Public lecture: do "blokes" still call the shots?

Tuesday, 17 February 2009

A free public lecture at the University of Adelaide tomorrow (Wednesday 18 February) will discuss how dramatically gender relations have changed in Australia since colonisation.

The public lecture is being held as part of a two-day conference to celebrate the work and achievements in the field of gender studies by University of Adelaide Professor Emerita Chilla Bulbeck, who retired from the University last year.

Leading experts from around Australia and overseas will attend the conference, with the free public lecture being given by one of the most widely cited scholars in the field of gender studies, Professor Raewyn Connell from the University of Sydney.

Professor Connell is the author/co-author of 21 scholarly books and more than 130 papers, including Masculinities (1995) and most recently, Southern Theory (2007), which explores the possibility of a genuinely global social science.

Professor Connell's lecture will look at the origins of gender relations in Australia from colonisation through the influence of the Menzies era, when "blokes" ran the country, to the present, where their dominance has been questioned.

In her lecture, Professor Connell will praise Professor Bulbeck's contribution to understanding gender relations, and will discuss how far those relations have come in Australia. She says of Professor Bulbeck: "Few people have done so much to illuminate what contemporary feminism has to deal with."

The conference also includes a number of other key speakers renowned for their work in feminism and gender studies, including:

• Professor Hester Eisenstein, Professor of Sociology, Queens College, City University of New York, and author of Inside Agitators: Australian Femocrats and the State (1996), Gender Shock: Practicing Feminism on Two Continents (1991), Contemporary Feminist Thought (1983) and Feminism Seduced (2009); and

• Dr Sarah Maddison from the University of New South Wales, whose recent publications include Silencing Dissent: How the Australian government is controlling public opinion and stifling debate (2007), Collective identity and Australian feminist activism (2008) and Black politics: Inside the complexity of Aboriginal political culture (2009).

WHAT: Free Public Lecture: "Long marches: gender politics and gender research in Australia" by Professor Raewyn Connell (University of Sydney)
WHERE: Napier Lecture Theatre 102, North Terrace Campus, University of Adelaide
WHEN: 5.00pm to 6.30pm Wednesday 18 February

For full details about the conference program, visit: www.hss.adelaide.edu.au/gwsi/news/

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