The student group Uni Melb for Palestine are currently occupying Arts West – a prominent building on campus.

When I left campus this evening they’d been there for around 28hours. Here are some quick thoughts.

If anyone is observing the sit-in from afar, it is important to note that university leaders and administration will do their best to position the sit-in as disruptive. They will point to cancelled classes as evidence of this. This is a tactic of power.

And when they do this, we should all know that the university chose to cancel classes in Arts West yesterday afternoon. The university sent an email this morning telling us that Arts West would be closed all of today and to ‘avoid the area’, without giving any information as to why. Honestly, they’d tell us more if there was a power outage.

Their threats to call the police on their own students will become calls to the police, and they will say they were “forced”, when the students have a clear list of demands regarding divestment from weapons manufacturing which the University is not willing to discuss. And so rather than address the ethical problems of being financially and intellectually invested in violence, they will frame the students as violent in order to justify police presence. As Sara Ahmed has told us time and again, ‘If you expose a problem, you pose a problem; if you pose a problem you become the problem’.

I walked into Arts West at lunch time today with no problem. I chatted with the students inside and then I sat in the sun outside to mark assignments. TV crew were hanging around. It was calm and quiet all day.

Students in my afternoon classes (not in Arts West) told me their tutors had simply moved classes into courtyards and carried on with very minimal disruption.

Students complained to me about the way news presenters from commercial TV studios were framing questions to people passing by the building.

Students asked permission to leave class early to attend a snap rally.
The students are not the problem.

The students are exposing a problem.

Time

Hamilton¹, that very popular but not very feminist musical, gives its last moments to a woman who wonders what to do with the gift of time. Addressing her dead husband she says, ‘I stop wasting time on tears, I live another fifty years, it’s not enough. … I ask myself what would you do if you had more time?’ (Miranda 2015a, ‘Who Lives, Who Dies’). I start here, not because I’m intending to write about Hamilton, although I could, but because I want to think about time. About the possibility of finding and making feminist time.

Finding Time Out, 30^th July, 2022

I’m at a quiet café in St Kilda. Sunlight is coming through the window behind me. I’ve just bought a copy of All about Love by bell hooks. I read the preface. I feel refreshed. I note in the margins that I am struck by how I have forgotten to take time to do what I love. I have forgotten what I love. I remember how I once said I ate feminist theory for breakfast. I need to get back to that diet.  I need to make time for that.

Time is a resource that feminists need to do what we do. Sara Ahmed (2017, p. 242) contends that ‘Time out might be required for time in.’ Doing feminist research requires time. Time for reading, writing, doing. Equally, it requires time for reflecting, for thinking, for sustenance, for inspiration.  Time simply for being. Time for loving ourselves, our work, and each other.

hooks (2001 p. 6) teaches us that to love is to ‘nurture our own and another’s spiritual growth.’ I try to make a feminist, spiritual practice of reading a chapter of hooks in that precious, mythic thing we call ‘spare time’. I want to read for sustenance and inspiration, and also joy. I want to read as an intentional feminist spiritual practice.

By the end of the year, I’ve read six chapters. There are only thirteen. Is one hour a month all I can cram, in between tutoring, marking, more marking, a non-academic job in theatre, finally finishing those few PhD revisions, making dinner, washing my clothes, washing the towels. My feminist growth is slow, but maybe slow growth is my feminist method.

Finding Time, Filling Time, 17^th November, 2022  
I wrote the first draft of this paper at midnight, because I found I had time.

I wrote my PhD during lockdowns put in place to limit the spread of Covid-19. Time was perhaps one of the few things I had in abundance. I rarely wrote at midnight, although I did often write late at night, because I had nowhere else to be. Time ‘off’, but being home, was not time out.

Writing on the possibilities of thinking about Covid-19 sociologically, Raewyn Connell (2020) suggested that now was the time to let go of old methods of doing sociology. Now was the time for sociology to be creative, innovative, imaginative. Connell (2020, p. 750) contends that:

For those working within the managerial university, perhaps it will be important to publish less and so free up more time for sustained thought. Heaven knows that was scarce before everything went online and seems to be scarcer since. This will need collective action.

