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Hamilton, Jennifer M
- PublicationHow Brandis plans to insulate the arts sector from the artists
We have very few details of substance regarding the Coalition's recent move to take A$104.7 million from the Australia Council's budget and to set up the National Program for Excellence in the Arts.
What we do know is that the 28 major arts organizations are safe – but that independent artists and the small to medium sector will have to withstand massive changes.
Last week the Australia Council announced that its June funding round would not proceed and that its six year funding program for organisations had been suspended. The ArtStart, Creative Communities Partnerships Initiative and Artists in Residence programs have also been cut.
- PublicationFive Desires, Five DemandsWe propose that feminist studies are particularly well-situated to analyse the paradox of what ‘we humans’ want as we gaze into the eyes of planetary catastrophe. The contributions in the special issue evoke tensions between a capitalist imperative to consume, activist calls for resistance, and queer feminist figurations of sex and longing. Asking in turn what we as editors want from the project of feminist environmental humanities, we respond: (1) we want to spark new relations between desire and demand from within environmental crisis; (2) we want a fulsomely feminist environmental humanities; (3) we want to inhabit the difficult and necessary articulation of ‘feminism’ and ‘environment’; (4) we want multiple, situated, perversely scaled and historically awkward genealogies for environmental humanities; and (5) we want ‘to take up the burden of remaking our world’. We contextualise these demands via a series of examples: the drought and bushfires currently gripping the places we are writing from; Betty Grumble’s performance LOVE AND ANGER; an origin story of feminist environmental humanities as told from our particular perspectives; and a 1943 short story, ‘Dry Spell’, by Australian writer Marjorie Barnard. We argue for the feminist potency of holding desire in tension with demand.
- PublicationThe Trouble with Babies, Donna Haraway. 2016-Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene Durham: Duke University Press, ISBN 9780822362241
Although Donna Haraway’s new book, Staying with the Trouble, is marketed as a monograph, it is really a collection of essays that many of us will have encountered in other contexts. ‘Sowing Worlds: A Seed Bag for Terraforming with Earth Others’, for instance, first appeared in Beyond the Cyborg: Adventures with Donna Haraway (2013) and has been in my Ecocriticism course reader ever since.1 Likewise, I cite ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin’ from Environmental Humanities in one of my recent journal articles.2 Neither article has been rewritten for this book. Other sections are familiar to me as keynote lectures I have heard in the flesh or listened to online. I begin my review in this somewhat narcissistic way to illustrate my bias—I am very engaged with Haraway’s work—and also to foreshadow my reservations about the success of this volume with specific regard to the central provocation announced in its title, namely the question of ‘making kin’.
- PublicationThe Future of Housework: The Similarities and Differences Between Making Kin and Making BabiesThis article critiques Donna Haraway's slogan 'make kin not babies' via a reading of her SF tale 'The Camille Stories'. It does so by considering the relationship between the care labour practices involved in making both kin and babies. The article has two central operations. It is an explicitly eco-social feminist argument against the use of making kin as an uncomplicated theoretical standpoint in the environmental humanities. At the same time, it deconstructs the iconic feminist ambit to be liberated from housework. These parallel operations emerge by characterising making kin as a kind of housework, which is a deeply ironic evaluation of Haraway's slogan. Overall the article is a response to the question: how is the work involved in making kin both the same as and different to the labour of making babies? The answer is constructed through the method of literary close reading, paying attention to genre and plot of 'The Camille Stories' alongside Fiona McGregor's novel Indelible Ink [2010. Melbourne: Scribe Publications] and Quinn Eades's all the beginnings: a queer autobiography of the body [2015. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing]. These comparative readings enable a reckoning with the gnarly and contradictory implications of 'making kin' across contemporary environmental humanities and feminisms.
- PublicationKing LeerTwo worldly problems represented in King Lear are the difficulties of generational change and the associated emotional suffering. Before exploring how this relates to the present historical moment, a quick refresh of the plot is in order.
- PublicationDesk Work: A Novel Idea by Fiona McGregor(University of Western Sydney, Writing and Society Research Centre, 2019-07-12)One morning I listened to Fiona McGregor talk about her writing on a podcast as I washed a dusty pink cashmere sweater I bought from an op shop for five dollars. Although it was before nine and I was still at home, I had started work for the day. Multitasking by doing laundry and listening to a podcast felt legitimate to classify as ‘on the clock’ because of several factors: the time and day of the week (Monday, 8.45am), the match between the manual activity and a key theme in my current research (housework) and, primarily, the direct relationship between the podcast and my task for the morning (drafting this review of McGregor’s A Novel Idea). While a complicated, informal, internal algorithm determined the legitimacy of this action, I felt justified nonetheless. Even if the difference between work and life is only ever one of degree, I won’t tell HR.
