Cirrus@Austlit

'Germaine Greer is a feminist iconoclast frequently misread, misunderstood and maligned. Her most recent book On Rape was unanimously panned in media reviews by feminists. This article argues that third and fourth wave feminist readings of On Rape-and of Greer more broadly-fail to grasp the book as part of her oeuvre. I note that Greer is making two related arguments in On Rape, both of which have been overlooked or underplayed in media reviews. The first concerns what she calls "everyday rape" or the unwanted, sometimes forced, sex that women routinely experience, and occasionally consent to, in long-term heterosexual relationships; the second concerns women's loss of sexual pleasure associated with this. Against the prevailing view that Greer has transmogrified into a "rape apologist," I read the book as part of an ongoing conversation that Greer has been having with the culture, with herself and with women for fifty years. Greer has not changed her position, rather she is looking at another angle of her long-standing argument that the sexually autonomous woman has the right to determine her own boundaries and experience and, moreover, that "bad sex" is emotionally and spiritually destructive. Greer hasn't changed, feminism has. I then return to the reception of the book and consider what distinguishes Greer's style and politics identifying her left libertarian radicalism as anathema to contemporary progressive politics.' (Publication abstract)

'[...] it has also become a place for radical and "gender critical" feminists concerned to centre women and mothers in their work, and who retain a sense of the importance of embodiment, sexual difference and a feminist analysis of gendered power relations. While the university purports to be a place for the free expression of ideas, the post-modern turn and some more recent strands of ideological progressivism have made the free expression of the full range of feminist ideas, including those pertaining to women and mothers, menstruation, breastfeeding and child care, increasingly difficult to name, explore and analyse. [...]even as women have gained access to all domains of social life as civil equals, becoming a mother continues to generate entrenched structural inequalities, including, in particular, a pronounced wage, wealth and leisure gap. [...]we have creative writing-poetry and prose-by a range of Australian women writers dealing with the topic of motherhood and mothering and, again, we can find quite frequently a theme of loss-a loss of ideals, the loss of fantasies of perfection, the loss of security, the loss of identity, the loss of income, the loss of a child, the loss of life and more.'  (Publication abstract)