In a similar manner, Debra Cohan (2021) suggests that the opportunity (and challenge) presented to academics by the pandemic is to take time to pause and reflect on purpose and priorities, refusing to fill up every moment of time. As I redrafted this, in early 2023, I wondered what might this meant for me, an in-process feminist researcher, sessional teaching assistant/lecturer/research assistant/tutor, thesis done but not yet graduated, articles under review but not yet published, and still riding with academic training wheels on, and grasping at every opportunity

An Introduction (or, some context)

My PhD explores the conceptual slide between ‘right’ belief and ‘right’ gendered and sexual behaviour within the Sydney Anglican Diocese. Sydney Diocese is, predominantly, a theologically and socially conservative diocese, holding to a doctrine known as ‘complementarianism’. Put simply, complementarianism tells a story about how men and women – and it only considers men and women – should live and do Christian ministry. The complementarian story says that men, specifically husbands, are to lead and teach, while women, specifically wives, are to submit. This story is informed by readings of the Bible and usually thought of as theology. However, I think of it as a discourse – a shared cultural story which uses gender to construct and regulate the boundaries of orthodoxy and orthopraxy (Shorter 2021). 

In my thesis I raised two central questions: What are the social consequences of complementarianism and how do the experiences of Christians, particularly of women and queer Christians, challenge or destabilise the complementarian story? To answer these, I interviewed parishioners and ministry staff, becoming what Sara Ahmed (2017, 2021) would term a ‘feminist ear.’ From July 2019 to November 2020, I heard people’s stories of life in the Diocese. I attuned my ear to the experiences of women and, where possible, gender diverse people. I attuned my ear to those who typically are not heard in Sydney churches. I have been attuned to their stories, so that in them, I might hear answers to my own research questions.

Developing feminist ears shaped the stories I heard, how I heard them, and how I wrote about them. While people told positive accounts of church life, they also spoke exclusion, gendered violence and religious trauma. These stories can be hard to hear. My thesis might be ‘done,’ but my work of hearing hard stories as I do feminist and trauma informed sociology of religion, particularly Christianity, is only just getting started.

The question propelling this essay ²is, how do I (we) find the energy and time to support feminist ears to keep hearing what is hard to hear?  This paper is a messy reflection on method, on writing and on time. I don’t have the clear outline of key points that would normally appear now, I’m still figuring them out.

In the following vignettes, I retune (and return) my ears to some of the stories I picked up during field work which I have not yet put down. I think about how I heard them, how I held them, how I wrote them.

December 2019

As I read Belle’s completed survey detailing her experiences as a leader in the church, I’m struck by how often she writes of feeling like a trespasser. When I interview her I’m struck by how often she cries. She describes herself as ‘not fully formed’ and repeatedly says she is worried about failing in her church work, failing God.

‘What do I want for [my daughter]’ Belle wonders, ‘I guess … to know that God … wants her to flourish, and be her full self … To be who he made her to be.’

I interject – ‘and not feel like a trespasser?’

Belle responds, ‘exactly. That’s right. Like the woman at [a church outside of Sydney] – where I felt like she was just so light in being herself, and using her gifts … but I’m still asking those questions of [ I note as I transcribe that Belle starts to cry] ‘is this ok?’ and ‘is this enough?’ and, does it match what I think God is doing in the world, you know?’

During the interview, I move to sit next to Belle. I hug her. I’m trying not to cry with her. Am I allowed to hug her? Am I allowed to cry? To shift tension, I tell her about my experiences at a church in London. I recognise my story in her story. As I speak, I am concerned there will be too much me on the transcript.

I’d like to come back to Belle in a year. To see if she feels more ‘enough’, more ‘formed’. I don’t do this. Am I enough as a feminist researcher? Why was this interview so hard to hear. Are my tears wasted time or are they my method? Is there a story contained in those tears, if I choose to listen? And if I listen to that story, what do I do with it? Who needs to hear it?

I know I’m not fully formed.

November 2019

Alice and I are at a café. She’d sent an email offering to be interviewed and explaining she’d been to theological college. This had been an experience of both grief and joy. I begin the interview by referring to this.

I intended to ask, ‘was grief and joy about college, or faith in general?’ I didn’t get that far. She jumped in, explaining her pathway to studying at a conservative Anglican college. At 3 minutes and 21 seconds, she casually, and almost cheerfully, discloses that she started dating another student who was ‘super abusive, super awful.’ Her church responded by standing her down from ministry. After a while, she says, ‘feelings check, by the way, are you ok?’

‘I’m ok, are you?’

‘yeah, I’m fine,’ she says, ‘I’ve told this story lots.’

Alice has told the story lots. In Complaint! Ahmed (2021, p. 36) writes that:

The person who makes the complaint – who is often already experiencing the trauma or stress of the situation they are complaining about – ends up having to direct an unwieldy process. The person who puts the complaint forward ends up being the conduit; they have to hold all the information in order that it can be circulated; they have to keep things moving.

