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Posts tagged feminism
See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Abuse by Jess Hill

Jess Hill’s See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Abuse (2019) is a wide-ranging examination of love, power, the perpetrators of domestic abuse and the systems that enable them. It won the 2020 Stella Prize, was made into a 3-part SBS documentary and is essential reading. Domestic abuse is a national emergency:

‘In Australia, a country of almost 25 million people, one woman a week is killed by a man she’s been intimate with. These statistics tell us something that’s almost impossible to grapple with: it’s not the monster lurking in the dark women should fear, but the men they fall in love with.’

Hill’s book is beautifully written, forensically researched, comprehensive and excellent. It puts domestic abuse in its historical context and canvasses a vast, complicated and ever changing terrain …

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My womb is not terra nullius

MY WOMB IS NOT TERRA NULLIUS

Any discussion of abortion must start with those capable of becoming pregnant, and our bodies. These days this is rarely the case. Such conversations, often conducted by cisgender men, usually start with religion or morality, and the vicissitudes of eggs recently fertilized by sperm, when in fact abortion is a matter of our human right to reproductive health and safe, affordable medical procedures.

Writing about abortion in 2018 is for me fraught with emotion – not with regret and loss, but with the charged history of my heart, so closely connected to my womb. It raised two of my great and sometimes conflicting passions: my love for my vocation, writing, and my love for the man who eventually became the father of my children. And yes, there was some fear there as well – palpable, bodily fear.

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