Feminist calls for better work for women, as important as they have been, have on the whole resulted in more work for women. Beyond the intensification of many forms of waged work… the burdens of unwaged domestic and caring work have also increased, both because of the pressures of neoliberal restructuring along with the double day, and because of the increasingly dominant model of intensive parenting presented as what is required to develop the communicative, cognitive, and creative capacities increasingly necessary for reproducing, let alone elevating, the class status of a new generation of workers (see Hays 1996). Given all the ways that the institution of the family — on which the privatization of reproductive labor has been predicated and sustained — is so clearly not up to the task of assuming so much of the responsibility for the care of children, the elderly, the sick, and the disabled, the refusal of the present organization of reproductive labor may have much to offer contemporary feminism.

[...]

Feminist antiwork critique would need to accomplish several things at once: to recognize unwaged domestic work as socially necessary labor, contest its inequitable distributon (the fact that gender, race, class, and nation affects who does more or less), and, at the same time, insist that valuing it more highly and distributing it more equitably is not enough — the organization of unwaged reproductive labor and its relationship with waged work must be entirely rethought. For feminist postwork imagination, it raises the following question: if we refuse both the institution of waged work and the model of the privatized family as the central organizing structures of production and reproduction, what might we want in their stead?

- Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries, Duke University Press, 2001: 110-11.

Reading some of the passages below I began to realise how regularly I have been exposed to people’s concerns about this aspect of my relationship over the past couple of years. This makes me wonder whether my responses to such concerns have been performative or truly held statements about the kind of marriage I want. As students have been writing in their GCST2610 essays this month, this is the difference between ‘surface acting’ and ‘deep acting’ in Arlie Russell Hochschild’s framework of ‘managing feeling’. It has a lot to do with the pressure I feel to conform to others’ expectations of marriage in spite of my personal politics and situation. This book has some helpful points of clarification as I think about changing concepts of work, intimacy, presence and love.

Notes from Fairlee E. Winfield’s Commuter Marriage: Living Together, Apart, New York, Columbia University Press, 1985.

Two-career couples: ‘feel no need to choose between two very important aspects of their lives, a job and a relationship’ (4)

Both job and an intimate relationship are highly important. Commuter marriage is a new social structure for which there are no rules and few norms (4)

Types of commuter marriages:

- The Young Professionals
- The Relocatees
- The Well-Established: ‘both have important and possibly even prestigious careers in different cities when they wed, but they choose to continue their two-city lifestyle. Frequently the well-established are also “well-heeled,” famous, and highly visible’ (16)
- The Economically Motivated

Younger couples struggle with ascendancy conflicts; they wrestle with the dilemma of whose career should predominate (21)

The issue is not whether the wife shall have a career; the majority of male students in university classes and middle-class males in the work force now state that they expect their wives to work. The issue is whose career is more important (24)

The gaming approach of “we’ll take turns” is a hedge that allows retention of male self-image on two levels: first, the recovery of the traditional ascendency of the male breadwinner role; and second, the maintenance of pride in a more participative intimate relationship (24)

‘adjusting couples’ (Harriet Engel Gross 1980: 573): ‘have not had the time nor the shared experiences that contribute to a sense of “we-ness.” They lack the emotional reservoirs of an enduring long-term marriage. Second, as new, struggling professionals, they have not yet confirmed their professional competence. They still lack the ego and strength of their older counterparts (25)

The negative pressures from friends, colleagues, and relatives who question their living apart can be neutralized by seeking friendships with singles and other commuter couples (25)

Three things seem to make coping easier for the older couples: (1) the solidity of their relationship, (2) the faith that they can endure the demands of living apart, and (3) the recognition that they are compensating for the wife’s past efforts on the husband’s behalf (28)

The ‘pseudo-divorce’ category is generalized to all commuters and prevents societal changes that would genuinely make two engrossing jobs, two residences, and a rewarding relationship less bizarre (28-9)

“Syndromes” affecting commuter couples

- The Supermom, Superdad, Supersuccess Syndrome (“role overload”): women tend to feel responsible for everything – practical and emotional (29). This depends on whether they aspire to both a high standard of domestic living and a high standard of career achievement (30)