Ahmed goes on to (2021 p. 50) describes a path from being the person who makes a complaint to being the person who actively works to make change. Alice stayed at that church for some time and advocated for a domestic violence policy. She said “I made a stance that I wouldn’t leave until that happened. … I feel like I have the capacity and the experience and a voice …  I see how God has helped me to be an agent of change’

Alice’s story is not an isolated story. The National Anglican Family Violence Research Report (Powell & Pepper 2021) shows that Anglicans experience instances of domestic violence at the same rate, or higher, than the general public. Misuse of Scripture is often part of that abuse. That report was hard to read. Sometimes the data is hard to read. Sometimes it arrives, unlooked for.       

Cassandra is in her seventies and has been at her current church for over thirty years. I ask her unplanned question – does she thinks the church culture in Sydney has remained constant or shifted?  Gendered violence is embedded in her reply, a sort of by-the-by this happened, and anyway on with politics:

Its shifted to be much more hard-line. I thought it was bad enough in the 60s and 70s. Now, I’ll have to give you a bit of information, that you won’t have a question for, which is that my now ex-husband was a very big deal in [Anglican governance], and he believed thoroughly in wives doing what their husbands said etc, and I went along with it, that’s what the bible said, that’s how it was. It did end up in, not domestic violence, but certainly domestic abuse. And because of that, he used to host the committee meetings at our house. …

In speaking about their religious lives, women I spoke to, alluded to the ways they had been limited, to the harms done to their faith, their minds and – in some cases – their bodies. Sociologist of religion, Meredith McGuire, teaches us that religiosity and spirituality is embodied. McGuire (2008, p. 97) writes, ‘spirituality fully involves people’s material bodies, not just their minds or spirits’. I did not intend to become someone who reads and writes about the violence done to peoples’ minds, spirits and bodies in Christian spaces. But that is the data that arrived.

May 2020

I interview Alice again, by Zoom. At the end of the interview, she asks how my research is progressing. I tell her:

I have a lot of interviews done. I’m starting to see the shape of some things. I think one of the hardest things for me, and I spoke with you about this back in November, that sense of, you know, I don’t want to write something that’s critical just for the sake of being critical, I have no interest being like ‘oh, church is a horrible place’, but … often the stories people tell you are stories of when they were hurt, so you can get stuck in a space of that, but part of the point of this is that there is so much nuance, and people who are thoughtful, and people who are working really hard to see other people flourish, and making sure to balance those things, well, as you say, can be complex.

She replies, ‘yeah, but you can only tell the truth you know.’

Confession/Conclusion

Writing about methods terrifies me.

As I pulled my thesis together into a first full final draft, and started to flesh out my notes on method and positionality, I realised how much developing a feminist ear was my approach, as well as a possibility and a limitation. I heard certain stories, from certain people, because I was a feminist researcher and also an Anglican woman, researching in a conservative Christian space.

 Of the 28 people I interviewed, there were eighteen women, one non-binary person and nine men. As an unmarried woman, I am not socially expected to speak about gender and sexuality with unmarried Christian men.  As researchers, ‘our very bodies and positionality in social life will impact on who we are able to talk to’ (Page and Shipley 2020, p. 11). Of the nine men I interviewed, eight were married. The one unmarried man was highly conscious of the impact of his own sexuality and unmarried status on his interactions with women at church (and perhaps also his interviewer?).

 I cannot be certain, but the willingness of women to be interviewed may indicate that, compared to men, women are more conscious of the limitations and harms of complementarianism. Or, perhaps in communities that privilege the voices of men, women and gender diverse people are more appreciative of the chance to have their Christian story heard.

Feminist hearing became my method for hearing those who are not heard. Doing the work to hear stories of inequalities and violence, and of resistance and remaking, takes time and energy, and I’ve run out of time to think more about time.

I don’t know how to draw this together. This paper is messy. I’m messy. I’m tired. I’ve read and re-read Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life so I know that feminists need other feminists to do the work we do. That’s why in my ‘spare time’ I’m setting up a support network for people doing feminist church work and research. That project gathers dust while I mark essays. I know that researchers need time to write, but to badly borrow from Virginia Woolf, writers also need money and a room of their own, and yet, I can’t buy time.

In 2022 I did not keep up my diet of feminist theory, or achieve my writing goals. Instead, I signed up to multiple casual teaching jobs. I also went back to my non-academic job because for three years people told me there was no work in academia. Research (and that thing we must do so that we do not ‘perish’) takes time, yet it is ‘the most easily deferred task as academics manage competing demands. … the “urgent” can crowd out the “important”’ (Peetz, Baird et al 2022, p. 74). Instead of finding ‘spare time’ for writing, I worked backstage on Hamilton, that popular but not very feminist musical.

