Blair Williams Blair Williams i(20959447 works by)
Gender: Female
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Works By

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1 Re-Energising the Revolution Today Blair Williams , 2023 single work autobiography
— Appears in: Women and Whitlam : Revisiting the Revolution 2023;
1 I Studied 31 Australian Political Biographies Published in the Past Decade — Only 4 Were about Women Blair Williams , 2021 single work column
— Appears in: The Conversation , 14 September 2021;

'This week, a new Australian political biography will appear on bookshelves. This is The Accidental Prime Minister, an examination of Scott Morrison by journalist Annika Smethurst.' 
1 Where Are the Great Women? A Feminist Analysis of Australian Political Biographies Blair Williams , 2021 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Journal of Biography and History , August no. 5 2021; (p. 23-37) 'As women have become more visible in the Australian political sphere, the volume of writing about their lives, careers and experiences has also increased. This has brought to light certain challenges and shortcomings, as well as enduring discursive biases in the existing literature. Political history, for example, and especially political biography, has generally ‘privileged the political activities of men and masculine political institutions’, telling the stories of so-called Great Men while excluding those who do not traditionally belong to this cohort. Any attempt to summarise the current state of biographies written on Australian political women and to assess the extent to which these can be improved must therefore address several overlapping lines of inquiry, the four most fundamental of which have been chosen for discussion in this article. First, I will provide an overview of the institutional and discursive masculine biases of political biographies in general. Second, I will outline the state of biographies written on women politicians, noting the lack of such texts and an increasing turn towards autobiography. Third, I compare two recent biographies on women politicians—Anna Broinowski’s Please Explain (2017) and Margaret Simons’s Penny Wong (2019)—to demonstrate how a tendency towards excessive personalisation can become problematic. Lastly, by exploring feminist approaches to political biography, I provide a working definition of feminist political biography and propose a list of ‘dos and don’ts’ for those political biographers who seek to develop a more inclusive model.' (Introduction)
1 Louise Swinn , Choice Words: A Collection of Writing About Abortion, Sydney Blair Williams , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: Queensland Review , December vol. 27 no. 2 2020; (p. 206-208)
— Review of Choice Words : A Collection of Writing about Abortion 2019 anthology prose autobiography
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