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December 17, 2003
I read this article on Australian national identity, femininity and cosmopolitanism by Melissa Campbell on the weekend. It's a good cultural studies piece and I've been puzzling about it ever since, especially in the light of Jean's comments questioning my remarks about a unified Australian national identity in this post. Some comments on it can be over at Back Pages in a play on an old text called 'From Deserts Prophets Come.'
Melissa's text resonates with some themes explored at junk for code----- here and there and here.
The core of the argument is the shift in feminine identity from the old rural Australian nationalist tradition to the cosmopolitan one. Melissa says:
"In this unstintingly blokey tradition of Australian identity, women's roles were limited and peripheral. As writer Anne Summers has famously outlined, they were put in two pigeonholes: damned whores or God's police. In the first category, women were Jezebels who led men astray. In the second, women's moral scrupulousness made them guardians of British colonial patriarchy."
If women's morality supported Australian colonial nationalism, then so did their underwear:
Corset Gallery
Corsets controlled women's bodies and also contained and controlled their sexuality. As Melissa succintly puts it "the corset attempted to maintain moral health - to prevent God's police from slipping into whoredom."
Things did not change much with the surfie culture or suburbia:
'In the early 1970s, Australian identity was led in a new intellectual direction - towards the ocker. "Ocker" was a playful, deliberately shocking sensibility that no longer romanticised the bush, but looked for Australianness on the beach and in the suburbs......Ocker was profoundly misogynist. Women - or, rather, sheilas - still had only two roles: sexpots and doormats. Tim Burstall's 1973 film Alvin Purple narrates the male fantasy of being irresistibly attractive to women. But the sheila's compliance wasn't only sexual. In 1975, historian Miriam Dixson described Australian women as "the doormats of the Western world". While suburban ockers revelled in their new-found liberties, their wives took Valium and cleaned up after them. While surfies frolicked in the waves, their girlfriends sat on the beach and fetched them meat pies and Chiko rolls.'
What did change was women's underwear: from concealing the female body's flaws to enhancing its sexual attributes. Women's underwear was used to make the female body an object of male desire. Brightly coloured and printed underwear moved from markers of whoredom to markers of sexual freedom. Thus we have:
 
Elle McPherson Intimate
Thus we have a shift in feminine identity. McPherson is selling a representation of what it means to be a sexy, cosmopolitan Australian woman: vigour, health and natural beauty infused with continental style. In the process Macpherson recasts Australia as a sophisticated, creative country.
That's the core argument. A feminine Australian identity has successfully created a space for itself through a critique of the old masculist one. I accept the argument.
What Mellissa then adds is a postmodern thesis that there are different representations of what it is to be a sexy, cosmopolitan Australian woman to play around with. Mcpherson, for instance, pushes the limits
 with her voyeuristic images of the French Maid range that tread a fine line between advertising and porn. Once again I accept that there are many differences within Australian feminine identity---eg., Kylie Minogue as the pop princess and her range of lingerie.
I have several areas of unease with what sits behind the Melissa's argument
First, Elle McPherson signifies cosmopolitanism not Australian. The two are opposed to one another since cosmpolitanism signifies of the world whereas Australia signifies of the nation state. Unlike Mcpherson in Australia most women would belong to Australia rather than to the world. What we can say is that Australian women are more than international consumers who using Mcpherson's underwear to construct their feminine identity.
Secondly, Melissa says that the text is empty when she says that:
"Importantly, these three international Australians don't trade explicitly on their Australianness in the way of, say, a Russell Crowe - indeed, none of them lives here. Instead, inserting themselves ironically into pre-existing ideas of lingerie-clad women, they offer themselves as clean slates on which international consumers can inscribe their own meanings."
The images of lingerie and bodies are not clean slates:
They are a form of advertising that seek to persuade and entice women to buy the product. The image has a particular form and style. They can only persuade and entice if they have cultural meaning that resonates with what women are seeking.
Mellissa describes this process very well with Sara O'Hare's modelling Bond's Chesty underwear:
Mellissa says:
"...O'Hare has also presided over Bonds' emphatic move towards man-style underwear for women. In a television commercial last year, she aped male slobbiness in a singlet and Y-front-style underpants, kicking back on the couch, watching sport. And, this year, she and a bevy of women companions could be seen cracking rocks in a quarry in boxer-style hotpants, wiping their foreheads with their shirt tails and wolf whistling at roadside service men.This commercial, which used the tag line "For hard-working girls", was so successful that it was pulled from the air because shops sold out of the boxer shorts she was modelling."
So much for the lingereie-clad models clean slates on which international consumers can inscribe their own meanings.
Thirdly, Melissa continues the cultural studies recoil from nature as the landscape country. Nature is cucure. The way it has been cconstructed. henc she say that "only now are we disentangling ourselves from the land we call home." TWe do not disconnect in the place we call home. We continue to reside in particular places on the continent even as we question, critique and reshape the cultural traditions that encode our place.
to be continued.
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Nice work digging up the corset images! That history of the "damned whores and god's police" thing is important I think when trying to work out what contemporary Australian femininity is all about.
Question: "McPherson signifies cosmopolitanism not Australian. The two are opposed to one another." In the post about The Truman Show you express frustration at the dumbed down versions of Australian-ness represented by our contemporary cinema. Going back to my own uncertainty about what "an" Australian cinema might look like, let me ask you this: What would a progressive, "cultured" Australian identity look like as/in film? Could it be "cultured" without simply being transplanted modern Europe? Could it celebrate the land without and claiming it as "ours"? Could it celebrate our "traditions" (our folk heroes, mateship), without being masculinist in the extreme? Any one of these is so problematic that libraries of books can and have been generated trying to grapple with them. What are your thoughts?