Growing Strong 2022

Growing Strong

Acknowledgment of Country The University of Sydney Women’s Collective meets and organises on the stolen land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. This land was never ceded. The Australian state and Non - Indigenous Australians benefit from the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous Australians. The ongoing effects of colonisation for particularly Indigenous women are stark.

Indigenous women are 32 to 80 times more likely to experience sexual violence than non-Indigenous women and five times more likely to be victims of homicide. More than half of these homicides are related to family violence. Similarly, Indigenous women make up only 2% of Australia’s population but 34% of women in prison. In 2014, a NSW study found that 70% of incarcerated Indigenous women in the state were survivors of sexual abuse, with 44% experiencing ongoing sexual abuse into adulthood.

The empty promises of our governments mean nothing unless they are backed up by real action. So far, Indigenous communities are left underresourced and underserved as their land is pillaged for mining and billions are spent on the prison industrial complex that incarcerates Indigenous people at unprecedented rates. As activists, it is our responsibility to support the fights of Indigenous women and communities.

Women are not free until Indigenous women are free.

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CONTENTS 1

Acknowledgment of Country

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Glossary Priya Gupta

Dom Perrottet: Enemy of Students Roisin Murphy

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What is WoCo? Madeleine Clark

Abolition Is Not Synonymous with Destruction, But With Transformation Jazzlyn Breen

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No Time For Terfs Hannah Rose

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Sexual Health Resources Collaborative

Sandstone Doesn’t Burn: Dismantling the Colleges Kimmy Dibben & Vivienne Guo

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The Fight to Save Gender and Cultural Studies Madeleine Clark

Inked Zoe Coles

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Nurses and Midwives In Crisis Mayla Meru

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Reproductive Justive in Twenty Two Lia Perkins

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BDS and Palestinian Liberation Ariana Haghighi

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Don’t Cross The Picket Line Claire Ollivan

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The Stolen Generations Have Never Ended Amelia Raines

The Female Body and the Dutch Golden Age Alex Mcleay

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The Nuclear Family Is A Scam!

Katarina Kuo

Cover Art: Alex Mcleay Editors in Chief: Madeleine Clark, Monica McNaught-Lee Editors: Alex Mcleay, Ariana Haghighi, Claire Ollivan, Hannah Rose, Katarina Kuo, Hannah Rose, Kritika Rathore, Priya Gupta, Roisin Murphy, Talia Meli Artists: Claire Ollivan, Hannah Rose, Mayla Meru, Monica McNaught-Lee

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Glossary Ableism - Acts or beliefs that devalue or discriminate against people with physical, intellectual or psychiatric disabilities. In a capitalist economy where your value is in direct relation to how much profit you can create for your boss, those who cannot work according to demand are deemed disposable.

customer service roles. Also often used to refer to the burden of being expected to provide unreciprocated emotional support because women are stereotyped as nurturing.

Enterprise Bargaining Period - Australia has very strict strike laws, meaning workers can only go on strike during their Enterprise Bargaining period. This can occur every couple of years, depending on what industry.

This is when workers can negotiate their contracts and fight for better conditions and wages.

Binary - Relating to or involving two things.

Often used in feminist discussions to refer to the limiting belief that there are two discrete genders which are discrete, i.e. the ‘gender binary’. Reducing everything to binaries necessarily devalues anything that lies outside those two categories. For example, trans and intersex people do not fit within the gender binary and this basis are discriminated against.

Gaslight - A form of deliberate psychological abuse where the perpetrator manipulates someone into doubting their own sanity, in order to gain control. Often misued in internet culture to refer to normal interpersonal conflicts and disagreements.

BIPOC - ‘Black, Indigenous and People of Colour’. This term exists to emphasise the unique struggles of Black and Indigenous people. The umbrella term ‘People of Colour’ can overshadow the importance of their fights.

Gendered Labour - The way work is divided between men and women according to gender is usually referred to as the ‘gendered division of labour’. This concerns not only paid work but also the work and responsibilities assigned to people in their daily roles, including in the home as well as in organising or activist spaces.

Capitalism - Our current socio-economic system which is based on the exchange of commodities and on the exploitation of wage labour for profit. Different countries and businesses compete against one another for profits and expansion. It dictates how society is organised.

Heteronormative - Relating to a world view that promotes heterosexuality as the normal or preferred sexual orientation.

Cis/Cisgender - someone whose personal sense of gender corresponds with their assigned sex at birth.

Internalised Sexism - When the belief in women’s inferiority becomes part of one’s own worldview and conceptualisation of themselves and others.

Colonial - Relating to the invasion, violation and ongoing control of lands and the societies inhabiting them.

Intersectionality - The interconnected nature of social categorisations such as race, class and gender, creating overlapping and interdependent systems of oppression. A framework that sees all oppressions as linked

Emotional Labour - The labour of managing your emotions for work, specifically in 03

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Glossary does not align with SWERFs.

and how this means we all have an interest in fighting for the rights of all minorities.

TERF - Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist.

This brand of feminism is gender essentialist and sees gender as a fixed binary and not something that is fluid and socialised. WOCO supports and welcomes trans people and does not align with TERFs.

Misogyny - Dislike, contempt, or ingrained prejudice towards women.

Non-Binary - An umbrella term for people who do not identify as female/male or woman/man.

Transmisogyny - A combination of transphobia and misogyny, manifesting as discrimination against ‘trans women and gender non-conforming people on the feminine end of the gender spectrum’.

NTEU - National Tertiary Education Union.

Australia’s union for tertiary education workers, including staff at universities. The NTEU fights for better wages and conditions for staff against university management. In Enterprise Bargaining periods they can take industrial action including strikes to win their demands.

TW/CW - Trigger Warning / Content Warning.

Unions - Mass organisations of the working class which aim to achieve the demands of their members and have been responsible for many historic wins. Usually each sector (eg. retail, education) has a union of its own that workers of the sector can choose to join.

Patriarchy - A system of society or government in which men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it. A framework that sees how society is seen through the eyes of men.

White Feminism - A brand of feminist centred around the ideals and struggles of primarily white women. White Feminism has historically left BIPOC behind, selling them out for seats at the table and joining their oppressors.

Rape Culture - A society or environment whose prevailing social attitudes have the effect of normalising or trivialising sexual assault and abuse.

Socialism - a broad socio-economic model wherein workers control the means of production and class distinctions are abolished. Instead of society being organised so that a minority have control over the profits and resources, socialism would share those things equally. There would be no profit incentive for businesses, instead the incentive would be to care for all people and living things.

Working class - The Marxist term referring to the economic class which lives off the sale of its labour power - i.e. from doing wagelabour. The common definition is to see the working class as blue collar workers such as a builder. The Marxist definition is to see anyone who has to go to work for a wage as part of the working class. All workers are exploited as they receive a wage according to the time they work and not according to the profits they produce.

SWERF - Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminist. WOCO supports sex workers and 04

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A bou t Wo co WoCo, the Women’s Collective, is an autonomous (this means open to everyone who is not a cis - man) activist space on campus. We are an anti-capitalist space that sees the way society is set up as unequal and unfair. We want to fight for the oppressed in society. For a world that treats everyone equally, where you are not discriminated based on your sex or race or wealth. With this framework we fight around issues that directly affect uni students, but also show our solidarity with social justice issues that affect the world we live in.

WoCo identifies as intersectional feminists.

This means we see all issues of oppression as connected. Intersectionality is to see how different oppressions are related and how they all affect individuals and communities.

