It's the lovely month of May; time for the next instalment of the SPIN.

NEW RELEASES

Last month we announced the release of the eBook edition of Remember the Tarantella. Reviewed in the Sydney Morning Herald as “A visionary and questing novel of startling energy, intelligence and passion…” Remember the Tarantella is the first in our new Digital Feminist Classics list, an initiative to make out-of-print or hard-to-find feminist titles available.

EVENTS

This month Readings’ Pages to Poetry will feature poets from the recently released Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets. Join Spinifex author Susan Hawthorne, contributor Peter Rose and co-editor Michael Farrell on Monday May 10 at 6.30pm at Readings Carlton. Pages to Poetry is free, with no need to book. 

Eltham Bookshop’s annual Past Matters festival is on May 21–22. This year there’s a focus on culture, history, family, memory and reconciliation. Speakers include Margo O’Byrne, Hannah Rachel Bell and Uncle Max Dulumunmun Harrison. For bookings and more details email elthambookshop@bigpond.com or phone 03 9439 8700.

SPINIFEX BLOG

Two new blogposts to catch up on this month:

Susan Hawthorne has followed on from Jo Case’s post on women’s writing and awards from last month, with a post called ‘Why men don’t read books by women’. Take a look and leave a comment in the box at the bottom of the post!

We also have a guest post by Melinda Tankard Reist, editor of Getting Real. Her post, ‘Women buying men for sex is not equality’ is a further reflection on our hypersexualised culture that was the spotlight of Getting Real.

The Spinifex blog has moved to the new ‘News & Events’ link at the top of our website. You can also find our news page and the newsletter archive there.

FEMINIST NEWS

There’s a great article on ABC Unleashed called ‘The bizarre case against Christine Nixon’. Jeff Sparrow looks at Nixon, Julia Gillard and Simon Overland, and queries whether women in public positions are treated to a level of criticism absent from their male equivalents.

Check out this conversation on Slow TV with a diverse group of women about the state of feminism, both in Australia and abroad. There’s also a link to a podcast of highlights on Radio National.

Spinifex also reported on an article by Emily Maguire on ‘Bad Girl Backlash’ and the movement to get soft porn out of the view of children.

And Mia Freedman talks about wanting to distance herself from the ‘anti-raunch’ groups (which would include Getting Real, which she favourably reviewed on her blog here). There are some interesting discussions in the comments of her post.

HUNGRY FOR MORE?

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