This essay had to respond to something from given quotations. I used this one:

“Luce Irigaray…attempts to posit an alternative body image which is for woman a full body image, based on two lips rather than a gaping hole…Irigaray’s writings…make it impossible to maintain the Freudian conception of the male body as full. The male body can only be full on the condition that the female body is lacking. To present a female body that is full poses the question, well what about the male body, what is it?”

Moira Gatens

I used Bedford’s If With a Beating Heart, Harris’s Lover and Farmer’s The Seal Woman.

My usual approach was to research the hell out of things and I did that with the first essay in this course. In this essay, either from time constraints or design I just spoke about the books and the only other work consulted was Sheila-Rae the Brave, a children’s book that my daughters loved.

As was usual at the time, no feedback was given on the second essay and my overall score of 6 (out of 7) for the course suggested it was accepted as legitimate. I don’t imagine there many other essays as odd as this one.

I wrote on the feminist spirituality aspects on Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera and Maxine Hing Kingston’s The Woman Warrior.

I was commended on my research and got 17/21 but I find it rather cringeworthy now, and I was obviously trying to drag the subject back to my turf. It’s a good thing I have computer files of these now, or the copious annotations that Levy had to make would be hard to take on a scanned document.

By mid 1996 I had two of the four subjects needed for a PG Dip Arts. I had studied mainly medieval English, but was struggling to find a subject that fit my availability and bravely chose this one.

I should have known better and spent a semester so far out my area, depth and comfort zone that I am still recovering. It was fantastic but terrifying. I recall two male participants originally, but the other one disappeared very quickly. I figured out that, as a male, I struggled with the feminist part of the course. I was too stupid to note how heavy the queer lit emphasis was and that that was also going to be difficult for a boring 35 year old straight male.

The convener was Bronwen Levy, who had a long career at UQ and is now an emeritus. She is the first of my old lecturers that I have found on twitter.

I recall this was one of the first courses where access to the internet made a real difference.

Assessment was two essays (40% and 60%) and a non-assessable but compulsory seminar based on something from one of the essays. It appears I was allocated Gloria Anzaldua for week 9. I recall getting some pushback with my suggestion that she was anything other than perfect.

The book list (pretty much one a week) will give the flavour of the course:

Woolf, Orlando

Franklin, Cockatoos

Marshall, Brown Girl Brownstones

Duffy, The Microcosm

Kingston, The Woman Warrior

Harris, Lover

Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera

Farmer, The Seal Woman

Walwicz, Red Roses

Bedford, If with a Beating Heart

Galford, The Dyke and the Dybbuk

A couple of these were hard to get and may have been scratched. I know I photocopied the entire book, Red Roses, because it was out of print. Unfortunately, it had no punctuation at all and had a bit of the “Finnegan’s Wake” about it so I didn’t get past a couple of pages.