Intersectionality is to see how all oppression benefits the ruling capitalist class. It is one thing to be a woman, another to be a woman of colour, another to be a working-class woman of colour. People who have more intersections of oppression have more to struggle against and more to fight for. But everyone who is oppressed has an interest in fighting against the capitalist system. To be an intersectional feminist is to reject the history of white “girl boss” feminism, which has sold out Women of Colour for a seat at the table. It is not enough to sit with men and help rule this unequal system.

where we can rely on our neighbours and government to care for us. Instead of spending billions of dollars on ways to survey, oppress and punish our most underserved (i.e. the poor, the homeless, and Indigenous communities), governments should be spending money on prevention and rehabilitation. This money should be used to fund things like mental health services and drug harm reduction programs.

WoCo sees that if resources were spent on helping people instead of policing them, our world would be a better place. We also see that the way to get this world is not through voting in various politicians who just listen to lobbyists, but to protest. We are an activist grassroots group and see progressive change happening on the streets. We have to force our politicians to listen, and the only way to do that is to make noise.

WoCo is also for prison abolition. Prison abolition encompasses not only the belief that prisons should not exist but an understanding that the criminal justice system under capitalism only exists to benefit the wealthiest amongst us.

Particularly in the feminist movement, we have seen the disastrous effects of relying on the state and the police to legislate and protect women. For example, Indigenous women make up only 2% of Australia’s population but 34% of women in prison. We cannot look to the violent state to protect us.

Abolition is not just about the dismantling of the criminal justice system, as important as that is. It is also about building communities 05

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O u r cam p aign s

This year the results of the National Student Safety Survey, which will document the prevalence of sexual assault on campus, will be released. The Women’s Collective on campus has a staunch history of fighting around the issue of sexual assault on campus. We will continue the Burn the Colleges campaign that brings attention to the innate sexism at the heart of the elite Sydney Uni colleges.

where health workers should be given all the resources they need. It is crucial we give community support to this fight. As these are female dominated industries their rights at work are feminist issues. Particularly as the government will often use sexist tropes of women being caring and nurturing to prevent them taking industrial action, insinuating that they should work for free. No labour should be unpaid. This is more so the case in a pandemic.

WoCo stands with all workers taking action.

We also want to support the National Tertiary Education Union as they go on strike for better conditions and wages. The university sector is made up of 58% women. As it is a highly casualised sector, the issues that affect casuals predominantly affect women. This also intersects with issues of domestic violence leave and transition leave, that are both demands of the NTEU in their log of claims. As students, showing our solidarity with staff is of great importance. It gives staff the confidence to go on strike, knowing that as they do, they are fighting to better our education.

Sydney Uni has a wide array of political groups and unfortunately this includes the right and far right. The group LifeChoices often have stalls that are explicitly set up to argue that abortion is a morally wrong act. They are aligned with right wing political parties who have millions of dollars behind them. WoCo believes that these views are dangerous for women and other minorities. Everyone should have the right to decide what to do with their bodies. We often protest the LifeChoices stalls to be another voice on campus and show that abortion is an individual choice.

Another campaign that will be vital this year is solidarity with the nurses and midwives in the NSW Nurses and Midwives Association. These workers have been fighting for better ratios, pay and conditions. They are demanding basic respect for their work during the pandemic,

We don’t know exactly what this year will look like, but we do know we’ll need as many people as possible on our side!

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Sexual Health Resources

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Safer Communities confidential helpline: (for USyd students and staff ) (02) 8627 6808 National sexual, domestic and family violence hotline: 1800 RESPECT NSW Rape Crisis hotline: 1800 424 017 Lifeline 24 hour crisis line: 131 114 Beyond Blue: 1300 224 636

QR code to: a) Directory of practitioners and specialists A list of practitioners that have been recommended by WoCo and other gender diverse folk. b) USyd Reporting Module: The module where you can report to the university that an incident has taken place. c) Zines on consent d) Other compiled resources for sexual health

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The Fight to Save Gender & Cultural Studies

By Maddie Clark

Sydney University wants to cut our courses. Last year, under a new management proposal called “FUTURE FASS” it was leaked that the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences would undergo major changes. While management and the Dean at the time, Annamarie Jagose, attempted to sell the cuts as beneficial, students and staff knew better.

With the new restructures up to 250 undergraduate subjects and over 240 postgraduate courses would no longer be taught. Department autonomy would also be jeopardized as schools would be merged under different management umbrellas.

This would severely impact Gender and Cultural Studies. Gender and Cultural Studies stands apart in FASS as a unique department. Queer and gender diverse students find a home in GCS where their experiences are theorised and understood.

As Third-year GCS student Misbah Ansari said at a rally on the issue, “GCS has always been interdisciplinary, focussing on the personal as the political, identity, and with several units questioning the conventional academic structure.

We need this Department’s integrity now more than ever.”

The cuts to GCS and to FASS in general make even less sense in relation to the finances of the uni.

FASS itself was projected to make a surplus of $135 million in 2021 and while other universities have lost income due to COVID, Sydney Uni has seen its enrolments and profits skyrocket.

university sector since 2020 and countless courses and departments have been decimated.

These cuts are devastating but they are not something new. They represent an escalation of a decades-long trend to transform universities into the U.S. style corporate model. In this project the government and university management are united.

Government funding over the last decade has been $10billion less than what was projected in 2010. With the introduction of Dan Tehan’s Jobready Graduates Package, costs were shifted onto students as degrees were tripled in cost.

Although universities condemned being left out of JobKeeper, they have been only too happy with the overall shift. COVID in particular has given them the perfect scapegoat to make the cuts they have wanted to make for years.

As students and activists it is our responsibility to fight. Last year, over 250 students gathered in a historic Student General Meeting to vote on a motion condemning the cuts. This was just one action in a slew of protests and activism that was organised to defend FASS. These actions must continue into 2022.

As 2022 USyd Women’s Officer and GSC student Monica said, “Although the university seems to be in control of our education, the reality is that its staff and students make it run. We are the university and through activism, industrial action and solidarity we can win.”

However, while these cuts will be detrimental to Sydney Uni, they fall in line with other universities across Australia. 40 000 jobs have been lost in the 09

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reproductive justice in twenty twenty two

by Lia Perkins

Reproductive Justice is the right to express bodily autonomy in choosing if or when to have children. It is also about the right to a safe and comfortable environment in which to raise them.

Access and choice to have an abortion is one part of reproductive justice, but it is not the only barrier for marginalised women.

The U.S.:

destruction of trees sacred to the Djab Wurrung people of the Kulin nation, was an attack on the ability of Indigenous people to access birthing.

Today, reproductive justice is under attack by conservative governments around the world. In the United States, conservative politicians have been curbing access to contraception, including abortion for decades. In September 2021 Texas adopted a law banning abortion procedures from as early as 6 weeks into the pregnancy, where abortions are regularly performed up to 12 weeks. The US Supreme Court will debate Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organisation later this year with the potential to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision in 1973 which paved the way for abortion legalisation throughout the US. The reintroduction of these bills reflects a sustained push from religious and right wing lobby groups and the rise of the far right in the U.S.

The SisterSong definition of reproductive justice includes the right to ‘parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities’. Community organisation Grandmothers Against Removals (GMAR) identifies 17,979 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children living in out-of-home care.

GMAR was founded to ‘address the systemic issues embedded in child removals and to advocate for more cultural and community based care’. Until First Nations women and families in Australia are afforded the right to give birth according to cultural practices and raise their children on sovereign land, reproductive justice has not been achieved.

Australia:

COVID-19:

Although the right to access an abortion in Australia is less politically debated than in the US, it is still under attack. For example, abortion was only decriminalised in NSW in 2019 and in South Australia las year. Although the majority of Australians are pro-choice, key political figures such as NSW MP Dominic Perrotet strive to push legislation that makes abortion more difficult to access. Australia has also followed the trend of universities becoming sites of contestation over reproductive justice, with organisations such as LifeChoice explicitly building on campuses to recruit students to anti-choice talking points. These points are coupled with more general rightwing ideas that centre “traditional family values” and conservative politics.

