What do I even do? School taught us how to not get pregnant. It never told us what happens when you do. What happens when you don't want to be. I call my mum. We go to the doctor's for a blood test and it comes back with what I already knew. I sit with my mum in that room, with the male doctor, with him smiling with excitement over my pregnancy. I tell him I don't want it and he gives me a number to call. I'm grateful for the privilege of getting this number. I'm grateful for the support of my mother there in that room. What if she wasn't there? I wonder. I can't bring myself to call the number. I don't know what to say. How was I meant to prepare for something like this? My mother calls for me and says the appointment will be in two weeks. I lay in bed for the next two weeks, unable to move from nausea and exhaustion. I have the abortion in my home state of WA where the law is blurred and abortion is legal if there is counselling and confirmation from someone outside of your body that you're making the choice best for you. Abortion is legal up to 20 weeks. There are no safe zones. After the two weeks pass, my mother drives us to a private clinic where they have locked doors and high security. No one is outside when we go in. I'm told to wait until my name is called. There are other women in the room and I wonder if they are here for the same reason. I'm not sure what else this service provides; school never taught us, society never told us. My name is called and a nurse pulls me into a room where I have an ultrasound to confirm the gestation. 7 weeks she says. Do you still want to go ahead with the procedure? Is she genuinely

asking if I've changed my mind or is she trying to convince me to not proceed? It's further along than I thought but of course, I still want the abortion. I knew immediately I wanted nothing else. After, we talk about contraception options and I opt for the IUD because it can be inserted at the same time. I'm thankful for my privilege in having this option. I'm thankful I am financially able to pay. I'm lead into a small, dark room and told to change into cotton clothes with no underwear. Then a nurse escorts me into the operating theatre where there is a team of people waiting for me. The anaesthetist tells me to count backwards from 10. I do so but then can't breathe and panic. He adjusts the dose and I'm gone. Not once before the abortion did anyone tell me what was going to happen. How the operation would work? What they would do to me? What would happen after? How I would feel? I wake up in a room with a row of chairs with women who I assume are just like me, waking up groggy and sore. I'm offered water and crackers and told I can go. Still, no one tells me what happened or what will happen. Outside there are protesters and I'm thankful for not having to face them. My mum takes me home and I lay in bed in pain, drifting in and out of sleep with a sanitary pad the size of a diaper in my underwear. I bleed and bleed and bleed. For six weeks. I'm not sure if this is normal but no one told me otherwise. I have had an abortion but still, we remain silent. The receptionist. The nurse. The doctor. All are silent and if it wasn't for the pain or the bleeding, I'd have no way of knowing if it really happened or not. I'm so fucking thankful for being able to have the abortion safely and with so much support from my family. But not all women are that lucky. Not all women have the privilege of being able to access abortion. That needs to change. Women's bodies, women's choices fucking matter. Fuck your politics. Fuck the white men in power who have the audacity to believe that THEY have power over what women do with their bodies. Abortion is a human rights issue. We should all have the right to choose what we want to do with our own bodies.

F UC K E D I F W E D O, A N D F UC K E D I F WE DON’T Misogyny, but like, make it erotic, writes Anie Kandya The sex positivity movement has lauded in the feminist movement in a big way, but there are undeniable issues in the belief that all consensual sexual acts are inherently healthy. The argument for sex positivity comes down to considering any and every sex act that a woman engages in enthusiastically as inherently empowering, solely because it goes against everything that the patriarchy has taught us to do; and that’s feminist, right? But while empowering and encouraging women to be active agents within their own sex lives is something that should be unequivocally supported, there is something sinister in how this movement, marketed towards women as feminist, has become weaponised against them. Particularly within the kink and BDSM communities, there is the ingrained belief that since erotic role-playing is a situational suspension of reality, the scenarios played out within it are to be exempt from the same moral criteria we would hold them to in any other situation. Part of the appeal of kink and BDSM is specifically that one is free from the burdens of their life outside it, and are able to play roles that are wildly different. However, it is important to acknowledge that enthusiastic consent alone does not make a sex act empowering, nor does it mean it is intrinsically progressive. In particular, sex acts that involve scenarios in which women are degraded and abused are widely free from criticism within the framework of sex-positivity; we would be quick to condemn people who expressed bigoted views, but yet we give bigotry accolades when it is eroticised. This is not to critique women who enjoy partaking in said acts, but it is to critique the socialisation of which such inclinations are products; we and our actions don’t exist in a vacuum. There is no denying that one’s personal autonomy plays a large part in their decision-making process, but any and every

decision we make is a result of our socialisation. Try as we might to unlearn the oppressive, patriarchal systems of learning in which we have been brought up, it is foolish to think that we could be remove ourselves entirely from them. The same thinking should apply to when our partners want to engage in problematic sex-play - we should be critically analysing where those desires stem from, the same way we would with any other problematic behaviour, regardless of whether we may feel comfortable engaging in them or not. Too often it feels as if sex positivity is another manifestation of the patriarchy, repackaged to appear shiny and new and sold to us under the guise of progressiveness. In particular, the currently held framework of the movement has curiously emboldened groups of men (I’m looking at you, straight, cis men) to identify as sex-positive feminists, allowing themselves to be labeled as progressive. They are granted societal permission, and even encouraged, to perform behaviour that would in any other case be seen has fundamentally unhealthy, unsafe or generally misogynistic, under the guise of ‘kinkiness’. All the while, women continue to be subject to the same misogynistic and abusive power dynamics. We should not be critical of sex, nor critical of women being empowered to enthusiastically engage in sex and discussions around it. Instead, we need to be critical of the way that this movement is being weaponised against us, to lead us to believe that by engaging in these acts, we are inherently empowering ourselves. We must analyse the politics that lie beneath sexual intentions, the same way we would with any other intentions. The sex positivity movement cannot and should not exist without a critical analysis, because sex and sexual acts themselves cannot exist within a vacuum and can never be apolitical. As such, the movement (and any movement which proclaims itself to be feminist) is useless if it doesn’t arm women with the knowledge of the political nature of the behaviour that they are expected to so willingly accept and engage in.

C E NS OR* D S h a n i a O ’ B r i e n i s * * * * * * * * * [ R E DAC T E D] * * * * * * * * * * * Ever since I started using social media, I've been warned about people with malicious intent: scammers, pedophiles, stalkers. I never thought it mattered because my intentions were never wrong. I never consciously wore “indecent” clothing, but I did not know what qualified as “indecent.” Honestly, I still do not know. Is a blouse that hugs my body and shows a fair amount of skin 'indecent'? Is it my fault if this is the body I was born with, and do not know how to appease everyone without covering up from head to toe? People have always had something negative to say. I have been told I will never find a husband or a job, that I will never be respected if I don't stop showing skin online. I took a (very long) break from social media, but that just resulted in more anxiety about giving in to a society that is not concerned with my safety and wellbeing. I was giving in to a mindset that blames the victim, that censors women's bodies, that shamed me for pictures where I looked 'indecent.' But why am I ashamed? Logically, I know now that I am not at fault, and that wicked people will always have dishonorable intentions no matter what I put out there. This cycle of shame has not started with me. If I do not work toward breaking it, there will never be a future wherein young girls won't have to think about

what a man so far in their future will think about their Instagram accounts. It's easy to say that I don't care about what people think. It's easier to stop posting pictures I know will result in contention. But is this the person I want to be? Do I want to hide away parts of myself because I am too afraid to fight for it? Do I want to continue being terrified of partaking in ‘normal’ Western activities because of my South Asian upbringing? When, in the middle of all of this, am I expected to form my own opinions about what is acceptable, and what is not? When, in a culture so oppressive, am I ever going to feel free? When can I do something I want to without thinking twice, thrice, four times about it? How many times will I be shamed out of "concern" for my character? I refuse to live with the constant fear of being "caught" doing something I do not think is wrong in the first place. I feel guilty writing this, and I will keep feeling guilty until I accept that I am the only one who should have agency in my life, online and offline. Coming to terms with the reality that I will have to fight back to reclaim my sense of identity for a long time is daunting. But the possibility that one day, hopefully, I will be able to be every part of myself is the only assurance I need to go on.

