This paper is interested in rekindling a conversation on the politics of form in feminist fiction (briefly) and critical writing (largely). While early debates on a women’s language or gynocriticism might seem so eighties now, what of the politics of location and embodiment? What remains of such ideological and optimistic ideals that seek to make visible the links between knowledge production and pedagogy, personal and political, subjectivity and scholarly apparatus, in the very form of writing? This paper poses fictocriticism as a possible remnant of such debates. Claimed as an ‘Australian’ form of writing, fictocriticism has competing narratives about its origins, attributed either to French feminist ideas of embodied writing practices or to male postmodernists through ideas of hybridity and pastiche.  While inherently more interested in its feminist heritage, function and form, I suggest that recent manifestations of fictocritical work produced by feminists is more often in the service of examining racism and whiteness, where origins don’t necessarily matter but bodies and the politics of writing do.

Dear Regina,

I’ve just seen a call for papers on feminist theory as praxis. Would you be interested in writing something together about it? I remember we used to have discussions about what a feminist novel would look like, what it would be about, what kind of form it would take, and I’ve been thinking lately about what happened to those debates about the form of feminist writing, the ways in which form needed to reflect content. I know it’s a bit cheeky of me writing to you like this, as you have always favoured the epistolary form as a writing device. It makes us think back through our penpals, doesn’t it, and has that added credibility of historically reflecting women’s writing practices from within their domestic relations. So I thought a letter might be appropriate. Then again, some might think it ‘old-fashioned’ in this digital age when sms text messaging and email are more common than letters, but maybe this is symptomatic of increasing time-poverty. As someone who has just moved to the other side of her country, I am thrilled to get old fashioned letters from friends now far away. Come to think of it, I am thrilled to get emails too.  Maybe I should write this as an email, put in some ;)s to make us feel better and get the tone right. But that would lose the historical relation to letters and to the epistolary novel.

Maybe you’re too busy to be in on a collaborative piece of work, though, now that you’ve left university work to pursue being a poet. Maybe you’re too busy enjoying yourself at creative writing! But then I’ve always thought that feminist academic writing should be creative and enjoyable too. I seem to have forgotten those values, and write ‘straight’ work now. But having just taught a lecture on women’s writing and écriture féminine, I’m reminded of all those issues of language and form and the pleasure that I used to get from reading those outrageous feminist theorists. The students didn’t know what to make of Irigaray’s (1985) essay, ‘When Our Lips Speak Together’, even when it was sidled between Dale Spender’s work on he/man language (1985) and Mothers of the Novel (1986), Deborah Cameron’s anthology of feminist critiques of language (1990), and Kate Jennings’ introduction to the first ever anthology of Australian women poets from 1975, Mother, I’m Rooted. Surprisingly - to me,  now - Jennings decided after reading hundreds of poems by women that there was ‘much evidence that there is such an animal as a female sensibility, and that women use language and imagery in a distinctively different way to men’ (Jennings 1975, 12).

It was like seeing the students newly born after reading those articles though. They said they had never really thought about issues of naming and language and form before, or the balance of men and women writers in their literature major. But Irigaray is another planet even from those arguments. When I explained her challenge to psychoanalysis, that the entire theory of subject formation and the subject’s relation to language would be inexorably changed if it took women’s sexuality as its metaphorical model rather than male sexuality, they were silent. So I just kept talking about her exhortations to invent a new language, to find our body’s language, and the ingenious wordplay between labial lips and oral lips, between sexuality and language, between women speaking together and addressing each other as lovers, as lesbian lovers. Some of them are familiar with Elizabeth Grosz’s work in Volatile Bodies, so I connected her (Irigaray-indebted) concept that all we write is produced through our corporeal, cultural and institutional histories, and so the body and writing are intimately connected (1994, 19). Even if the students were stunned into silence by what Irigaray was saying, they were alert enough to comment on the form in which she says it. The ambiguity, multiplicity, the play on words and meanings, the direct address, the playfulness, all the talk about love and kissing and touching, contiguity: it is still so different from what we understand ‘academic work’ to be. And yet, this is where I learnt the pleasures of reading theory.