- Fatigue Fallout Syndrome: physical exhaustion; emphasis on good health; problem of stamina commuting requires (31)
“You do run out of steam. We’re amazed sometimes that we have survived until the holidays.” Not everyone makes it. They are simply too tired. But only a few considered that the drain on physical energy incurred by frequent travelling is a major issue. The commitment to work, especially for established couples, is so well fixed that dropping out seems unthinkable (33)
Commuter couples aren’t the only ones who fact the “intermittent husband and wife syndrome.” Military, diplomatic, truck driver, and oil rig wives, to name only a few, have all reported that they feel more relaxed when their husbands are away once they have become accustomed to getting along on their own. Adjusting to widowhood or divorce has received a great deal of attention from psychiatrists, but adjusting to a returning husband or more recently a returning wife is just now beginning to be investigated.
Symptoms include weeping, headaches, alcoholism, sexual promiscuity… early psychiatrist studies classified these as neurotic responses (34)

- Identity Syndrome: internally generated conflicts about whether one is a ‘good’ husband/wife/person…(35) arising ‘from cultural ideas of work and family as intrinsically masculine and feminine’ (36)
Lacking a new model, the exotic two-city family compares itself with “real’ marriage (people live together)… there is limit beyond which experimentation seems unable to go without damaging the male or female sense of self-esteem (36)

- The Motivational Syndrome: Why am I doing it?
→ alone at the top syndrome: both partners need a “wife” (41)

Married singles are expected to be promiscuous, and because of this expectation they are frequently subjected to sexual harassment. Peers, friends, co-workers, an employers look at the partners in commuter marriages as footloose, fancy free, and ready-to-play. They assume that the commuter is “separated” or getting a divorce, that no serious relationship exists simply because the couple is not living together as convention requires. Married singles are seen at best as “available” and at worst as rakes and wantons (46)

Most of the commuter couples tend to rule out sexual jealousy because such doubts are too much to cope with in a busy two-city marriage. They feel that extramarital relations are likely to cause serious strains on their present relationships. Sexual permissiveness is not a natural outgrowth of untraditional marriage (47)

Researchers insist that commuters do not have any more affairs than stay-at-home couples. So much concentration is poured into work and marriage that there is little energy left over for it. Obviously, women who were once upon a time limited to the milkman or the golf instructor now have the same opportunities for misbehavior as the men have had all along, but fatigue can put restrictions on extramarital affairs (49)

Dual-residence relationships don’t have more sex but the people involved enjoy sex more. Couples are generally highly monogamous and devoted to their sexual partners… Social problems, obstacles to privacy, and financial difficulties of commuter marriage at the lower income levels can diminish the “honeymoon” aspects. However, the couples who can use their imaginations in detailed planning of their “prime time” together have an advantage regardless of income level. It is really the care taken in shared time that is the important factor, and commuters seem to take more care because time is so precious (60)

The two-city marriage breaks a rigid moral commitment to the traditional family. Because this new social structure demonstrates that the major concern in our culture is not the family, nor intimacy, but work, it breaks very powerful taboos (63)

Couples who live together, apart, resort to the strategy of insisting that they are “only doing this temporarily” (77)

The required behaviour, at least for the moment, is that a couple live together. If you can’t do that because of a career considerations, you must at the very least say that you would like to do it. That is the ideal (77)

Commuter couples have almost no time for mutual friends, but their support system can more easily develop through encouraging separate circles of friends in the two locations where they live (84)

Overall, commuting couples report fewer social contacts because of their ambiguous social status, but they seem to be only slightly disturbed by this… “we each have a few devoted friends in our separate cities. That and our relationship is enough” (85)

It is estimated that half of the commuter marriages are in the academic world where work schedules are flexible and jobs are very scarce. But the number is growing in business, politics, journalism, publishing, and show business (166)

Couples who live together full time frequently seek leisure activities with outsiders – as a type of release from overdoses of intimacy in a marriage. Commuters, on the other hand, continue their leisure activities together (168)

Solitude in itself doesn’t produce loneliness, it comes when expectations fail (170)

But for those who were interested, here is a draft of the piece I presented last month on smart phones, intimacy and adultery.

This paper brings together some of my home/work research with theories of intimacy and love that are taken from my course.

I feel like there is more to go with this project yet, and had to stop at a certain point before delving further. I wanted to write more about the history of flirtation that is missing in this version – and the way ambient technology platforms thrive on the contingency of mobile (or what Bauman calls) “liquid” lives.

