Cirrus@Austlit

'Fiona Foley identifies as a provocateur. This term, defined as "a person who deliberately behaves controversially in order to provoke argument or other strong reactions", is evident in the art she makes, her recent academic career, her public statements, writing and persona. In my recent biography, 'Fiona Foley Provocateur: An Art Life', I endeavour to describe the courage that this political positioning has always, and continues, to require from her. At its relentless heart is her family lineage which includes notable leaders, especially her mother Shirley Foley, whose vision for land on K'gari involved restoration of Badtjala possession of this special "paradise." Fiona's fight for justice extends to all Indigenous people, and more broadly to reconciliation, to the embrace of what she describes as the difficult, "shared" histories of those descended from Australia's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nations and incoming colonist and settler populations.' (Publication abstract)

'Approaching through the lens of transnational corporeal feminism, this article reflects upon the veiled, inscribed, and stripped bodies as the rhetoric of protest and site of justice negotiation in the works of Sylvia Plath, Imtiaz Dharker, Shirin Neshat and Randa Abdel-Fattah. Undeniably, the root of sexism, racism, homophobia, ableism, and ageism lies in the forceful denial, or attempt to erase the bodily existence, of the marginalised other. Corporeal feminism is about revealing this purposeful denial of “unwanted” bodies and the structural process of terrorising and monstracising those bodies. Above all, it is not enough to kill those bodies or let those bodies die: more importantly, the bodies must be a spectacle of shame, what Jasbir Puar calls "debilitation" in her book 'The Right to Maim'. The bodies of the oppressed are the site of fear for the oppressor and hence become the space to prove the oppressor’s superiority of maleness, whiteness, and ableism. This article examines the strategic feminist praxis of embodied epistemology and how the assaulted, shamed, veiled, and erased bodies could be weaponised in feminist consciousness raising.' 

(Publication abstract)

'She did not live there, but from the first day of September 1934 when her burnt and battered body was discovered, her shocking death made headlines in the local paper.' (Introduction)

'This essay targets a version of the "family man," in media cultural representation, that serves patriarchal and capitalist interests as a gendered figure of social/structural support for violence against women. It reads three violent crimes where white, middle-class men in conventional, ideated family roles murder the women who are either married to, or estranged from them. I locate aspects of media coverage of the crimes that run contrary to a public narrative of outrage about "domestic" violence and "family" violence that feeds into a more general, neoliberal tendency of sounding progressive without being politically so, identified, among others, by Faith Agostinone-Wilson in 2020.

Analysis of media texts shows that concerted efforts to identify multi-faceted expressions of men's privilege are a way to resist even subtly naturalised forms of men’s violence against women. Extreme and lethal instances of this violence (as victims' "family" experience) are reported ever more frequently. The project of insisting upon the implicit connections between notions of white middle-class normalcy and the stereotypical family to structurally supported, gendered violence is reaffirmed as necessarily disruptive.' (Publication abstract)