Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

Kristina Gottschall
Black (girl) power?: Indigenous girls coming-of-age in Australian cinema
Thinking of films from the Australian context as collective knowledges, memories and pedagogies, this paper
looks across 15 films from 1955 to the present day about Indigenous girls and young women. I consider
intersecting concepts including, Indigeneity, age, gender, sexuality, rurality and affect in the making of these
Indigenous girls, to think about cultural understandings of Indigenous girls coming-of-age. I argue that
popular cultural representations of Indigenous girls coming-of-age are different to non-Indigenous girls’
coming-of age, and explore why this might be. Mobilising work over the last decade on Girlhood and
contemporary femininities, I argue that what is made possible and impossible for Indigenous girlhood in this
context are the results of dual contemporary projects - a “decolonising the screen” and “girl-power”.
Monique Mulholland “The pathological native” versus “the good white girl”: an analysis of race and colonialism in
two Australian porn panics
Two examples of “porn anxiety” have surfaced in Australia recently. The first of these is the Northern
Territory Emergency Response (NTER) intervention into 73 Aboriginal communities, instigated by the Liberal
Coalition Government in 2007. A key measure of the NTER is a blanket ban on pornography in these
communities. The second case refers to panics about pornification, concerned about the porno-saturation of
young people”s cultural worlds. In both cases, a straightforward connection is made between children,
pornography and harm. However, the “problem” is constructed in very different terms. Addressing a gap in
the literature, this paper explores connections between race, colonialism and pornography. I unpack how
“pornography, fear and young people” is incited in each case, how the problem is differently constructed in
racialized terms, and how solutions to the problem are framed. I argue that the porn panics under
examination are viewed through historically persistent racialized and colonizing discourses—in the NTER
case, a particular racialized child becomes the focus, in ways that entrench colonial constructions of the
pathological and degenerate other. In pornification panics, while fears are couched in terms of a general
unraced child, anxieties rest on securing the goodness of the white middle-class girl.
8F
Fashion’s Image: Haunting, Obsession and Fantasy (Chair, Karen de Perthuis)
While a fashion garment may be showcased only once or twice, its image often undergoes a wide circulation, in
which the garment is transformed from physical object to perceptual trace. Lingering as spectral representation of
what once was, the image becomes, in time, the only remnant of the garment’s existence. The photograph of the
garment attests to the memory of its reality, confirming “that the thing has been here” (Barthes 2009, p.76).
Immortalised in an image, the garment is suspended between presence and absence, serving as a prompt to
imagining, remembrance, or longing, consequently becoming as much of a thing as the garment itself. Similarly, the
emotive response elicited by the fashion image can be just as haunting as the experiential memories we have of
actual garments. This session explores the imaginative, spectral dimension of aesthetic experience that fashion’s
image both memorialises and engenders.
Rosie Findlay
You Can’t Lose Something You Never Had: Longing and the fashion photograph
There are a select few fashion images imprinted in my memory. At first casually encountered, they have
come to haunt me, what they depicted ever beyond my grasp yet distinctly remembered. More powerful
than mere remembrances of images once seen, recalling these photographs- and, more significantly, the
garments they depicted – elicits a longing not unlike unrequited love. In the case of each, my impulse is
impossible: I have borne these images for years, during which time I have never seen any of the pictured
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