“D O M Y T I TS B OT H E R YOU?” Spectacular Fashion and the Naked Dress, words by Donnalyn Xu Something about it is almost lethal. The turn of a waist, or the tasteful slip of gauze as it falls over a bare shoulder. An underwear line, half-hidden. Beige tape below the breast. There’s the immateriality of it all, the illusory play of light – how it touches our bodies the way nothing else does. Not nude, but naked. When Rihanna wore Adam Selman’s Swarovski dress at the 2014 Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) Awards, news sites all over the world described it as her most daring red carpet look. Featuring more than 200,000 crystals hand-embellished onto a transparent fishnet gown, it was an almost absurd display of luxury and eroticism. However, its ability to shock was in more than just the extravagant dress. By wearing spectacular fashion, Rihanna ultimately revealed how the political site of the female body is itself a spectacle, a performance, and a crafted image. This notion of the spectacle harkens back to Guy Debord’s Marxist theory, where a society of appearance both falsifies and reflects reality. Through the idea of play, actions transcend the ordinary to portray a desired impression. Images replace the real, and the ordinary self becomes the extraordinary other. Housed in a room of representations, it is the product of reality itself. This can be seen in the naked dress – a piece of clothing that is sheer, translucent, fitted, or revealing. It exposes the naked body, while also transforming it into something beyond the ‘authentic’ world. It encompasses the real, and the illusion of the real. Are we looking at a clothed body? A naked body? Or perhaps something else entirely? As wearers of spectacular fashion, women are subjected to cultural and political conceptions of the physical self. By revealing flesh, the naked dress forces us to interrogate the way that women’s bodies are commodified in a Western patriarchal society. The sexualisation of the female form disrupts the purely aesthetic appeal of the naked dress, if such a thing exists at all. More than any other article of clothing, its relationship to the body is an essential part of its design. It is not only activated through embodiment, but given meaning through movement. It is almost entirely dependent on the wearer, whose body is the finishing touch. Selman himself noted that the most scandalous part of the Swarovski dress was not the crystals or the fishnet, but the beauty of the female form. What we see is a dress that reveals as much as it suggests, like a hand reaching out: an invitation, or a challenge. The political site of the female body is further magnified in the celebrity sphere, where there is a blurred division between reality and the playful society of spectacles.

Typically worn by celebrities at fashion and media events, the naked dress exists as part of cultural performance. In these exclusively theatrical spaces, spectacular fashion is not simply an object of clothing, but a personified representation of fantasy. At an award show full of photographers and onlookers, Rihanna actively participates in the culture of image-making. Picture the flash of a camera on diamonds, the animating effect of a single spark magnified. The glorious radiance of a crystal do-rag. How the naked dress absorbs heat, repurposes flesh. In this world, the wearer is transformed into a spectacle that can only function through illusions and commodities. She consumes her own image; she becomes a spectator of herself. The woman is no stranger to this feeling, spectacular fashion or not. Although the naked dress appears to reveal what is usually hidden, it is inevitably a highly constructed image. Underneath her slip of fishnet, Rihanna’s chest is bare, but her beige coloured underwear is plainly visible. The purposeful revelation of what is known to be a hidden undergarment is almost as equally startling as her exposed body. More than transparency, there is the question of nakedness as a performance of intimacy – we only see what we have been allowed to see. Skin as costume, skin as delight. And it is delightful, in the way that spectacular fashion always is, but rather than an elaborate display of feathered shawls and puff pastry organza, we are left with a dress that is ironically as excessive as it is scarce. As Journalist Cait Munro describes, the naked dress conceals a “facade being held together by a bricolage of double-sided tape, bizarre styling tricks, and possibly black magic.” The naked dress, then, as bewitching. The wearer as enchantress. Although it supposedly reveals what is hidden underneath, it merely transforms the body into a constructed ideal of rehearsed revelation, sheltered by the seductive glamour of illusions, of something beyond our imagination. In the society of the spectacle, interactions between fashion and the female body are highly political and complex. In post-modernity, the naked dress may appear to be a subtler expression of extreme fashion on the runway. However, it emulates the playful spectacle that continues to shock, enthral and surprise. The naked dress carries with it an element of drama in disguise. It is an homage to contrasting images: the diamonds and the fishnet, the exaggerated act of stripping bare, the sharp feelings ignited by the most mundane and intimate moments. There is, of course, the theatrical significance of something as precise a silhouette. When asked about her bare breasts, Rihanna simply said, “I just liked it better without the lines underneath. Could you imagine the CFDA dress with a bra? I would slice my throat.”

E XC E R P T S F ROM

‘ A F I E L D G U I D E T O M Y P E LV I C N E R V E ’

Words and photography by Savannah Stimson

T I M E , A N C E S T RY, A N D T O N I MORRISON’S GUIDING LIGHT Kiki Amberber on the impact Toni Morrison has had on herself, and the broader world Toni Morrison has been a presence in my life at once electric, kind, and devastating. I am still discovering the ways in which her work is making and re-making me, her visions of time and ancestry constantly and quietly transforming my thinking. I suspect this transformation will never end. Morrison’s words sink below the skin like saltwater, colouring everything inky-bright and a little sharp. I see her everywhere; in fragments of music, text and images that initiate me into a dialogue with a fluid past. I remember the potential of ancestor-oriented futurities and the role language plays in this. I gain hope. I first read Beloved last year and it sat with me gently, in the way that Morrison’s words do; a tide crashing quietly, with electric impact. My body of water met her endless shore. In Beloved, I was first struck by the tenderness with which Morrison imbues her characters, her refusal to let the text become a tragedy heavy with unnamed bodies. The people in Beloved, as in all her work, undergo massive suffering yet do not blur into each other. They demand recognition, and singularity. This was radical to me. Morrison’s treatment of time and the past drew itself more slowly upon my consciousness. Morrison frequently employs a non-linear writing style and multiple narrator perspectives to evade a traditional sense of time and narrative development: “Beloved, she my daughter. She mine.” / “Beloved is my sister.” / “I am Beloved and she is mine.” This project is widened in scope when her novels are viewed in tandem, forming webs that speak to each other. Beloved forms a trilogy alongside Jazz and Paradise, texts unconnected by temporal or geographical location. When time and place cease to be significant purveyors of meaning, what remains? Here, Morrison's notion of 'rememory' moves away from the official history of institutional stories of the past to a more personal past that is always in flux, as is characteristic of human memory. It serves

as an intervention into the erasure of marginalised groups by official history. Morrison suggests that where gaps will always exist for those without adequate resources to tell their stories, and where the concept of truth is unhelpful, collective dialogue and cultural memory open spaces for the creation of imagined alternatives, and the impelling of agency. In an essay from Morrison’s archives, she reflects on memory as fraught with pain and possibility: “the stress of remembering, its inevitability, the chances for liberation that lie within the process.” Does this gift us something in thinking through Morrison herself, the legacy she leaves and how we might go on in her absence? As with her work, learning of Morrison’s passing was an experience of gradual, building emotion. I sat still in my bedroom, a little shocked by the waves of grief pressing themselves softly on me. I felt panic at the thought of moving through the world without her. I was also aware of a deep gratitude for having been touched by her work and the gaping hole left by her loss. Reading Morrison’s words and the words of others about her, it was clear her presence was not diminished but pulsed stronger through multiplication of the love and joy she inspired. Doreen St. Félix, in an essay in The New Yorker, considers “the age Toni Morrison was when she died, eighty-eight, as two infinity signs, straightened and snatched right-side up.” If time as treated by Morrison is collapsible and expandable, divorced from Western understandings of truth and objectivity, Toni Morrison remains a tangible presence. Perhaps we can conceptualise Morrison’s thinking around time to speak to her and our other ancestors, opening a line from the past to as-yet unknown futures. This sensibility of ancestral dialogue is explored by Alexis Pauline Gumbs in her book M Archive: After the End of the World. Gumbs describes the work as one of speculative documentary, which imagines and bears witness to a postapocalyptic world through poetry and prose. She says, “M is for must be and maybe and much.” In creating a direct line between irrecoverable pasts and unknown futures, Gumbs’ work embodies Morrison’s vision for a surpassing of temporal linearity. I locate a similar experience listening to music by artists such as Dev Hynes and Solange, whose songs reference history in a swelling, non-linear fashion that places it directly into the confusing rush of the present. In ‘Augustine’ by Dev Hynes’ Blood Orange,