COVID-19 has increased systemic disadvantage among people at the sidelines of the health system, especially in the reproductive sphere. As the public health system fails to support thousands of people, those living in rural and regional areas have less access to abortion and other essential healthcare. COVID-19 most significantly affects the safety and wellbeing of disabled and immuno-compromised people. The government was slow to respond to the Omicron variant and disabled people urgently in need of Rapid Antigen Tests were only supported by the Disability Justice Network, a grassroots mutual aid organisation.

Reproductive marginalisation of disabled people has continued for decades. For example, the forced sterilisation of people with a disability is legal in Australia, despite the UN determining it ‘an act of violence, a form of social control and a form of torture’.

Reproductive justice is particularly difficult to access in Australia for First Nations people. Reproductive justice includes the ability to participate in cultural practises around birthing, so the proposed

Reproductive Justice is a useful framework for feminists to understand and fight against oppressive structures that use people’s bodies to marginalise them because of their race, disability, class and/or sexuality. It is to see that all people should be able to make decisions over their own bodies and lives.

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DON’T CROSS TH Why we must show solidarity with staff

Note: This article contains sections of the 2021 Women’s Honi article ‘Academic housework: the gendered effects of precarity’.

stand with staff unionists when they strike for fair working conditions.

Staff working conditions are student learning conditions

Mass casualisation is a feminist issue.

Exploitation is built into the University of Sydney’s corporate business model. But with strikes forecast this year, we have a chance to unite and fight for something better.

Employment in the university sector is becoming ‘uberfied’ and staff are suffering undignified and insecure conditions as a result.Casualisation involves the transformation of workplace employment practices from mostly permanent positions to an increase in casual contracts. In universities, the growth of a precarious underclass of workers allows management to save costs on employee expenses and sack staff more easily.

Higher education has long been under attack from successive Liberal governments and out-of-touch university managers. Both are from the corporate world and both have no interest in funding education that challenges students to think critically about society. Instead, they want to fashion our university sector into a degree factory, where students pay more for less, and they reap the profits. These cuts have disastrous effects. In the span of a four-year degree, things become worse every year: courses you looked forward to doing since enrolling are cut, electives are replaced with mind-numbing interdisciplinary projects, and in-person seminars become pre-recorded video modules alongside a multiple-choice quiz.

Meanwhile, academic staff are becoming increasingly underpaid and overworked, all the while facing the constant threat of losing their jobs. Management’s double speak just becomes the twist of the knife.The pandemic has worsened this trend.. In just one year, 40,000 university jobs were lost across Australia. Over 60% of those jobs were held by women. Reliant on exorbitant fees for international students to keep the sector afloat, higher education was hit harder by the pandemic than any other industry. It did not help that the government refused to provide universities with JobKeeper support.

Over the past two decades, this mass casualisation trend has subjected thousands of women to no job security, systemic underpayment, and few employment rights. At the University of Sydney in 2021, almost 55 percent of casual staff and almost 61 percent of fixed-term staff were women.

The gendered effects of precarious employment are further compounded for women of colour, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, disabled women and working-class women.

Casualisation leads to wage theft and wage theft is embedded in the university business model. Underpayment is not an aberration but a standard practice that exploits casuals by failing to pay them appropriately for their time markingessays, answering emails and preparing class content.

But this is no excuse for the onslaught of neoliberal austerity measures we have seen at universities in the past two years. While Vice-Chancellors rake in million-dollar salaries, wage theft, restructures and mass redundancies occur.

Class exploitation in the education sector, as with class exploitation everywhere, is a feminist issue. 58% of workers in Australian universities are women, meaning massive nation-wide job losses have had disproportionate gendered effects. The disciplines most targeted in austerity measures have also been the ‘feminised’ ones, with humanities departments such as the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences under particular threat.

Cutting courses and forcing staff into insecure employment conditions does not improve our education. As the saying goes: staff working conditions are student learning conditions. When universities prioritise running for-profit over creating knowledge for the public good, exploitation is inevitable and our learning is severely compromised. It is therefore imperative that as students and feminists we

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HE PICKET LINE to fight for a good university.

The USyd Casual’s Network’s The Tip of the Iceberg report last year provided evidence that mass underpayment of precarious workers disproportionately affects women. On average, women had 1.5 times the amount of wages stolen compared to men, and were underpaid at a higher rate.

Georgia Carr, a casual staff member who co-authored the report, said that “being insecurely employed contributes to and exacerbates all of the usual issues faced by women at work: the gender pay gap, greater employment instability, unequal superannuation, unequal opportunities for promotion and more.”

What is at stake in the Enterprise Agreement?

Members of the National Tertiary Education Union (representing academic staff ) and the Community and Public Sector Union (representing professional staff such as librarians) are currently in bargaining for a new Enterprise Agreement with USyd management. The EA is a contract which determines work conditions for all staff and is renegotiated every four years. Previous bargaining rounds have seen staff go on strike, such as in 2013 where a week-long industrial dispute culminated over management’s proposal to strip back intellectual freedom as well as pay and leave conditions.

Important in the NTEU’s log of claims for the current Enterprise Agreement is an end to casualisation itself and improved access to leave for precarious workers. In the current agreement, casual stadd are not paid for parental, sick or

domestic violence leave, forcing them to work in conditions that are unsafe for their wellbeing. This is exploitative and dehumanising for all, but the impacts are felt disproportionately by “women and non-cismen [who] are more likely to be primary carers, are more likely to be victims of domestic violence and are over-represented in casual work,” Georgia said. “As long as those things continue to be true, disadvantaging casual workers will be synonymous with disadvantaging women.”

Unionists are fighting to enshrine rights for transgender and gender diverse workers in the EA as well. They are advocating for a total six weeks of paid gender affirmation/ transition leave including social and medical steps. “It would make a very small difference [in expenditure] for the University to agree to this, but for trans people it would make an enormous difference,” casual staff member Dani Cotton said. Trans staff at the University have had to take unpaid leave for several months to transition, been forced to dip into their sick leave, or even had to delay affirmative steps for years to save up enough annual leave.

While staff fight for a better contract, management are trying to erode key working conditions. In their log of claims they are proposing to threaten the 40:40:20 model enshrined in the existing Enterprise Agreement. Currently, the workload of academic staff is 40% teaching, 40% research and 20% administration. Management’s desire for the model to be more ‘flexible’ suggests they want staff to engage in more teaching, which generates more profit than research.

The NTEU are concerned that abandoning the 40:40:20 model will lead to further casualisation, creating an underclass of casual teaching staff who will experience difficulty converting to more permanent positions without having demonstrated research output. Research fuels good teaching and separating the two will only further jeopardise the quality of our education.

Staff and students unite and fight Our casual tutors work tirelessly to provide us with a quality education, yet are not paid for the majority of the time they spend answering emails, preparing classes, formulating assessment feedback and supporting us with pastoral care.

Those who do the core work in higher education are treated as disposable — the first to be dismissed by management when revenues take a hit.

This is a structural problem directly tied to the corporate, for-profit university model. We can only fight these attacks through organised collective resistance. We have power in numbers when staff and students unite, and we’ve won in the past. Let’s stand with staff on the picket line when they strike for fair working conditions and an end to mass casualisation. A few days of missed classes is nothing to complain about when the future of our learning is at stake.

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Growing Strong Indigenous carers.These statistics prove that Australia never stopped forcibly separating Indigenous children from their community. The Stolen Generations continue today.