I must tell you Gina that it is SO much fun teaching this material, the material that I dwelt on deeply and broadly when I was doing my doctorate. Even though I’ve been teaching now for ten years (can you believe it?), I think this is the first time I’ve had the opportunity to teach what I really, really know and enjoy. This is how it should be, right? It’s ironic though that I had to leave a literature discipline and move to a women’s studies program to finally teach theories of women’s writing. Remember when I wanted to challenge the form of a doctoral dissertation, arguing that it was patriarchal and that a feminist dissertation should take a different form to fit what it was saying? It was difficult to imagine, but then Irigaray provided an inspiring model in Speculum of the Other Woman, and her phrase about ‘jamming the theoretical machinery itself’ (1985, 78) proved to be a productive image for me (and one which I still associate with jam). I think I had more luck making the methodology feminist, by positioning the women novelists as knowing subjects, as experts on their own work. One of those writers, Susan Hawthorne – novelist, poet and founder of Spinifex Press, confirmed for me the need for contesting form when I interviewed her. She said:

I think that women at the moment are experimenting more with form and with content, and style and with genre - the whole thing. I think it's also happening amongst other groups, like, black writers, indigenous writers etc, people coming from cultures which are not currently in dominance. I think that part of the reason that's happening is because we haven't had a voice, and the old forms don't necessarily suit us. When you have something different to say then you are forced to say it in different ways and so you have to seek out a form that's going to suit your needs, suit the needs of the text and of the content and the themes that you're dealing with. (Hawthorne, 1998, 225)

This was in the early 1990s. But then by the end of that decade Susan Lever was critical of feminist literary criticism which privileged experimental literary forms and disregarded realist writing as conventional and old-fashioned, thereby failing to find the more subtle (but more read) forms of gender analysis in those novels (2000 Real Relations).

Those debates about the form of a feminist novel still seem unanswerable, and rarely discussed in what I read now. When Beryl Fletcher’s first novel – The Word Burners – came out in 1992, I thought this was a turning point in feminist fiction. It was set in New Zealand in the broad context of a Women’s Studies course and included an amazing essay belonging to a rebellious student character. The essay was titled ‘Talking Cunts’. The essay was an act of language rebellion in the story and was also emblematic of the novel’s thematics, with a nod to Irigaray and all those radical feminists who took on vulval imagery as a transgressive counter-culture. It’s a decidedly ‘academic’ novel, in that it uses the university context as a way of talking theory, of writing feminism, of questioning if feminism can be academic. Was it you I lent that novel to and you dropped it in the bath? I can’t imagine you’d do that sort of thing. My copy still remains puffed up with being wet then dried out. Maybe those debates about the form of a feminist novel ask the wrong question. Maybe we’re satisfied with storytelling in whatever form it’s in. I’ve convinced myself that the reason I drift to the television to unwind before going to bed is for the same reason my daughter still insists on a half-hour of stories before sleep. Even if we don’t get to the end of the story, there’s something soothing about listening to it.

But it’s the form of feminist critical writing that seems to have undergone the most radical change, or to occupy a position of potential change, in the way that Irigaray still seems radical. I still find great solace in Catherine Waldby’s paper on ‘Feminism and Method’ which has that marvellous image of the ‘fiction of the disembodied scholar’ (1995, 17). For some reason I imagine a headless scholar – the colloquial ‘talking head’ I guess, the image of the mind/body split. Waldby poses this fiction as ‘one of the most effective methodological devices available to masculine knowledge’ (1995, 17). The disembodied scholar, she argues,

refers to the assumption that the scholar is simply a properly trained mind, unlocated in the specific historical experience and social position of a sexed, classed or racially marked body. The device of the bodiless scholar allows knowledge the apparent ability to transcend any particular point of view and the limits of any particular experience. (Waldby 1995, 17)

Waldby relates it to Donna Haraway’s image of the ‘god-trick’, the authority that is gained by posing as ‘seeing everything from nowhere’ (Haraway 1991, 189), and Heather Kerr calls it ‘the unmarked voice of the Anglo-American Academy’ (1995, 91). Waldby’s chapter is written as ‘straight’ academic writing, but it provides superb reasoning and rationale for validating other kinds of writing which are embodied, indebted, partially located in their theoretical enterprise. This mode of writing in Australia has been termed fictocriticism. Elsewhere it goes by other names and forms: theory-fiction, paracriticism, postcriticism, metafiction. Nancy Millar made it her signature form of personal criticism (1991), and Jane Gallop’s method of symptomatic reading has been named ‘anecdotal theory’ (2002). But in Australia, fictocriticism has stuck.

