I’m so grateful to Rebecca for her work on this and the experience of collaborating together. It’s taught me a lot about the difficulty of writing interdisciplinary analysis – and reminded me of the challenges in producing internet research beyond social sciences paradigms. I really value the determination and imagination Becky is showing in bringing together different disciplinary influences in her PhD work, which this paper has developed from.

Unfortunately in the process of peer review we were asked to remove the song lyrics we originally included in the paper. (I hadn’t realised that copyright was so strict… and have had song lyrics published in the same journal before). Anyway, when reading, know that we originally wanted this as our main intertextual reference. Lily says it better than us.

Annamarie Jagose “Feminism’s Queer Theory,” Feminism and Psychology 19.2 (2009): 157-74.

Annamarie Jagose “Couterfeit Pleasures: Fake Orgasm and Queer Agency,” Textual Practice 24.3 (2010): 517-39.

Sara Ahmed “Sexual Orientations” in Queer Phenomenology, Duke UP (2006).

Feel free to jump in with thoughts and reflections. I will post the coming week’s readings separately.

NB: The discussion can happen through “comments” (firstly by clicking on the comment link below the title of this post). Or if you have longer reflections I can post them as a separate entry on your behalf.

Also, on Friday 24th, Kane and I are organising an all day workshop, ‘Researching intimacy, sexuality and space’ at The University of Sydney. It will feature a series of speakers from Sydney and elsewhere, and finishes with a public forum with Sara and others debating “Why Gender Matters.”

Full details of the line-up will be available shortly. For now, I wanted to mention that in preparation for the Friday event we are running a weekly reading and discussion group that people here may wish to follow online or come along and join.

We’ve decided to group the discussions under three themes that relate to the Friday program and the drawcard speakers – Annamarie Jagose, Kate Lilley, Melissa Hardie, Lee Wallace, Kane Race, Elspeth Probyn and Sara. The readings will give a good sense of each speaker’s background and key ideas, and we will use the meetings to discuss how their work and the different lineages relate to each other – and to the field.

Here’s how it will look:

Week 1 – Sex (AMJ)
Week 2 – Style (KL, MH, LW)
Week 3 – Space (SA, KR, EP)

The themes are broad but from each we will get a chance to discuss 1) politics of queer/sex/identity 2) aesthetics and style – especially in cultural forms 3) theories of space, embodiment, belonging, scenes.

If you are interested in coming along to one or several of these we will meet on campus each week starting this Friday (3rd) at 3pm. Both Kane and I will be there and possibly other faculty depending on availability.

The following readings are the starting point for this week’s meeting:

Annamarie Jagose “Feminism’s Queer Theory,” Feminism and Psychology 19.2 (2009): 157-74.
Annamarie Jagose “Couterfeit Pleasures: Fake Orgasm and Queer Agency,” Textual Practice 24.3 (2010): 517-39.
Sara Ahmed “Sexual Orientations” in Queer Phenomenology, Duke UP (2006).

Get in touch to find out more…

Looks like I’m speaking on day two. The paper is something I’m working on for a collection on ‘identity technologies’ edited by Anna Poletti and Julie Rak.

This is one of a series of pieces inspired by teaching my course, Intimacy, Love and Friendship, which runs again this semester. I welcome input and more examples! Details below.

All in your hands: Smart phones, intimacy and adultery

This paper explores emerging practices of intimacy, publicity and privacy evident in a range of mobile media applications, particularly those that facilitate and obscure adulterous behaviour. The forms of surveillance imagined through these technology designs, and their gendered assumptions, will be features of the analysis. The paper draws together a history of writing on love and flirtation, theories of intimacy and friendship, and empirical studies of mobile media – including research conducted by the author on technology use among white collar professionals. In this framework, smart phones are shown to reflect the vulnerabilities of contemporary relationships as much as their changing function. If mobile technologies provide an infrastructure to relieve the tensions inherent in normative coupledom today, they also hold the potential to refigure our sense of domesticity’s function, most obviously in terms of the link between physical proximity and intimacy. The surveillance capacities of new media devices here offer insights into emerging models of friendship, sexual ethics and care.

Women comprise 46% of all academic staff at the university.
Women make up 52% of staff at Levels A, B & C.
Women make up 35% of staff at Level D.
Women make up 21% of staff at Level E.

According to the Provost, women apply for promotion less often. But when they do apply, they are usually more successful.

Go figure.

While the structure of the funding scheme means this is an invite-only event, there is room for just a couple of extra people to come along at this late stage. Do get in touch if you are interested.

In preparation for the event, we’ve been using a delicious tag “GLT” to assemble a list of references that speak to the workshop themes. Anyone is welcome to add their own suggestions to this list.

I’ve posted an overview of the project – taken straight from the grant application, for those of you wanting an insight into the genre – on a new research page. I’ll add more details and give an update on the outcomes from the event when I have a bit more time.

The group builds on the foundation laid by Kane’s fabulous book, Pleasure Consuming Medicine, and recent work I’ve done on the night-time economies of Australia’s inner-cities. It is also a chance for us to work collaboratively with students in the department who are leading the way in researching these issues locally.

In my case the project continues a set of concerns I began to investigate in Brisbane through essays like ‘Normal Homes’, which deals explicitly with city space, sexuality and ideas of kinship. It also develops from writing I did at the outset of my forthcoming book, which describes changes to Brisbane in the wake of the creative industries policy drive. In that context, Fortitude Valley was just one area to be transformed from eccentric haven to jewel in the crown of a new leisure economy marketed to wealthy locals, cosmopolitan tourists and interstate migrants. In a further paper I co-wrote with Jason Wilson, these transformative acts of urban entrepreneurialism are described as a “cultural economy of infamy” – its ultimate manifestation being the Underbelly franchise.