he sings, “our heads have hit the pavement / many times before.” He is talking about a million forms of harm and none of them; his words, for me, are a form of time travel collapsing black experience(s) into a single, infinite, multitudinous point. In her book of essays Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Morrison talks about the act of writing as one of fabrication and fantasy. She argues that novels never indicate truth but are instead the product of “the imagination […] which bears and invites rereadings, which […] implies a shareable world and an endlessly flexible language.” This act of fabrication is often co-opted by a white gaze, conceptualised by Morrison as observing people of colour through a lens framed by both need and desire; fear and longing. Playing in the Dark reminds us that even with Morrison’s disruption of time, bodies are still impacted by the violence of institutional racism. Against this, she provides us with a fantastical image of her own: the power of language to rectify harms by imagining new histories, telling more complete stories, and establishing ancestral lineages through openings in fluid time and space. In 1993, Morrison said, “we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” In Morrison’s hands, language is a tool for people of colour to continue surviving; it becomes both the blood-line and the beating heart. Morrison argues that in a racialised world, for people of colour, “imagining is not merely looking or looking at;” instead, it is an act of “becoming.” Perhaps this project of becoming through imagination is neverending, a point never to be reached but strived for across temporal space and ancestral layers. The dialogues I have with the women of colour in my life grow us towards this space of imaginative becoming; they reignite worlds and realign realities. I want to keep moving towards openings in space for the creation of futures. In the meantime, I’ll look for traces of Toni Morrison wherever I can find them; infinitely grateful for her guiding light each time it touches my skin.

W H Y I T ’ S O K AY T O WAT C H T H E BAC H E L OR Ellie Stephenson is a fan of trashy TV There’s nothing worse than sitting down for a good vent about The Bachelor with a female friend, colleague, or favourite auntie when [insert condescending male acquaintance here] interrupts with the charming refrain: “The Bachelor? Really? I thought you were smart!” The most immediately annoying thing about these kinds of comments is that they generally come from men who think that golf is real exercise, complaining about political correctness is good comedy, and cargo shorts count as clothing. These guys do not occupy the moral high ground of good taste, nor are they consumers of thoughtful and high quality media. It seems mean-spirited, then, to mock young women for their pleasure in unwinding and getting perhaps a little emotionally involved in something that’s not Serious High Art By Dead White Men (or a podcast). It’s annoying for another reason. The Bachelor is undeniably a flawed and sometimes silly TV show. But it is also extremely watchable. The reason, at least in my experience, is that the women on the show are very fun. No one would watch an hour of the Mattchelor insipidly nursing a cup of tea and flexing his forehead vein. And seasons of The Bachelorette are inevitably masochistic to watch, with a line up of identically boring and freaky men failing to inspire. The women on The Bachelor, whether villainous or angelic, are frequently funny, sweet and/or interesting. Towards the end of each series they have backstories, complex emotions, and seemingly genuine friendships. It’s dismissive to say that watching interesting character development and emotional journeys is vacuous. Unfortunately, The Bachelor does its excellent contestants a disservice. Whether through actual direction, or just ingenious editing and casting, the show robs the women it stars of their full personalities. It routinely confines people into convenient patriarchal boxes that provide drama and fairytale narratives but ultimately make for shallower TV. On the last season, this manifested in the obsession with marriage and kids. Matt, blurring the line between Nerdy Man and Soviet State Planning Committee, had a concrete 5 year plan for his life, wherein a wife and kids were a certainty. This became a pervasive drama throughout the show. Most

notably, the persecution of Abbie was based on the bizarre idea that a woman can’t possibly be on the show for The Right Reasons™ if she doesn’t nervously check her biological clock every few minutes. It’s absurd that a 23-year-old not having her life meticulously planned out was framed, not as a non sequitur, but as a conniving betrayal. Matt’s date with Helena, where he asked her to plan their relationship on a confronting 10 year timeline, understandably freaked her out. Deciding on your imaginary child’s 7th birthday present before you’ve finished your second date is a bit much. All this was compounded by the constant focus on Matt’s career, with endless astrophysics puns never letting the audience forget that the producers were proud of getting someone smart on the show. The Bachelorettes were also very qualified, with a couple of engineers interrupting the usual demographic of designers and models. Matt’s 5 Year Plan seemed as though it would come at the expense of these careers -- which were at best ignored and at worst actively treated as disposable -not his. The show would have been better had it avoided this framing: it could have prompted serious conversations about domestic labour and gender roles within families, rather than pressuring the women to compete over how clucky they were. The Bachelor (and admittedly the women on it) also suffers from a belief in an unwritten ‘girl code’ which punishes women for being insufficiently demure. It was this girl code behind the unreasonable demands that Abbie not kiss Matt, the anger at any girl fully participating in a group date, and the backlash unleashed for telling Matt about drama in the house. Ultimately, the girl code tries to enforce passivity, making it seem immoral to competitively participate in the show or to be overtly sexy. The Bachelor would be a better show if it stopped arbitrarily picking women to present as villains and creating conflicts over this girl code. Watching The Bachelor exposes women to sexism from two sides: dismissiveness about viewers of reality TV being stupid; and the poor framing of women on the show. This may seem inconsequential, but the programme informs a lot of discourse in our society about love and romance. It might be a show full of heterosexual nonsense and wacky group dates, but it should at least do its contestants, and its viewers, justice.

WOM E N A N D H E A LT HC A R E Klementine Burrell-Sander on the failings of the healthcare system and the need for medical intersectionality. In Australia, we are lucky enough to have a fairly well-functioning healthcare system that ostensibly allows everyone access to the care they need, regardless of their financial circumstances. Unfortunately, our healthcare system still operates in a society that is rife with oppression. Some oppression is obvious – like our continued racist treatment of Indigenous people within medical institutions – some of it less evident but deeply damaging nonetheless. Thus, there arises the need for an intersectional approach that considers access to healthcare as well as other cultural and financial barriers in order to examine this issue in the detail it deserves. There is ample evidence of how women in general are disadvantaged by health services, but this grows exponentially worse when the women in question belong to any so-called minority group – that is to say, if they’re not white, welloff, straight and able-bodied. Some of it is due to outright discrimination, but the effects of unconscious bias and inadequate education can be far more insidious. The explanation for the disparities in the healthcare system is complex and multifaceted. In some cases, it’s caused by blatant gendered discrimination. Roughly 70% of chronic pain sufferers are women, and studies suggest that women feel chronic pain both more frequently and severely than men. Despite this, pain is frequently undertreated in women, apparently due to archaic beliefs that women are predispositioned to be hysterical and less able to accurately report the degree of pain they’re experiencing. Horrifyingly, in a 2014 survey, nearly half of women with chronic pain were told that the pain was ‘all in their head’. Another common mantra – largely heard from male doctors – is that pain caused by ‘female diseases’ like endometriosis is just a normal part of being a cis woman. It isn’t hard to link these disturbing facts to the lingering misogyny of healthcare providers and the institutions that back them. Additionally, beyond a brief dip into the reproductive system, XX-chromosome physiology is rarely taught in medical schools. In fact, the regressive practices around treating females has earned itself the nickname ‘bikini medicine’, derived from the fallacy that the only differences between the sexes are the parts covered by a bikini – the breasts and genitals. Fatally, this practice completely fails to recognise that, for instance, symptoms of issues like heart attacks can vary hugely between sexes. As a result, many diagnostic failures when screening tests or lists of symptoms do not include the symptoms or signs experienced by XX-chromosome patients.