In the introduction to a dedicated collection called The Space Between: Australian women writing fictocriticism in 1998, Amanda Nettelbeck writes that fictocriticism is a

hybridized writing that moves between the poles of fiction (‘invention’/’speculation’) and criticism (‘deduction’/’explication’), of subjectivity (‘interiority’) and objectivity (‘exteriority’)’.  (1998, 3-4)

Interestingly she positions fictocritical writing as a product of postmodernism, even though the collection is entirely women writers. This perhaps accounts for the male writers who also adopt this mode of writing, like Stephen Muecke and Noel King who she mentions. But it also defuses the feminist analysis of rational, linear, logical and patrilinear argumentation that retains authority because of its very form, and its privileged theoretical relation to subject formation. Nettelbeck declares the term ‘fictocriticism’ to be provisional and self-critical, and that the anthology’s borders of women writing in Australia are ‘marked by even as they query the gendered and the geographic identities that are anticipated’ (1998, 10). And yet it has remained women, in Australia, who have proliferated this mode.

At around the same time, in 1997, Anna Gibbs argued that fictocriticism emerged largely from non-academic writers in Australia, from women who were reading and fascinated by the French feminists texts during the 1970s and 1980s. Frictions, a collection of feminist prose writing Gibbs edited with Alison Tilson in 1982 provides some of the first examples of fictocriticism, although most of the writers are now in academia. I guess that interest in continental psychoanalytic philosophy put them in good stead. Another of the writers I interviewed argued vehemently that in order to practise a mode of writing like this you had to ‘announce yourself to be doing that and to have those knowledges and be from somewhere’ (Coombs, 1998, 203). Do you remember Margaret Coombs being so angry about when she wrote passionate essays of cultural analysis and was just written off as being ‘just an ignorant writer’? So while fictocriticism may have begun outside of academia while it was published in independent feminist presses (like Sybylla Press, who published Frictions), now it seems quite securely anchored to the academy through a hierarchy of legitimation and author(is)ing that is embedded in universities. Ironic, as that is exactly what the form questions. And doubly ironic, as it initially acted as a kind of bridge, or conduit, between specialist academic discourse and the grass roots of the women’s liberation movement and vice versa, being mobilised and interpreted by both groups. I was amazed to discover a translation of Irigaray’s essay ‘One Does Not Move Without the Other’ with commentary in a 1982 issue of Refractory Girl, an early Australian grassroots feminist magazine. That ‘crossover’ aspect is clearly part of the politics of fictocriticism, as it also crosses over academic journals and creative writing journals, over disciplines, over difference, overtime, over and out. It has that play of excess, that slipperiness between work and play, between proper and improper, between publishable and unpublishable.

Another crossover is between feminism and postmodernism, although this is not straightforwardly evident in the way Nettelbeck and Gibbs align fictocriticism as originating either through male postmodernists or through feminist psychoanalysts respectively. There’s no reason why the form cannot arise from or even appropriate both narratives of origins. I’ve come to realise that my work is postmodern feminism, a claim that draws attention to the kind of feminism I’m interest in, rather than any primary postmodern allegiance. Certainly Gibbs’ lineage mirrors my experience of coming to writing through reading the French feminists. Susan Sheridan uses that memorable concept of the graft to talk about the way Australian feminists selectively take up foreign ideas and ‘graft’ them into something new, some antipodean form quite distinct from its continental beginnings (1998, 1). Maybe it would be necessary to put in some disclaimer here, about fictocriticism not being restricted to imaginary national borders, or sexual difference, or indeed being all that different to the essay or the novel which it could be argued were always interrogative, always contesting form, always radical from their predecessors. Nettelbeck does this. And yet those originary moments of feminist contestation are what mark fictocritical work for me, and for Gibbs:

In an act of defiance, an attempt to exorcise the paralysing interdictions of disciplinary academic authority, feminist writers in particular have sought other relationships to such forms of authority than those of simple submission and unthinking repetition. (2005, np)

Fictocriticism, she writes, ‘was never a genre that was One’ (1997, np) and ‘must be constantly invented anew’ (2005, np). It is provisional only in so far as it is unpredictable, calling on both innovation and regularly repeated clichés, symbolic and imaginary, dreams and rational argumentation, citation and imagination. Part of its charm and potential is that it is undisciplined and multidisciplinary, in the same way as Women’s Studies crosses over and through disciplines to produce a different kind of knowledge and pedagogy.

