Issue Details: First known date: 2021... 2021 Single Motherhood as a Site for Feminist Reimagination in Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip and 'Other People’s Children'
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'By investigating the worlds of single mother protagonists in Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip (1977) and Other People’s Children (from Honour and Other People’s Children, 1980) this essay reflects on how Australian single mothers and their lived experiences were fictionally depicted in the decade the Supporting Mothers’ Benefit was introduced by the Whitlam Labor Government (1973).1 Much has been written about Garner’s variously-constructed collective households and the young, inner-city types who inhabited them. This essay focusses on how Garner’s single mothers negotiate the private and the political while negotiating maternal and erotic desire in the aftermath of the gains made by second-wave feminism. Contemporarily, despite these gains and the rise in and acceptability of SMC (single mothers by choice), ‘the family’ as an ideological construct, together with the predominance of phallogocentric logic continues to inhibit single mothers’ rights, equality and agency. This is one of the great contradictions of single motherhood: that while patriarchy enforces gendered and repressive values upon single mothers and their opportunities for transcendence, as a liminal, ‘in-between’ space, single motherhood presents a site for resistance and re-imagination, as well as an escape from domestic violence. I contend that in these early works Garner teases out this contradiction of constraint and freedom, similarly to how she famously examines the fault lines that exist in the ‘gap between theory and practice’ (OPC 53).'  (Publication abstract)

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    y separately published work icon JASAL Conference Issue : Reading and Writing Australian Literature vol. 21 no. 2 2021 22894191 2021 periodical issue 'This issue of JASAL publishes essays first presented at ASAL2020 Virtual, an online conference that replaced a conference at James Cook University, Cairns, after COVID-19 restrictions necessitated a reimagination of the face-to-face program. At the time of writing this introduction, twelve months after ASAL2020, many of those who attended the conference are again in lockdown as new strains of COVID-19 test the capacities of health and civic authorities, and the patience of a population seeking to comprehend this ‘new normal.’ Many of those who attended ASAL2020 also logged on again in July 2021 to join the Australian Literary Studies Convention, hosted by Victoria University, confirming the value of virtual communion to the development of the work we do as literary scholars and the spirit in which we do that work.' (Roger Osborne : Reading and Writing Australian Literature: Introduction 2021
Last amended 2 Sep 2021 13:35:59
https://openjournals.library.usyd.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/article/view/14859 Single Motherhood as a Site for Feminist Reimagination in Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip and 'Other People’s Children'small AustLit logo JASAL
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