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Sue Lovell
Griffith University
Otherness and Cultural Representation in the Fiction of Janette Turner Hospital
Janette Turner Hospital's feminism has accurately been described as 'shifting'
and variable. This paper first examines how Turner Hospital
manages to represent western feminism's own otherness to itself; what in a positive
light may be called an internal diversity that demands the demise
of the use of an upper case F for the very word feminism/s; or what in a negative
light may be called its increasing tendency towards divisiveness
and fragmentation. This paper then evaluates the impact of Turner Hospital's
strategies of cultural representation in relation to postmodern
feminism/s.
I examine how Turner Hospital manages to represent feminism's own otherness
to itself in two ways. Firstly, I work with the texts to present
characters that appear to embody and represent types of feminism: Juliet's struggle
with her Westernised liberatory feminism in The Ivory Swing, Bea's
earth mother image in Charades and Lucy's post structuralist insistence that
she can be various selves in The Last Magician. Secondly, I bring
into focus Turner Hospital's extra diegetic comments on feminism: her insistence
on the necessity to retain one's own voice in the face of being
policed by other women, her concern with the broader sense of the importance
of cultural representation as a form of agency, her struggle to
speak of the other without speaking for the other, her conscious adoption of
bewilderment as a trope that undercuts the authority of being white and
western without putting it under erasure.
Bio: Sue Lovell was born in Cambridge, UK just late enough to miss the fun and games of the sixties. Her parents migrated to Australia in 1973 on one of the last of the ten pound assisted passage berths. She attended high school in Brisbane and graduated from Griffith University (Queensland) in 1981 with a BA and a Diploma of Teaching. She married and then taught at high school for several years until resigning to look after a family in 1984. She returned to Griffith in 1995 and has recently completed a doctorate on the work of Janette Turner Hospital. Currently working as a casual academic at Griffith University and at Southern Cross University (Lismore, NSW), she is preparing articles and conference papers from the thesis. Most recently, she presented in Wellington, New Zealand at the conference of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association. She is due to return to Auckland in July to present a paper for a conference titled 'Poetics of Exile'. Her broad areas of interest include gender studies, the emergence of posthumanism and narrative theory. These areas combine through an interest in how nomadic subjectivity (as an internalised sense of self/selves) is linked to narrative processes (self-talk, reading, autobiography, fiction) that attempt to come to terms with conflicting social identities.
<S.Lovell@mailbox.gu.edu.au>