ABSTRACT
Feminism is rarely represented as missing. from public debates in ‘today’s multicultural Australia’. This is a media phrase for a discursive field that shapes as well as celebrates contending models of national culture. Within this field, the fact that models do contend – in such genres as the report, the public submission, the interview, the guest column or personality spot, the letters page and the talk show, the documentary or drama series, the critical review, the current affairs programme and the formal TV debate – is valued as marking the difference of ‘today’ from the bad old days of monocultural national identity. So feminists who use these genres are often confronted by images of feminism’s role in national life that are cheerfully incommensurate. Australian feminism is simultaneously superseded (by post-feminist concerns, for example), bureaucratically entrenched and repressive (according to its men’s movement critics), dispersed or diversified (by feminisms of difference) and too rigidly a white/Anglo-Celtic/middle-class/baby-boomer/heterosexual movement – while still having ‘a long way to go’ in securing for women anything like equal empowerment in public institutions, equal representation in Parliament or really equal pay. Feminism is much contested. That is why it is a force in public life.