If you believe your history textbook, the Stolen Generations are over. They were a shameful example of distant colonial violence that ended as soon as Kevin Rudd said “sorry”. Your history textbooks are lying. The removal of Indigenous children continues today at an unprecedented rate. The only difference is it’s hidden in the welfare system.

Indigenous women have always been at the forefront of fighting against these removals and their fight extends to today. Grandmothers Against Removals (GMAR) is one organisation that emerged as an advocacy group in response to the persistence of the Stolen Generations.

The group was founded in 2014 by “First Nation Grandmothers who were directly affected by forced child removals.” GMAR works to resist and heal the intergenerational damage caused by the Australian Government. Support for families navigating the CPS system, community care and fierce advocacy underpin the work that GMAR does.

In so-called Australia the primary institution which addresses child welfare issues is Child Protection Services (CPS), who are overseen

by Family and Community Services (FACS).

They claim to ‘provide assistance to vulnerable children who are suspected of being abused, neglected or harmed, or whose parents are unable to provide adequate care or protection.’

What constitutes ‘adequate care or protection’ however, is never neutral. It is informed by the same racist ideologies upon which the These Blak grandmothers and aunties are policies of the Stolen Generations were staunch advocates at the forefront of constructed and enacted; including white modern colonial resistance, disrupting supremacy, eugenics and racial genocide. the normal functioning of a state which Dogmatic beliefs regarding child rearing, continues to threaten Indigenous family structure and indigenous self determination. Their work is feminist, determination persist to this day, and are anti-colonial, anti-racist and propresent within welfare systems. Rather refugee. Their organisation expands than forging systems of community care the demands of reproductive justice in and meaningful support with longevity, Australia, moving beyond discussions the state continues to impose forced “...they take of bodily autonomy to resisting state removals – such which are antithetical them from the intervention, access to children and to ‘adequate care or protection.’ whole family, the right to raise them on traditional land and in community.

This can be observed in the disparate the community, number of Indigenous youths receiving the culture.”

“They don’t only take the children CPS compared to non-Indigenous youths, with Aboriginal and Torres - Aunty Hazel from the parents as such, they take them from the whole family, the Strait Islander children being engaged community, the culture.” says Aunty

by CPS at a rate 8x higher than nonHazel, a founding member of Grandmothers Indigenous youths. The rates are particularly Against Removals. GMAR fights to end the deplorable in relation to Out of Home Care, the Stolen Generations and for funds to be given most extreme form of “protection,” completely directly to communities to raise their children removing the child from their immediate, and autonomously. potentially their extended, family. Out-of-home care is extremely harmful for Indigenous youth Removing children from their family, their kin, as it dispossesses them from traditional land, and their traditional land – and fracturing ties kin and culture. Indigenous youths receive outwith culture and spirituality continues Australia’s of-home care at a rate 10x higher than nonmorbid history of dispossession. It is through Indigenous youths and it is predicted that this community care, meaningful support, and rate will double by 2028. recognising Indigenous systems of care and According to Grandmothers Against Removals kinship as indispensable, that justice for First “as of February 2020, there are 17,979 Aboriginal Nations people can finally begin. and Torres Strait Islander children living in outof-home care” with only around 60% of such

By Amelia Raines youths being placed with relatives, kin or other

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The Stolen Generations Have Never Ended

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DOM PERROTTET

by Roisin Murphy At some point in the next three years, you will meet a dickhead college boy, probably an engineer - definitely a Young Liberal - who will mansplain his way through conversations and leave you entirely unimpressed. 20 years ago, that dickhead was Dom Perrottet. And now he’s the New South Wales Premier.

In the post-apocalyptic scenario where the aforementioned man garners political success, things get pretty bad.

In the abstract, it might seem like this wouldn’t impact students in a significant way – it’s not state governments that fund universities, and it’s not state governments that fund Centrelink. However, the overwhelming majority of new COVID cases in NSW are among people aged 20-29. This is, at large, a result of our Premier’s strategy of letting the virus rip. It is of course true that this strategy is having its most devastating impact on at-risk communities, such as older people, people with disabilities and First Nations people. However, there is also a significant impact on students and young people that shouldn’t be overlooked.

To state the obvious, online learning is abysmal. While it does open doors for many people who are disabled, immuno-compromised or living overseas, it is not delivered in a holistic way, with recycled lecture recordings and minimal student support producing a substandard education. Simultaneously, online learning closes many doors for students who are unable to learn in such a setting, including those with learning difficulties who need in-person support and those in unsafe home environments. For as long as the Premier provides 15

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no concrete plans for viral management, online learning will likely remain a reality.

There’s a common understanding among students that our university experience has been largely lost due to COVID. The Government’s strategy of hands-off viral management suggests freedom and an ability to live our youth, but continues to provide the opposite – de facto lockdowns and a summer inside. Before coming to uni, it’s likely you envisioned a lifestyle strongly centred around campus. A period of your life which would function on a healthy balance of leisure and intellectual stimulation, each one reliant on the other. These are the images we’re sold of university, and where we expect the real learning to happen.

Dom Perrottet despises a sceleisure at uni. He wants you work done, and go home. In for that since he was at uni, for himself campaigning for Unionism (VSU). VSU shifted a compulsory-fee paying model is largely credited as the death of hard to prove - the rapid decline of its introduction in 2006 is incredibly guessed that when you defund student ies and venues they run go under.

nario in which you enjoy to show up, get your fact, he’s been pushing where he built a name Voluntary Student student unions from to a voluntary one, and campus life, which isn’t university culture since clear. Who would have unions, the clubs, societ-

It’s true that a young, dickhead engiPerrottet, who was passionately camVSU could never have envisioned Omicron. But there’s no doubt have jumped at the opportuniuniversities in the dark and force soulless methods of learnthere’s no doubt that he is that opportunity now.

neer version of Dom paigning for the spread of he wouldn’t ty to leave them into ing. And using

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Abolition Is Not Synonymous With Destruction, But With Transformation

By Jazz Breen

to allow communities to thrive.

The systemic issues acknowledged by abolition are rooted within the violent processes of colonialism, capitalism and imperialism. Prison abolition is thus inherently anti-colonial, anti-capitalist and anti-imperial. This means acknowledging how states control and police marginalised groups, perpetuating cycles of violence. It also means how white Western cultural hegemony undermines the importance and value of non-Western ways of understanding health, justice and community.

This article was first published in 2021.

I would like to preface this article with an acknowledgement that the concepts in this text are the result of an accumulation of knowledge over decades, with key contributors being Black women.

I could not hope to fully explain abolition within this article, so I have listed a number of texts at the end which I recommend as further reading.

The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement on a global scale in 2020 brought with it increasingly popular calls to ‘defund the police’ and ‘abolish the prison industrial complex’. Abolitionists, activists and hyper-policed communities around the world welcomed this, as the broader public openly discussed the ideas of abolition for the first time.

Within Australia, Indigenous activists organised some of the largest demonstrations against police brutality in decades, highlighting that over 470 Indigenous people have died in custody since 1991.

However, as is natural with social change, increased discussion of new topics brings about misleading information and active opposition. This article is an attempt to counter this by providing an explanation of the core ideas of abolition.

Abolitionist thinking also acknowledges that those who commit what is seen as crime are not experiencing violence or injustice for the first time.

What is abolition?

Alongside calls for the abolition of prisons and police have been calls for carceral reform. If the goal was to fix a broken system then these might be good ideas. But the carceral system is not broken. It is working in the exact way it was planned to work.

Experiences of trauma, poverty, and exploitation are not fixed by locking up those who react negatively within their environmental circumstances. The underlying causes of violence and harm do not disappear once someone has been relocated into a prison cell. Considering that 46% of Australian prisoners return to prison within two years of being released, it is clear that the current system does not adequately end cycles of violence and harm.

Why not reform?

