Spinifex Press – förlag

Just over a decade ago, and gaining steam thereafter, a massive debate began raging about what a woman is, whether or not sex is real, and if it is, whether it matters less than claimed ‘gender identities’. This debate has been raging globally. It has been raging loudly for those of us in the middle of it, but much more quietly for the multitudes who do not yet quite understand it. As the contributors from around the world explain, the debate started in the 1990s, but it took some time to erupt in the mainstream. These are the ‘gender wars’, or, if you like, the ‘trans wars’.The ‘gender wars’ arose because women and men who call themselves ‘transgender’ started to impose their beliefs on others. Men who call themselves women (‘transgender women’) demanded that women and girls agree with them. They demanded access to female-only spaces such as toilets, locker rooms, and changing rooms. They demanded access to lesbian spaces such as clubs and dating apps. They demanded to be permitted to participate and compete in women’s sports. They wanted access to everything that is meant to be exclusively for women and girls. And so, out of the wilderness grew a community of women labeled ‘TERFs’. The acronym originally stood for ‘trans exclusionary radical feminist’. It was meant to refer to the radical feminists who, early on, fought the idea that some men could be women if they put on a dress, or if they had their penises removed, or even if they just said they were women (self-ID). Many women would go on to reclaim the acronym for ourselves. We are the TERFS, or its plural, Terven. We are all over the world, and we are the women winning the gender wars on behalf of women and girls as a sex class and on behalf of the material reality of sex.

In Search of My Mother is the autobiography of Olivia Maurel, who was born to a surrogate mother in Kentucky, USA as a ‘made to order’ baby for a wealthy French couple. She did not know about the circumstances of her birth until she was 30 years old when a DNA Ancestry test revealed US relatives and no French genetic heritage.Now 35, married and with three children of her own, Olivia looks back on her lonely childhood spent living between France and the USA. In spite of her affluent lifestyle, she felt she did not belong and missed a spiritual connection to her mother.Drawing on her own traumatic experiences, Olivia Maurel has become a fierce abolitionist. She calls surrogacy the objectification of women’s bodies, the deprivation of surrogate mothers’ freedom, and the falsification of their consent. Surrogacy also involves high-risk pregnancies and the contractual purchase of a child. As the spokeswoman for The Declaration of Casablanca – an international group wanting to abolish all forms of surrogacy globally – Olivia travels the world in pursuit of this task, highlighting that surrogacy violates the human rights of women and children.In Search of My Mother is a powerful and moving testimony to the misery surrogacy creates for the children born in this unethical way.

Transgenderism in the twenty-first century is patriarchy emblazoned in imperial form.At a time when supposedly enlightened attitudes are championed by the mainstream, philosopher and activist Heather Brunskell-Evans shows how, in plain view under the guise of liberalism, a regressive men’s rights movement is posing a massive threat to the human rights of women and children everywhere.This movement is transgender politics which, while spouting platitudes about equality, is in reality colonising and erasing the bodies, agency and autonomy of women and children, while asserting men’s rights to bodily intrusion into every social and personal space. The transgender agenda redefines diversity and inclusion utilising the language of victimhood.In a complete reversal of feminist gender critical analyses, sex and gender are redefined: identity is now called ‘innate’ (a ‘feeling’ located somewhere in the body) and biological sex is said to be socially constructed (and hence changeable). This ensures a lifetime of drug dependency for transitioners, thereby delivering vast profits for Big Pharma in a capitalist dream.Everyone, including every trans person, has the right to live freely without discrimination. But the transgender movement has been hijacked by misogynists who are appropriating and inverting the struggles of feminism to deliver an agenda devoid of feminist principles. In a chilling twist, when feminists critique the patriarchal status quo it is now they who are alleged to be extremists for not allowing men’s interests to control the political narrative. Institutions whose purpose is to defend human rights now interpret truth speech as hate speech, and endorse the no-platforming of women as ethical.This brave, truthful and eye-opening book does not shirk from the challenge of meeting the politics of liberalism and transgender rights head on. Everyone who cares about the future of women’s and children’s rights must read it.