I am not sure of the disciplinary “home” for this work though – and am wondering where it belongs. I feel that my writing is moving away from cultural studies towards something I can’t yet name. Any thoughts on audience/readership would be really welcome.

Since I am currently destined to teach love full time (!), I am even contemplating a short book that brings together some of these ideas alongside other pieces I’ve published. My colleague Annamarie planted this seed when she suggested some time ago that the follow up to Work’s Intimacy should be Intimacy’s Work! What do you think?

My research is intended to be an ethnographic exploration of the affects generated by the event of drag kinging. Via the notion of ‘communities of investment’, my research interrogates how different ‘flows’ or ‘layers’ of desire both constitute and represent various participants in the Sydney drag king scene. I ask: what are the ways in which the drag king scene constitutes and facilitates relations between bodies and desires? What are the ways in which these desires are embodied and articulated within this context, and what does this mean for participants invested in ‘the scene’? That is what I was trying to record that night.

Drag kinging is the lesbian subcultural practice, usually by women but sometimes trans- and otherwise identified- men, of a consciously enacted masculinity within the context of performance. It exploded in popularity in lesbian bar culture and queer scenes in the early 1990’s, and drag kinging has been increasingly recognised by participants as a viable subcultural phenomenon.

As the popularity of drag kinging has increased within lesbian and queer performance communities, academic interest has followed. As I developed my literature review, I began to run into difficulties in situating my research questions within the existing consolidation of drag kinging as an object of academic knowledge. Judith Halberstam, arguably the scholar on drag kings, produced a groundbreaking chapter in her 1998 text Female Masculinity, which highlighted drag king culture as a visible cultural phenomenon and a viable object of study. She produces a taxonomy of drag kings that looks to the embodiment and employment of masculinity in performance, for the wider project of illuminating the ‘transgendered’ or ‘gender-ambiguous’ figure as a symbol for the importance of promoting non-normative identities and practices.

This produces the drag king as a particular category of knowledge. In the current field of drag king scholarship, the figure of the drag king becomes the key theoretical figure for articulating drag king practices; he is elevated to be representative of drag king culture. I suggest that this produces a relationship between visibility and intelligibility. The primacy of his form enables a mode of analysis through which drag kinging can be understood as transgressive. Conversely, the relevance and meaning of drag kinging can only be identified through the affects of which the form is taken to be representative. This generates an established methodological approach to drag king research.

Subsequent scholarship has continued to produce knowledge about drag king practices within these two discursive frameworks of visibility of form and political effects. What interests me is this process by which research objects become concretized in scholarly work, and subsequent compulsion to approach those cultural practices in future scholarly engagement through those same frames. I suggest that this is the inevitable result of an archive predicated on the visibility of the drag king performer. But, what happens to other participants in drag king culture in this existing body of work? My concern is to move past this form of intelligibility produced about the drag king in order to approach drag king culture in a way that considers the multiple forms of investment by all participations in the event. How can I approach the ways in which the audience participates and the desires that are introduced, enacted and transformed, without positioning them in relation to the more dominant figure of the drag king performer?

The problem with an archive based on visibility is that is requires an additive approach premised on the priority of content. If one can find those missing people, objects or practices, it can be added to the existing archive in order to make it more ‘complete’. An additive archive, just like that process whereby cultural objects are turned into research objects, is based on the notion of visibility. This is because all it requires of the researcher is to bring the missing object into focus – to shine a spotlight on – to recover what is missing. It doesn’t allow for the interrogation of how the archive structure might privilege certain forms of engagement, or how alternative forms of engagement are restricted or constrained within that archive. An archive established on the visibility of the drag king form will not be fundamentally changed if the voices of audience members are simply added, as the underlying methodology is not identified and challenged. The drag king is still, so to speak, king.

What I am working on at the moment is using the work by queer theorists to move towards an archive based on affective relations – an archive understood in terms of spatiality rather than visibility. Through the interventions of queer theorists into the forms and functions of the archive, the concept has been expanded to be now capable of capturing and constituting the ephemera and the affective relations of queer subcultural identities and practices. In demonstrating new capacities of the archive, we can now speak about archives of performance and desire, and the relationship between the two.

