CASS students win prizes for Excellence in Gender Research

On the Second Anniversary of the Gender Institute the following CASS students were recognised for undergraduate and graduate work completed in 2012. Below are the details of the CASS recipients and the comments from the judging pannel on their awards, provided by the Gender Institute:

Equal winner’s prize for undergraduate honours thesis 2012, including $500:
Jonathon Zapasnik for ‘Deceitful Skin: Embodying Sexual Trauma in Queer Time and Space

Jonathon Zapasnik’s thesis focuses on issues of child sexuality, trauma and memory. He sensitively handles the vexed question of a child’s embodied experience of sex with an older person, and the ambivalences created by the conjunctions of violence and desire. Through a reading of two challenging, even harrowing, novels Jonathon develops a notion of queer time and space which resists a progressive chronology or a coherent spatiality. We found the thesis original, lucid and theoretically sophisticated and hope to see its insights published. Jonathon’s excellence in studies of gender and sexuality has been confirmed with the award of a scholarship to pursue a PhD here at ANU.

Supervisor: Dr Rosanne Kennedy

First prize for PhD thesis, including $1000:
Catherine Bishop for ‘Commerce was a woman: Women in business in colonial Sydney and Wellington.’

Catherine Bishop’s research is truly original in three respects: the depth and breadth of her archival research, in addition to her exemplary use of newly-digitised materials; the comparative trans-Tasman framework of her study; the challenge her arguments present to existing historiographical assumptions concerning the pervasiveness of 'separate spheres' ideology and the domestication of women in the mid- to late nineteenth centuries.

Her thesis renders visible the intensity of women's involvement in commercial ventures in colonial Sydney and Wellington. As one examiner suggests, Bishop's study makes the “case for a revision of surviving narratives of a gender division of colonial labour that cast married women as housekeepers and child minders to the exclusion of income-generating work.” Another comments, “this is a meticulously researched and very well written thesis that makes an original contribution to Australian and New Zealand social history, and in particular labour history and gender history.”

The committee is confident that this PhD thesis is the most worthy of those submitted to merit the 2012 prize. Bishop's writing documentation meet the highest academic standards and she convincingly advances feminist history.

Supervisor: Prof Angela Woolacot
 

First prize for journal article published in 2012 by an ANU graduate student, including $500:
Anne Rees for ‘The Quality and Not Only the Quantity of Australia’s People'

The article is about the life and thought of Ruby Rich, a 20th Century Australian feminist (1888-1988) who was highly involved in the Eugenics movement.

As her PhD supervisor Angela Woolacott writes: "it is an original and significant article based on substantial research in primary sources, as well as extensive secondary source reading. - Most challenging of all, Rees has investigated and analysed two seemingly contradictory aspects of Rich’s work: her feminism and her eugenicism. While prior scholarship assumed a contradiction between feminism and eugenicism, Rees places Rich in her intellectual and scientific context, showing that in fact in the early to mid-twentieth century it was possible to believe that eugenics was consonant with some values then considered socially progressive, including feminism. Demonstrating this intellectual consonance was a philosophical, logical and historical challenge which Rees met through her careful and extensive research, nuanced argument and lucid writing.

This excellent article advances broader feminist history and understanding of gender particularly through its analysis and critique of the assumed contradiction between feminism and eugenicism - it is an original argument in relation to the existing literature, it is clear in its development of argument, it has relied on primary resources and extensive secondary sources and it is a well written and engaging piece.

Supervisor: Prof Angela Woolacot.    

The College wishes to congratulate all recipients on their fantastic achievements.

Read more about the Gender Institute.