Our projects
The research stream, Critical Studies in Gender, Sexuality and Power, was instantiated in late 2019 in order to bring together talented researchers from across the Faculty of Arts whose research engages with gender, sex and sexuality as key categories in their work. Macquarie University has a rich and impressive history of world-leading critical research in gender, sex and sexuality but, recently, fewer opportunities for scholars from different disciplines to come together and enrich their work. The aim of the stream, in its first full year of operation, is to host a series of symposia, workshops and colloquia to investigate the connections between our work, engage with researchers around Australia with related research interests, and provide opportunities for diverse audiences to engage with our research. As such, the stream itself has not ‘directed’ or ‘produced’ research projects at this stage. Some examples of the exciting projects currently being conducted by members of the stream are listed below.
Gender and sexual politics: Changing citizenship in Australia since 1969
Researchers: Professor Robert Reynolds, Professor Michelle Arrow, Associate Professor Barbara Baird (Flinders), and Dr Leigh Boucher (project funded by the ARC Discovery Project scheme)
This project examines the effects and legacies of the feminist and sexual revolutions for citizenship in Australia. In the last fifty years, Australians have increasingly claimed rights and protections in the intimate languages of sexual and gendered identities. This has reorganised public culture in confounding ways and led to debates about how and in what ways ideas about intimate life and identity politics should frame the rights, protections and obligations of citizenship. Complex and sometimes competing claims about the rights of same-sex couples, the protection of victims of domestic violence, the importance of sex education for minors, the harms suffered by fathers and many others have reverberated in Australian political life since the early 1970s; in other contexts scholars have suggested these kinds of claims represent the emergence of sexual citizenship. This project will provide a critical genealogy of claims made in the language of gendered and sexual identities which have opened up and challenged Australian citizenship since 1969. The project hopes to benefit policy makers and stakeholders with a new understanding and framework to navigate this complex landscape and test the utility of the notion of ‘sexual citizenship’ to explain these transformations.
Significances of ‘childhood’ in postcolonial Australia
Researcher: Dr Joanna Faulkner (project funded by the ARC Future Fellowship scheme)
The project investigates the rhetorical and political use of the figure of the Aboriginal child as a site of mediation in efforts to reconcile cultural tensions in Australia, particularly between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. Utilising an interdisciplinary critical analysis of concepts of childhood, expected outcomes include enhanced understanding of the specific character of injury inflicted upon Aboriginal communities through interventions targeting their children, such as their removal into out of home care. This should provide significant benefits to the contemporary social project of reconciliation, through increasing critical attention to the part of cultural misunderstanding in perpetuating Aboriginal disadvantage.
The Literary Afterlife of Anne Boleyn
Researcher: Dr Stephanie Russo
This project explores the ways in which Anne Boleyn has figured as a symbol for a whole range of ideas about sex, history, politics, gender, religion and power. This project spans five hundred years of writing about the Tudors, from the work of Sir Thomas Wyatt, to contemporary literary, televisual and digital texts.
Christian Consciousness Raising: Magdalene Journal and Australian Feminism
Researcher: Associate Professor Clare Monagle (project funded by the SLNSW fellowship scheme)
This project will investigate how the Magdalene Journal served as an incubator of an emerging Christian feminism in Australia, and how it reflects upon the push by many women to be allowed to participate in the highest offices, and positions of authority, within their various faith communities.
Legal Responses to Historical Child Sexual Abuse
Researchers: Dr Katre Gleeson, Dr Sinead Ring (National University of Ireland) and Professor Kim Stevenson (University of Plymouth).
Societies across the Global North have witnessed radical changes in how the law understands and responds to the sexual abuse of children. There has been a shift away from a deeply suspicious approach, to a more nuanced appreciation and expression of the significance of these harms for children and society, and recognition of child sexual abuse as a civil and criminal wrong. A possible key reason for this change is the intense public focus on the problem of so-called ‘historical’ child sexual abuse: abuse that took place many years ago. This project critically analyses the transformation that has taken place in three jurisdictions - Australia, Ireland and the United Kingdom - in respect of how the law responds to allegations of historical child sexual abuse. Its premise is that our understanding of child sexual abuse is not an immutable reality, but a socially and legally constructed phenomenon. The project examines the construction of child sexual abuse in the present, by adopting a historiographic perspective exploring and comparing the responses of the law, legal institutions and legal professionals in three Western common law countries that have each experienced public crises over historical child sexual abuse in the late twentieth/early twenty-first centuries.