At the end of act one, as the ensemble crowd around Hamilton asking, ‘why do you write like you’re running out of time?’ (Miranda 2015b, ‘Non-Stop’), I tell myself to make time for feminist research, reading and writing. For feminist listening.  Make time to nourish your feminist ears, mind, spirit and body. Kristin Aune (2015) – yes, new information in the last lines – contends that feminist spirituality is simultaneously social and individual, it is practiced, it is lived.  I want to make time for my own feminist spiritual practices, for being in the company of feminists whether that’s my peers or my books. I already know that’s what I need to do to support myself and to support others, as we hear stories that are hard to hear. I don’t want to hold these stories on my own. I want to make feminist time and I want to make time for feminists.

References

Ahmed, S., 2021. Complaint! Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Ahmed, S., 2017. Living a Feminist Life, Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Aune, K., 2015. Feminist Spiritualty as Lived Religion: How UK feminists forge religio-spiritual lives. Gender and Society 29(1), pp. 122–145. doi: 10.1177/0891243214545681[last accessed 19 November 2022].

Cohan, D.J.,2021. ‘Rethinking What We Value: Pandemic teaching and the art of letting go’ in J.M. Ryan,  ed., 2021. COVID-19: Two Volume Set (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi-org.ezproxy.uws.edu.au/10.4324/9781003155911 [Last accessed 15 December 2022].

Connell, R., 2020. ‘Covid-19/Sociology’, Journal of Sociology, 56(4), pp. 745–751, doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1440783320943262 [Last accessed 15 December 2022].

hooks, b., 2001. All About Love, New York: William Morrow.

McGuire, MB., 2008. Lived Religion: Faith and practice in everyday life, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Miranda, L., 2015a. ‘Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story?’, Hamilton: An American Musical

Miranda, L,. 2015b. ‘Non-Stop’, Hamilton: An American Musical

Page, S.J., & Shipley, H., 2020. Religion and Sexualities: Theories, themes and methodologies, London and New York: Routledge.

Peetz, D, M. Baird, R. Banerjee, T. Bartkiw, S. Campbell, S. Charlesworth, A. Coles, R. Cooper, J. Foster, N. Galea, B. de la Harpe, C. Leighton, B. Lynch, K. Pike, A. Pyman, I. Ramia, S. Ressia, M.N. Samani, K. Southey, G. Strachan, M. To, C. Troup, S. Walsworth, S. Werth & J. Weststar 2022. ‘Sustained knowledge work and thinking time amongst academics: gender and working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic’, Labour and Industry, 32(1), 72-92, doi: 10.1080/10301763.2022.2034092, [Last accessed 15 December 2022].

Powell, R., & Pepper, M., 2021. National Anglican Family Violence Research Report: Top Line Result, NCLS Research Report. NCLS Research

Shorter, R 2021, ‘Rethinking Complementarianism: Sydney Anglicans, orthodoxy and gendered inequality’ Religion and Gender, 11:2, doi: 10.1163/18785417-bja10005

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1. As a member of crew on the Australian production of Hamilton, I have heard the lyrics cited in this essay multiple times throughout 2022, performed by the Australian company at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Melbourne, located on Wurundjeri Country. ↩︎
2. This essay began life as a conference paper, presented at The Australian Women and Gender Studies Association conference on Activist Energies in November 2022. ↩︎

Here are some words I wrote over on Facebook. I’ve got questions, and no answers. Sorry.  But maybe you can help me think through this.

So, if you’re willing, come on a thought experiment with me…

Are university queer spaces safe for conservative queer people? (And if not, should they be? And would this create a risk for non-conservative people and how would you mitigate that?)

Are they too ‘left’?

10 years ago I started a blog called Reflections and Fragments. It has been good to me, but after two degrees,  several journeys to the UK, and an ideological shift that took me from uncomfortable with the only Feminism I had encountered (Liberal Feminism), to being increasingly at home in the vast and diverse lands of intersectional, socialist and post-humanist feminism(s),  I have decided it is time to end my relationship with my first blog, and move on in search of new experiences. So here I am at wordpress.

I have no idea what I’m doing (fun times and bad formatting will surely follow), but I know that I’m going to keep thinking and writing things about sex, politics and religion, and now those things will have a new home. (The old blog will stay, so if you feel the need to reread the angsty poetry of my teens and early twenties you know where to find it)

I’m probably going to move some of my existing pieces over here and then in that marvelous thing called “spare time” I’ll hopefully write some new things, and we (I assume there is someone there, reading this) can go on an adventure together. *

Let’s do this!

*by adventure I mean be willing to think through potentially uncomfortable ideas, perhaps learn to think of ourselves and our world in new and different ways, or perhaps go on a thought experiment and then end up exactly where you started. And by together I mean separately, I’ll be at my computer and you’ll be at yours, but this is the beauty of the interwebs.

“we need to learn to think differently about ourselves” – rosi braidotti