Both archives of performance and desire constitute and are reflective of the subcultural community that operates at an affective relation to them. Queer archives draw on an already established and recognizable ‘archive of feeling’ – of the fleeting, ephemeral moments, memories and experiences that render the performance and desires relevant and affective to participants. These archives draw their affective power from each other, where the individual is moved in the moment that collectively produced ephemera is mediated through bodies. This operates at the interplay between the shared and collective memories and fantasies that comprise queer desires and bonded experiences, and the individuality of the access and embodiment of each one’s own archives of memory and desire. Yet, in the moment of feeling, it simultaneously constitutes a new archive comprised of a moment of queer experience generated by the affective relation of those desires in the performance space, which can be drawn from in future moments. The affective relations between the collective and the individual play the key part in how these archives of desire are constantly regenerated.

If we can talk about archives predicted on spatiality, rather than visibility, then the researcher is necessarily imbricated in the construction and re-construction of the archive at every moment of interaction. True of any research, but especially so in relation to queer subcultures, the researcher builds on an existing affective connection, one developed from the intimacy of emotional investment. This means that the archive’s meaning emerges from the queer sensibility of the researcher rather than being intrinsic to its objects. Therefore the researcher, in reviewing the archives of performance and desire, likewise draws on, interprets, and feeds back into these archives, and, as with all participants within the subculture that is constituted and sustained by these archives, reconfigures them at the moment of connection to them. This generates the notion of the archival practice as an event, in which objects, participants and researchers are all necessarily imbricated. Accordingly, my interaction with my ex did not ruin my research for the night. Rather, my relationship with her was drawing on and reconfiguring the archives of performance and desire in that instance of affective connection. I, as well as she, was invoking a shift in these moments by virtue of individualised and collectivised participation at the event.

Auto-ethnographic accounts are a way of tracing these relationships between the researcher and other participants, and as participants themselves in drag king events. An archive, based on relations, proximity and layering – something than we might be able to call topography of the archive – is one where I form part of that terrain, essential as any other participant, venue, intoxicant, bar stool, etc. Therefore, the utility of queer approaches to archival methodology lies in how objects of knowledge can be reused, revitalised and revalidated. Instead of notions of intelligibility that have over-relied on the visibility of research objects, these queer approaches to archives recognize that intelligibility is produced as part of the affective register, in which I am also implicated. It provides a way of understanding the topography of the related drag king archives, the process of producing frames of reference to read that terrain, and the opportunities inherent in shifts in those frames.

This is a slightly modified transcript of Kerryn Drysdale’s presentation as part of the postgraduate panel, ‘Researching Queer Scenes, Spaces and Practices’, at last week’s workshop. Kerryn is a PhD student in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney.

I am still a bit overwhelmed by the quality of presentations and the quantity of people in attendance at both days. I wish I could have seen everything. It also seems significant that we could fill a lecture hall beyond capacity to debate Why Gender Matters in the middle of summer in 2012. This was a very happy Sydney moment.

Feel free to share comments and feedback on the event here. I will be posting a couple of the presentations in separate entries to follow. Thanks to everyone who helped make such a special day. As I said in my welcome – we need to enjoy and celebrate these spaces and discussions when they exist! Never take them for granted.

Everyone is welcome, and this week Elspeth Probyn will join us for the discussion along with some other department colleagues.

If you would like the readings emailed to you let me know – although most are already available online through academia.edu or other sources (tip: add “pdf” to a Google search…)

Don’t forget to register for our workshop and Sydney Ideas events on Friday, February 24… we need to be sure the rooms are the right size

Gordon Waitt and Kevin Markwell, “Touring the Sexualized City” in Gay Tourism: Culture and Context, Haworth Press, 2006: 159-202

Kane Race, “Party animals: the significance of drug practices in the materialisation of urban gay identity” Forthcoming in S. Fraser and D. Moore (eds.) The Drug Effect: Health, Crime and Society. Cambridge University Press

Will Straw, “Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Scenes and Communities in Popular Music,” Cultural Studies, Vol. 5, No. 3 (October, 1991) 361-375.

Elspeth Probyn, “Glass Selves: Emotions, Subjectivity, and the Research Process” in S. Gallagher (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of the Self. Oxford UP. 2011.