In fact, a study in 2000 found that cis women were seven times more likely than cis men to be misdiagnosed and discharged during a heart attack because their symptoms didn’t align with the male-centric symptoms taught to healthcare staff. While it’s true that genetic factors can increase disease risks for people from a given ethnic background, it seems obvious that many disparities in healthcare suffered by women of colour are caused by social factors; statistically, women of colour have much higher rates of pregnancy-related complications and mortality. Additionally, misogynoir experienced by African-American women is clear in the fact that they are 20% less likely to be prescribed pain medication, more likely to suffer strokes and less likely to survive them, and more likely to suffer mistreatment or underdiagnosis of breast cancer. Hispanic women suffer higher rates of cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Asian-American women are less likely to be screened for cancer, even though cancer is the leading cause of death in Asian-Americans. There’s plenty more statistics to be quoted, but the trend is clear; in this white supremacist patriarchy, societal bias manifests in worse health outcomes for women of colour. Though it may seem counterintuitive to some, having any kind of disability can worsen your experience with healthcare. Reproductive and sexual health is a particular issue for patients with disabilities, with some patients with disabilities discouraged from having sex or bearing children, and even undergoing forced sterilisation. In addition, many disabilities are poorly understood, especially in the case of ‘invisible’ conditions like chronic fatigue syndrome or neurological disorders. Such patients are often dismissed as lazy, weak or attention-seeking when they seek help. Similarly, healthcare staff may take prescriptivist approaches to treating patients with disabilities, telling them that they should lower their expectations of their life instead of encouraging them to demand the best possible treatment. Healthcare professionals should be working with patients with disabilities, but far too often, they ignore the lived experience of the patients they’re supposed to help. It is abundantly clear that our healthcare services are failing women across the board, and it is women of colour, disabled women and queer people who suffer most. We cannot boast about our healthcare system being one of the best in the world until we begin to address the deep structural oppression within it, and effect real positive change for the women and non-binary people who are being hurt most by its failings.

P U B L I C D I S P L AY S O F (DIS)AFFECTION To call out, or not to call out? – Shani Patel asks the question. Like many people in this era of social media, I often end up lost in the depths of Facebook comments sections. It’s a pretty average habit, until I find myself spending hours reading the public outrage of Baby Boomers under a ‘Sunrise’, ‘TODAY’, or ‘Sydney Morning Herald’ post. You know, the ones deliberately written in a way that will provoke 66 year old Sharon/John/Cheryl/Darren/etc. into an emotional and usually ill-informed rant about climate strikers, refugees, vegans, feminists, or any of the topics that these outlets love to throw around with a baiting title for engagement. I find myself here multiple times a day. I don’t reply like I used to in 2016 when I used arguing with strangers as a form of excitement and procrastination during my dreary HSC days. Often, I just sit and fume about the widespread ignorance that tends to be displayed and let my thoughts spiral angrily until I hastily close my phone. On a similar and more personal scale, this tendency has weaseled its way into my other social media habits - on multiple occasions, I have engaged with cishet white males from high school who have been provoked by the messages I post and share to my Instagram stories. I won’t lie, I get a kick out of this particular tendency – I am entertained by exposing the ignorance of the people who made me feel too Brown throughout high school. Perhaps it’s due to the extensive effort I once put in to bury my identity around them and keep my opinions aligned to theirs. Perhaps I perceive calling these people out to be empowering, without really understanding why. Either way, I’d never comprehended the harm of doing this until my girlfriend recently pointed out: by sharing the reactions of these people, what kind of online space was I creating for myself, my loved ones, and the communities that I belong to? My younger sibling, who currently attends the high school that I graduated from, acts in a similar way, publicly shaming any backlash over the issues they speak out about, with this years’ notable occasions including Invasion Day and the Global Climate Strikes. Despite the 5 year age difference between our cohorts, we both seem to engage for the same reasons – to educate friends and family, to retort back when people attack us, to reaffirm our opinions beyond echo chambers of like-minded views, and because, in their words “I know it’s not my responsibility… but who else is going to do it?”. It’s no secret that in this society, people belonging to marginalised groups are often

tasked with the responsibility of educating everyone else, with this burden falling heavily on Black women. And whilst I have only occasionally been asked to educate cishet men on current affairs (easily Google-able ones, at that – how hard is it to figure out why Uber drivers or school students are striking?) as a queer Asian woman, I have still managed to internalise this responsibility alongside a desire to assert my voice and political identity to the passive audience I once silenced myself for. Years after branching out from these groups and allowing myself to form an identity, I still find myself pinned beneath a white gaze – evident even by the positive messages I get from other white friends commending how I speak up and thanking me for educating them, whilst refusing to act similarly and share the burden. For a matter of years, I’ve taken on this role with apparent ease, and internalised it to a point that I reacted defensively when it was first brought to my attention. In a podcast by The Guardian, writer Jia Tolentino remarks, “the economic model of the internet re-selling and selling data points about our identity and our search to further harden, or shape or change that identity,” and importantly concludes that “our selfhood was not meant to bear that kind of economic weight.” And indeed, selfhood needs

I’m no longer it, let alone has

sure that the ability

my own bear it.

This leaves me at a point of disparity - it is not within my nature to stay quiet on topics that I feel passionately about. How am I meant to refrain from engaging with ignorance when we next roll around to January 26th and social media becomes flooded with pictures of Southern Cross tattoos and SMH articles about “political correctness gone mad”? Last year on this very date, I had a photo sent directly to me of a white boy I once had a crush on holding a can of VB in one hand, and his middle finger up on the other. Perhaps it’s time to cleanse my online spaces – to unfollow, to unlike, and to finally cut these ties. Not to stop speaking out, but to ensure that my sibling and I are able to let people take on the responsibility of educating themselves, to nurture the online spaces we inhabit, and to allow ourselves to step back and breathe.

ECOFEMINISM Alex Mcleay thinks feminism must be anti-capitalist and environmental “The universality of female subordination, the fact that it exists within every type of social and economic arrangement and in societies of every degree of complexity, indicates to me that we are up against something very profound, very stubborn, something we cannot rout out simply by rearranging a few tasks and roles in the social system, or even by reordering the whole economic structure.” - Sherry B. Ortner, Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture? (1974) The oppression of women has a long, complex history, variably and idiosyncratically affecting every woman who lives today. The enforcing patriarchy has taken many shapes and forms, in different cultural, economic, political, and physical patterns. As we stand today, we exist in the midst of a climate emergency and on the precipice of ecological disaster. An understanding of the multifaceted effects of patriarchy, in conjunction with the more commonly discussed effects of industrial capitalism in creating the aforementioned climate emergency must be reached, as well as the ways we, as a society, can move forward from this. Expansionist and extractionist methods of economic growth have been well established within the European modus operandi for centuries, as evident through years of territorial wars and the brutal endeavours of colonialism. Murder, expatriation, and devastation of land was an accepted component of European prosperity. The utilisation of coal and the steam engine allowed an intensification of violent colonialism and war abroad, as well as entrenching systems of capitalism and inequality within England. Mechanised factories could move to cities, and a larger, more desperate pool of workers allowed factory owners to keep wages low and hours long. Women, and specifically married women, were desired as labourers, as they were seen as more docile and accepting of harsher conditions for less pay. Consumerism further legitimised waged working and alienated people from resources, methods, and production of goods. The interlocking processes of repressing workers, foreign imperialism, and resource extraction were simultaneously fuelled by coal. Within Western European history and philosophy, there is precedent that allows men to think of conquering women and nature in the same way. Dualistic positioning labels Man as having standing, while Woman, as opposed to him, does not. Similarly, Humanity, or Culture, has standing, while Nature does not. Man has been bestowed by the Western Canon (a retrospectively applied label loosely linking Ancient Greece and contemporary England) the virtues of rationality, order, enlightenment, and law. The perceived superiority of European men justified/s the violent marginalisation of all foreign people in concurrence with the personal,

