carole ferrier

The University of Queensland, Australia, School of English, Media Studies and Art History, Faculty Member

Followers

Following

Public Views

Carole Ferrier Emeritus Professor, Literature and Women's/Gender Studies, has worked at The University of Queensland in Brisbane for getting on for 50 years. Editor/author of a dozen books and 150 articles and book chapters she has been Editor of Hecate: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Women's Liberation since 1975, and of the Australian Women's Book Review since 1999. Particularly interested in women writers in English from the early twentieth-century on, Australasian and around the world, and their contestations of capitalist or state capitalist patriarchy, imperialism, white supremacism, racism, compulsory heterosexuality, colonialism and "western civilisation." Has also always made time for activism around these questions and, especially in the twenty-first century, ecology and planetary survival. https://hecate.communications-arts.uq.edu.au

less

François Soyer

University of New England - Australia

Alejandra B Osorio

Wellesley College

Maria Cristina La Rocca

Università degli Studi di Padova

Florin Curta

University of Florida

Randolph Head

University of California, Riverside

Fátima Sá

ISCTE - University Institute of Lisbon (ISCTE-IUL)

Luc Duerloo

University of Antwerp

Fabien Montcher

Saint Louis University

Herbert S Klein

Columbia University

José Manuel Santos

University of Salamanca

Interests

Uploads

Papers by carole ferrier

Teaching Courses in Black Women's Fiction in Australia: Some Observations

Hecate, Nov 30, 1987

Den when we start to shoutbout a culture o we owna language o we owna identity o we owndem an de ... more Den when we start to shoutbout a culture o we owna language o we owna identity o we owndem an de others dey leave to control us saySTOP THAT NONSENSE NOWWe're all British!(1)Black women's writing is almost always marginalised or, more usually, totally excluded in `literature' departments in Australian educational institutions. (Details of what is currently taught will appear in the next issue.) Some courses show a few Black writers being read but, generally speaking, in the field of literary studies in Australia they remain largely invisible, with Black women writers almost invariably even more so. This article will take up some aspects of what is means to teach Black literature, and especially Black women's writing, in educational institutions in Australia. It is designed to give encouragement to those who would like to do this, but don't know where to start (though I am offering not a map, but merely a chart of some rough tracks, with indications of where swamps, bogs, and particularly rocky ground might be encountered).A teaching practice that simply `modifies the Canon' by the insertion of the odd token Black, female, gay or working class writer into traditional courses is not, in itself, particularly radical, as the evolution of early `second wave' feminism from the late 60s has demonstrated. Indeed, if such texts are read within the New Critical/Leavisite parametters still widely current in most Australian tertiary institutions, staff and students will frequently end up confessing themselves at a loss and/or concluding that these texts are `not very good'.This is partly because (for almost invariably white teachers, and mainly white students) standards of `literary value' based upon the European `canon' have been internalised. Often Black women's texts will be perceived as insufficiently figurative, as overly reflective, in terms of their style.(2) It is also because of subtle racism/laziness/chauvinism and/or an intimidating sense of lack of knowledge of often totally unfamiliar cultures produced by our `educational' system. This lack of knowledge is unlikely to be easily remedied by your "library resources" (a term that you will hear a lot when you start talking about introducing the study of Black women writers!)But the real hostility will start when (as you need to, to set up some space to move in) you suggest that this study is a field or discipline of its own. (This is something rather different from slotting in the Walkers -- Kath or Alice -- into the old courses, to show we're not prejudiced and, yes, there is the odd "quite interesting" Black woman writer whom we might include -- though we'll probably make them optional since, after all, they haven't "stood the test of time"). When you insist that this token representation within the old pedagogical frameworks is not what you are talking about, it will be argued, as it used to be for women's studies, that there are no journals and few publications "in the field" -- which will change to "in the library" when you prove the former proposition incorrect. You may also, in the course of this, have to engage in a debate about whether these are "significant" publications. So a fight (usually) with your departmental bureaucracy for the acceptance of courses in Black women's writing is the first step, though this acceptance will never really arrive and, if it does, you are probably doing something wrong. One of my colleagues has a sticker on her door saying "Centre for Peripheral Studies", and this seems to me to be about as far as we can get within the institutions as they are currently constituted.However, having managed to get a course approved, you are only just starting. You have overcome the institutional inertia, but the field itself is fraught with theoretical and political debates and problems. Even for those with good intentions (in terms of an interest in the decentring of white racist and imperialist culture, and its dominant assumptions -- one of the key elements of the reconstitution of the object of study that I am talking about) there has often been an extreme diffidence about approaching the study of Black writing. …

