feminism

IN REPLY TO GARNER

MOST READERS WILL BE FAMILIAR with the Ormond College sexual harassment case by now: it centred on the allegations made by two women students at Ormond College that the College Master, Alan Gregory, had sexually harassed them after the formal proceedings of the college's valedictory dinner in 1991. After several months of trying to get the college to deal adequately and seriously with their complaints, the students went to the police. Gregory was subsequently charged with two counts of assault and was found to be guilty of one of these counts -- a conviction which was later overturned on appeal. Despite the success of the appeal, though, both complainants were believed not to have lied about their respective allegations. In 1993 Gregory resigned from Ormond College and in 1995 Helen Garner's controversial book about the case, The First Stone, was published.

Jenna Mead's bodyjamming provides the long-awaited response to the kinds of issues that were both raised in and erased by The First Stone. Its contributors include, among others, feminist and Cultural Studies writer Meaghan Morris; Gangland author Mark Davis; renowned feminist academics Rosi Braidotti, Elspeth Probyn, Jenny Morgan and Ann Curthoys; cartoonists Judy Horacek (whose work here is a treat) and Kaz Cooke, journalist Matthew Ricketson, and XX, one of the complainants in the Ormond case whose thoughts on it are offered here for the first time. It's an impressive and critically diverse line-up. And the topics each of the writers tackle are equally diverse which is perhaps in part due to the fact that not all of the writers here focus specifically on The First Stone -- although clearly that text has been the point of departure for the production of the collection as a whole. The essays range from Braidotti's reflections on the repercussions of Garner's decision in 1972 to provide her first-formers at Fitzroy High with an unauthorised lesson on sexuality -- the details of which she subsequently wrote about for Digger, to Amanda Lohrey's fictional piece on one woman's obsession with her body weight, to Alice Blake's discussion about the significance of feminism for the union movement, to Jenny Morgan's critique of sexual harassment policy through the notion of citizenship, to Natasha Stott Despoja's reflections on the kinds of enabling constraints that impact upon women in Parliament and in politics more generally.

Certainly bodyjamming is not just thematically wide-ranging; it's a blatantly controversial book as well. Indeed, some of the book's contributors -- particularly Mead and Braidotti -- have already been dealt a substantial, if verbal, knuckle-rapping by several reviewers and columnists. Robert Manne said that he was `genuinely shocked' by the book and maintained that its ultimate purpose was `to destroy Garner's reputation'; the (fortunately) inimitable Frank Devine said that bodyjamming was 'pretentious and spiteful'; Kate Legge suggested that the book should have been called 'bodybagging' and even Virginia Trioli who supports the project of taking to task the (mis)representations of the Ormond case by both Garner and the media, made note in her review of what she calls 'the rage and resentment that seethes in this book'.

While it would be disingenuous of me to deny that I was irritated by Mead's repeated and clearly cynical references in the introduction of bodyjamming to Garner as a Walkley-Award-winning Journalist, famous author and cultural icon, as well as by Braidotti's truly bizarre suggestion that Garner, as a 'mediocre artist,' is something of a vampire, I'd also want to stress that bodyjamming does so much more than simply bitch about The First Stone and its author. Most of the book's contributors offer well-researched and conceptually meaty engagements with their chosen topics. Certainly Mead's interview with Morris -- which covers issues like the manufacture of public space, student-teacher sexual relations, and the conceptual slippages between sex, sexual harassment and sexism -- is exceptional. Further, Foong Ling Kong's juxtaposition of the Ormond affair with the Hill-Thomas case in America and her analysis of the biases prevalent in the language of The First Stone, Davis' consideration of how the rise of 'victim-feminist' narratives and rhetorics is part and parcel of a more complicated and worrying socio-political trend towards neoconservatism and economic rationalism and Mead's Foucauldian-inflected discussion of how the media's focus on the Ormond Case and Garner's book about it obfuscated the degree to which that case was, in fact, about sexual harassment, rather than about the evils of young, 'politically correct' feminists and the 'generational' rifts within the feminist movement, are compelling to say the least.

Kate Madonnell teaches in the Department of English at the University of Melbourne

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