Frigidity in France: the history of a sexual pathology and of its place in feminist critique. The history of sexuality is an area of research which puts into historical perspective the disorders and abnormalcies which make up so much modern talk about sexuality. It helps to show that many of the supposed sexual problems which are central to modern thinking took shape only recently, and did so in particular circumstances. This is in fact a very active field of international humanities research, a ....Frigidity in France: the history of a sexual pathology and of its place in feminist critique. The history of sexuality is an area of research which puts into historical perspective the disorders and abnormalcies which make up so much modern talk about sexuality. It helps to show that many of the supposed sexual problems which are central to modern thinking took shape only recently, and did so in particular circumstances. This is in fact a very active field of international humanities research, and this project will make an Australian-based scholarly contribution to it. A detailed, circumstantial history of frigidity will make it possible to question the 'science' which founds twentieth-century norms for female sexual behaviour. It will also enable the project to make a critical contribution to modern feminist thinking.Read moreRead less
A Generic Study of Colette's Short Writing. The study uses "genre" as a key to a literary-historical account of Colette's short writing in its cultural context. The corpus is generically ambiguous, since it first appeared as "articles" in magazines and was later collected in volumes, thus acquiring a more "literary" status as "essays". Taking into account both the conditions of publication and the rhetoric of these pieces, I shall investigate the network of cultural relations in which they parti ....A Generic Study of Colette's Short Writing. The study uses "genre" as a key to a literary-historical account of Colette's short writing in its cultural context. The corpus is generically ambiguous, since it first appeared as "articles" in magazines and was later collected in volumes, thus acquiring a more "literary" status as "essays". Taking into account both the conditions of publication and the rhetoric of these pieces, I shall investigate the network of cultural relations in which they participate, and their command of their readership. This will show how Colette made a place for "women's knowledge" in public culture and what that place was.Read moreRead less
Representing Kanaks: Generic Variation, Identity, and the Politics of the Everyday Semiotic. The project hypothesizes that representational struggles over indigenous identity are crucially shaped by the range of genres in which identity is asserted. Through the case of Kanaks in New Caledonia, as represented by several everyday genres hitherto neglected by scholarship, the representational politics of indigeneity are interrogated with the aim of demonstrating that Kanak existence is constituted ....Representing Kanaks: Generic Variation, Identity, and the Politics of the Everyday Semiotic. The project hypothesizes that representational struggles over indigenous identity are crucially shaped by the range of genres in which identity is asserted. Through the case of Kanaks in New Caledonia, as represented by several everyday genres hitherto neglected by scholarship, the representational politics of indigeneity are interrogated with the aim of demonstrating that Kanak existence is constituted in the semiotic detail of everyday generic variation. The project's significance lies in its radical reconception of identity and representational politics: going beyond indigenous versus colonial binaries, it reveals the complexity of day-to-day competition over and consolidation of indigenous identity through representational systems.Read moreRead less