For my first post on this blog it seems fitting that another first can be noted, that of Australia's first female prime minister. Not that that means much in terms of any more palatable policies from the Australian Labor Party (on gender, or any other, issues), and as a certain person sighed to me, its clearly a case of 'same horse, different jockey' when we compare Gillard's policies with those of her predecessor. However, the fact that the jockey is now female at the very least offers those of us interested in the ways in which the media often ham-handedly deals with the changing configurations of gender in today's world considerable fodder with which to work.
One tack to take would be to laugh at the apparent irony of a woman leading a country whose cartoonish image is of beer swilling neanderthals (of the male variety) who drag women by the hair as they thump-thump to the next cricket game or shrimp barbecue. Kathy Lette has kindly provided us with this angle already, and although it seems to be offered with her proverbial tongue in cheek, it nonetheless does little to probe what social and cultural specificities, if any, must be considered when we are presented with a female Australia leader. Lette's article, which trips out all of the most tired images of the sexist Aussie male (which are not necessarily to be refuted, but they are hardly original - it is significant that Lette's article was published in a British newspaper), with the end result that the Australia female in whose name Lette claim's to speak is completely obscured in the mire of Paul Hogan and Men At Work stereotypes. As a result, Lette's final claim that Gillard's ascension to the position of most-powerful-person-in-Australia is representative of a long awaited dissolution of the glass ceiling confronting Australian women is nothing but empty rhetoric: if the bogey-man Australian women apparently face is the cartoonish Aussie bloke, its a wonder Lette's glass ceiling hadn't disappeared long ago. Of course it hasn't, and won't, because the social and cultural reality facing Australian women and men dealing with the social configuration of gender today is far more complex than Lette's image from The Far Side suggests.
The other option commonly taken to Gillard's (non)election has been to make snide remarks about her 'deliberate barren-ness' and unmarried state, a common tactic ever since her installation as Deputy Prime Minister three years ago. While it is generally only those on the right, and the more nutty ones at that, who explicitly argue that Gillard's lack of children should be seen as some sort of smear on her character (most famously Bill Heffernan), her eschewal of traditional family roles appears in a surprising number of center and leftist appraisals of Gillard as well. In this coverage, the very existance of people like Heffernan to take the clearly retrograde stance of calling Gillard 'deliberately barren' seems to make space for commentators to call for 'more reasonable' discussions of Gillard's home life, rather than recognizing it for what it is, a non-issue. Such a discussion appeared perhaps most offensively in a recent article by Bettina Arndt, in which the sex therapist and former self-proclaimed feminist (i.e. someone who should know better) claimed that Gillard's unmarried state made her a bad role model for young women who may be trapped by unscrupulous men into de facto relationships that will undoubtedly leave them abandoned and holding the baby. This in itself was an interesting scare tactic to evoke, considering the fact that the other threat Gillard apparently poses to society, apart from being in a de facto relationship that could leave all Australian women single mothers (a state apparently worse than death?) is that she is childless. So she simultaneously encourages, by her very presence, all women to jump into bed with the next two bit boyfriend who comes along, shack up and make babies, and to be too busy with their careers that they forget (or worse, choose not to!) have babies at all. The first concern has been roundly condemned by many who see Arndt's commentary as out of touch with contemporary Australian reality. However, the second is more ambiguous in a climate in which it is taken as given that new work and family patterns are leaving women unintentionally and unhappily childless - and that the feminists are somehow to blame. Hence pop-blogger Mia Freedman's (who annoys the life out of me, but not the point) otherwise angry response to Arndt's article was nonetheless infused with the same scare tactics about women who forget to have children and end up miserable 40 year olds with only a career to give them succour. I'm always amazed by these assertions that woman may forget to have children, and end up with a geriatric uterus (seriously, that is the medical term) while not realizing they suddenly turned 38 and don't have a baby in the house. People know how old they are and whether or not they want children. Women, like men, make these decisions as they come along, but they don't forget. Its like we all are meant to be on some acid trip until we reach infertile age and then suddenly come off it and feel like we missed something while we were hallucinating all those great things about the fullfilling lives we were leading. Grrrrrrrr.
Anyway, back to Julia. Discussions, whether positive or negative, of Gillard's life choices regarding children and spouse thus also appear regularly even in friendly commentary, in a way and to an extent that they arguably would not for a male candidate. Admittedly I am not in Australia at the moment and this could be all over the papers, but who the hell would care what Tony Abbott's family life was like if he didn't harp about family values all the time (and even then, we hear far less about who he would be bringing to the lodge than Julia). This is a man who wants it to become harder for people to divorce, wants to force all children to read the Bible (in a country in which, according to the last census, little over half of the whole population identifies as Christian and those people are more likely to be over 75 than under 25) and thinks women should treat their virginity as a gift not to be given away lightly (but is more ambivalent on what men should do). Theres no point going into to the egregiousness of Abbott's policies on gender and, well, everything here, because he's frankly a sitting target, but the point of the above list is that Abbott makes family, gender, and sex central aspects of his political rhetoric and policy goals. And we still hear more about Gillard's domestic life, or accusations of a lack thereof, than we do about Abbott's. The reason why is about as complicated as boiling pasta - ie, because she's a woman - so it almost offends people's intelligence to point it out. Nonetheless, I think it is important to remember as we shrug our shoulders and say it doesn't matter whether she is a woman or not (it shouldn't) that for a lot of people, if only at some kind of subconscious level, it apparently does.
On a related note, the truth that the fact that Gillard has a vagina doesn't make her gender politics enlightened was brought into sharp relief last month when she revealed that she had no intention of reopening the issue of gay marriage in the near future. It would be nice if one thing to come out of the unfair attention on her non-traditional family life was that she developed a political awareness of and empathy towards others who do not fit into cookie cutter images of heterosexual families but apparently we'll have to wait and see...
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