In this thought-provoking collection of articles drawn from her blog, The 11th Hour, Jennifer Bilek delves into the intricate relationship between transsexualism, transgenderism, and transhumanism. She sheds light on how the push for perceived human rights for marginalized groups often obscures broader societal dynamics.Jennifer Bilek traces the evolution of transsexualism from a personal fetish into an industry that commodifies human reproductive sex, particularly womanhood. This process divorces it from its biological roots and its connection to the environment, reducing human reproductive sex to medically and technologically manipulated components.She highlights how young people are sold the notion of expressing themselves and alleviating feelings of dissociation through the purchase of these manufactured identities with the term ‘transgender’.Through an exploration of the transhumanist movement, Bilek investigates how its proponents blur the boundaries between humanity and mechanization. Society is undergoing a profound transformation away from the biological realities of reproductive sex, driven by emerging technologies that shape children's perceptions of their bodies from an early age. The narrative of gender identity transcendence exploits their vulnerability, pushing them toward an increasingly medicalized future.Her thorough analysis exposes the technological and financial motivations behind a political agenda masquerading as a human rights movement. This agenda seeks to redefine reproductive norms and propel society toward a posthuman future, ultimately undermining womanhood and eroding women's rights.

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is based on the relationship between mind, body and emotions. Chinese Medicine for Women takes a common-sense approach to women's health based on these principles. A practitioner of shiatsu therapy, acupuncturist and TCM herbalist, Bronwyn Whitlocke outlines the practices and applications for women's health, including stress, diet and lifestyle. There are chapters on menstruation, pregnancy, menopause and infertility, as well as on migraines, colds, obesity and depression. Bronwyn Whitlocke is also the author of Shiatsu Therapy for Pregnancy.

A new definition of woman has taken hold in Western societies. Instead of a matter of biology and material reality, we are told it is an identity. Anyone who declares himself to be a woman is a woman; the body has henceforth become irrelevant. Gender, we are told, is a spectrum, and it resides in the mind. In countries such as Norway, Canada, Argentina and Australia, laws have been enacted that give anyone the right to change his or her legal sex, irrespective of whether the person has had a medical procedure. At the same time, the industry for gender reassignment surgery is growing at an unprecedented pace. Seven out of 10 teenagers who seek treatment are now girls.The new definition of sex has been hailed as progressive. But is it really? And is it new?In this groundbreaking book, Swedish feminist and Marxist author Kajsa Ekis Ekman traces the ideological roots of this new definition.

NEW PREFACE In 1998, Sweden passed ground-breaking legislation that criminalized the purchase of sexual services which sought to curb demand and support women to exiting the sex industry. Grounded in the reality of the violence and abuse inherent in prostitution – and reeling from the death of a friend to prostitution in Spain – Kajsa Ekis Ekman exposes the many lies in the ‘sex work’ scenario: Trade unions aren’t trade unions. Groups for prostituted women are simultaneously groups for brothel owners. And prostitution is always presented as a characteristic of the woman. The men who buy sex are left out.Drawing on Marxist and feminist analysis, Ekis Ekman argues that the Self is split from the body which makes it possible to sell your body without selling yourself. The body become sex. Sex becomes a service. The story of the sex worker says: the Split Self is not only possible, it is ideal.Turning to the practice of surrogate motherhood, Kajsa Ekis Ekman identifies the same components: that the woman is neither connected to her own body nor to the child she grows in her body and gives birth to. Surrogacy becomes an extended form of prostitution. In this capitalist creation story, the parent is the one who pays. The product sold is not sex but a baby. Ekis Ekman asks: why should this not be called baby trade? This brilliant exposé is written with a razor sharp intellect and disarming wit and will make us look at prostitution and surrogacy and the parallels between them in a new way.

