Thinking culture now updating

Posted on | April 27, 2010 | 2 Comments

Just to cross-promote to readers who may be interested, the GCS blog, Thinking Culture, is now up and running again. I’m hoping some of you will be keen to subscribe to that feed in addition to this one. As well as offering a space for students and staff in our Department to write, I’m trying to build a set of resources for cultural studies students in the blogroll and links section. It needn’t be exhaustive but if you’d like to be included please get in touch. Here’s the first post:

An intention I have for this blog is to further the cultural studies tradition of sharing “Working Papers”. Researching my PhD, I tracked down a number of the original “Working Papers” published by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. These were pretty rudimentary photocopies of typed scripts, but they were useful for showing the kind of research being done within the Centre, as well as the development of staff and students’ ideas over time.

The Centre actually developed this concept to publish a specific journal, Working Papers in Cultural Studies, from 1971. As Graeme Turner explains, the Centre’s collectivist practice – students often published in collaboration with staff – worked against the established hierarchies of teacher and pupil, indeed the publishing program itself was a measure of the Centre’s unconventional institutional ambitions.

We can see this tradition continuing in other initiatives since this time. In Australia, for instance, M/C Journal began in a similar fashion (it would be great to hear more about this history if anyone involved is reading!). Meanwhile postgraduate journals like Melbourne University’s Antithesis offer an important role for students seeking to get involved in publishing, and to have their writing read alongside more senior scholars (the blogroll on that site has links to other postgraduate journals of this type).

At a time when publishing seemed to matter as much as thesis completion, there were conflicts in the BCCCS between the perceived urgency of political and intellectual consolidation and the need to produce more sanctioned qualifications. This is a tension that continues to drive many students in our Department, and I hope that by sharing their work here they may be able to come to some kind of accommodation.

For feminists in the BCCCS, working groups were also important. The Women Thesis Writers’ Group invited feminist grad students and other friends of the Centre “to exchange written work, provide and receive feedback, and discuss ideas” according to the editors of Off Centre: Feminism and Cultural Studies . This important book marked the 10 year anniversary of Women Take Issue – the feminist edition of the Working Papers journal, which holds particular meaning in the scholarly history our Department follows. Perhaps this space can offer a similar, if wider, function of support.

As I have argued in my own research, blogging is useful for thesis writers in particular because it breaks the isolation of the sole-authored project. In increasingly professionalised and competitive graduate programs for cultural studies, it may even provide a space for dialogue across campuses and regions so that the politics and ethics for contemporary cultural theory may continue to be defined and realised.

Category: Web(log) Stuff

How do you buy a wedding ring?

Posted on | April 25, 2010 | 13 Comments

The next bit of wedding planning is to buy the rings, since we both agree we’d like to have one. It was different with the engagement. I proposed to William so I didn’t expect a ring. I am also not much of a jewelry person. But wow, try explaining that to someone sometime, that you don’t see the need for an engagement ring. People really don’t mind telling you their opinion about that one.

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?

Category: Events, Gender, Marriage

Literature and cultural studies

Posted on | April 19, 2010 | No Comments

One of our grad students in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies is organising a panel for the Crossroads in Cultural Studies conference in June. It’s exploring links between literature and cultural studies. As part of the preparations, she is doing a survey of postgraduates and early career  scholars working on literature in the field of cultural studies.

Questions will ask for feedback detailing the feelings/reflections of these scholars around how their literary scholarship is encountered and valued within the ‘cultural studies’ disciplinary domain. Respondents’ identities will be kept anonymous, however responses will be used and potentially detailed in a paper that considers the place of literary objects in cultural studies.

Interested participants or people who may know potential participants are encouraged to contact estelle [dot] noonan AT sydney [dot] edu [dot] au . And come along to the panel if you’re heading to the conference!

Category: Academia, Research
Tags: Crossroads 2010

Happily ever before and after

Posted on | April 7, 2010 | 13 Comments

Yesterday we met our wedding celebrant for the first time. We were a bit nervous beforehand. So far the celebrant plans have fallen through twice. My sister in law’s mother was first to be asked, but unfortunately illness means she can’t risk traveling to the wedding. Then after a trip home to Tassie last year my cousin mentioned that his partner had a niece in Townsville… who was also a celebrant!! This seemed too good to be true, and ultimately it was. In February the second celebrant called to say she was pregnant with the baby due very close to the wedding day. Her doctor advised her to pull out, so now we have a local recommendation.

I was nervous before the meeting because in the past fortnight I’d only just realised the extent of the Howard Government’s changes to the Family Law Act. I knew the laws had been amended, but I didn’t realise that every marriage celebrant in Australia must now use this formulation in the service itself for the wedding to be legitimate:

Before you are joined in marriage in my presence and in the presence of these witnesses, I am to remind you of the solemn and binding nature of the relationship into which you are now about to enter. Marriage according to law in Australia, is the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life.