Optional:

Guy Davidson,”‘Contagious Relations’: Simulation, Paranoia, and the Postmodern Condition in William Friedkin’s Cruising and Felice Picano’s The Lure.”  GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 11.1 (2005): 23-64.

Judith Halberstam, “What’s that smell? Queer temporalities and subcultural lives” International Journal of Cultural Studies 6,3 (2003): 313–333

Elspeth Probyn, “Only connect? Communicating across the coreperipheries of geography and discipline”. Address to the Australian Academy of the Humanities, 2011.

Friday 24 February, University of Sydney

Location: Main Quadrangle, behind the Jacaranda tree: S224, S225 and S204

*To register for Researching Intimacy, Sexuality & Space on the 24th please email: sexualityspace@gmail.com. Please let us know of any access requirements in this email.*

PROGRAM

9.15am S224 Welcome and introductions

9.30am S224 Keynote: Annamarie Jagose, ‘Behaviorism’s Queer Trace: Sexuality and Orgasmic Reconditioning’

10.45 Break

11.00 S224 Plenary: Queer Style: Film, Poetry, Soap Opera

Speakers:
Dr Lee Wallace
Dr Kate Lilley
Dr Melissa Hardie

12.30 Lunch break (BYO)

1.30 – 3.00. Parallel Sessions

1. Transnational Queer S224

Queer thinking and thinking queer in Latin America
F. Serrano-Amaya, M.A. Viteri, & S. Vidal-Ortiz

The diary of an activist abroad: queer transnational flows and activist kinships
Daniel Marshall

Sex, tourism and desire: the emotional labour of gay hospitality
K. Markwell & Gordon Waitt

2. Liminal texts/spaces/events S225

James Franco’s ‘thing’
Adrian Jones

We will eat you, after we eat your children: queer futurity and narrative
Anna Westbrook

Queer Olfactories: Smelling Feeling, Disorientation, Peculiar Pillows
Kurt Bugden

3.00 Break

3.15: S224 Postgraduate panel: Queer methods

Kerryn Drysdale, Jess Kean, Kate O’Halloran + more TBC
Chair: Melissa Gregg (postgrads interested in joining can contact MG)

4.30 Break

5.00: S204 Sydney Ideas Panel: Why Gender Matters

Professor Sara Ahmed, Gilbert Caluya, Jennifer Germon, Annalise Pippard
Chair: Elspeth Probyn

Full details: http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2012/why_gender_matters.shtml

6.30 Close – Cash bar on campus

Queer Thinking – Saturday 25 February – Seymour Centre

Featuring Professor Sara Ahmed, ‘Willful Queers: A queer history of the will’ – 7pm

Queer Thinking consists of a number of events on the 25th from 12pm – 8pm
For the full program see: http://www.mardigras.org.au/queerthinking/index.cfm

Bookings are advised.

In her article, “Feminism’s Queer Theory,” Annamarie alerts us to the complex and apprehensive relationship shared between feminist and queer theory. The title of the article itself acknowledges the understated historical roots of queer theory as a development “alongside” feminism, as opposed to its Other. Starting her analysis from the “category of woman” problem, she progresses to the “controversial analytic separation of gender and sexuality,” in order to illustrate the “possibilities of queer feminist thought.” For Annamarie, such possibility arises through the recognition that “feminist theory and queer theory together have a stake in both desiring and articulating the complexities of the traffic between gender and sexuality.”

I agree with Annamarie’s argument. The relationship between gender and sexuality cannot be easily divided into two camps; both feminist theory and queer theory bring something unique to the table of identity politics and political projects. Something I am particularly interested in here is the relationship between academia and activism, especially in regards to queer theory. There seems to be a consistent dialogue between the women’s movement and feminist theory, which doesn’t seem to exist between the gay movement and queer theory. Due to the rise of ‘what Lisa Duggan has styled ‘homonormativity,’ theory and activism has become increasingly disjointed. Does this account for the “death of queer theory”? If anything, what has queer theory achieved? Should we do away with it? Does its resistance to definition hinder its ability to provide an adequate model for political action? How can a dialogue be opened between theory and activism? Is there anything feminism can teach its queer theory?