physical, and political repression of women. Mary O’Brien notes that “... men did not suddenly discover in the sixteenth century, that they might make a historical project of the mastery of nature. They have understood their separation from nature and their need to mediate this separation ever since that moment in the dark prehistory when the idea of the paternity took hold.” Western European obsession with the complete comprehension and ‘penetration’ of nature set a track for the domination of the subject. Issues of patriarchy and climate destruction have been exacerbated by the conditions of neoliberalism. Wealth and power have been consolidated within destructive industries such as fossil fuels, mining, and plastic consumables. This wealth exists in the hands of mainly white, American men. Circumstances of Western society today necessitates that average people continually buy new things that are cheap and disposable, with planned obsolescence built in. Women are disproportionately affected by this, with a specific instance being the constraints of the beauty myth that coerces women into buying huge amounts of clothing that will go out of style, chemical based makeup, and plastic surgery. People have been alienated from their environment, their labour, production and consumption, and their own existence both internally and externally. This luxury of consumerism in the West has been at the expense of the majority of the planet. Many countries have had to mine, farm, excavate, and export massive amounts of natural resources in an effort to match the path of industrialisation and modernisation as dictated by powers such as the United Kingdom and the United States. Liberal feminism has not made the gains for all women as it has promised. The few figureheads of female CEOs and the ideas of ‘lean in’ feminism do not do justice to the vast majority of women. Women will not be liberated by gender equality that only favours the ruling class, especially when it is a known fact that women do two thirds of the world’s work for 10% of its pay. When the limitations of society and culture are pushed, women are forced to step to the plate. This is evident through research on ecofeminism by Ariel Salleh who identified that “...what happens in the fullness of capitalist patriarchal time, is that men retain their ‘rights’ in a public and legal sense, while social ‘responsibility’ falls to women.” Environmentalism similarly will not make the gains the earth needs unless it also sets out to deconstruct the method and psyche of capitalism that rationalises extractivism and expansionism in the name of wealth. Women must constantly fight to have the gendered nature of environmental issues addressed. It is socially and structurally evident that women earn considerably less money than men and yet still have the burden of care, making them disproportionately susceptible to climate disasters in terms of mobility, safety, food security, and financial security. None of this means to reduce discussion to any forms of gender essentialism. There is a tendency to discuss the procreational capacity and care work commonly undertaken by women as having more of a natural, biological aspect than the work of men. Women and men should be equally encouraged to engage in green, climate, service, and care work. It is to say that we must deconstruct the assumptions we have culturally generated and engage in perpetuating about the role of women in society and how we envision our relationship to the environment. The inscription of maternity and nature onto women’s bodies as a default is an element of the 1/0 culture and Man over Woman (= Nature) dynamic that justifies Male domination. I apologise for the binary language used in this article. This is not to erase gender non-conforming identity from discussion surrounding environmentalism, nor is it to reduce the position of non-binary people in the environmental movement and larger society now. This article aims to interrogate the patriarchal dynamic of misogyny and extractivism that is critical to the climate crisis as it exists today, which has a distinct binary dynamic to it.

S O W E’V E DECR I M I NA L I Z E D A B O RT I O N. N OW W H AT ?

Words by Ziyun (Nina) Qiu

Nothing that’s worth fighting for is easy to get. The ‘choice’ that we fight for does not magically come merely with the removal of a formal ban. In other states where abortion has been decriminalized for much longer than in NSW, getting an abortion remains just as inaccessible for those who come from regional areas and low socioeconomic backgrounds. If we let abortion services remain as inaccessible and unaffordable as they currently are, the ability to choose that we have fought so hard for will be tenuous and uncertain. The prochoice movement must therefore harness the momentum derived from its success and keep pushing for substantive choice, which lies in designated public services, coverage under Medicare and the removal of heavy restrictions around GPs and pharmacies who can provide abortions. A cross-sectional study suggests that more than one in 10 people who access abortion services were from outer regional or remote Australia. Figures from Marie Stopes Australia further show that only 0.2% of regional GPs in NSW are registered to prescribe RU486, the drug used for medical abortions. This means a significant number of people who need access to abortions do not have viable options to exercise their right to bodily autonomy in their local area. Lack of local resources also leads to inadequate understanding of different abortion procedures, which removes people’s agency in making informed choices about their bodies. Furthermore, those who travel for more than four hours to receive an abortion are more likely to be more than nine weeks pregnant. This points to a delay in access due to geographical barriers, and as even heavier restrictions apply to pregnancies beyond 22 weeks, such a delay

could put people requiring abortion access in situations that are no different than before decriminalization. Even if geographical access or legal barriers are no longer an issue, one may simply be unable to afford an abortion. As of 2017, the median upfront cost for Medicare-rebated medical abortions before or at nine weeks was $560, or $470 for a surgical abortion. Furthermore, in many regions, there are no public and few private health services that provide surgical terminations. On top of how difficult it is for people of low socioeconomic status to secure enough money for the upfront payments associated with getting an abortion, costs increase significantly for procedures undertaken after 12 weeks. This will most likely affect those who travel from regional and rural areas of NSW the worst. I have witnessed someone in my life go through the experience of accessing abortion. She had received assistance with a second pregnancy and had a termination for her third. The decision came after long consideration of her age, health, and financial capacity. While she wasn’t able to financially support a third child, she was one of the lucky ones that could both access abortion in a public hospital in her neighborhood and afford the steep fees associated. If she had been forced to carry the pregnancy to term because such an expensive procedure was out of reach, it would have put her in an unthinkable situation. So, in cases where abortion is a legal option but remains inaccessible, much work still remains for the movement. To preserve the progress that’s been achieved so far, the broad left must gather their forces around

a pro-choice movement that fights to make the choice they’ve won actually available to people from all geographic and socioeconomic backgrounds. We must work towards implementing designated public providers of both medical and surgical abortions across the state, so that everyone can access them without delay or long-distance travels, just like other essential health services. We must also put abortion drugs and procedures on Medicare. If we believe that abortion is a human right, and that it is fundamental to individual autonomy, the existing rebate regime is far from adequate. Finally, heavy restrictions limit not only the number of GPs capable of prescribing RU486 but also the number of pharmacies that can issue and administer the drug. This has led many to turn to tele-abortions, where people undergo medical abortions within their home. While tele-abortion has been a leading development in medical abortions, it is not an ideal option, lacking the level of care of a clinic visit. Furthermore, tele-abortion is not appropriate for all cases such as surgical abortions. Therefore, we ought to focus on lifting the heavy restrictions in a system that remains oppressive to people in need of abortion access. As part of the pro-choice movement, we must remain indignant about systemic inequities and injustices, because we are progressive, feminist activists. We are activists that do not stop at our first success. We are activists that keep fighting for a better tomorrow. Our next mission beckons.

L E SS IS MOR E : A WOM * N OF C O L O U R ’ S E X P E R I E N C E O F S PA C E Words by Vivienne Guo It’s no surprise that all women in today’s world live under the oppressive shadow of a Western patriarchy; women of colour walk the edge of a blade between two. I struggle to love the blood of my ancestors that flows through my veins and is in every beat of my heart, because it has forced me into gilded prisons of body dysmorphia and silence.

of my motherland; simply, I am ashamed that the Chinese patriarchy that raised me had inevitably betrayed me. This was a patriarchy that only understood honour and pride; it would erase me without a second thought if I compromised its perfect world. I have been terrified – of intimacy, physicality, sexuality, love – ever since.

In the chaos that is unpacking each and every trauma in my writing, one question stands fundamental; how do I learn to grow, which is by definition the process of being more, when I have lived my whole life being told that I should take up less space?

I’ve always found it hard to distinguish where exactly the Chineseness in me stops and where the Westernness begins. I have never had the white privilege of considering gender apart from race. I am young, but my perceptions of this world are already crystal clear. This world is already unfriendly to women, non-genderconforming people, trans people, intersex people. It is especially unfriendly to women of colour, indigenous people, non-English speaking migrants and refugees.

