In/visibility: Women looking at men's bodies in and through contemporary Australian women's fiction

Masculinity is an increasingly prominent and important issue in debates within feminism, literary studies and visual theory. This study intervenes in and contributes to such debates by analysing an emerging group of Australian womens fictions (published between 1998 and 2002) which focus on male characters and, in particular, on the description and narrative potential of their bodies. The majority of these texts, and the ones that are explored in this thesis namely, Jillian Watkinsons The Architect, Georgia Blains The Blind Eye, Mireille Juchaus Machines for Feeling, Fiona Capps Last of the Sane Days, Sarah Myless Transplanted and Wendy Scarfes Miranda share two preoccupations. Firstly, male characters bodies are almost always damaged or suffering in some way; secondly, the ability (or inability) of female characters to look at these bodies is repeatedly foregrounded. I argue that the interactions between male characters bodies and female characters gazes function in complex ways both to confirm and to challenge patriarchal constructions of masculinity and male corporeality. Specifically, this occurs in relation to the engagement of each text with popular discourses of feminism and masculinity crisis, discourses that emerge and interact in complex and often contradictory ways in depictions of male visibility and exposure. While my approach is generally feminist, it is also fiction-centred. Thus, I draw on a variety of theoretical perspectives, including literary theory, masculinity studies, visual theory, history, sociology and philosophy, in order to unpack and engage with these contemporary Australian womens fictions. Paradoxically, one of the main consequences of this fiction-centred approach is a reengagement with and a rethinking of theoretical concepts emerging from psychoanalytic feminist film theory. In a remarkably consistent and explicitly pedagogical way, these fictions explore notions of objectification and dichotomisation, especially as they are elucidated in Laura Mulveys analysis of Hollywood narrative cinema. Objectification is overwhelmingly aligned with oppressive power structures and identified as problematic, and the first half of this thesis explores the novels critiques of this mode of visual interaction. The second half investigates the alternatives to objectification imagined in these fictions. While, upon closer consideration, some of these alternatives recapture male and female characters within traditional patriarchal power relations, others enable a rethinking of both womens vision and desire, and mens subjectivity, visibility and desirability