Discipline:

Women's and Gender Studies

Investigators:

Associate Professor Barbara Baird

Summary:

This research brings historical approaches to understanding the politics of sexuality and reproduction in Australia.

The ways that abortion is represented in public discourse and, recently, the ways in which abortion services are provided, are a focus.

Claims to citizenship by queer folks, including lesbian mothers and those who campaigned for marriage equality, are similarly a focus.

The category of ‘the child’, and the ways it is used to pursue political agendas, is an abiding interest.

Across all these issues, the place of race and national identity politics is present in understanding how gender and sexuality are constructed.

The research has been centrally useful in creating change, most recently in achieving the decriminalisation of abortion in South Australia.

Grants:

• ARC DP170100502: Gender and Sexual Politics: Changing citizenship in Australia since 1969 (2017-2022)

Category:

Histories and politics of reproduction in Australia, especially abortion

Histories of queer politics

‘The child’

Discipline:

Women's and Gender Studies

Investigators:

Dr Laura Roberts

Summary:

This research seeks to bring a new philosophical lens to understanding the problem of gender oppression through an analysis of the transformation of the city of Barcelona into a feminist city.

Analysing how the city of Barcelona has undergone this complex process of transformation requires a novel conceptual framework and this research thus aims to weave multiple threads into an interdisciplinary approach that garners insights from feminist politics, feminist cities, feminist philosophy and philosophy of the city.

Ultimately, this project develops a new approach to understand the transformation of the city from both an institutional perspective and an existential perspective, asking inhabitants how they feel living in a feminist city.

Grants:

• CHASS ECR Research Grant (2021)  

Category:

Feminist cities 

Philosophy of the city 

New municipalism

Discipline:

Women's and Gender Studies

Investigators:

Ms Van Thi Nguyen, Ms Katharine Annear, Ms Joanne Chua, Ms Cara Ellickson, Ms Munkhtsetseg Erdenebaatar, Ms Minh Huyen Thi Ngo, Mr Diego Del Valle Cortizas, Dr Anu Mundkur 

Summary:

Drawing on feminist disability theory, women with disabilities (WWD) from the Global South and Global North and their allies, collaborate to create and perform fashion shows to identify, share, unmask and subvert the reification of able-bodied beauty in global fashion.

Queer crip theoretical perspectives on “compulsory able-bodiedness”, a phrase originating from Robert Mcruer (2002), shape the ways that this participatory action research (PAR) and Communications for Development (C4D) project addresses dehumanising and disempowering social norms that perpetuate higher rates of violence against WWD.

The framework involves different cohorts of WWD collaborating, to purposefully lead in challenging the harmful social norms that impact their lives.

Contributions offer valuable new cross cultural insights into the possibilities for WWD to transform understandings of beauty in their different locations and within the normative global field of fashion and society more broadly.

Category:

Disability studies

Development studies

Discipline:

Women's and Gender Studies

Investigators:

Associate Professor Barbara Baird

Summary:

This project investigates the provision of abortion services in Australia since 1990. Most humanities and social science research into abortion focuses on law, or politics, or media representation, or personal experience. This project forges new ground by investigating the system and everyday politics of the provision of abortion care, including the failure of the public health system to provide this common and necessary health care service.

In the post-decriminalisation era in Australia we need to focus on improving access to abortion care and providing culturally appropriate services. This project is based in interviews with around forty advocates and providers as well as documentary research.

The book Abortion Care is Health Care will be released by Melbourne University Publishing in October 2023. 

Grant:

Funding was provided by the former Faculty of Social & Behavioural Sciences at Flinders University.

Category:

Sexual and reproductive politics

Discipline:

Philosophy, Women's and Gender Studies

Investigators:

Dr Laura Roberts, Associate Professor Athena Colman (Brock University, Canada)

Summary:

This project brings together the leading feminist philosophers of our times in an edited collection celebrating the 50^th anniversary of the publication of Luce Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman.

This text is arguably worthy of being placed amongst the key works that constitute the most important philosophical contributions published in the late twentieth century; undoubtedly, it is one of the most significant texts of feminist philosophy to appear in the later half of the past century.

Our collection will bring together important Irigaray scholars and the range of contributors in this volume illustrate the geographical and generational differences in feminist philosophy.

It includes new work from some of the most influential feminist philosophers of the last 50 years, including Rosi Braidotti and Adriana Cavarero alongside scholars who have translated Irigaray’s texts (Gail Schwab) and written important monographs on Irigaray’s work (Rachel Jones, Tina Chanter, Alison Stone, Penelope Deutscher, Michelle Boulous Walker, Mary Rawlinson, Laura Roberts) as well as mid-career scholars who are taking up ideas in Speculum in conversations with questions of race, trans studies, feminist politics and methodology, and whose voices will be crucial in shaping Irigaray’s influence in the years to come.

Category:

European social philosophy

French feminist philosophy

Philosophy of sexual difference