This is a revolutionary book that challenges our preconceptions about the past. We often think of history as a linear development in which we are steadily moving out of a violent and patriarchal past to a more equitable and peaceful future. While we have no shortage of wars -- and the incidence of violence against women is alarmingly high -- we are told that humans have never lived in such peaceful times. We continually hear that our predecessors were violent but also that patriarchy is inevitable and universal. But what if none of this were true? What if we were descended from peaceful societies in which women were respected and equal to men? Would this inspire us to seek new ways of organising our lives and of interpreting the present? Based on many years of research into ancient history and prehistory, Judy Foster and linguist Marlene Derlet take on the world. They argue that three million years of peace, a period when women's status in society was much higher than it is now, preceded the last six thousand years of war during which men have come to hold power over women. They challenge the academic resistance to these ideas and re-examine both the archaeological work of Marjia Gimbutas and recent research into the prehistories of Africa, East and South Asia, the Americas, Australia, South-East Asia and Oceania.

Bringing together women across cultures and generations – from lifelong lesbians exploring their experiences through a lesbian feminist lens, to women consciously leaving heterosexuality behind to embrace lesbianism – I Wish I Was a Lesbian addresses those questions and more. Once understood as the cornerstone of patriarchal control of women, any current political analysis of heterosexuality is now buried under an avalanche of essentialist ideas that serve to invisibilise its political nature and de-radicalise feminism. From autobiographical and theoretical essays to poetry and artworks, I Wish I Was a Lesbian defies taboo and silencing and reopens the conversation. It challenges the notion that heterosexuality is the natural and inevitable fate of most women.There are many forces keeping women in heterosexual relationships. The latest is to accuse lesbians who have had previous relations with men of being ‘not real lesbians’, ‘pretenbians’ or ‘bisexuals’. But the idea that lesbians are ‘born that way’ is not based in either reality or science. There are no lesbian genes or lesbian brains. For women currently rejecting men and saying they wished they were lesbians but don’t know how to get there, this book offers a vital tool for political reflection and consciousness raising. It invites women everywhere to connect the personal with the political and to ask themselves the most radical question of all: “What is heterosexuality – and do I really want to be part of it?”

How do you pick up the pieces after your life is shattered by war? How do you continue living when your country no longer exists, your language is no longer spoken and your family is divided, not just by distance but by politics too? What happens when your old identity is taken from you and a new one imposed, one that you never asked for? When Olivera Simić was seven years old, President Tito died. Old divisions re-emerged as bitter ethnic conflicts unfolded. War arrived in 1992. People were no longer Yugoslavs but Serbs, Croatians, Bosniaks. Old friends became enemies overnight. In this heartfelt account of life before, during and after the Bosnian War and the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, Simić talks of her transition from peace to war and back again. She shows how she found the determination to build a new life when the old one was irretrievable.

In this blisteringly persuasive and piercingly intelligent book, Sheila Jeffreys argues that women live under penile imperialism, a regime in which men are assumed to have a ‘sex right’ of access to the bodies of women and girls. She reasons that the ‘sexual revolution’ that began in the 1960s unleashed an explicit male sexual liberation and that even now, under current laws and cultural mores, women do not have the right to self-determination in relation to their bodies. Sheila Jeffreys argues that the exercise of the male sex right has mainstreamed misogynist attitudes and so-called sexual freedom has meant the freedom of men to use women and children with impunity. The power dynamics of sex, rather than being eliminated, has been eroticised, supported by state regulations and structures that have further entrenched male domination. And while men’s sexual fetishisms such as BDSM and transvestism have been normalised, women now have to fight as their spaces are being erased and their voices silenced in a faux inclusivity that has ‘naturalised’ sexual harassment. Sheila Jeffreys contends that women’s human rights are profoundly harmed and sexual violence is used more than ever to enforce social control of women. This is a sobering and brilliant analysis of the modern predicament of women that is impossible to ignore.

The sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s is remembered as a time of great freedom for women. But did the sexual revolution have the same goals as the Women’s Liberation Movement? Was it truly liberation for women or just another insidious form of oppression? In this provocative book, Sheila Jeffreys argues that sexual freedom sometimes directly opposed actual freedom for women. Anticlimax traces sexual mores and attitudes from the 1950s to the 1990s, exploring the nature of both straight and gay relationships and offering original and compelling commentary on Lolita, Naked Lunch, The Joy of Sex, the Masters/Johnson report, and other representations in the literature on sexuality. At the root of sexual liberation, Sheila Jeffreys finds an increasing eroticisation of power differences within heterosexual, lesbian and gay communities. Her alternative vision of sexual relations based on equality is a major statement in the debates over sex and violence, that remain relevant in discussions over SlutWalk, sexualisation of girls and the pervasiveness of porn culture.