The S&S project is an attempt to chart these trends in Sydney specifically, answering questions like these that Kane has summarised:

*How do strategies of city branding appeal to, and repackage, histories of subcultural and illicit activity in their attempts to market the city? What are the implications for sexual minorities and how are sexual subcultures transformed in this process?

*What are the effects of current policing initiatives (drug dog operations, patrolling of beats, etc.) on the shape and social possibilities of sexual communities in cities like Sydney?

*How is the night-time economy represented, marketed, and governed? What forms of consumption (licit and illicit) does it depend upon – explicitly and tacitly – and what relations are there between them?

*How do we resist the sanitization of sexual cultures as these cultures begin to feature in more extensive networks of commerce, government, and public representation?

At the moment we’re meeting fortnightly to discuss readings that set up our aims for the group. Later in the semester this will expand to include a selection of guest speakers from scholars, activists, community and council reps and more.

One of our researchers, Viv McGregor, has started a tumblr blog featuring images of sexuality and space. It’s a work of art in itself! Well worth a bookmark. Viv has also started a delicious page for relevant links – feel free to link to us and add more with the sexualityspace tag.

We welcome involvement from anyone interested in cultural economies, consumer culture, cultural geography, criminology and urban governance… and most of all those whose precious intimacies and alternative forms of sociability are increasingly subject to arbitrary surveillance and suspicion.

The Facebook page is one of the easiest ways to keep in touch.

I already had my mother’s engagement ring in any case. It’s quite beautiful: four small diamonds set to make a square so that the pattern makes a cross. It’s also a bit religious in that way. I think my mum converted to Catholicism before marrying my Dad.

I started wearing mum’s ring about a year ago when my Aunty told me I should. She was thinking of the symbolism (and no doubt her relief!) that I am “taken”. And as one of my few living female relatives, I figure it’s the least I can do to make my Aunty happy.

But I like to wear it because it reminds me of mum as much as it does the other connotations. Mum died before I met William, and by wearing the ring I try to enact some kind of conciliation between what I know she hoped for my happiness and one of the ways that happiness has taken shape. It also makes me feel connected to my past family at the same time as I am preparing to join another.

Last weekend William and I tried to find some jewelery shops to look at some rings, even just to work out what size we are, etc. We found a couple of places in the city but in each case we left quickly feeling really flustered and intimidated. One was way too fancy and everything felt too important and expensive for us to ask to see. The second, more mainstream shop was just the opposite – quite crowded. The wedding ring counter was already taken by two couples and I got the feeling they would be there for some time.

We tried a few more places that we found in the arcades but by then I was starting to realise that “buying the rings” was creating some serious conflicts for me in terms of my critical “gender studies” habits. I was feeling a rush of adrenaline when entering the shops that wasn’t what you’d call positive. It was more a feeling of terror and alienation, as if we didn’t belong here and shouldn’t be pretending that we did.

Well, that’s also the feeling I get trying to do a lot of other normative things and it’s only typical of our relationship that we ended up abandoning the ring shopping and spending the rest of the afternoon at a book shop. William bought a journalism book and I bought three cultural theory ones – including a history of marriage!

From the safe theoretical position I profess regularly I can of course note the following: that the feeling I had in the jewelry stores comes from seeing in other couples the kind of pleasure I am supposed to be feeling in wanting to get married; that what I saw was other couples performing a script I am supposed to know how to act and enjoy.

But what does it mean to want to get married when this isn’t the kind of pleasure you want from it? If buying or receiving the ring isn’t the most profound statement of love and self you will ever be able to make?

I also wonder if it’s possible for our rings to be a symbol of commitment that doesn’t necessarily have to be tied to intense, hyperbolic consumerist citizenship. I think this is where I’m at a disadvantage without my mum around any more. That’s because even if I’m not religious I think she might have been able to help me broker a solution to this that is more suited to my politics (as well as all the other tacit forms of confidence that having a mother can bring, that only not having a mother around makes you appreciate).

Without her too, I think that maybe what I lack right now is a set of knowledges shared between women that would help me fill this void of understanding who I am in relation to options presented entirely by the market (okay, maybe I’m talking about more than rings here). Combined with other wedding preparations I’ve talked about here, I’m certainly worried about the parasitic relationship between love and commerce, and would like to think more about how it’s possible to nourish the kind of extended family and kinship networks that can revitalise and sustain people in a variety of intimate relationships, in addition to marriage as an institution.

So, without having any other advice right now, this post is of course a really long way of asking whether any of you reading know of any nice places to buy a ring? Or people who make rings, maybe even out of existing ones? And honestly, what would you think of someone who bought a wedding ring online?

Perhaps the only thing more upsetting than this is the explanation of yesterday’s research findings:

SHARON BELL: The metaphor that we use is that women’s career is like a labyrinth, and you need to actually be able to negotiate that complex labyrinth. There is a number of pressures that come to apply.

A labyrinth! Apparently this is the preferred term over the “glass ceiling” and “leaking pipeline” metaphors of previous studies. In any case, they are all attempts to explain this diagram, which will be familiar to many “mid-career” academics.

The report itself is fantastic, but many people may not bother to read it when it comes packaged in Management 101. This was the case on ABC’s PM last night:

DAVID MARK: What are the ramifications for the under-representation of women in science?

SHARON BELL: Well, I think the main ramifications are the fact that if we don’t have a diverse workforce, we’re not actually maximising our productivity through diversity and that will impact on innovation.

Sharon, how about this for your next presser:

“At least half the population faces implicit or explicit obstacles to following the so-called formal career path. This is the case in universities as well as other jobs. The singular career path is a fiction based on the experience of a minority. It is a premise that should be dispelled at every level of leadership and management if the word diversity means anything at all.”