Knowledge and pedagogy are linked, as always. Anne Brewster tells us that part of her interest in fictocriticism is because her upper level students in an interdisciplinary school

express frustration with the discursive limits of the essay which has long enjoyed the status of the prime genre of written assessment in literary and cultural studies courses. They find the conventions of the so-called impersonal, disinterested voice of academic scholarship and the narrative closure of the essay limiting. They often question the hierarchisation and compartmentalisation of genres in the academy. (Brewster 1996, 90)

Fictocriticism, she argues, serves ‘as an alternative model of knowledge production’ (1996, 90) and also foregrounds production as process. 

But it works the other way as well, where teaching prompts research papers, like the lectures on language I’ve just put together which prompted this permutation. I’m probably also remembering the doctoral dissertation I examined a couple of weeks ago, which reread all the major twentieth century social theorists through a feminist psychoanalytic perspective. I had the most amazing dreams after a day of reading the chapter on Kristeva’s semiotic and the role of the maternal in the prelinguistic stage of subject formation. They (the dreams) were all pink and red-brown and hues of warmth, circular and spiralling comfort, in caves and nestled in roundness with flexible walls and softened boundaries. I was dreaming of myself all coiled up but relaxed, like a nautilus shell wrapped around its precious cargo in the watery-warm oceanic tropics. Probably all very essentialised some might say, but it was a feeling rather than a visual dreaming, and the warmth and nurturing stayed with me all day. Don’t you love it when you have such nice dreams you try to consciously recall them? But the recall is only ever partial - and so different in the daytime, in consciousness, in writing, in the symbolic. But the fictocritical will happily allow such drifting, such distractions from and refraction of rational prose. Such interruptions disrupt our performance as coherent subjects, recalling a prior version of self and the maternal gift, as Irigaray would argue. Fictocriticism performs (its) difference, and part of that difference is attributable to sexual difference.

The other set of differences being played out in fictocriticism this (twenty-first) century is racial difference. Fictocritical work is produced by white feminists like myself in this country, but there’s been a distinct turn to utilising it to examine personal histories of whiteness, of locating the writer within a racist culture in order to examine contemporary race relations and theorise reconciliatory positions. In an issue of the journal Cultural Studies Review in 2003, for example, Robyn Ferrell’s piece on ‘Pinjarra 1970: shame and the country town’ reflects on her position growing up as a white girl in a small rural community in Western Australia, and the multiple histories of the area including the Pinjarra massacre of its local indigenous people in 1834. It reads this remembered, renarrated story of a childhood through her accumulated reading and writing in philosophy, in feminism, in social theory and race relations and asks how the shame of being part of a racist nation might be ameliorated or restorative justice thought through. It acts, as Gibbs characterises fictocriticism, as ‘an interrogative mode of writing which aims to open up spaces of debate rather than to close them down with assertions’ (2005, np). In the same journal issue Heather Kerr directly links the ethics and aesthetics of fictocriticism to the particularly Australian national project of mourning, grief, elegy, and empathy (in relation to its indigenous history). In a ‘straight’ theoretical article, she suggests that,

in the Australian context, acknowledgement of affects as important effects of history is still politically urgent. In this sense at least, fictocritical empathy and the work of mourning might be necessary, if not sufficiently radical, aesthetic gestures, keeping in view the analogical historical ties between selves and others in particular settler communities. (Kerr 2003, 198)

These examples are not alone. Perhaps this is where fictocriticism as a form of feminist writing meets fictocriticism as a form of postmodern (or particularly postcolonial) writing, in that writing on gender and race requires self-reflection, or at least locating the writer as gendered and raced. Both ideological positions are based on a politics of difference and it makes sense for the writer to be located in the institutional, corporeal and cultural histories which produce and contest that difference. While this can serve national agendas, it also serves explicitly feminist agendas of locating the writer, whether they be male or female: of documenting and contesting the fiction of the disembodied scholar. Since Australian feminist theory has been contested by Indigenous scholars like Jackie Huggins and Aileen Moreton-Robinson to be obsessively white, it also behoves us to examine our own raced histories, theories, and fictions.