I felt a bit sick when I read this the other day. I’ve been to marriage equality rallies and I’ve taught same-sex entitlements in class. But I’d avoided reading guidebook examples which show the legal requirements in detail. I only discovered the true force of the stipulation in my friend Michelle’s beautiful memoir of her marriage to Heather in Canada. (Michelle’s book, Ghost Wife, shows the implications of these words in the most vivid love story that reaches across couples, families, countries and generations. It needs a publisher if you know one!)

Yesterday we asked the celebrant if we could add some of our own words before the compulsory part of the service to make it clear that we don’t agree with the new statement. I figured this might be better than inviting guests to “boo” after the final line (?). I shouldn’t have been so surprised that politicians would feel entitled to dictate love’s terms to advance the interests of the nation: after all, I have read Lauren Berlant’s work for many years. I suppose what I do find shocking is the extent of the joylessness in the formal processes around marriage – as opposed to the pervasive optimism of its spin-off industries.

Take this, for example. Happily Ever Before & After is the booklet issued to couples by celebrants on behalf of the Attorney General. It lists “things you need to know” about marriage, including health and welfare benefits, taxation, making a will, and joint ownership of assets. It also has a services section listing counseling resources “before marriage”, “during” and “after breakdown of marriage”. The narrative suggests a certain inevitability to these stages – despite the larger heading: “Marriage is important”.

That this depressing account welcomes all couples who are well and truly in the process of planning a wedding encapsulates the contradiction at the heart of federal attempts to define marriage in exclusionary terms. To put it simply: those who seek to protect marriage from external threats freely admit its precarity is internal. It is in the formal documentation! How else might we explain state-sanctioned campaigns that warn: “unless your marriage is carefully nurtured there is a high risk it will end in divorce”? The patronising tone that warns lovers that their actions “should not be taken lightly” (another line in the compulsory ceremony book) is the weakest form of moral guidance in a society that claims secularism but actively promotes ideology.

Last year I tried to shock my students with statistics to show them that, going on numbers, and the average length of marriages, staying married to one person for life was one of the more radical things they might accomplish. The wonder on their faces as they realised they may not have to give up on love to be political! So, whatever words we choose to say in July, it is this objective we will have in mind. It will be to demonstrate a binding union with our many friends who question the wisdom and power of self-appointed guardians protecting an institution that cannot win its own ideal recruits.

Category: Marriage, Politics

Dismantling the home office

Posted on | March 30, 2010 | 4 Comments

This weekend I took apart our home office. It’s the first step in reclaiming my life after finishing the book manuscript. In a tiny 2 bedroom apartment, there’s not much room in the first place. Why would I work in one of them? When clearly my study shows I can work in all of them?

More seriously, what I’m talking about is developing a personal response to the things I found in writing the book, particularly chapter seven, which talks about home offices and their impact on relationships and families.

On the one hand, there’s something interesting going on in working couples where one partner is “entitled” to use the home office for paid work – and therefore entitled to solitude or intimacy with work – while the other “enjoys” the alleged benefits of domesticity: open rooms, noise, food, tv, phone calls, hanging out with kids (insert favourite pursuit here).

There’s also the family that spends a lot of time in separate rooms on separate screens – messaging each other if they interact at all. Parents worry that they aren’t being domestic in the right way by spending nights alone and apart from others in the house. But how does this compare over time, across history? Does the concern come because these parents grew up with television, which somehow facilitated domestic unity better? Or is it something else entirely? What is the function of domesticity anyway?

In the book I suggest that online sites like Facebook actually take on some of the characteristics of domesticity if this means having reliable companions and witnesses at routine hours of the day. So what does this mean for co-habitation for work-focused online types? What becomes of the actually physically present people professionals live with when they spend so much time online?

Another issue I want to think about when it comes to home offices is how they so often look like work offices: with all of the corporate mundanity such an aesthetic implies. A sample of photos from the study helps to illustrate this.

Some immediate questions that strike me are: who can afford to have a separate room of the house for work in addition to an office at work? Is a home office or study a necessity? What are the reasons people think it is a necessity? Are they right?

By extension, what would happen if we thought about labour politics in terms of space – that is, if we decided not to invest in real estate to make up for workplace inadequacies? Here I am specifically avoiding the situation of students and freelancers, which I take up in other chapters of the book. But some of the photos above are of part-time workers’ home offices which they used during days away from “the office”.

In future I think I might need to explore a materialist account – OMG even an actor-network-theory account (?!) – of how objects bring a set of affects and associations that can infect the home space with work anxieties. I’m reminded of the television producer who had to shut the door on her home office sometimes so she couldn’t see the objects that had such power to symbolise WORK; or the part-time worker who had to hide the laptop at home on Fridays so that she wouldn’t log in to her email.

For the moment, a big question coming out of the study is: to what extent do we willingly set up these domestic cubicles and enslave ourselves to a continuum of corporate culture stretching from work to home? Is having a home office a luxury, a convenience, and also a significant means by which we accept certain logics and vistas (the pun on the Microsoft name is intended) and therefore become habituated to an all-encompassing grid of productivity?

Category: Research, Work

Press release for WfH project

Posted on | March 25, 2010 | No Comments

This is the press release that went out today from the Sydney Uni media office. Thanks to Jackie Chowns for her work on this. Watch out for me on Sky news this afternoon (yes, you read that correctly!)

