Writing Gender

Inaugurated in 2021, Writing Gender is an annual public seminar event of the Writing and Society Research Centre's collaboration with the Sydney Review of Books and the Gender UNLIMITED* team at Western. The series adopts a different theme each year with the aim to bring gender equity practitioners across the Australian HE sector into productive dialogue with writers and Arts and Humanities researchers. Together we explore the ways in which writing can create new knowledges around gender, as well as guide the increasingly complex social and cultural understandings of gender equity and gender diversity in our local and academic communities. The event's focus on the literary arts sector and creative praxis further aims to both promote and provoke progressive and dynamic conversations around gender and the factors that intersect with gender to compound inequality. Each year, Western’s HDR candidates are additionally invited to attend a writing masterclass related to the event theme.

Writing Gender #1

17 September 2021

Writing Gender #1 considers 2 key questions around gender and writing: (i) How does creative writing generate new knowledge and understandings around gender? (ii) How can writing help reshape public discourse about gender and culture, especially through its capacity to explore cultural testimony, embodied experience, alternative histories, and future worlds? Guest speakers included Roanna Gonsalves, Jazz Money, and Yves Rees. The panel discussion was facilitated by Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, and the Sydney Review of Books published essays produced for this event.

Writing Gender #2

9 September 2022

Writing Gender #2 considers how writing plays a significant role in making visible acts of cultural, physical and gendered violence against women​ and trans and gender diverse people, through both the telling of stories, and the re-witnessing of trauma. It explores such writing within contexts of cultural safety and healing, and the vital necessity of articulation, including the power of trauma-informed narratives to engender greater public awareness and instigate social action. It finally reflects on the potential toll of this repeated narrative re-visiting, especially in public spaces, including digital communities. What happens when trauma is the conduit to writing in the public sphere? What new kinds of violence can occur when trauma is mobilised through writing for public consumption? Guest speakers include Amani Haydar, Eda Gunaydin, Mykaela Saunders and Eloise Brook, with Donna Abela as facilitator.