Annamarie’s article, “Counterfeit Pleasures,” examines fake orgasms as the means of socio-political transformation, as read through Foucault’s invocation of bodies and pleasures. Annamarie recognises that “one’s relation to the disciplinary system of sexuality is articulated with regard to historically specific and bounded sites of contestation.” She argues that fake orgasms are a “counterdisplinary discourse”—something that “does not necessarily feel good.” Rather than embracing the sexual practice as a site of socio-political transformation, she suggests that the fake orgasm opens up an “alternate way of thinking about the political, offering not a future-directed strategy for political transformation but an eloquent figure for political engagement with the conditions of the present.” By doing this, Annamarie joins the recent movement in queer studies toward temporality studies; affective relations in history. She advocates for the “importance of alternative political imaginaries for queer conceptualisations of erotic practice and identity.”

I really enjoyed reading this article. I thought it provided an interesting framework for thinking about the use of sexual practices as a means of political transformation. Whilst I think I follow the basic premise of her argument, I don’t quite grasp what she means by “alternative political imaginaries” for sexual practices, such as the fake orgasm—if someone can clarify? On another note, having just read Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure, I can see a definite relationship between Annamarie’s and Jack’s engagement with the “unintelligible, the unproductive and the wasteful.” So, my question here relates to how such engagements with failure in Jack’s case, or the “counterdisciplinary,” can influence the ways we think about intimacy, and more broadly, politics of sex and identity?

In her chapter, ‘Sexual Orientations,’ Ahmed inquires “what it means to ‘orient’ oneself sexually toward some others and not other others.” Her phenomenological approach to sexual orientation presents a challenge to the normalisation of bodies as heterosexual. Through a reading of Freud, she suggests that “compulsory heterosexuality” carries on the family line, both literally and figuratively. She says “For something to be required is, of course, ‘evidence’ that it is not necessary or inevitable. Heterosexuality is compulsory precisely insofar as it is not prescribed by nature.” Thus, ultimately, compulsory heterosexuality fails. Compulsion directs objects towards lines of orientation—it “puts some objects and not others in reach”. New lines of direction are established when bodies make contact with the object that is not supposed be there (i.e. the “contingent lesbian”). Pulled by desire, a body leaves the heterosexual matrix and as a result, the body requires a reorientation through assembling other objects that are otherwise not visible or reachable in the field of heterosexuality. For Sara, the potentiality in this rejection of compulsory heterosexuality resides in its refusal to turn to face the hail of interpellation: “Having not turned around, who knows where we might turn. Not turning also affects what we can do. The contingency of lesbian desire makes things happen.” Thus, the lesbian looks to other lines of orientation, which inevitably affects the things she might do.

A challenging read. Theoretically, there is a lot going on in terms that Sara draws on many competing frameworks, such as phenomenology, psychoanalysis, critical race theory, feminist theory, and queer theory. I think phenomenology offers an interesting twist to the mix. It’s interesting in the sense that post-structuralism developed, partially, in reaction to phenomenological thought. Are we witnessing the “come back” of phenomenology into critical theory? I think one of the criticisms often directed at feminist theory and queer theory is its inability to address the real-life experiences of its subjects. Can a return to phenomenology help resolve some of these inadequacies?

To conclude, I think Annamarie and Sara are asking us, their readers, to rethink the ways we have thought about the intersections between sex, sexuality, and identity. Whether they state it, or not, both of them acknowledge the complexity of these intersections, which I think is one of the great things about working in the field: its heterogeneous terrain. There’s never a dull moment.

Jonathon is about to start Honours in Gender, Sexuality, and Culture at the ANU.

This week’s readings for Queer Thinking are as follows:

Melissa Hardie, “The Closet Remediated: Inside Lindsay Lohan,” Australian Humanities Review, May 2010.

(optional: “Beard,” in Rhetorical Bodies, eds. Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999)

Lee Wallace, “Dorothy Arzner’s Wife: Heterosexual sets, homosexual scenes,” Screen 49:4 Winter 2008.

Kate Lilley, Ladylike, Salt Publishing, forthcoming. (Latest book of poems)

Kate Lilley, “Lesbian Professor,” Australian Feminist Studies, 11:23 1996

(optional: “Early Modern Garbo: the Two Bodies of Queen Christina” in Women Making Time, eds E. McMahon and B. Olubas Perth: UWA Press, 2006, 16-35)

I have copies of all of these to email anyone who would like to follow our thinking…

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.