The much-touted “work/life balance” is shaping up to be riddled with paradox with new research showing work-related email invading the homes and intimate leisure spaces of workers, causing stress, anxiety, an inability to switch off as well as the potential to damage family relationships.

Dr Melissa Gregg from the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney carried out a three-year study entitled “Working from home: New media technology, workplace culture and the changing nature of domesticity”.

The study was part of an Australian Postdoctoral Fellowship Project in which in-depth interviews were carried out with 26 information workers from large organisations over a three-year period.

“The study coincided with the rise of online culture over the past three years: specifically social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Many people consider these platforms to be purely leisure practices to be used in people’s time off.

“But for workers in a range of office jobs, it’s become part of the job. And largely this has happened without any discussion at the workplace about implications for workload.”

Many workers in the study responded that checking and sending emails from home did not constitute “work”. They would check email at night in bed, and as early as 6am before children woke, so that they could focus on ”real work” in office hours.

“This study was designed to pick up all that extra work that goes on outside the office, which is generally sold to us as this new freedom to be in touch with work when it suits us.”

“We found some surprising stories from people who said they were concerned that their children were addicted to the internet, but who were actually showing signs of addiction themselves. But these people didn’t see their use of computers as a problem because it was do with work.”

The study found that children using computers and other technology at home were affected by the workloads of parents who seemed too distracted or exhausted with work to interact with them, Gregg says.

Part-time workers were found to keep email accounts open on official non-work days to “keep things moving” and avoid “holding up” full-time workers. “This hidden labour in the home translates to a significant amount of unpaid work performed by women,” Dr Gregg says. “It’s another factor in the ongoing gender pay gap.”

Gregg says that many in the study reported increased signs of stress and anxiety.

“The evidence shows that most people think it is just their own individual failing that they can’t keep up both with the technology and the amount of communication they are having to deal with.

“Once you see this message across industries you know that it is a problem that has to be dealt with structurally, not by forcing workers to adopt individual solutions.”

(The results will be published in Work’s Intimacy, Polity Press, later this year)

Category: Publications, Research, Work

Work’s Intimacy: Contents

Posted on | March 24, 2010 | 6 Comments

I just sent off the manuscript that has been keeping me so anti-social. I am beside myself. I have no idea what my life will be like without this book weighing on my mind!

Below is the ToC. I have already sent some bits to a couple of you, but basically most of this is new writing. If there is a chapter or section that you particularly want to see, please do get in touch. I could use the feedback.

Introduction
Work’s intimacy: Performing professionalism online and on the job

PART ONE

THE CONNECTIVITY IMPERATIVE:
BUSINESS RESPONSES TO NEW MEDIA

1. Selling the flexible workplace: The creative economy and new media fetishism
2. Working from home: The mobile office and the seduction of convenience
3. Part-time precarity: Discount labour and contract careers

PART TWO

GETTING INTIMATE:
ONLINE CULTURE AND THE RISE OF SOCIAL NETWORKING

4. To CC: or not to CC: Teamwork in office culture
5. Facebook Friends: Security blankets and career mobility
6. Know Your Product: Online branding and the evacuation of friendship

PART THREE

LOOKING FOR LOVE IN THE NETWORKED HOUSEHOLD

7. Home offices and remote parents: Family dynamics in online households
8. Long hours, high bandwidth: Negotiating domesticity and distance
9. On call

Conclusion
Presence bleed and the prospect of work limits

Category: Publications, Research, Work

Why bother?

Posted on | March 17, 2010 | 11 Comments

This semester I teach Arguing the Point: Research in Gender and Cultural Studies. It’s a graduate course for students writing a thesis for the first time and those new to our discipline. The classes are a mixture of themed discussion and practical workshops. A final “After 5″ hour focuses on research skills.

Tonight I’m spending the last hour talking about motivation, discipline and time management.

What motivates you to write a thesis? How do you plan a year – or 3 years – of your life as represented in print? How do you stay disciplined enough to realise your original motivation? If you aren’t used to writing regularly, are there ways to learn? What if something goes wrong?

I also want students to think about changes in their personal life and relationships that might need to be considered in achieving these goals. In Honours year particularly, Australian students face a terrifying jump in expectations (whether real or perceived) to be able to succeed at the level they might be familiar. The private toll this can take is a major factor that our teaching should address.

The bigger question I want to ask arising from this is, to borrow from Jonathan Franzen, Why Bother? What do we tell ourselves we are doing as scholars to justify the peculiar requirements of the academic lifestyle? Is there a formula for being a happy scholar? What habits would you advise for those embarking on a thesis?

Category: Academia, Teaching

So long so long

Posted on | March 16, 2010 | 1 Comment

The Pixies close their set with “Where is my mind?” at the Horden Pavillion last night.

Category: Saturn Returns

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Thinking culture now updating

How do you buy a wedding ring?

Literature and cultural studies

Blogroll update

Happily ever before and after

Dismantling the home office

Press release for WfH project

Work’s Intimacy: Contents

Why bother?

So long so long

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