*** I have a memory of standing naked in front of a full-length mirror. In my teenage years, hours of weekly soccer and gymnastics lent itself to a slender ‘feminine’ physique corded with reliable muscle. It was a body that I could rely on; it was warm, it was healthy, it was mine. I should have been proud. But instead, I found myself breathless with terror. It is rare that I remember my thoughts in excruciating verbatim, but I remember this one: I need to gain weight to make myself less of a target to men. The problem here was more than just the passing discomfort of a young woman coming to terms with her sexuality. I live in a world where every woman that I know has experienced some form of sexual harassment or assault, where one woman in Australia dies every week at the hands of male violence. Their names are left to the sands of history, as though they are just words and were not once whole people with lives, families, and dreams. Irrefutably, the true problem is that this world is so hostile to women that a child felt that she had to damage her body to make herself undesirable and thereby safer. The safety mechanism of ‘unattractiveness’ is a lie as well; we know damn well that the way that women dress or look does not determine the likelihood of being sexually assaulted. Yet, the sexuality of my sixteen-year-old body felt like a threat to my life. My sixteen-year-old body found itself as the bedrock of many repeated traumas. That sixteen-year-old understood the word ‘anorexic’ to be synonymous with ‘beautiful’, a learned vernacular which was borne of the glamorisation of mental illness amongst my young, naïve peers. And like all other areas of my life, race followed me in this too. My Chineseness engendered a nickname that followed me for years: “anorexic panda,” my schoolmates would sometimes call me.

As a woman of colour, I have been discouraged from taking up space from the moment that I began to understand gender. I have been discouraged from taking up space in conversations, on the street, on sidewalks, in classrooms, in my own home. Imagine if women of colour had the same confidence as men – white men in particular. The middle-aged white man next to me is manspreading on the bus, pressing me as a result into the cold glass of the window, in stark contrast to a brown woman sitting two seats in front of me looking for all the world like she wants to shrink into herself. The likelihood is that she too, like me, has lived a life that told her to take up less space. Imagine if women of colour felt that they were able to take up space in conversations. My dad, a conservative Chinese man in every sense of the tradition, has told me on numerous occasions that I am too opinionated, too loud, too much. How different this world would be if women of colour had the confidence of white men, buoyed by the dual privileges afforded to them in an all too white world. As much as I would like to excavate the relics of my cultural past, I know that there is no way to divine the true genesis of my traumas nor is there a way to sever them from the person I am today. Yet, my takeaway from this experience is that I owe it to myself to at least attempt to understand the root of my personal gendered trauma. Only then will I be able to begin the long arduous process of healing.

My coloured experience of gender is one fraught with gaslighting, most painfully from my close family members. Chinese beauty standards – skinny, pale, demure – are saturated with internalised Westernness and its exotification of my people. I did not fit comfortably into any of those expectations. When I was younger, dinners with our family friends would see my grandmother build me up with humble brags about me being “too skinny”. When I gained weight as I passed into adulthood, my weight became my family’s silent shame. I was underweight for most of my teenage years and though I am a healthy weight now, I still struggle to see myself as anything other than chubby and undesirable. The voices of my Chinese family are always in my head, speaking to me about the shame that I bring to them, and they are joined by another voice that tells me that I would be prettier if there was less of me, if I took up less space and made people less uncomfortable. If I dig deeper into the annals of my past, there is one memory that I return to over and over, because it leaves me feeling unspeakably violated and at a loss for a nameless something that I have been missing for so long that I never even realised it was gone. If I were to try to name it, I might call it Innocence. I am maybe eight or nine years old. My parents have taken us to a family friend’s house, where he tells my parents that he has some clothes to gift to us; my parents accept these gifts gratefully and with humble thanks, because any new clothes were a luxury. I am told to try these clothes on to make sure that they fit. I change in the bathroom, and go out to the living room where the adults are talking in animated Cantonese. The room goes quiet when I enter, and all eyes are on me. In front of my parents in this silent room, this supposed family friend says: “Wow! So sexy!” My parents laughed, and the conversation moved on. I knew without a doubt that they could see the visible discomfort in my face as I stood there frozen with equal amounts of shock and learned discipline – I had not been dismissed by the adults and it would embarrass my parents if I were to behave in a way that did not reflect the quiet and dutiful girl that they had raised me to be. That girl could not speak, so I will speak for her; in what horrific world would the sexualisation of an eight-year-old child be acceptable? Looking back on this moment, I am ashamed to be Chinese. To clarify, it’s not that I hate where I come from, the language of my proud ancestors or the rich traditions

Art: Ellie Zheng

PORTRAIT OF A DAYDREAM I wonder how it feels To exist constantly in the shadowy painting of reality To know only workload, work stress, heart ache (the primary hues of the every day) I try to untangle the strings tethering me to the colourful release lights flashing inside my mind in the land where I am still queen Where there need be no king, and I rule with dreams And bring myself back down To the misted illustration hovering outside my head Where I am still the citizen of a stolen country Where reality is still there every time I wake. Sometimes my mind flickers and folds in between the layers and my feet falter, unsure of which colour terrain they dare to believe. the strings tangle themselves, too close To separate with flawed fingers And I choke Trying to bite off the knots with my teeth. They are wrapped around my neck now, pulling me in Till reality grows dim My eyes are entranced as The artworks plait themselves together in a cacophony of colours Dancing to a lullaby which dulls the creeping ache and breathes the blackness of primary colours away, till my kingdom is a distant memory where the tide flows backwards, and the sea is painted too high for me to swim in it. Now, I choose the sand. Still, it seems I will always be a painter in the artwork of dreams.

-Laura de Feyter

CONTENT WARNING: SEXUAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL ABUSE, RAPE.

THE MISSING N UA NC E OF THE MODERNIST CANON Ra n u k a Ta n d a n o n t h e w o rk o f Je a n R h ys

The Modernist canon is an integral aspect of Western literature, and the themes of colonialism, capitalism, post-war poverty and modern society running through its seminal works have captivated me since I was introduced to the lines of T.S. Eliot in high school. However, it was not until I studied Jean Rhys, Claude McKay and Nella Larson that I learned about the writers sidelined and trodden on as the canon was emerging: the female, the black, and the Creole writers. The reduction of great work from marginalised writers extends far beyond leaving them out of the canon and off the syllabus; it ultimately comes down to how they are studied. While cultural context and societal paradigms are incredibly important background tools to judging a piece of writing — whether this be a novel, an essay, or a poem — what has revealed itself to be most important to me is acknowledging the autonomy of the author. It is possible to form critiques about one’s society which are informed by but not dependent on one’s circumstances, but scholarly study up until recently has failed to address this nuance, instead caving to the argument that personal experience lessens the strength and legitimacy of a critique. I would insist that the opposite is true: personal experience brings to societal critique a strength and legitimacy that cannot be attained otherwise. Historically, English-Creole author Jean Rhys has been predominantly read through the lens of the ‘myth of feminine distress’. Even Ford Madox Ford, short-term partner and strong promoter of Rhys’ work, narrates in his introduction to The Left Bank that she wrote with ‘a kind of pre-intellectual feeling, what he described as “an instinct for form”’; a very undercutting remark about her femininity. This kind of thinking which began in Rhys’ own time has since served to undermine how seriously she has been taken as an author. While male modernists of the period such as Hemingway, Joyce and Eliot have been studied for their academic style, form and technique — despite also writing about men who are alienated from themselves — Rhys has been studied for her emotional states and experiences. James Nicholls puts it well: ‘In the critical writing on Jean Rhys, this process of biographical pathologisation is usually constructed around a nexus of the emotionally dysfunctional, sexually promiscuous woman, and the woman as writer’. Jean Rhys by no means had an easy life, and understanding her life is integral to understanding her work. She was born in a small white Dominican community in 1890 to a Welsh father and a Scottish Creole mother. Rhys had a challenging relationship with race all of her life, neither belonging to or quite accepted by Dominica or England. She made her entrance into the Modernist canon early on; however, her Caribbean identity was essentially ignored, and she was seen as a European writer, which deeply affected how seriously her intrinsic criticism and understanding of the world around her was taken. Good Morning, Midnight was the first Jean Rhys novel I picked up and it immediately captivated me. Her emotion and her disjointed narrative voice pulled me in. The novel takes place over a ten-day period in October 1937, and follows Sasha Jansen, a middle aged women with a complicated and traumatic past, through the streets, hotel rooms, and cafés of Paris. Much like Rhys’s other fiction, it is semi-autobiographical, and the more deeply you can study and understand her life, the richer her novels become, the more they reveal to the reader. Despite this, I believe it is important to emphasise that the semiautobiographical nature of this novel in no way takes away from its worth, in no way takes away from the depth of critique she gives about modern society; about capitalism and the economy; about colonisation, poverty, fascism, modernity. Rhys was a colonial writer, and was just as much influenced by, and responding to these influences as male modernists of her time. Jean Rhys writes often about rooms. When one thinks of the importance of rooms in the Modernist period, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own comes to mind. However, there are several integral differences between Rhys’ room and Woolf’s room that are important to highlight. Woolf’s room is a place of autonomy and creation. It is a room which has been purchased with a woman’s own money, it is a place of luxury, and despite the hard work that goes into acquiring

