Issue Details: First known date: 2019... 2019 A Mystery Haunting Us All : Historicising Media Cultural Explanations of Family Violence Through Australia's Jaidyn Leskie Child Murder Case
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'This paper demonstrates the historical importance of a notorious Australian child murder to developing research on cultural factors influencing public understanding of family violence. It shows how the 1997 disappearance of 13-month-old Jaidyn Leskie from his babysitter's house in a downcast regional Australian town still matters in media and cultural explanations of child murder as an extreme end point of such violence. The scene set is of a haunted postcolonial imaginary moving subjects through media cultural space as failures of class and gender performance. Its tableau of "freaks" forms when the child murder story is written and read from a late-twentieth-century aspirational vista, and its key subjects underperform, in neoliberal terms, their class and gender roles. I observe them as prototypes for more likely subjects in contemporary media attempts to explain violence against children, and family violence more broadly, as a problem of role performance in Australia's haunted media culture. I suggest deconstructive engagement with texts that capture this process, but also invoke particular ghosts as they strive to explain a tragic crime.'  (Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Hecate vol. 45 no. 1/2 Carole Ferrier (editor), Jena Woodhouse (editor), 2019 21220789 2019 periodical issue

    'The house husbands or SNAGS, a new phenomenon, did not see this as a permanent role and most, sooner or later, tired of a lack of life in the public sphere; despite a brief fashion for the male population's public job being private Home Duties, many men longed to re-enter the usual world; one in which important or sometimes stimulating things went on. The Australian Institute of Family Studies (in the government Department of Social Services) has regularly researched attitudes to gender roles within households in relation to things such as divided domestic work and has found, in its surveys, considerable support for shared housework. Other factors are in play in many countries, especially the incidence of child marriage (650 million girls) and of Female Genital Mutilation (imposed upon 200 million girls), the latter increasingly administered by actual health services rather than the stereotypical old, female relative with a razor blade and a sewing basket. The witches and midwives of centuries ago were one thing (documented, for example, in Barbara Ehrenreich's 1973 Witches, Midwives and Nurses) but more recently, in COVID-19 times, women are much in demand in their jobs/professions as health workers, and have been given enthusiastic encouragement to lead their working life in close contact with often viralent infections, as "essential workers"-a category that seems to have benefits for the bourgeoisie who belong to it, but not many for nurses working long and demanding shifts, wearing often-uncomfortable Personal Protective Equipment, in hospitals and infection-testing clinics.' (Carole Ferrier, Editorial introduction) 

    2019
    pg. 209-230, 310
Last amended 5 Mar 2021 07:55:31
209-230, 310 A Mystery Haunting Us All : Historicising Media Cultural Explanations of Family Violence Through Australia's Jaidyn Leskie Child Murder Casesmall AustLit logo Hecate
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