The basic premise of abolition is that the use of carceral control and surveillance to address systemic social issues exacerbates violence and harm. The abolitionist argument is that resources must instead be re-allocated towards dismantling systemic sources of violence and harm. Abolition is not an argument for ignoring social unrest and violence. It is an argument for addressing the root causes of these issues. Rather than punishing people, we need to radically transform the negative environmental circumstances which lead to antisocial behaviour and harm. Abolition means not only abolishing the existence of prisons and police, but developing processes of transformative justice

The carceral system is intrinsically tied to the processes of capitalism and colonialism. The first police forces were invented to serve the interests of slave owners and capitalist bosses. Even if police themselves were unbiased, they would still exist as an arm of the state which works to uphold laws designed to protect the economic interests of the rich.

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Growing Strong Police, prisons and other forms of carceral control are tools of the state. They work for those who run it; capitalists who rely on exploitation, such as prison labour, to gain profits. No amount of diversity training will stop police officers arresting Indigenous activists fighting against mining companies, because the police force will always serve the interests of the capitalist state, and the state will always serve the interests of the market.

sexual assault and violent crime. There is absolutely a need to address the existence of these acts within society. However, prisons do not stop these acts of violence from being committed. Victims are rarely able to achieve justice within courts and these courts do not address these crimes at their root cause. Furthermore, laws passed in the name of addressing sexual violence, only help expand the carceral system that hurts the women it pretends to care for. Indigenous women make up only 2% of Australia’s population but 34% of the women in prison. Expanding police powers and prisons do not protect them but contribute to their incarceration and the breaking up of communities.

No amount of surveillance of the actions of police would stop bosses legally using the state to crush union strikes for conditions and pay. The police, and subsequently prisons, do not and will never work for anyone but the state and the capitalists who run it. No amount of reform can change this.

The only way to stop these actions is to end the circumstances which lead to them. This means to end poverty, destroy patriarchal gender dynamics and ultimately create the circumstances where these acts do not occur.

But what about justice?

The absence of prisons is not the absence of accountability when harm occurs. It is necessary that responses to harm do not continue cycles of violence. The carceral system does not reduce harm. Instead, prisons are sites of state-enacted violence. Those who leave the carceral system bring with them higher levels of lifelong poverty, increased levels of mental illness, suicidality and poor physical health.

Practical steps forward Abolitionists work not only to undermine the carceral system, but also all facets of systemic racism, patriarchy, and capitalist exploitation.

Abolitionists seek not only to destroy the systems, institutions, and laws which cause harm, but also to build alternatives which empower and transform individuals and communities. The social relationships which exist to shape the societies we live in are enacted by people, and thus can be changed by people. The way things are now is not simply the natural state of things, and it has not always been this way. In order to achieve the just and fair world abolition calls for we need to restructure society in a revolutionary way, and nothing less than the destruction of capitalism, patriarchy and systemic racism will get us there.

Prisons are seen as the ‘answer’ to issues faced by systematically marginalised groups, while medical care, therapy and access to support is the answer for those with higher levels of privilege.

The difference between receiving adequate care and being placed into a prison cell is directly related to your class and racial identity.

But what about violent crime?

One of the most common rebuttals to the ideas of abolition is the need to address domestic violence,

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By Kimmy Dibben and Vivienne Guo

wealthy and privileged.

They are notorious for being hotbeds of sexual violence and hazing. Sexual violence is concerned with power and power structures not only enable the violence but fuel it by silencing survivors and protecting perpetrators.

What has the University done? ViceChancellor Michael Spence certainly doesn’t give a fuck.

He’s previously said that the University is powerless to stop the violent hazing that happens at the start of every year. The lack of repercussions makes for a complete l a c k of accountability within colleges and a lack of support for survivors.

CW: Graphic accounts of sexual violence and hazing In 1977, an 18 year old girl was found raped and murdered on the oval at St Paul’s College. In the decades since, throwing dead fish on first years, setting fire to pubic hair and ejaculating into shampoo bottles, have all remained part of a deep-rooted hazing culture at the University of Sydney colleges, St Paul’s, St John’s, St Andrew’s, Wesley, Sancta Sophia and the Women’s College. In 2012, 30 St John’s residents nearly killed a peer in a hazing ritual. And yet nothing has changed.

WoCo’s Dismantle the Colleges campaign has been one of our most radical and necessary campaigns to date. The burning need for structural change was made clear by End Rape on Campus’ Red Zone Report (2018), which draws attention to the horrors that universities seek to keep out of the public eye for fear that they will impact enrolment numbers and thus the University’s revenue.

Women and vulnerable students are forced to bear the brunt of this; that is the cost of the University of Sydney saving face.

At the colleges, students pay $30,000 a year in rent, ensuring that only the rich are able to buy their way into their hallowed halls. Amongst this highly privileged demographic, most of the residents are white men, usually from a small pool of private schools in Sydney. It is no secret that boys private schools often allow for the misogynistic ‘old boys’ mentality. Case in point is the Wesley College journal from

Simply put, the colleges are elitist and deeply sexist institutions that mostly house the 19

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2016 which ranked women on attractiveness and repeatedly called them “bitches”, “sluts”, and “hoes.” This misogyny is enabled in elite private schools and it doesn’t end there; it is encouraged in the colleges and this experience is carried on throughout a working life in positions of high authority in politics, business, and the media.

brick by brick. But the colleges as they are, with their blase attitude to misogynistic traditions a n d rape culture, cannot be allowed to stand. The entire system must be torn down and rebuilt from the ground up, to provide safe, affordable public housing for students who need it most.

Epidemics of rape, hazing and bullying won’t just vanish with the archaic colleges by themselves either. Universities still have a long way to go in terms of action, to pull these problems out root and stem, and it must start with the colleges.

The existence of the colleges and their $30,000 entry fee is made even more abhorrent by the student housing crisis.

Many students are forced to sleep in places like Fisher Library, where they live in a state of perpetual uncertainty and anxiety. There is no doubt that the colleges are a shocking misuse of resources. They sit on rent-free Crown land, protected by state legislation that is over 160 years out of touch, born of a time where universities belonged solely to the wealthy elite, allowing the colleges to thrive ‘in perpetuity’. These laws also enshrine the self-governance of the six largest colleges, ensuring that hazing and sexual violence are ‘handled’ by institutions whose best interests lie with public image and not with survivors.

We don’t want to burn down the colleges.

Sandstone doesn’t burn. But they must be abolished. Nothing short of closing the colleges will sufficiently address issues of student safety, sexual violence, hazing, misogyny and elitism.

In the knowledge of all this, I would happily chime into chants of “burn down the colleges.” But of course we don’t want to literally burn down the colleges. Nor do we want to physically tear down the buildings,

To survivors: we see you. We believe you.

We support you. We will fight for a better world.

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Words by Zoe Coles Art by Monica McNaught-Lee

Growing Strong The tattoo of a pin-up girl on a sailor’s arm is flat, ironed onto skin.

She does not speak, mouth poised open in deep violent reds.

Imprinted on skin without skin of her own, moving only when he moves, a toe twitching when a bicep is flexed.

When speaking to Time magazine on the rise of post-2016 election feminist tattoos, Margot Mifflin, who authored Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo, expressed that this reflected a “reassertion of the claim over their bodies during a time when women’s bodies issues were so prominent in the media from discussions and debates over breast cancer, eating disorders, cosmetic surgery, motherhood and abortion…I think that tattoos became a way for women to take control of their own bodies and define them how they wanted to.”

The sailor’s tattoo of the pin-up comes to life, and seeks permanency in herself.