The most sustained work I know of that uses fictocriticism to actively rewrite sexual and racial difference is Margaret Somerville’s (1999) text, Body/Landscape Journals. It begins with a sensory description of the dry scrubby bushland where she lives, teeming with life, and asks,

This place exists here in my performance of it. In telling the story of place it comes into being as a particular landscape evoked by a particular body, just as I come into being through that performance. How do I represent myself and the landscape? … What stories does mine make space for and which ones does it displace? (Somerville 1999, 4-5)

Somerville lives in rural New South Wales where she works at the University of New England and collaborates with Aboriginal women to publish their stories. She describes a feeling of belonging to land as something distinctly corporeal and deeply felt, a trope that is becoming increasingly common in settler narratives, and yet she is also aware of the duplicity, discomfort, and dangers of appropriation, of the unearned claim implicit in this assertion. How do we, as ancestors and recipients of the privileges of white colonisation and Indigenous genocide, articulate a sense of belonging that does not repeat the shameful patterns of those ancestors? In her facilitative role with Aboriginal women and their stories, Somerville ‘sensed the body and body/place connection always already there in the stories but didn’t know how to do it for me’ (1999, 12). ‘Was there a possibility’, she asks, ‘of belonging through and with Aboriginal women’s stories of place?’ (1999, 8).

Somerville’s body/landscape journal is a writing that is formed around the specificity of bodies and landscapes in a quest to find a way of articulating the relation between (her)self and place in all of its complexities. It weaves Irigaray into tropical North Queensland beaches and environmental activism, sets spatial practices and contact zones amongst Indigenous-white relations and writing politics, and it takes the form of its writing as a compelling part of its reconciliatory and critical position. Midway through the book in a section stylised as a diary entry, the narrative ‘I’ reflects on reading theory:

As I fall asleep, I wonder about this male writing that I admire so much, why I can’t write in this persuasive voice, the accomplished ease and wholeness of the work, the erotic power of persuasive language … the compelling power of grand theory. I admire and desire their language of persuasion, soaring towards the angels, while I scrabble on the ground amongst the fragments. But I am also frustrated that there is no body presence in their writing. From whence come their obsessions; who are they? (1999, 89-90)

This clearly locates Somerville’s work as feminist as much as it is postcolonial, even though an interview with her by Fiona Probyn is titled ‘Towards a “Postcolonial Practice of Writing”’ (Probyn and Somerville, 2004). Somerville stresses that she came to feminism ‘in a desert landscape with Aboriginal women’ through a corporeal rather than a conceptual model (Probyn & Somerville, 2004, 57, 58), and was greatly excited by corporeal theory and the ‘French feminists’. Coincidentally, Body/Landscape Journals was written ‘originally as a PhD and in defiance of academic conventions about thinking and writing’, and she says ‘I came into academia … as an angry woman, and wanting to bring experiences and knowledge from outside – as a woman, and a mother, of different landscapes, of body knowledge and other modes of knowing’ (Probyn and Somerville, 2004, 58). Somerville uses her experiences in the desert with Aboriginal women as a point of entry into her theoretical project, but the written form she chooses is distinctly related to the angry woman’s project. Somerville suggests that if the mind/body dichotomy is dismantled, then other dichotomies also come tumbling down, like black/white, female/male, queer/straight. Locating the writing self within our time and place, within the politics of capitalism, patriarchy and colonialism, can only ever be a partial acknowledgement of the writer’s position in relation to their subject, but it’s something more than the fiction of the disembodied scholar.

This turn to bring fictocritical writing into the service of a postcolonial feminism, or a feminist postcolonial writing, or an embodied practice, could arguably be the future of feminism. The register of fiction in fictocriticism is not necessarily what we automatically associate with fiction, but is an aspect of the imagination, of narrative, fantasy, memory, dream, unlikely association, pastiche, even a personal or autobiographical mode in which the fictionalised narrative ‘I’ is never fully present to itself, is only ever partial and provisional (as indeed is the narrative you, Regina). Fictocriticism is mobilised, as Anna Gibbs argues, ‘ultimately, to do something differently, to undo something, to make a difference’ (2005, np).