such a room, it is a place of privilege; an ideal far out of reach for the black woman, the colonised woman, the Creole woman. By contrast, the rooms of Good Morning, Midnight are nonautonomous. They are paid for by a variety of different men who Sasha is constantly borrowing money from. It is not a place of sanctuary or comfort, because its impermanence seeps through the cracks in the walls and permeates every underlying anxious thought that Sasha holds. The rooms she stays in are never static, and nothing ties her to any particular place. The relationship she has with these hotel rooms changes throughout the novel. At the beginning, Sasha holds out hope that if she can just get this ‘light’ room than everything will be okay. ‘Suddenly I feel that I must have number 219, with bath… number 219, with rose-coloured curtains,carpet and bath.I shall exist on a different plane at once if I can get this room, if only for a couple of nights. It will be an omen.Who says you can’t escape from your fate? I’ll escape from mine, in room number 219’. However, this optimism never lasts, and by the time she has settled in room number 219, she has accepted that ‘All rooms are the same. All rooms have four walls, a door, a window or two, a bed, a chair, and perhaps a bidet’. The hotel rooms in Good Morning, Midnight are saturated with the past, and invaded by men. The metaphorical intrusion of unwanted guests and memories into her hotel room culminates in the rape scene at the end of the novel, and signifies that Sasha cannot escape from ridicule, anxiety and depression, because it is not only the outside world thrusting these things upon her, but her own mental instability. ‘This damned room… it’s saturated with the past… It’s all the rooms I’ve ever slept in, all the streets I’ve ever walked in’. Because Rhys’ novels are so autobiographical, she has not historically been seen as an author who really addressed contextual issues of class inequality, economics, and the impact in cities of capitalism-driven consumerism on the population. Good Morning, Midnight however, very clearly addresses the importance of money to those who don’t have it and demonstrates how far-reaching the consequences of such an absence can be, especially on women. In the modern city, ‘Money becomes the common denominator of all values… [reducing] all quality and individuality to the question: How much?’. There are seemingly endless recurring references to money in Good Morning, Midnight, from the prices on the menus in the cafés and restaurants which Sasha frequents, to Sasha’s internal dialogue about the price of renting a room, and the items of clothing she wants to buy. Living in a patriarchal, capitalist state, Sasha is forced to constantly worry about her appearance. She thinks that if she just buys this new dress, this new hat, these new shoes, then nobody will think twice about her social status when they pass her in the street. Despite the fact that she is living on the poverty line, she can pass as rich if she performs these high class symbols appropriately. These are symbols of no meaning beyond appearance, yet in Sasha's world, they are incredibly important to the act that she performs. As a Creole woman, Jean Rhys was very aware of the complex consequences — most importantly in this case, economic and psychological — of colonial politics on colonised peoples. The criticism of these policies is not always explicit in Good Morning, Midnight, however, the implicit remarks add much to the reading of the novel; the fact that money is an everpresent source of angst in this world is demonstrative of this. In Good Morning, Midnight, women in particular are seen to be deeply affected by the struggling economy. Early in the novel, Sasha establishes her ‘market value’, telling her employer what a month of her work is worth. Continually throughout, references to prostitution enhance the notion of everything being for sale;

a gigolo who Sasha encounters refers to himself as a ‘market good’. Rhys doesn’t shy away from depicting the horrors that women experience and that she herself has experienced. One of the most important issues that she addresses in Good Morning, Midnight is trauma and traumatic patterns, and her exploration of these themes is convincing and genuine. Knowing the context within which Rhys wrote this book gives us a much better understanding as to why she, as a semi-autobiographical author, writes the character of Sasha Jansen in the way that she does. Part way through writing Good Morning, Midnight, Rhys paused, put it aside, and began to write an account of her childhood — now known as the Black Exercise Book — describing sexual and psychological abuse she suffered at the hands of a family friend when she was only a teenager. There are scenes of sexual trauma in Good Morning, Midnight that correlate to those described by Rhys in the Black Exercise Book. The responses described by Rhys, both in her own account of her experience, and in Good Morning, Midnight are common responses of survivors of this type of abuse. In the Black Exercise Book, Rhys writes, ‘I follow him sick with fear of what is going to happen but I make no effort to save myself. If anyone were to offer to save me I would refuse. If anyone were to say shall I save you I would answer no. It must happen. It has to happen.’ In Good Morning, Midnight, ‘Sasha describes a brief experience of splitting in a scene she remembers from her previous life’, where she is forced to ask a man called Mr. Lawson for money. In order to receive the money, Sasha is forced to let Mr. Lawson kiss her, yet she responds to the advance, ‘split between a yielding body and a repulsed mind’. ‘I am standing there with the note in my hand, when he comes up and kisses me. I am hating him more than I have ever hated anyone in my life, yet I feel my mouth go soft under his, and my arms go limp.’ This splitting is a common response to sexual trauma, and Rhys’s portrayal of it in Good Morning, Midnight is a representation that goes deeper than making a simple statement about the power dynamics between men and women, or about poverty and class struggle in her European context. Good Morning, Midnight is not a novel about trauma, but it stages the experiences of trauma, and depicts a self-destructive, self-punishing protagonist who is caught up in repetitive and compulsive patterns of behaviour that can be traced back to a traumatic experience in her past. The rape scene at the end of Good Morning, Midnight is one of the most important parts of the novel. It is the culmination of the trauma and depression that has been building up to this point, yet Sasha doesn’t react with anger; rather, she sees it as a sort of rebirth. Good Morning, Midnight is only one of Jean Rhys’ many novels, but it is a special one. That it can address complex and difficult issues while staging the hope and optimism of love is a testament to the writer that Jean Rhys was. That she can bring out emotion in us while also making us think deeply about the world goes to show that she deserves serious scholarly attention, and that she deserves to be recognised among the writers that defined modernism. This passage, drawn from Part Three of Good Morning, Midnight, epitomises that feeling for me; it holds both love and tragedy, emotion and intellect. ‘When I saw him looking up like that I knew that I loved him, and that it was for always. It was as if my heart turned over, and I knew that it was for always. It’s a strange feeling – when you know quite certainly in yourself that something is for always. It’s like what death must be.’ I know I’m not the only reader who this passage will stay with, and the power that Jean Rhys has to convey emotion in this way while making strong critiques of her society says to me that she — alongside other female, Creole and black writers — deserve deeper and more nuanced study.