Tattooing is a practice created by Indigenous people that colonialist sailors co-opted and appropriated during the various invasions executed in the socalled “age of discovery.” The word tattoo itself is from the Samoan word tatau, meaning “to strike.” In Fiji, Veiqia is a rite of passage for women that was brutally interrupted by British invaders who introduced fines and described the practice as “disfigurement.” Even though the practice was condemned, attempts were made to collect and collate specimens for British museum collections, to give physicality and reinforce the idea of distance between ‘us and them’ in their fragile glasshoused exhibitions. However, as anthropologist Karen Jacobs noted “the tattooed body is hard to collect.” It is precisely this inability to collect, to fragment, to take away, that allows for the art of tattooing to be a distinctly feminist one. In an era where feminine, non-binary and trans bodies are battlegrounds against patriarchal dominance (abortion rights, disordered eating, rape, sexual harassment, victim blaming); to get a tattoo is to say my body belongs to me. Fuck you, this is mine and I’ll show you as I paint it how I please.

The tattooed feminist body is an exercise in affirming agency. It is a reclamation, a refusal. Where bodies are supposedly destined to be capitalised upon - hiding ink at work as to not interrupt customer’s fantasies of service people as robots without stories to tell - tattoos insist on a voice. The patriarchal need for feminine bodies to be untouched, unmarked, undamaged is an attempt at continuing the paedophilic culture of “feminised purity” perpetuated under constructs of virginity. The nagging stranger that questions what about when you’re old expects an invisibility of elderly feminine bodies that have expired beyond their days of sexualisation and baby-making. The tattoo sags on wrinkled skin that has seen more days than you and I, and breaths, I am still here, my stories inscribed, beating, bleeding, clinging onto skin because this body is still mine.

To ink one’s body with imagery and symbols that reflect individual taste, stories and history is an exercise in body neutrality. It rebels against the social currencies conventionally added and subtracted by the passive and uncontrollable aspects of the body one exists within, and instead the interior-self expands and rises like oil on water to the very top layer of skin where active choices of how I shall be perceived can be made. Feminised people are taught to contain their desires, to move aside, to make space for someone else. A tattoo is a decision on a platform that is so rarely afforded choices. It bridges body and soul, framing pieces of existence - both sorrow and bliss - into permanency. An outline of a home town, the name of the matriarchal grandmother, a snake that wraps herself around the forearm refusing to shed skin.

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2.

3.

1.

1. Symbolic tattoo that represents the Malaka tribe of West Timor.

2. Face tattoo of a woman of the Li ethnic minority of Hainan, China.

3. Traditional veiqia hand tattoo tattooed as part of a Veiqia revival project.

Most importantly though, a tattoo is a denial of disappearance. Once it is inked, it cannot go away.

Once we are here, we will stand our ground.

After the cultural, societal and economic needs for the silence of women, unpaid labour, non-complaining, emotional labour, taking up less space, disappearing quietly, gently, accepting the pain inherent to womanhood, through invasions onto the body from strangers, rape, the white men sitting in parliament voting against pro-choice bills, protest softly, don’t disturb, lobotomies and diagnosis of hysteria for those that try to be heard. The First Nations women who prevailed in matriarchal societies that were systematically destroyed under colonialism, quiet now...hush disappear quiet now, to be seen, sexualised and fetishised but not to be heard, like children, patronised, run along now, now come back here…ink persists. A denial of the disappearance that we were expected to inhabit, like ghosts. I am still here in this body. My body belongs to me.

During the Japanese occupation of Malaka, East Timor during World War II, women tricked the Japanese soldiers by heavily tattooing themselves and thus leading the Japanese to believe they were married and could not be taken into forced sexual slavery, known as jugun lanfu or comfort women. Their markings signify rebellion and resistance, a refusal to move. What signalled being taken by a man in marriage was really a band of women who saw men’s respect for other men as higher than that for women and turned that against them. They marked themselves in tessellating patterns of ink that remain on them today, as they too remain in Malaka, largely in the village of Uma Thos, wrinkled and beautifully visible, a continuation of that initial denial of disappearance.

Almost eighty years later on my eighteenth birthday, I am tattooed with a drawing I did when I was fourteen. I am taken by me and for me. A refusal, a rebellion, a speech, a story - all inscribed, insisting on being noticed.

My body belongs to me.

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Nurse and Midwives

By Mayla Meru The Liberal government has spent months convincing the public that the health system is fully capable of handling the current rise of COVID cases. It is more apparent every day that it is not. Within weeks of Dominic Perrottet taking over as Premier of NSW, it became clear that the government would be further moving its focus to the economy rather than public health and well being.

This decision was evident when the NSW government refused to implement health orders to slow down the spread of Omicron.

Instead, Perrottet passed the baton of care to the public under the guise of ‘personal responsibility.’

that due to the high number of health workers that are close contacts or COVID positive, many nurses and midwives are being forced to cancel annual leave, work overtime and regularly work double-shifts.

These conditions put immense physical and mental pressure on essential workers and places both workers and patients in danger.

Despite demands for change, the NSW premier has continued to declare that the NSW health system “remains strong”. This statement does not reflect the reality of the current working conditions for NSW nurses and midwives. Most recently on the 19th of January, a protest was held at Sydney’s Westmead hospital demanding action.

Westmead staff are being pressured to take on excessive amounts of overtime, work up to 20 hour long double shifts, and are often unable to take proper breaks. The NSWNMA is demanding the government be honest with the public and “concede the health system is not coping”.

Letting the Omicron variant rip through the community is informed by ableist ideologies. Those who are chronically ill and disabled, those who are at the highest risk of contraction, serious illness and death from the virus, are treated as disposable. Their deaths, discounted. This policy approach has been rightfully described as indirect eugenics.

Throughout the pandemic, the NSWNMA has campaigned for safe nurse-to-patient ratios (one-to-four on ward floors, oneto-three in emergency wards and one-toone in ICU), a wage increase of 4.7%, and pandemic pay. The NSW government has ignored these calls, instead insultingly

On the 19th of January NSW COVID hospitalization rates reached a new high of 2,863. The New South Wales Nurses and Midwives’ Association [NSWNMA] spoke out about the impact of these hospitalization rates on public hospitals. They explained 23

in crisis

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How you can support nurses and midwives: Support nurses and midwives by attending strikes and protests to call on the government for industrial change. If you are unable to come in person to protests and strikes you can also support the campaign by following NSWNMA and APA|NSW on social media or sign up at ratioslifeordeath.org.au to receive updates through email. You can also search NurseKeeper or go to agreennsw.good.do/nursekeeper/action/ to send a letter to the NSW Premier demanding immediate action to support NSW nurses and paramedics.

offering nurses and midwives a pay rise of only 1.5%. The NSWNMA is also calling on the NSW Premier to introduce ‘pandemic pay’ (as seen in Victoria) which would mean nurses and midwives in public hospitals receive an extra payment of $30 per shift.

Such a pay rise would at least acknowledge the extra work and extreme working conditions that the most recent COVID wave has caused.

overtime to meet chronic staffing shortfalls.”

Outrage ensued across the state after many nurses came forward, detailing how they had been asked to work while COVID positive if asymptomatic, in order to combat staffing shortages. Such a request puts other health workers and patients in harm’s way.

In some instances, hospitals have even been forced to treat COVID patients in the same spaces as non-COVID patients. This severe lack of preparation by the health sector and the federal government has put all aspects of the public health system under severe strain.

Not meeting the demands of the NSWNMA and other frontline workers can result in life-threatening consequences for patients.

Nurses and midwives across NSW have recently spoken out, explaining how lack of government support for health workers is directly affecting patient welfare, “... patient safety is being compromised as fatigued nurses and midwives regularly work

The government is currently relying on nurses and midwives to work in unsafe conditions in order to keep the public safe.

For public health and wellbeing, it is more important now than ever that the demands made by the NSWNMA are met.

