Imagining the Future: Young Australians on sex, love and community

Do young Australians understand and live ‘equality’ and ‘difference’ differently from older generations? Is Australia the gender equal society that many claim it to be? How do we understand and explain growing economic inequality when our dominant ideologies are individualism and neoliberalism? What are or should be the limits of tolerance in our negotiation of cultural difference? Imagining the Future explores our contemporary complex equality narrative through the desires and dreams of 1000 young Australians and 230 of their parents from diverse backgrounds across Australia. This ‘extraordinary’ data set affords analysis of the impact of gender, socio-economic disadvantage, ethnicity, Aboriginality and sexuality on young people’s ‘imagined life stories’, or essays written about their future. An intergenerational comparison assesses how different young people really are from older generations. The book offers a compelling and subtle engagement with the sometimes ‘deeply moving’, sometimes ‘hilarious’ voices of young people to deliver insight into the challenges and complexity of gender and other social relations in early 21st Australian society

‘If Most Men are Against Us, Can We Call Ourselves Feminists?’: Young People’s Views of Feminism – East and West

Based on a survey of 1700 largely young middle-class urban dwellers in ten countries in the Asia-Pacific region, this paper explores several dualist constructions of feminism

It takes Two. "About Face: Asian Accounts of Australia" by Alison Broinowski. [review]

This is an ambitious and provocative book. While Bulbeck suspects that there has been a certain levelling of the Asian images of Australia to achieve coherence in the argument, this detracts only in a small way from a book that throws down the gauntlet to Australians and our leaders. If we had developed and pursued intelligent, independent, and well-resourced foreign policy and cultural relations with our Asian neighbours, would the Bali bombings have been avoided?Australia Council, La Trobe University, National Library of Australia, Holding Redlich, Arts Victori

Ageing Giant. "Family and Social Policy in Japan: Anthropological Approaches" by Roger Goodman (ed) and "Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Embodiment and Sexuality" by Vera Mackie. [review]

In the latest offerings in Cambridge University Press's 'Contemporary Japanese Society' series, Vera Mackie outlines 130 years of Japanese feminism, while Roger Goodman's collection explores a decade of policy interventions in that country that challenge a society still based largely on a strict gendered division of labour. Men's primary role is to be the overworked salaryman warrior, while women's is to care for dependants, both children and grandparents, in a society that 'is rapidly becoming the world’s oldest ever human population'.Australia Council, La Trobe University, National Library of Australia, Holding Redlich, Arts Victori

"I wish to become the leader of women and give them equal rights in society": how young Australians and Asians understand feminism and the women's movement

It is widely known that “feminism” is an “f… word” in Anglophone western countries, refused by many women and despised by many men. Some commentators argue that the word “feminism” has even less currency in Asian nations, where histories of colonialism cast feminism as an imperialist import from the west. My research findings, based on a study of young South Australians and young Asians living in Beijing, Hanoi, New Delhi, Mumbai, Chiang Mai, Bangkok, Seoul and Yogyakarta, challenge this claim. In general, there is stronger support for feminism and the women’s movement in most of the Asian samples. Various explanations for this are canvassed. First, where feminist reform has stalled in the Anglophone west, women’s movements in countries like South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan are still achieving legislative change and the introduction of women’s studies courses, although this is met with both support and resistance among young people. Secondly, there is widespread endorsement of “state feminisms” in countries like China, Viet Nam and Indonesia, often built on historical connections between the women’s movement and the national liberation movement. Third, in some countries, such as India at least until recently, the women’s movement’s role is constructed as the “upliftment” or “empowerment” of the poor and disadvantaged. Excused from being the objects of change, middle class Indians might find feminism less personally discomfiting than the “personal is political” rhetoric of western feminism