Chilla Bulback updates us on research on Families, Relationships and Gender at Gender, Work and Social Inquiry (GWSI), School of Social Sciences, University of Adelaide. This is an article from the November edition of Nexus, the newsletter of the Australian Sociological Association, edited on behalf of the Families, Relationships and Gender thematic group of TASA.
Research on Families, Relationships and Gender at Gender, Work and Social Inquiry (GWSI), School of Social Sciences, University of Adelaide.
Chilla.bulbeck@adelaide.edu.au (professor emerita)
Almost everyone in GWSI (http://www.hss.adelaide.edu.au/gwsi/) researches gender. As I will suggest below, almost all of us have at least a tangential research interest in ‘families and gender’ or ‘relationships and gender’. These research areas have spawned two one day conferences, organised almost completely by a band of our postgraduate students, with support from the indefatigable Professor Margaret Allen, as postgraduate co-ordinator for the first conference, on masculinities.
This was held in October 2007, and included papers from four postgraduate students and one member of staff. Karina Bria designed a stunning programme with multiple images of masculinities (which alas cannot be included in this article due to copyright issues). Kirsty Whitman introduced the day’s events, presented a paper on her doctoral dissertation exploring working class masculinity and popular culture in Australia, and then closed the conference with a video collage of ‘media images of men’. Three other postgraduate students presented papers. Andrew Hughes’ thesis concerns the experiences of men ‘policing’ in the contact zones of Papua New Guinea and central Australia (interaction with Indigenous Australians). He discussed the role of men as mentors for reproducing homosociality on the frontier. Penelope Eate discussed the masculinity of the flaneur, which she is exploring in film. Helen Ewart’s thesis involves a comparative analysis of masculinities and femininities in Gawler, South Australia, and Mudgee, New South Wales, between 1890-1910; she presented on “Bruce May: Warrior and Christian Gentleman”.
Professor Margaret Allen gave us a glimpse of her research on another contact zone: between India and Australia when both were colonies or members of the British Commonwealth. Her paper was called “Diverse Masculinities: ‘A Fine Type of Hindoo’ meets ‘The Australian Type’” (published in http://epress.anu.edu.au/transnational_citation.html, an ebook, Transnational Ties: Australian Lives in the World, edited by Desley Deacon, Penny Russell and Angela Woollacott).
The second one-day conference on ‘New family formations and continuing inequalities’ was organised by postgraduate students Toni Delany, Tegwen King and Pauline McLoughlin in November 2008. Karina Bria explored ‘First time fathers, paternal depression and bonding with baby’ in which fathers reported on their feelings of loss associated with restricted contact with their newborn babies. Toni Delany spoke about ‘Maternal intuition: Reinforcing gendered care dynamics in the family’, or the way in which health care professionals undermine women’s knowledge as unreliable ‘intuition’, part of her thesis on the constructions of maternal responsibility within medical and public health discourse. Three other postgraduate students gave presentations. Pauline McLoughlin is conducting research on young people’s experiences of couch surfing (moving from house to house sleeping on other people’s couches): ‘Friends as the new family? The double-edged sword of youth couch surfing’. Ruthie O’Reilly is researching lone person householders in contemporary Australia and gave a presentation on ‘The rise of the lone person household and the contemporary Australian family’. Clare Bartholomaeus gave a presentation (‘Listening to children: Voices in research about children and gender’) about involving children in research. This relates to her thesis in which she is exploring the different perceptions of and influences on young masculinities and femininities as understood by primary school children, and their teachers and parents..
Two members of GWSI staff presented: Professor Margaret Allen on ‘White Australia Policy and intervention in the Indian family in Australia 1901-1950’ and Associate Professor Margie Ripper on her exploration of lesbian couples’ access to assisted reproduction methods: ‘"Prefer loving couple": Sperm donor selection criteria for recipients’.
