Elevate Difference

Reviews of Spinifex Press

My Sister Chaos

A woman leaves her country at the last minute, as a refugee in a civil war. She and her sister leave together and seek asylum in a new country where they will continue their lives. Laura Fergus’s wonderful first novel takes up the story of this woman (I) and her sister (the sister). We do not learn the sisters’ names. We do learn that they are twins and that they are no longer very young.

Getting Real: Challenging the Sexualisation of Girls

Getting Real is a collection of essays that are charges against the worldwide phenomena of the pornification of childhood through advertising, marketing, and pop culture. This was a great book to read, particularly as the authors are Australian and I sometimes wonder how much of our collective reaction to porn and adult images going mainstream is a reflection of our country's Puritanical leanings.

The Butterfly Effect

While reading the first half of Susan Hawthorne’s newest collection of lesbian poems, The Butterfly Effect, I found myself lost in footnotes. Each poem reads on the right page, while footnotes to the poem fill up the left page. Most of the time, the footnotes are as long as, if not longer, than the actual poem. At first, I thought this was a brilliant idea. Then I started to get slightly annoyed by the footnotes and felt that they were a little pompous and unnecessary.

September 11, 2001: Feminist Perspectives

As an antidote for all the disingenuous head-scratching over “what went wrong” in Iraq—how the United States transmuted the world’s sympathy and support into global revulsion in the wake of September 11, this painful retrospective on what might have been—or rather what should have been—is a powerful tonic. The writings gathered here, a pastiche of genres and a powerfully diverse set of feminist voices, were written in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks and published by an Australian press.

HELP! I'm Living with a (Man) Boy

Seems like writer and feminist psychotherapist Betty McLellan has heard my cries. Help! I’m Living with a (Man) Boy tackles what really needs to happen in dealing with the men (or boys) in your life.

Making Sex Work: A Failed Experiment with Legalised Prostitution

Mary Lucille Sullivan attempts to tackle the world's oldest profession, but provides more questions than answers. When the State of Victoria in Australia became one of the first governments in the world to legalize prostitution in 1984, both residents and the rest of the world wondered how this radical law would affect women's role in this underground, but very active workforce. Making Sex Work: A Failed Experiment with Legalised Prostitution investigates whether the ladies of the night in Victoria are expanding or diminishing the sex industry.
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