Vivian Blaxell’s brilliant essay, 'Nuclear Cats', was shortlisted for the Melbourne Prize for Literature in 2021. In this Q&A, we get deeper into the thought behind her writing, covering themes like beauty, gender, the animal / human divide, history and Australian culture. Vivian Blaxell is a trans pioneer, former teenage sex worker, mental health nurse and professor of history and politics specialising in Japan and East Asia, and the co-founder of Tiresias House (now the Gender Centre in Sydney). She now lives in Naarm/Melbourne and is working on a set of linked autobiographical essays (The Long After) of which ‘Nuclear Cats’ is one. You can read Vivian’s shortlisted essay online at Meanjin: https://meanjin.com.au/%E2%80%A2-essay/nuclear-cats/.

What are feminine masculinity and masculine femininity, and how do popular digital representations shape our notions of beauty, self-care, and work? In this episode, we speak to Dr Hannah McCann and Shirley Xue Chen about digital representations of gender and beauty in RuPaul's Drag Race and Queer Eye, as well as romance and gender in Australia's new season of The (Bisexual) Bachelorette. We also discuss their research on Beyond Skin Deep, (https://www.beautysalonproject.com/) an ARC-funded project considering the role of salon workers in the emotional lives of their clients. It also looks at how salon workers are in a unique position to help address important social issues such as family violence, mental health, and social isolation.

Why are women so frequently targeted with hate speech online and what can we do about it? In this talk, we chat with Dr Louise Richardson-Self about her new book, Hate Speech against Women Online, published in 2021 with Rowman and Littlefield International. Dr Louise Richardson-Self is Lecturer in Philosophy & Gender Studies in the School of Humanities at the University of Tasmania, and her new book investigates the woman-hostile norms of the English-speaking internet, the ‘rules’ of engagement in these social spaces, and the narratives we tell ourselves about who gets to inhabit such spaces. You can pick up a copy of Louise's book at https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538147795/Hate-Speech-Against-Women-Online-Concepts-and-Countermeasures.

In this Q&A we chat with Gary Hall about his book, A Stubborn Fury. This book offers a powerful and provocative look at the consequences of this inequality for English culture in particular. Focusing on the literary novel and the memoir, he investigates, in terms that are as insightful as they are irreverent, why so much writing in England is uncritically realist, humanist and anti-intellectual. Experimentally pirating McCarthy, Eribon and Louis, A Stubborn Fury addresses that most urgent of questions: what can be done about English literary culture’s addiction to the worldview of privileged, middle-class white men, very much to the exclusion of more radically inventive writing, including that of working-class, BAME and LGBTQIAP+ authors?

Can computers be creative? Is algorithmic art just a form of Candy Crush? Cutting through the smoke and mirrors surrounding computation, robotics and artificial intelligence, in this Q&A Joanna Zylinska argues that, to understand the promise of AI for the creative fields, we must not confine ourselves solely to the realm of aesthetics. Instead, we need to address the role and position of the human in the current technical setup – including the associated issues of labour, robotisation and, last but not least, extinction. Offering a critique of the socio-political underpinnings of AI, AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams raises poignant questions about the conditions of art making and creativity today.

How can we implement posthuman ways of existing in everyday life? And what does it mean to be 'posthuman' in Australasia? Dr Elese Dowden discussed these questions with leading Posthuman scholar Dr Francesca Ferrando, Founder of the Global Posthuman Network and Adjunct Assistant Professor in Philosophy at New York University. Our conversations revolve around her recent book, Philosophical Posthumanism, and we consider how we might apply ideas in posthumanism to our everyday lives in Australasia.

In this Q&A with feminist philosopher Christine Daigle, we discuss how Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy represents a first major step towards a rejection of the humanist subject. Christine argues that Beauvoir's work is influential for the development of contemporary posthumanist material feminism. Specifically, she argues, Beauvoir's unprecedented attention to embodiment and biology, in The Second Sex and other works, as well as her notion of ambiguity, serve to challenge the humanist subject. While Christine is not claiming that Beauvoir was a posthumanist or material feminist thinker avant la lettre, she shows that Beauvoir is an important precursor to some of their key ideas. Indeed, her thinking about the body, sex, gender, and the importance of embodiment and situation constitutes a challenge to the subject of humanism, thereby opening up a path for thinkers that follow to push Beauvoir’s critique and articulate a posthumanism that does away with the subject of humanism.

In this talk, we'll hear from Rose Trappes and Ali Teymoori. Honour killing is the murder of women and sometimes men who have been perceived to have broken codes of sexual conduct in a local community. The crimes are typically justified as part of the process of restoring honour to a family or community. Rose and Ali use philosophical, feminist, and social theories to develop an interpretation and explanation of honour killing as a “dark side of modernity”. Specifically, they discuss how sexism and systematic marginalization combine to reinforce the reliance of minorities and tribal groups on honour codes and their accompanying practices of honour killing. Effective approaches to combat honour killing require not only addressing the issues of sexism and fundamentalism, but also the systematic exclusion and stigmatization of local groups and minorities. Their talk is based on work with Arash Heydari (University of Science and Culture, Tehran, Iran).

In this Q&A, Matt Sharpe gives us insights from his recent public policy research into the impacts of marketization and casualization on Australian and German universities. The marketization of higher education, although presented as a neutral means to achieve 'efficiencies', inescapably produces “problem tendencies” (cf. Habermas, 1992; Crioni et al, 2015) within teaching, between casualization and reduction of teaching staff and quality of instruction; within research, between free inquiry and applied, quantifiable research; and within institutional culture, between the uncommodifiable, collegial dimensions of academic work and the culture of auditing and compliance promoted by neoliberalism, as well as its attendant costs (Power, 1997; Craig et al, 2014). Matt contextualizes and examine figures from Germany and Australia, explaining why the Australian experience has been so much worse, as the responses to COVID-19 since March 2020 have highlighted.

In this podcast, Erin McFadyen thinks about the human desire to voice animal subjectivity, and the limitations of our power to do so. In works such as Les Murray’s Translations from the Natural World and John Kinsella’s The Jaguar’s Dream, a lyric impulse to speak from the subject position of the animal taps into a long Anglophone poetic tradition of ‘translating’ or ‘voicing’ our more-than-human companions. With recourse to Latour’s actor-network theory and the object-oriented ontology of Jane Bennet, Erin argues that contemporary Australian attempts to translate nature into lyric poetry leave a gap — that is, they always contain a little failure — which signals not human power over the non-human world, but rather our embeddedness within an ecology which eludes our understanding and control. This is a poetics that calls for an ontological humility, for a relinquishing and redistribution of power, and for an enchanted environmentalism.