Due to the initiative and hard work of Toni Delaney and Tegwen King, two of the presentations from the family formations mini-conference will appear in the August edition of the Gay and Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review (GLIP Review). This issue, guest edited by Toni Delaney and Tegwen King, is described as follows:
Families remain one of the most important bases of social organisation in Australia. However, 'traditional' family structures and meanings are now sharing space with more dynamic social relationships. The authors submitting papers for this special issue address one or more issues that influence Australian family formations, such as gender, health status, policy, sexuality, age, relationship status and ethnicity. … The issue of persisting inequalities within families, despite the shift towards the post-modern conceptions of choice and freedom, is a major focus of the papers in the Special Issue.
Articles from GWSI authors are as follows: Margie Ripper ‘Same sex parenting through donor insemination. Is this a new family form?’; Gabriella Zizzo (a postgraduate student), ‘Lesbian families, egalitarian mothering and the unconventional uses of breast milk’ and Toni Delany ‘To Entrap and Empower: Understanding the social implications of maternal intuition within heterosexual family relationships’. More information should soon be available (or may now be) at http://www.groups.psychology.org.au/glip/glip_review/.
The engagement of so many of our postgraduate students in organising two one day conferences and guest editing an issue of a journal is indicative of the vibrant research culture which they have created in GWSI (with a little help from their supervisors). The students who participated as organisors developed and displayed their skills as future conference organisers (programme development, catering, publicising the conference and so on), conference session chairs, editors of academic writing and of a journal issue. There is more than one future academic amongst them: to be snapped up by a lucky sociology department somewhere in Australia.
It could be that all members of staff and postgraduate students are engaged in research on either ‘families and gender’ or ‘relationships and gender’. Other thesis topics include Sally Gibson’s on conservative resistance to relationships education in South Australian schools (influencing relationships among young South Australians); Kanchana Bulumulle’s on understanding male privilege in the academy: Sri Lanka and Australia (it is well known that workplace relations and status impact on family life); Didarul Alam on the stigmatization of sex workers in Bangladesh as carriers of AIDS (which presumes that ‘wholesome’ family relationships do not involve AIDS); Tegwen King on urban redevelopment, identity and difference (where and how we live has an impact on our family relationships).
The research of all our staff members has connections with family and relationships. Dr Susan Oakley is examining waterfront renewal and how waterfront landscapes are transformed in terms of discursive constructions of place, work, housing, community and consumption. Dr Anna Szorenyi is currently working on a life writing project exploring transgenerational relationships to historical atrocity in the context of migration. One of Dr Megan Warin’s research topics is the links between obesity, gender and class in differing socio-economic locations and their relationship to life-course transitions, including family formation; while another is on Persian migrant women and their embodied performance of traumatic memory (like Anna Szorenyi’s work, exploring family members under the stress of dislocation).
Dr Kathie Muir explores the deployment of the ‘working families’ discourse in her recent book Worth Fighting For: Inside the Your Rights at Work Campaign. The term wrested the discourse of families away from the right, allowed the ACTU campaign to speak to non-union members and located both women and men as workers and family members (the lived experience now for a majority of adults in both sexes). My research on young people’s attitudes to sexual relationships and domestic democracy, among other things, can be found in Sex, Love and Feminism: the Attitudes of Young People in ten Asia-Pacific Nations (http://www.routledge.com/books/Sex-Love-and-Feminism-in-the-Asia-Pacific-isbn9780415470063). I am now working on a book which focuses on young Australians’ imagined futures in intimacy, work and citizenship, in particular the continuing gender differences between dreams and expectations concerning the intersection of relationships, family and work; and the new forms of citizenship engagement imagined by young Australians.
There is thus a diversity of research on relationships, families and gender in Gender, Work and Social Inquiry. GWSI is currently particularly vibrant due to a group of committed engaged postgraduate students, many with overlapping interests in the area of families or sexualities. Alas, staff and staffing levels are under unremitting siege in a faculty facing budget difficulties, while GWSI is going through a process of staff renewal.
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