- PublicationConstructing Dying and Death as an Eco-Political Concern in Performances of Shakespeare's King Lear and Sarah Kane's Blasted
This essay shows how Shakespeare's King Lear and Sarah Kane's adaptation Blasted represent dying and death as both inevitable and insufferable. It is only in the context of performance, and the powerful emotional responses elicited from the audiences, that the play's particular representations of death and dying serve an index of a wider cultural problematic. This essay then moves to construct this spectacle as an ecopolitical concern.
I contend that desiring to avoid death, or viewing death as an insufferable horror, generates a particularly antagonistic relation with the material world and animal condition. This is most explicitly articulated in the emotional states of the spectators: expressed in the first instance as a desire not to watch or experience the horrors represented in these two plays. These same spectators are, perversely, unable to look away because of death's inevitability. This essay then considers the ecological implications of such a dynamic in terms of the reception of these plays in performance. Beginning by constructing death as an ecopolitical concern, the essay then moves to explore the potential for adaptation—in this case Kane's digestion of Shakespeare—as a creative practice capable of moving us towards the ecopolitics of particular issues. Then the final section traces how reading the plays in a particular way foregrounds death and dying as an ecopolitical concern.
- PublicationComposting Feminisms and Environmental HumanitiesComposting is a material labor whereby old scraps are transformed—through practices of care and attention—into nutrient-rich new soil. In this provocation, we develop “composting” as a material metaphor to tell a particular story about the environmental humanities. Building on Donna Haraway’s work, we insist “it matters what compostables make compost.” Our argument is twofold. First, we contend that certain feminist concepts and commitments are foundational to the environmental humanities’ contemporary emergence. Second, we advocate for more inclusive feminist composting for the future of our field.
We begin with a critical cartography of some of the field’s origin stories. While we discover that feminism is named or not named in several different ways, what most interests us here is a particular trend we observe, whereby key feminist scholars or concepts may be mentioned, but their feminist investments are not incorporated as such. Following this cartography, we dig into the stakes of these missed opportunities. A failure to acknowledge the feminist context that grows some of our field’s foundational concepts neutralizes their feminist politics and undermines the potential for environmental humanities to build alternative worlds. To conclude, we propose feminist composting as a methodology to be taken up further. We call for an inclusive feminist composting that insists on feminism’s imbrication with social justice projects of all kinds, at the same time as we insist that future composting be done with care. Sometimes paying attention to the feminist scraps that feed the pile means responding to feminism’s own potential assimilations and disavowals, particularly in relation to decolonization.
Like both the energy-saving domestic practice and the earlier social justice struggles that inspire it, composting feminism and environmental humanities involves messy and undervalued work. We maintain, however, that it is a mode of scholarship necessary for growing different kinds of worlds. - PublicationA Field Guide for Weathering: Embodied Tactics for Collectives of Two or More Humans(Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada, 2018-09-20)
; Neimanis, AstridaIn our inherited meteorological practices and frameworks, weather conditions are managed for us in a range of ways (for example, through architecture, technology, commodity culture, infrastructure, economic rationale). This field guide brings the weather back to the body. A traditional field guide provides tools for the individual sovereign human subject to observe and document nature "over there". In contrast, through a range of different activities, our field guide not only invites investigation and cataloguing of the field that we also comprise, but also challenges what counts as a noteworthy observation regarding the weather and also climate. - PublicationLear in the Storm: Shakespeares Emotional Exploration of Sovereign MortalityWhen Shakespeare rewrote the age-old story of King Lear (c.1606), he created an extended storm sequence and, over several scenes, dramatized the ailing monarch’s emotional response to the elements. In this regard, King Lear differs significantly from its source texts, in terms of the basic plot, and from Shakespeare’s other plays, in terms of the use of wild weather as a dramatic device. The only instance of a meteorological effect in the Lear story before Shakespeare’s version is in the anonymously written play The True Chronicle History of King Leir (1605). But the ‘thunder’ in this version is a pragmatic plot device: thunder frightens Leir’s potential assassin into dropping his dagger. Conveniently spared a cruel ending, Leir happily reunites with Cordella and reclaims the throne. In stark contrast, Shakespeare’s Lear directly pleads with the storm for assistance and, tragically, this storm does not help him. In creating a pitiless storm, Shakespeare uses this meteorological event differently. In King Lear, he forgoes the supernatural scene setting of the thunder and lightning in Macbeth and refuses the simple foreshadowing of political tumult facilitated by Julius Caesar’s busy skies. The storm is also neither a device for gathering all his characters into the one setting as in the sea storms that precede Twelfth Night and A Comedy of Errors, nor is it the spectacular meta-theatrical trick of The Tempest’s tempest. Indeed, nowhere else does Shakespeare place a protagonist exposed to the howling wind and rain and, over several climactic scenes, dramatize his emotional struggle in the face of a violent cataclysm.
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