Sighted: 28/03/18
Debra Dudek critiques two novels by Morris Gleitzman, Girl Underground (2004) and Boy Overboard (2002), analysing the representation of ethical relationships between detainees and Australian citizens. In relation to children's multicultural fictions and non-fictions, Dudek suggests that in terms of cultural citizenship, Australia needs to move from 'an ethics of compassion to an ethics of responsibility' in order to understand tolerance as 'a way of respecting absolute differences' (20-21).
Dudek explains how an ethics of responsibility requires the citizens of Australia to actively participate in the dismantling of mandatory detention as an enactment of justice that works towards realizing the meaning of a 'fulfilling social life' (20-21). For Dudek (and others) this begins with the recognition of difference rather than its effacement.
Sighted: 28/03/18
Sighted: 28/03/18
Sighted: 28/03/18
Sighted: 28/03/18
Sighted: 28/03/18
Sighted: 28/03/18
Pearce looks closely at two recent Australian texts and the specific portrayal of Muslim-Australian girls. She utilizes a postcolonial approach to compare the ways in which the film Marking Time and the novel Does My Head Look Big in This? engage in the racialized politics of Muslim identity.
In terms of the struggle for agency and identity, Pearce argues that Marking Time conforms to an Orientalist paradigm, whereby Muslim identity is represented as mysterious and exotic, providing the site for the white, western male hero's 'rite of passage' (p.59). In contrast, Does My Head Look Big in This? challenges negative stereotypes and notions of 'tolerance' which permeate western representations of Muslim identities and culture, by re-articulating a politics of difference and indicating possibilites for the inscription and articulation of cultural hybridity and multiple subjectivities.
Sighted: 28/03/18
Sighted: 28/03/18
Sighted: 28/03/18
Sighted: 28/03/18
McInally is concerned with fictional representations of eating disorders and uncovering any intersections between anorexia and girl-girl desire. McInally 'investigates this interface' in Killing Aurora (Barnes) and Leaving Jetty Road, (Burton) by drawing on the post-structuralist concepts of Deleuze and Guattari as a way of thinking beyond the binarised terms that shape and structure our lives and identities (168). For Deleuze and Guattari, 'desire is an affirmative mobile force that propels living things towards each other' (168) and it is this proposition that McInally utilises to critique hetero-normative cultural systems. She argues that anorexia is 'interrelated to the cultural insistence that girls move beyond intense, passionate and desirous relationships with each other, into normative heterosexuality', a sexuality that upholds western patriarchal capitalist paradigms that 'privilege lack over connection'(168). For McInally, Burton's novel follows this paradigm in its 'reductive and limiting ideologies regarding subjectivity, femininity and desire', while Barnes' novel offers a new and/or different way of reading desire which 'affirms its intense and connective potential outside binarised codifications' (172).
Sighted: 28/03/18