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BDS and Palestinian Liberation

By Ariana Haghighi.

Photo courtesy of Aman Kapoor.

from the Israeli government and complicit institutions such as the Sydney Festival. Given that many of these institutions operate on profit incentives and positive press, boycotts disrupt business as usual in a way that forces them to reckon with their association.

Every January, the Sydney art scene explodes with the bang of the Sydney Festival, a cornucopia of theatre performances and visual art installations. It is renowned for its progressive image and support of marginalised communities. This year, however, this image was questioned as it came to light that the Sydney Festival accepted $20,000 in funding from the Israeli embassy. Israel is an apartheid state that was founded on the genocide and dispossession of Palestinian people. As such, artists and consumers alike denounced the Festival’s acceptance of funding as hypocritical, particularly considering their purported ‘anti-colonialist stance’.

Campaigns for divestment aim to encourage institutions such as banks and universities to withdraw investments from the State of Israel. The movement also pressures governments and international bodies such as the United Nations to censure and sanction Israel. The withdrawal of aid and abetment of Israel is significant; it seeks to isolate Israel economically and on the international political stage.

The movement is now a juggernaut, but first found its footing in 2005 with a coalition of 170 grassroots Palestinian groups, such as unions, refugee networks and women’s organisations.

These groups drafted an open letter one year after the International Court of Justice opined that Israel’s barrier-building was illegal, detailing the envisioned use of “non-violent punitive measures” to restrain Israel’s activity.

The Australian branch of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement wrote an open letter calling for the Board to “seriously reconsider” their association with the Israeli embassy. From a few performers signing on and refusing to perform, now more than 100 individuals and organisations have withdrawn, disrupting more than 40% of the scheduled events. This is one of the most successful BDS campaigns seen in Australia but the campaign itself has a long history.

The letter mentioned the groups’ inspiration from effective initiatives used to abolish South African apartheid. In the 1980s, boycotts and divestment campaigns against the South African government were at their zenith, placing increasing pressure on the Cabinet until it successfully crumbled and justice was had. South Africa was banned from participation in international cricket for 22 years, which eventually extended to all international sporting competitions

Palestinian-led BDS is a global effort encompassing unions, academic associations and other groups. It aims to compel the Israeli government to recognise the rights of Palestinian people and censure Israel’s regime of settler colonialism, apartheid and occupation. The method of BDS is three-fold.

Boycotts involve the withdrawal of support 25

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including rugby.

movements, rather than political leaders.

Though this poses perceived weaknesses in a lack of financial resources, the young and grassroots leadership holds an important strength in ensuring the voice of the movement aligns with goals of racial justice and is divorced from compromised and corrupt authority. In its 17 years it has attained economic victories, as well as governmental support, international recognition and widespread awareness.

These sanctions worked due to the cultural isolation it enforced — rugby was one of the strongest passions of members of the ruling Nationalist party. The economic pressure also proved significantly effective as banks divested and withdrew loans critical to the survival of the state. By the mid 1980s, a quarter of people in the UK testified to personally boycotting South African goods — it was this widespread reach of calls for economic and cultural boycotts, coupled with sustained mobilisation and activism, that toppled the racist regime.

The success of the boycott of the Sydney Festival is an encouraging development and reflects the greater awareness around the atrocities of the Israel state and the need for Palestinian liberation.

A key difference between the Palestinian and South African anti-apartheid movement is that Palestinian BDS is led by grassroots social

From Gadigal to Gaza protest, Sydney 2021 26

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the female body and the dutch golden age

by Alex Mcleay

Each body appears to the outside in a completely different fashion to the way it is experienced by the one who inhabits it. Any One and Other are similar in more ways than they differ, yet the corporeal body bounds the extent of physical experience. Each body, for the one experiencing its pathways of habit and effort, is defined by internal landmarks of pleasure and pain, courses of joys through arteries and the return of agonies through veins. The landscape of another’s body is almost impossible to know through sight alone - the tiredness of one’s muscles, the sensitivity of the soles of their feet, frustration tensed tightly in limbs and extremities.

Gaining knowledge of another and understanding the similarities between bodies can usually only be found through time and touch, as when a parent knows to avoid scrubbing too hard behind their child’s ear during a bath. However, I am almost certain that Bathsheba and I hold our devotion in our stomachs.

Eventually, Bathsheba will put down the letter she has received from her husband and go to King David. Her husband will shortly be killed, and she will become pregnant with the child of King David who will shortly afterward die. But, during the moment captured by Bathsheba Reading David’s Letter (Rembrandt, 1654), this is yet to come. At the centre of this instant is the stomach of Bathsheba. After the first time I saw this painting, I could not take my mind off it — how the fat of her sides dimpled, the soft curve that moved down to her thighs, the pear and blue pucker of her navel. At the centre of her body, this tender space houses her future grief, and at the centre of this story, it houses the death of her husband and her son.

Bathsheba sits with an awkward posture — her back leg raised above her front, her head and navel facing off two different tangents. The unusual curve of her spine may be justified by the delivering of her bare body to the spectator. However, it is not delivered coherently.

The draping and weight of the limbs speaks more to the experience carried within herself — sign posts and avenues of affections, energies, capabilities for what

is to come when the letter is put down. What does a woman’s body mean, what does it mean in a painting?

The answer is never the same, no matter how many times the question is asked. Here it is the home of tragedy to come, the space she will always come back to, softness to comfort the strength of her endurance.

In Bathsheba with King David’s Letter (1654), painted by an apprentice of Rembrandt, Willem Drost, her large, soft eyes are pushed aside by the central framing of her breast, tumbling out of draped linen. Her skin is cool and smokey, her bust fills canvas, and her languorous posture is closer to a sculpted Venus than a woman at her bath. She does not, as in her former iteration, appear engaged in her own actions. Alone, isolated as an erotic figure, she is a subject aware of being a woman, and aware of being surveyed.

The female nude is a recurring subject matter in the tradition of European oil painting — a hairless, pale woman, presented for the spectator as a sexual object, with little to nothing to do with her own sexuality. There is a stated humanism in the tradition of European art: the individual autonomy of the male painter, patron, owner. This has been complimented and contradicted by the objectification of the female subject. The splayed flesh and form of the woman is made available to the spectator-owner in such a way that allows him to view her to minuscule detail. He does so at a moment’s notice, in the company of his peers, in a way that cannot imagine her doing the same to him.

Bathsheba (Rembrandt, 1654) was painted during the Dutch Golden Age, a period of capitalist prosperity as the Dutch East India Company expanded through South East Asia and the Baltic States. The Dutch East India Company and the Dutch West India Company gained a monopoly on the spice trade into Europe as their naval capacity grew. The Netherlands also imported harvest goods in bulk from Eastern and

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Growing Strong Southern Europe and would profit off of bad harvest periods and famines in France and England. The Dutch were active in the Atlantic slave trade, and traded slaves in Asia through the 1600s. The mercantile and bourgeois classes bloomed. The country was home to the first transnational corporation, the first modern stock exchange, and the first central bank.

lived. These paintings decorated the experiences of their owners, adorned their nobility. These were the only kinds of paintings that would depict naked women - Aphrodite, Eve, Leda, the Three Graces, Susanna, Bathsheba…

John Berger writes “Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects… Oil painting celebrated a new kind of wealth — which was dynamic and which found its only sanction in the supreme buying power of money. ” The oil painting depicted only what was entirely external to the spectator, something that could be bought. This medium, through its richness of texture and vibrancy of colour, demonstrated an enriched fidelity to reality. These works demonstrated an enhanced proximity to tangibility which validated their purchase to the spectator-owner alone.

