Feminism of curiosity and imagination in the face of bureaucratic brutality and systematic murder. Empathy and intuition failed her as a means of accessing such past experiences. To find a way forward, she introduced the legend of the Gorgon. A Gorgon was a terrible creature of ancient Greek mythology whose glance turned everything to stone. Perseus was able to slay the Gorgon Medusa by holding her reflection in his polished shield and cutting off her head. Clendinnen believed, ‘If we are to see the Gorgon sufficiently steadily to destroy it, we cannot afford to be blinded by reverence or abashed into silence or deflected into a search for reassuring myths.’ So the question she posed was this: what kind of steady, systematic scrutiny, what kind of moral intelligence, might enable us to hold this terrible thing in our contemplation? Her answer was the craft of history. Has anyone celebrated the historical method so well? Through powerful storytelling, forensic analysis of episodes, and her lovable companionship in ‘the secret society of readers’, Clendinnen inducts us in the wonders of historical thinking. She reveres historians as ‘magicians’, and tutors our sense of awe at the ‘secular resurrections’ they can conjure. She invokes a past that is powerful and ever-present: ‘its hand is on our shoulder’. Boyce reminds us that Clendinnen was a member of the celebrated ‘Melbourne Group’ of historians that came into being at La Trobe University in the 1970s and included Greg Dening, Donna Merwick, Rhys Isaac, June Philipp, and Tony Barta. They pioneered approaches to ethnographic history and took on the challenge of integrating anthropology and history by attending especially to cross-cultural encounters and episodes. In remembering Clendinnen, we honour also the work of these friends and colleagues and the inspiration they gave a generation of Australian historians. The collection ends with Clendinnen’s later writings on illness and memory. In the netherworld of the hospital, Clendinnen’s researched pasts began to interlace with her own. The deities (‘monsters of caprice’) who held sway over the Aztecs of Mexico now seemed to have her in their grip. The gruesome Aztec theatre of excising a living, beating heart from the body of a warrior became weirdly inverted in her own experience of having a living organ from a dying body installed in hers. She wrote about this paradox in her memoir Tiger’s Eye (2000) and also in an article for the Australasian Journal of Psychotherapy, which, rather wonderfully, has been included in this collection. Clendinnen happily presented herself to the psychological profession as ‘a talking document’. Clendinnen loved the way literacy connects ‘the living with the living, but also with the great company of the dead’. She cherished her friend Michel de Montaigne, who died more than four hundred years ago but who ‘is still alive to me’. She saw her art as achieving a kind of triumph over death, as denying the immutability of time. James Boyce’s selection has been made with such insight and sympathy that it produces what feels almost like a new book of Inga Clendinnen’s, a secular resurrection of its own. g Tom Griffiths is Emeritus Professor of History at the Australian National University and Chair of the Editorial Board of the Australian Dictionary of Biography. His book The Art of Time Travel: Historians and their craft (2016) includes a chapter on Inga Clendinnen. 16 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2021
After the revolution
Feminist challenges to contemporary sexual politics Zora Simic
Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again by Katherine Angel Verso $29.99 hb, 147 pp
Why We Lost the Sex Wars
A
by Lorna Bracewell University of Minnesota Press US$25.95 pb, 277 pp
mong historians of sexuality, it is customary to stress that there was never just one sexual revolution, but many. There were the pop-culture versions, the countercultural expressions and perhaps most momentously, but least discussed, the everyday or ‘ordinary’ sexual revolution. Or conversely, as French philosopher Michel Foucault so influentially argued in The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: The will to knowledge – first published in French in 1976 and in English in 1978, in the very thick of the so-called sexual revolution – there was no liberating sex from the disciplinary and regulatory effects of modern sexuality, already by then at least three centuries old. One of the delusions of the age was that, as we put sexual repression behind us (by saying yes to sex, for instance), ‘tomorrow sex will be good again’. In her timely and genuinely refreshing new book, Katherine Angel’s title, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and desire in the age of consent, nods to Foucault with good reason. Angel writes in her powerful opening chapter that the promise of good sex looms – if we get consent right. And it is women and girls who bear the burden of what Foucault called the ‘incitement to discourse’. Under the terms of what Angel labels ‘consent culture’, ‘women’s speech about their desire is both demanded and idealised, touted as a marker of progressive politics’. When it comes to good sex, women must know and say what they do or don’t want.The 1970s feminist mantra ‘No Means No’ has given way to ‘enthusiastic consent’ – a fine idea in theory – but as Angel points out, it is not always easy for women to work out what they want sexually, and even if they do ‘enthusiastically consent’, they can be punished for it, and often are, one way or another. For instance, the emphasis in rape and sexual assault trials on ‘whether a victim consented to sexual activity’, rather than ‘whether the act took place’, often works against women who exhibit in any way ‘a confident desire for sex’. From another direction, the woman who is uncertain about her sexual desires is pathologised, and it is up to her to fix it – otherwise she remains doomed to ‘bad sex’. Angel’s concern is not with disavowing consent, which is, after all, a ‘bare minimum’. Instead, she interrogates consent and its limits in the interests of advancing sexual ethics beyond their current impasse. In doing so, she joins others on similar quests, including Michaela Coel, creator and star of the British television series I May Destroy You (2020), a polyphonic examination of all kinds of sex not always easily reducible to consenting or not, and gender and sexuality scholar Joseph J. Fischel, author of