An award-winner when first published, this book has become a classic text for health activists and feminists interested in the complexities of how drugs are developed, marketed and sold to women around the world. In this book the authors review the unusual history of the French abortion pill, RU 486 (mifepristone). They scrutinize the science and politics from inception through to its use on women.

They call them ‘women of love,’ but the lyrical beauty of the term has a hidden dark side: a workforce of very young girls tasked with feeding their families by offering up their bodies for sale. The girls belong to the Nat which includes some of India’s very poorest. For centuries, the Nat men have sent their daughters, sisters, and wives into sex trafficking. Baby girls are welcome arrivals in these towns of love—everyone knows that one day, they will be the breadwinners. As a Nat, you are untouchable, despised by Indian society. How would anyone dare break free of this legacy of prostitution, when it also would mean being shunned by your entire family?

When two women and a dog set off on a holiday they have no inkling of what’s to come. They wake to find the river has crept up silently during the night. Trapped by floodwater, they devise escape routes only to be faced with more obstacles at every turn. Only the dog remains calm. This novella grips you with its language, its pace, its anxieties.

1920, deep in the New Zealand bush, a settlement of Christian fundamentalists live a life of austerity and isolation. It is a place where there is little space for compassion, particularly for the women who can never rid themselves of Eve’s original sin. The elders rule over the women, children and young men, meting out punishments for transgressions as ordinary as self-reflection. Sisters Juno and Hannah have grown up in the community, but when a stranger washes up on the river bank and Hannah goes to his aid, she finds herself accused of necromancy. The girls flee but are quickly forced to accept help. Hannah, unsure who is friend or foe, finds herself dependent upon and attracted to the man into whose lips she breathed life. Juno and Hannah is a remarkable novella. The vivid New Zealand landscape reflects the journey of the sisters with its bounty of beauty and resources but also with its scars, wrought during the early days of colonisation.

The book documents the fight that was put up by a group of poets, artists and ecologists to save the Great Barrier Reef from oil drilling. It's a remarkable story being re-published in the midst of another attack on the Reef as oil tankers and an increasing number of coal freighters are plying its waters in the newly-built super ports.

This collection of imagist poems combines mythology, archaeology and translation. Susan Hawthorne draws on the history and prehistory of Rome and its neighbours to explore how the past is remembered. Under the guidance of Curatrix, Director of the Musæum Matricum, and Latin poet, Sulpicia, travellers Diana and Agnese are led through the mythic archives about wolves and sheep before attending an epoch-breaking party to which they are invited by Empress Livia.

Sydney, Milsons Point, 1926. Entire streets are being demolished for the building of the Harbour Bridge. Ellis Gilbey, landlady by day, gardening writer by night, is set to lose everything. Only the faith in the book she’s writing, and hopes for a garden of her own, stave off despair. As the tight-knit community splinters and her familiar world crumbles, Ellis relives her escape to the city at sixteen, landing in the unlikely care of self-styled theosophist Minerva Stranks. When artist Rennie Howarth knocks on her door seeking refuge from a stifling upper-class life and an abusive husband, Ellis glimpses a chance to fulfil her dreams. The future looms uncertain while the past stays uncannily in pursuit.

In this moving collection of poems, award-winning writer Sandy Jeffs shares her journey through madness over four decades, drawing inspiration from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and the motley gathering of characters at the Mad Hatter’s tea party. Both delightful and insightful, playful and serious, witty and whimsical, The Mad Poet’s Tea Party provides a devastating commentary on how our society treats those with mental illness from the perspective of someone who has experienced all its interventions. It captures in poetic form the enigmas and contradiction in madness.

