The State and Violence Against Women
1/12/2006
State-sponsored violence against women occurs frequently in Australia, without question. This was only emphasised by the recent police violence against women at the G20 protests in Melbourne. [ Read more]
Measuring violence against women
Improving Conditions for sex workers
Jul 14th 2004
from the newswire
Two of the most rotten things about capitalism are the way it forces us
to do things we wouldn't want to do unless we needed the money and the
way everything is turned into a commodity. Moralism and puritanism are
politically useless when discussing the question of prostitution
because they are ultimately disempowering to sex workers.
Organisations like The Scarlet Alliance are tremendously important and
there's nowhere near enough of this kind of organising. These groups
work at the coal face of the sex industry to improve the conditions sex
workers and give them a sense of their own worth and strength. In many
ways these groups are like the trade unions you would find in
conventional industries. In other ways, they go beyond what normal
unions do because of the nature of the sex industry. [Full
Story]
Sheila Jeffreys, Associate Professor in the Department of Political
Science at the University of Melbourne, argues that The Legalisation
of Prostitution is A failed social experiment. Read the discussion
about Queer
theory and violence against women.
[Scarlet Alliance |
International Union of Sex Workers |
Historical essay: Emma Goldman on
The Traffic in Women]
International Women's Day
Mar 8th 2004
Around Melbourne this week women are celebrating International Women's Day in rallies, a fair at Ceres Environmental Farm, breakfasts, and other events. March 8 was first celebrated as International Women's Day in 1911, and in Australia in 1928, and associated with a general strike in 1909 for 13 weeks by the women Garment Workers Union in New York. On Saturday March 6 a rally and march was held in Melbourne, although numbers attending were disappointing, and the rally reflected only a small proportion of the diversity of feminist and women's organisations in Melbourne. ( Photos).
Issues addressed by speakers at the Saturday rally included the Stolen Wages Campaign, the sexual abuse of women by footballers, the Women for Peace vigil against war outside the US Consulate, and women in unions.
In Brisbane several hundred women rallied in the city Square and held a march.
[Discuss |
Women's stories - women's actions |
A History of International Women's Day in Australia]
Miss Universe: The Body Politic
Nov 25th 2003
from the newswire
The Miss World competition was established in 1951 by Eric Morely with the
purpose of discovering the most ‘beautiful’ woman in the world. The competition
was held in a Bingo Hall, to encourage people to visit the Festival of Britain;
in 1951 Miss World was crowned in a bikini. During the 1980s the competition was
revamped, and claimed to pay more attention to the personalities of women, in
2003 competition publicists claim that the Miss World contest embodies ‘beauty
with a purpose.’ In the 21st Century the competition is televised worldwide and
is the third most watched show in the world, with approximately 2.5 billion viewers.
Controversy has surrounded the competition, at times with right-wing
fundamentalists and feminists protesting against the contest’s representations
of womanhood, as illustrated in Nigeria earlier this year. In the Australian
context it is claimed that the competition’s purpose is to ‘capture the modern
Australian woman,’ who is ‘a much broader person’ than simply a professional
beauty. Is the Miss World competition ‘congruent with what really is going on
for a young woman,’ a celebration of beauty, intelligence and womanhood, or
simply an affirmation of stifling gender norms, nationalism and sadistic beauty
myths? [ ...More]
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The Howard government's Workplace Relations laws will have a 