Teaching African American Womenâs Literature in Australia

Palgrave Macmillan eBooks, Oct 9, 2015

Women's and gender studies in Australia today

Women's Studies began in Australia in the early 1970s with the first crossdisciplinary subjec... more Women's Studies began in Australia in the early 1970s with the first crossdisciplinary subjects at Queensland and Flinders (Adelaide). Through the 1970s and early '80s they spread to almost every campus, associated (sometimes uneasily) with an activist and socialist-inflected second wave Women's Liberation movement. They articulated new perspectives that came into the universities from the end of the 1960s that addressed - and sought to bring centrally into play in critical reading - along with issues of gender, those of class, race and ethnicity, and sexuality. In 1996 a conference at the University of Sydney entitled 'The Return of the Repressed', revisited the successful 1973 strike over ...

Editorial: [From the late 1960s, critical forms of history and literature have opened up a space for marginalised or silenced voices to counteract conservative or repressive regimes and ideologies.]

Hecate, 2006

The article discusses how books have influenced the course of life history. Several titles of boo... more The article discusses how books have influenced the course of life history. Several titles of books are given, both fictional and non-fictional. Some commentaries are mentioned, expressing the writer's own ideologies on education and sociology. There are also essays concerning political and social issues.

Ruby Langford Ginibi (26 January 1934

Jean Devanny : romantic revolutionary / Carole Ferrier

Historical Fiction and Fictional History: An Interview with Valerie Miner

Meanjin, Dec 1, 1987

“A whole other story vibrating within it”

BRILL eBooks, 2002

Review *The Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 289: Australian Writers 1950-1975*, edited by Selina Samuels

Australian Literary Studies, Oct 1, 2005

“Never Forget that the Kanakas Are Men”: Fictional Representations of the Enslaved Black Body

BRILL eBooks, 2008

Everyday Revolutions: Remaking Gender, Sexuality and Culture in 1970s Australia

Australian Historical Studies, Jul 2, 2020

His research centres on the construction and representation of difference in liberal democratic p... more His research centres on the construction and representation of difference in liberal democratic political and popular cultures. This has produced work that investigates a wide variety of historical contexts and representations. This includes research on the dynamic of settler-colonialism and changing constructions of manhood in nineteenth-century Victoria, anthropological constructions of the 'Aborigine' in nineteenth-century Australia, sexuality in contemporary historical films, contestations over masculinity in the representation of the AFL, and the impact of changing EVERYDAY REVOLUTIONS viii ideas about sexuality on the operation of citizenship in late modern Australia. He is currently a Chief Investigator (with Michelle Arrow, Barbara Baird and Robert Reynolds) on the ARC-funded project 'Gender and Sexual Politics: Changing Citizenship in Australia since 1969'. He is currently coeditor, together with Michelle Arrow and Kate Fullagar, of the Australian Historical Association's journal, History Australia. Georgine Clarsen teaches Australian history in the Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts at the University of Wollongong. She has published in the area of women's engagements with automobile technology and the role of automobility in the creation of settler identities and space in twentieth-century Australia. Georgine picked up a spanner in the 1970s and became a qualified car mechanic. She worked for many years as the production manager of the Australian performing company Circus Oz. Elizabeth Emery is a feminist scholar, artist and educator working at the intersection of textiles history, feminist theory and activist politics. Her work as an artist and researcher centres on the subversive use of textiles as a creative strategy of resistance within the history of women's domestic labour and in feminist movements. Elizabeth is currently sessional lecturer of Art History and Textiles Studio at the University of South Australia School of Art, and is a PhD candidate in Women's Studies at Flinders University.

Download

Politics and Culture

Teaching African American Women’s Literature in Australia: Reading Toni Morrison in the Deep North

Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2010

skip nav. ...

Literary Lives in Letters

The Janet Frame reader

Women's Press eBooks, 1995

Compiled and edited by Carole Ferrier, a collection of extracts from the fiction, poetry and auto... more

A whole other story vibrating within it': some approaches to the 'New Literatures

skip nav. ...

Women's house, Brisbane