Most everything has dried up: water, the womb, even the love among lovers. Hunger is rife, exceptacross the border. One night, a village is bombed after its men attempt to cross the border.Nine-year old Amedea is buried underground and sleeps to survive. Ten years later, she wakes with a locust embedded in her brow. This political fable is a girl’s magical journey through the border. The border has cut the human heart. Can she repair it with the story of a small life? This is the Locus Girl’s dream, her lovesong—For those walking to the border for dear life And those guarding the border for dear life

I remember how you were, not how you are. We were we until we became you and I. Midori and Âu Cô are international university students tasting freedom from family for the first time. They discover Melbourne and each other. All is well until the tsunami that swamps their world...

What is it like to be adopted, have your identity changed and never feel quite at home in your new family, despite being loved? What is it like to become a social worker and be faced with the challenges and consequences of other adoptions every day? What is it like to hear the moving National Apology for Forced Adoptions by Prime Minister Julia Gillard in 2013 only to be faced a few months later by a new prime minister intent on forgetting all the lessons learnt and championing a deregulated parent-centred market-driven adoption industry? Penny Mackieson takes us on her journey with the unique perspective of both the adopted person and a professional who worked in intercountry adoption for over a decade. She unravels the complexity, debunks the myths, analyses the policies and raises important questions about the ethical and human rights dilemmas in adoption.Adoption Deception: A personal and professional journey is a passionate, heart-wrenching and unflinchingly honest account of one woman’s life as an adopted person and her campaign for change. The author presents a compelling argument for Permanent Care instead of adoption for vulnerable children unable to be raised by their families.

Mapping inter-cultural relationships as they are played out in a remote Aboriginal settlement in Western Australia's Great Sandy Desert, this book challenges White Australians to reconsider their relationship with Indigenous peoples. Unpacking White cultural practices, it explores the extraordinary difficulties which Indigenous women face when they attempt to maintain and pass their cultural knowledge, customs and skills on to their children and youth.

For too long the global sex industry and its vested interests have dominated the prostitution debate repeating the same old line that ‘sex work’ is just like any job. In large sections of the media, academia, public policy, government and the law, the sex industry has had its way. Prostitution Narratives refutes the lies and debunks the myths spread by the industry through the lived experiences of women who have survived prostitution. These disturbing stories give voice to formerly prostituted women who explain why they entered the sex trade. They bravely and courageously recount their intimate experiences of harm and humiliation at the hands of sex buyers, pimps and traffickers and reveal their escape and emergence as survivors. . Essential reading for Women’s Studies.

The pathology of patriarchy, the idea that one group of people should control another—even own them, own even life itself—is at the core of today’s crises. The End of Patriarchy asks one key question: What do we need to create and maintain stable, decent human communities that can remain in a sustainable relationship with the larger living world? Robert Jensen’s answer is feminism and a critique of patriarchy. He calls for a radical feminist challenge to institutionalized male dominance; an uncompromising rejection of men’s assertion of a right to control women’s sexuality and reproduction; and a demand for an end to the violence and coercion that are at the heart of all systems of domination and subordination. The End of Patriarchy makes a powerful argument that a socially just society requires no less than a radical feminist overhaul of the dominant patriarchal

The eyes catch a black bird close to an eerie sun. Instantly, a poem: an accident of composition. Or a tree, rock, light from a story heard, dreamt, read or remembered returns as if it were the only tree, rock, light in the planet. The poet is caught, returned to her first heart: poetry. After four novels, Merlinda offers seventy-six poems from the stillness of contemplation to the spinning of tales, then to passage across different histories. Glass becomes eternal greens underwater, fish gossip about colonisation, a gumnut turns dissident, and the dreams of Captain Cook and Pigafetta circumnavigate the globe leaving a trail of blood, beads, and the scent of cloves. But in between, the poet hopes: ‘there could be accidents / of kindness here.’

Following Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, writers rework images of the body, resisting those wanting to create monsters and angels.

‘You can never be too thin or too rich,’ said Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor. But Francesca Miles, independent feminist detective, disagrees. When one of the richest men in Sydney is found dead in his penthouse, she teams up with Inspector Joe Barnaby in a mystery that follows the trials and tribulations of a family that should have everything that money can buy. A thoroughly riveting read.