So what do you say ‘Gina, shall we give it a go? Maybe you could write it in poetic form, but then your poems do the same work as this anyway, don’t they. Let me know what you think anyway,

All the best,

Ali

REFERENCES

Bartlett, A. (1998) Jamming the Machinery: contemporary Australian women’s writing (Canberra: Association for the Study of Australian Literature).
Brewster, A. (1996) Fictocriticism: pedagogy and practice, in: (Eds) C. Guerin, P. Butterss and A. Nettelbeck, Crossing Lines: Formations of Australian Culture Proceedings of the 17th Annual conference of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 1995 (Adelaide: Association for the Study of Australian Literature).
Cameron, D. (1990) Introduction: why is language a feminist issue?, in: (Ed) D. Cameron, The Feminist Critique of Language: a reader (London: Routledge)
Coombs, M. (1998) Interview with Margaret Coombs, in: A Bartlett Jamming the Machinery: contemporary Australian Women’s Writing (Canberra: Association for the Study of Australian Literature).
Ferrell, R. (2003) Pinjarra 1970: shame and the country town, Cultural Studies Review, 9.1 pp. 23-34.
Fletcher, B. (1992) The Word Burners (Melbourne: Spinifex Press).
Gallop, J. (2002) Anecdotal Theory (Durham: Duke University Press).
Gibbs, A. & Tilson A. (Eds) (1982) Frictions: an anthology of fiction by women (Melbourne: Sybylla Cooperative Press).
Gibbs, A. (1997) Bodies of Words: feminism and fictocriticism – explanation and demonstration, TEXT, 1.2 Online journal http://www.gu.edu.au/shcool/art/text/oct97/gibbs.htm
Gibbs, A. (2005) Fictocriticism, Affect, Mimesis: engendering differences, TEXT, 9.1, Online journal http://www.gu.edu.au/school/art/text/april05/gibbs.htm
Grosz, E. (1994) Volatile Bodies: towards a corporeal feminism (Sydney: Allen & Unwin).
Haraway, D. (1991) Situated Knowledges: the Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective, in: Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge).
Hawthorne, S. (1998) Interview with Susan Hawthorne, in: A. Bartlett, Jamming the Machinery: contemporary Australian women writers, (Canberra: Association for the Study of Australian Literature).
Huggins, J. (1998) SisterGirl: the writings of Aboriginal activist and historian Jackie Huggins (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press).
Irigaray L. (1987) The Speculum of the Other Woman (New York: Cornell University Press).
Irigaray L. (1985) When our Lips Speak Together, in: This Sex Which is Not One, Trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (New York: Cornell University Press) (C’est Sexe 1977).
Irigaray, L. (1982) One Does Not Move Without the Other, trans Rosi Braidotti, Refractory Girl 23, pp. 12-14.
Jennings, K. (Ed) (1975) Mother I’m Rooted: an anthology of Australian Women poets (Melbourne: Outback Press).
Kerr, H. & Nettelbeck, A. (Eds) (1998) The Space Between: Australian women writing fictocriticism (Perth: University of Western Australia Press).
Kerr, H. (1996) Fictocritcism, the ‘doubtful category’: and ‘the space between’, in: (Eds) C. Guerin, P. Butterss and A. Nettelbeck, Crossing Lines: Formations of Australian Culture Proceedings of the 17th Annual conference of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 1995 (Adelaide: Association for the Study of Australian Literature).
Kerr, H. (2003) Fictocritical Empathy and the Work of Mourning, Cultural Studies Review,9.1 pp. 180-200.
Lever, S. (2000) Real Relations: the feminist politics of form in Australian Fiction, (Toowoomba: Association for the Study of Australian Literature).
Millar, N. K. (1991) Getting Personal: Feminist occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts (New York: Routledge).
Moreton-Robinson, A. (2000) Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women Feminism (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press).
Nettelbeck, A. (1998) Notes Toward an Introduction, in: (Eds) H. Kerr & A. Nettelbeck, The Space Between: Australian women writing fictocritcism (Perth: University of Western Australia Press).
Probyn, F. & Soverville, M. (2004) Towards ‘a Postcolonial Practice of Writing’, Hecate,30.1 pp. 56-71.
Sheridan, S. (1998) Introduction, in: Grafts: feminist cultural criticism (London: Verso).
Somerville, M. (1999) Body/Landscape Journals (Melbourne: Spinifex Press).
Spender, D. (1985) ‘He-man’ language: how sexism is reflected and perpetuated by words, in (Eds) J. Rigg & J. Copeland, Coming Out! Women’s Voices, Women’s Lives (Sydney: Nelson).
Spender, D. (1986) Mothers of the Novel: 100 good women writers before Jane Austen (London: Pandora).
Spinifex Press http://www.spinifexpress.com.au/
Waldby, C. (1995) Feminism and Method, in: (Eds) B. Caine & R. Pringle, Transitions: New Australian Feminisms (Sydney: Allen & Unwin).