Issue 8:
BODIES
This issue of Demos explores the ways in which the body moves through the world – how it labors and loves, how it treads the duplicitous thresholds of legality, how it is radicalised, and eternalised, how it is corralled and transgressed.
Maralinga
Between 1952 and 1963, British forces dropped nine nuclear weapons and nine thermonuclear weapons between Woomera and the Western Australian border, within contamination distance of urban centers. The Menzies-led Australian government of that time was wholly complicit...
Resignation Syndrome
The nation turns its face towards the wall and does not see the dying child. But she is here. She lies amongst the flowers that spread their seas of blue across suburban gardens. Her shallow fevered breath inhales the distant scent of moss and earth. The colours on...
On Being __ Your Body
Technology is making us robots. It feels like an absolute cop out to begin a piece by gesticulating about the age of technology – but hear me out. In a recent media consumption frenzy, I came across RadioLab’s recent experimentation with the Turing Test which...
Bodily Integrity: The Forced Medication of Prisoners with Mental Illness
I. Introduction “Every person with disabilities has a right to respect for his or her physical and mental integrity on an equal basis with others.” — Article 17, Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities All individuals are entitled to bodily integrity—the...
For Car
Image credit: Kon Kudo. Dear soft rubber, hard metal dress me: one part at a time interject with vanit y, shoulders nearby hold arm above head press face against windscreen stay MALLEABLE ...
Reflections from Manus and Nauru
Image by Farhad Bandesh. The following artworks, writing, poetry and music come from four asylum seekers—Mustafa, Abbas, Farhad, and Behrouz—who have been detained for the past five years by the Australian Government on Manus Island and Nauru. Hundreds of refugees...
The hands have memory
What else have I dreamt of, waking in twisted sheets as the blue dawn walks the slope at the end of our beach? The hands have memory, the breath too. In the sky, a letter in cloud, a rune of ending, written without hands, without breathing. The hands have memory, the...
The Rise and Fall
The East Asia-Australia Flyway is a migratory shorebird highway that over 8 million birds use to travel between the Arctic Circle and Australia.[1] Countless tiny birds make this amazing journey each year, however their path is now being impacted by climate change...
Unraveling threads – revealing body through dance
One of the ways I experience dance is as a series of body images.‘instilled,’ a solo dance performance (2010) contains many elements that express how I image body, both mine and others. These include images that are visceral, infant-like, in-culturated as woman, as...
Goulburn Hospital
Goulburn Hospital The women of my family end up in hospital beds Surrounded by the people they spend their lives looking after It’s not meant to be ironic But it feels strange Our bodies owned by something else In the hospital beds I’ve visited the women I’m part of...
How a Body Becomes a Boat: An Interview with Justine Poon
Justine Poon is a PhD student at the Australian National University. Her thesis topic: “How a body becomes a boat” examines the ways in which law, political discourse, imagery, and metaphors shape how asylum seekers are treated and perceived in Australia. Far from the...
The Grey Area – Nuances of sex, Consent and Power
Linda Martín Alcoff, 2018. Rape and Resistance: Understanding the Complexities of Sexual Violation. Cambridge, Polity Press. Available Online: https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Rape+and+Resistance-p-9780745691916 In 1977, Foucault made the controversial proposition that...
L
Walking the dog up the track through the gums and kangaroos, down through suburbs crawling into the morning. The dog (a dingo cross?) browses the roo poo, which people think gross but which provides a certain consolation: at least one of us knows how to transact with...
Bodies – is that all we are?
‘Bodies, is that all we are?’ This was the response from a colleague of mine when I was discussing a monograph I had recently published entitled Cultural Responses to Occupation in Japan: The Performing Body during and after the Cold War (2016). The wry humour was...
Bodies on the Line in Palestine
Throughout history, humans have utilised their bodies to fight against different forms of oppression and shape their political and social landscape. From Ghandi to the Occupy Movement, the marginalised and oppressed have used their bodies to gain visibility and shine...
Two Poems
Well Then Introduce Myself to Me If you – happen to consider yourself female. And you are, alone at midnight (Tuesday morning) It can be good practice to strip down naked even though it is nearly ten degrees and you fucked your heater with red wine...Past Issues