CROSSWORD BY EL SNAKE

ACROSS 1. Class of people who oppress women (3) 3. Receive (3) 5. Pinned down (6) 8. Bird with big eyes and a tiny brain (3) 9. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? (3) 12. Either/or, neither/? (3) 13. Good enough (2,2,7) 18. Prefix meaning against (4) 19. Happen again (and again and again) (5) 20. An American might call this a commercial (2) 21. The sun (3) 22. Japanese sports shoe company (5) 24. Strike breaker (4) 26. A bed, first thing in the morning? (6) 28. Slant, perhaps in a misrepresentative way (4) 30. Not bright (3) 32. Arts degrees (3) 34. First name of Barter or last name of Muhammad (3) 35. Initialism for a type of radiation or a popular major at USyd (2) 36. Clever and calculated (9) 38. Asian girl who raves (2) 39. Small and obnoxious string instrument

(3) 41. It may be electric (3) 42. A little gear in a machine (3) 43. Obscure pop duo consisting of Lizzy Plapinger and Max Hershenow, currently on hiatus (4) 45. Something you shoot with (6) 47. American Elevator Company (4) 49. One who builds with stones or bricks (5) 50. One of ten on your body (3) 51. 106.5, 104.1, 95.3, for example (2) 52. Last name of Super Rich Kids and Thinkin’ Bout You singer (5) 54. Iconic phrase uttered by Cher in Clueless (1995) (2,2) 55. Starting to be obsessed with (11) 58. Internet abbreviation meaning “if you ask me” (3) 59. Country engaged in trade war with China (at the time of writing) (3) 60. Lil ___ X (3) 61. Rich women (6) 62. Object used to hang up laundry (3) 63. That man (3)

DOWN 1. The MS in MSG (10) 2. Awkwafina’s real name (4,3) 3. The G in MSG (9) 4. Extremely inbred Egyptian king (3) 5. Gets into position for a photograph (5) 6. Teachers; experts; masters (5) 7. Electronic funds transfer (3) 10. What the F stands for in F=ma (5) 11. One kind of higher degree by research (3) 14. Italian city with a very famous landmark (4) 15. Include someone in a list of secondary email recipients (2) 16. Parts of a circle or parts of a story (4) 17. Last name of the singer who loves it when you call her Señorita (7) 23. Perfect (5) 25. Alias (3) 27. Piece of old cloth (3) 29. Enough space for Anthony, Lachlan, Simon, Emma, Murray, Greg and Jeff? (6,4)

USYD WOCO BOPS A pl a y l i s t o f h e c t i c w o m* n to have a dance to

6 Inch – Beyoncé (ft. The Weeknd) Birthday Cake – Rihanna Strawberry Kisses – Nikki Webster Let Me Blow Ya Mind – Eve (ft. Gwen Stefani) Crazy In Love – Beyoncé (from “Fifty Shades of Grey”) Level Up – Ciara Skyline Death (MANIIK Cover) – Tzekin, Slodown, MANIIK Bank Head – Kingdom (ft. Kelela) Her/Indica – Dizzy Fae 7/11 – Beyoncé PYNK – Janelle Monáe Promiscuous – Nelly Furtado (ft. Timbaland) Can’t Touch It – Ricki Lee My Type – Saweetie Big Ole Freak – Megan Thee Stallion Get MuNNY – Erykah Badu Motivation – Normani Woman Like Me – Little Mix Girls Night Out – Charli XCX

31. Annoying and unpleasant (7) 32. ßßßßßß (5) 33. Irresistable allure (5,4) 37. Taylor Swift’s fourth studio album (3) 40. Paramedic, in America (3) 42. Deceive someone with a false identity online (7) 44. Disorderly protest; mayhem (4) 45. Genus name for wolves, coyotes and jackals (5) 46. Water surrounding a castle (4) 48. Genre of film and literature which sometimes features robots (3-2) 49. Sorcerer (5) 51. Three letters that are consecutive in the alphabet and also on a QWERTY keyboard (3) 53. Typographical unit (2) 56. Gossip (3) 57. Little sleep (3)

C A S E WO R K

DO YOU NEED A SHORT EXTENSION?

Dealing with Harassment The University is committed to providing “…a safe and healthy workplace and learning environment that is free from bullying and unlawful harassment and discrimination”.

You can ask your course co-ordinator for two days extension on a non examination task, eg. a take home assignment. This is an informal arrangement, and does not stop you from applying for Special Consideration (still within 3 days of original due date). For more details check out the quote below from the University’s Coursework Policy: 66A Simple Extensions (1) A unit of study co-ordinator, who is satisfied that it is appropriate to do so, may permit a student to submit a non-examination task up to two working days after the due date with no penalty. (2) Such permission is an informal arrangement between the unit of study co-ordinator and the student which does not: (a) affect the student’s entitlement to apply for special consideration under this policy; (b) alter any time limits or other requirements relating to applications for special consideration; or (c) constitute an academic decision for the purposes of the University of Sydney (Student Appeals Against Academic Decisions) Rule 2006 (as amended).

Need help or advice? Your SRC is here to assist you. The service is FREE, independent and confidential. Phone for an appointment: (02) 9660 5222 We are located at: Level 1, Wentworth Building (G01) help @ src.usyd.edu.au | src.usyd.edu.au | fb: / src help

Ask Lola SRC caseworker help Q&A Simple Extensions

For this week's autonomous Wom*n's edition Abe has handed this column over to Lola for her sound advice. Dear Abe, I just broke up with my partner and I am too upset to finish the essay that’s due in at the end of the week. I’ve seen my doctor and she said that I just needed to concentrate on my assignment and not worry about romance. Without a doctor’s certificate I cannot apply for Special Consideration, but I really don’t think I can get the assignment in on time. Sincerely, Single

Dear Single, I am sorry the doctor did not take your distress seriously. Please do talk to someone, e.g., a counselor, if you find your circumstance negatively effecting aspects of your life. As you said, without a Professional Practitioner’s Certificate it is unlikely you would be successful in a Special Consideration application, however, you may be able to apply for a Simple Extension. Simple Extensions are an informal arrangement between a student and the course co-ordinator, where a student is given two extra days to complete an assignment. Often that is enough for you to take a breath and settle your thoughts before launching in to an assignment. Abe

The University is committed to providing “…a safe and healthy workplace and learning environment that is free from bullying and unlawful harassment and discrimination”. What is Unlawful Harassment? The University defines unlawful harassment as any type of behaviour that occurs when a person, or a group of people, is intimidated, insulted or humiliated because of one or more characteristics. Unlawful harassment can arise as the result of a single incident as well as repeated incidents. Harassment can occur through behaviour such as: • telling jokes about particular racial groups • sending explicit or sexually suggestive emails or texts • displaying offensive or pornographic websites or screen savers • making derogatory comments or taunts about someone’s race or religion, gender or sexual orientation • asking intrusive questions about someone’s personal life, including their sex life • creating a hostile working environment, for example, where the display of pornographic materials or crude conversations, innuendo or offensive jokes are part of the accepted culture. Some types of harassment, such as sexual harassment and other forms of physical assault and/or stalking, are also illegal under criminal law. These types of harassment may result in criminal prosecution. Other types of harassment may not be ‘unlawful’ under anti-discrimination legislation, but may nonetheless contravene the University’s Staff and Student Codes of Conduct or the University’s Bullying, Harassment and Discrimination Prevention Policy 2015. What is Unlawful Direct and Indirect Discrimination?

The University’s policy defines both direct and indirect unlawful discrimination. Unlawful direct discrimination occurs when a person, or a group of people, is treated less favourably than another person or group because of one or more characteristics. Direct discrimination can also occur if assumptions are made which result in a person or group being treated differently on the basis of one or more characteristics. Indirect discrimination occurs when there is a rule or requirement that disadvantages one group more than another on the basis of one or more characteristics, unless it can be shown that the particular rule or requirement is reasonable in all the circumstances or is required to perform the inherent requirements of the job. What is stalking? The Crimes Act says that “stalking includes the following of a person about or the watching or frequenting of the vicinity of, or an approach to, a person’s place of residence, business or work or any place that a person frequents for the purposes of any social or leisure activity”. This may be by another student, staff member, or someone not involved in the university community. What should you do? If you think you are being discriminated against or harassed, make detailed notes about dates and times of the incidents, noting any potential witnesses. Call 1800RESPECT for confidential information, counselling and support, or talk to an SRC caseworker for information on how to make a complaint, what possible outcomes there are, and how to manage any impact this may be having on your studies. Remember that a caseworker will not force you to take any action you don’t want to take. If you are being stalked you can report this to University Security or the Police. Your safety is an immediate concern. Contact us on help@src.usyd.edu.au or call to make an appointment on 9660 5222.