Baker Oostwaert and his wife, Jan Steen (1658)

Danae, Jacob van Loo (1655-60)

In this period, paintings were more frequently done ‘speculatively’, with no commissioner or patron, to be sold on the market to an unknown buyer. Paintings became more portable, on form fitted canvas, preframed. These were easier to sell to a dispassionate buyer looking for ornamental signs of his wealth to adorn his home and life. Still life, landscape, and genre painting flourished. The former two served as indicators and reflections of luxury items to be owned, vistas to be viewed from held property. Genre painting depicts ‘everyday’ life: people in average clothes, in fields and taverns, smiling and laughing. The poor, ignored in the streets, became comforting in the home — smiling, displaying wares or their labour for sale, smiling at the kindness of their potential benefactors, smiling with their teeth. A house could become filled with refractions of a curated, idealised world, that looked upon an owner with hope and happiness, inviting them to do as they please.

During the Dutch Golden Age the hierarchy of genres was a widely held theory, positing still life at the bottom, followed by landscape, genre, portraiture, and finally historical painting. Historical paintings depicted scenes from religion, mythology or antiquity. The classics offered examples of how the heightened moments in life should be lived, or, at least, should be seen to be

The human was no longer self-evident. The female subject would appear only when idealised, modeled, under the guise of antiquity. The idea and its representation, the body and mind were unaligned, unlike, for example, portraiture. Calvinism grew in the Netherlands and one’s predestination for salvation needed to be reiterated through worldly prosperity.

Although object and nature were increasingly reduced to commodity, there was still an understanding of the perseverance and eternal nature of the soul. The equality of objects in oil painting goes hand in hand with the object’s commodification. Here, more so than the Renaissance, the commodification of the naked woman as an artistic subject is evident. The painting communicates to the spectator-owner through references, not actuality — symbols of femininity, grand antiquity, sophistication and luxury. The subject of the painting could never be more than totally exterior to the spectator-owner. Femininity and the female body are alienated from men and women, stylised, and sold back to a purchaser — a practice that has set tangents for sexual objectification and the porn industry today.

The static painting isolates an instant of nudity, while in a lived sexual experience nakedness is an active process. This moment of the painting can very often be chilling in its banality, as sexual fantasy is exposed to be fantasy alone, and the ownership of a instant is shown to be less fulfilling than a tangible experience, or even human relationship. Fundamentally, a painting in this age and ever since is a significant form of property, in a way other ephemeral art forms and literature are not.

The human, the naked woman, the spectacle depicted in a painting is commodified by the nature of the oil painting — again when this painting becomes a good to be bought and sold, and again when it is a speculative good, its value fluctuating based on arbitrary qualities and valuations. Orbited by death and despair, Bathsheba holds in her naked stomach this tragic isolation of the subject as she sits, having her feet washed.

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is a scam!

Words by Katarina Kuo Art by Talia Meli

but also as a locus for economic production and redistribution, and gender and class struggle are often played out within family units.

It has long been a recognisable image - a married mother and father, and their two to three kids. As broader social change has led people to move away from the nuclear family, conservatives have begun to cling even more stringently to the narrative that this familial structure can offer an inherent good and, in spite of these changes, the pressure to fill the roles prescribed by the nuclear family persists.

Placing these often heteronormative and rigid family values into an economic context is important to understanding why they are so difficult to escape. Historically, familial systems have played an important role in driving social and economic development. Families have existed not only as collectives based on kinship and connection,

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In pre-state societies, economic, and cultural change were predominantly affected by kinship groups and tribes – these groups made decisions about how to share resources, how to redistribute land, how to settle disputes, and how to build new settlements. Over time, power was drawn away from kinship groups and towards the state. As states grew to replace kinship groups as political and economic decision-makers, emerging states often sought legitimacy by atomising kinship groups and boosting patriarchs as the heads of their houses. A useful example of this is the process of state formation that took place in England and Wales between the 8th and 15th century. Emerging rulers in this period consolidated their power by

Growing Strong winning the allegiance of men away from their kin – for example, by allowing men to usurp some of their kin group’s authority, particularly over land, women, and children. These developments laid the foundations for the shrinking of family units, and the bolstering of patriarchs at their head.

to various groups of people. Queer people, single mothers, divorcees, and working women, for example, all struggle to replicate this familial structure. The nuclear family as an archetype is also inaccessible along the axis of class. The wealthy are able to maintain the amity of marriage because they can afford to reduce the economic stressors that often make it difficult. They can afford things like counselling, resources and nannies.

In early, pre-industrial societies, most economic activity took place within the household, and production and distribution were organised by custom and tradition. As societies have industrialised, the family unit has continued to play a crucial role in the redistribution of resources. The unequal division of labour by class and by gender under capitalism necessitates a means of economic redistribution, as not everyone has direct access to the economic means of survival. In Western liberal democracies, families exist primarily as income-pooling units rather than as incomeproducing units. It is often the family, and not the state, that acts as the major agency for transferring money from wage-earners (often patriarchs, or male breadwinners) to non-wage-earners (often women and children). This dynamic also survives by allowing wage-earners to profit from the unpaid labour of non-wage-earners – overwhelmingly, it is women who bear the brunt of unpaid care and domestic labour, and this does not vary significantly according to class or race. This distribution of labour ensures the necessity of the family as an incomepooling unit.

In spite of this exclusivity, many systems of social support continue to be geared towards the nuclear family. It is easier for married, heterosexual couples to adopt, and owning property or withdrawing loans often requires the pooling of incomes. Social customs and traditions, such as Mothers’ Day and Fathers’ Day, also continue to celebrate heterosexual dual parentage. Attempts made by governments to mitigate the trend away from nuclear families – such as attempts to increase marriage rates, push down divorce rates, and boost fertility – also often have the effect of making the problem even worse.

There is a common conservative narrative that there is an inherent benefit to growing up in a nuclear family. Advocates for the nuclear family point to the fact that coming from a two-parent household continues to be a strong predictor of economic mobility, that children of divorce are likely to divorce themselves, or that children of single parents tend to have worse health outcomes. The common line that “people should be able to choose the kind of family they want to have” is, while true, not particularly useful in addressing the actual issue.

The nuclear family in its most recognisable form, a married mother and father with 2.5 children, emerged during the mid-20th century. The archetype took hold most strongly in the US, where a variety of forces – the separation of extended families as rates of immigration rose, a return to traditional values of stability in the aftermath of two world wars, and mass prosperity – collided to produce the American nuclear family. From 1890 to 1960, the average age of first marriage in the U.S. dropped by 3.6 years for men and 2.2 years for women. Children were no longer raised to take on jobs within their families (such as farm work); they were raised to leave the nest, seek work, and build discrete families of their own. During this period, the relegation of women to the domestic sphere was locked in by corporate incentives. Well into the 20th century, many companies would only hire single women, so that those who were married would continue to work in the home. From this period, the nuclear family was woven into the culture and national identity, and the culture of much of the Western world.

However, considering the nuclear family as an economic model as opposed to merely a model of kinship explains the flaws with this line of argument. The issue is not necessarily that being born to a married mother and father predisposes a child, emotionally and developmentally, to success.

Rather, it is that it’s economically easier for nuclear families to access the resources that make this success possible. Replicating the economic unit around which much of Western society is built predictably makes it easier to find success in that society.

David Brooks writes that “when we discuss the problems confronting the country, we don’t talk about family enough. It feels too judgemental. Too uncomfortable.” But in any discussion of economic and social reorientation, it is important to consider the role that kinship and family units play in restructuring. Heteronormative and misogynistic expectations are often grounded in complex economic and social processes. To consider the family as an economic unit makes these expectations easier to understand and unpick.

Even as social values shift, the expectation that families will fall into this particular shape still looms large. The problem is that it is broadly inaccessible

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