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Susan Hawthorne discusses her new book Vortex: The Crisis of Patriarchy which draws on her decades of experience and radical feminist knowledge to take on a huge task. Vortex is a wide-ranging analysis of the devastation patriarchy wreaks, including on women, lesbians, Indigenous people, people with disabilities, refugees and landless people, nature and the planet itself.

In this podcast, Susan explains the key ideas in Vortex, the running theme in the book of the myth of Cassandra and Trojan horses, how growing up in Australia has affected her work and why she asks readers whether we care about the safety of lesbians. (And if that isn’t enough, Susan weaves in stories from her life, reads two of her poems and suggests how women might reverse the patriarchal crises.)

Susan Hawthorne has been active in the Women's Liberation Movement since 1973, joined the Collective of Melbourne's Rape Crisis Centre in 1974 and co-founded independent feminist publishers Spinifex Press in 1991 with partner Renate Klein. Susan has been an aerialist with Women's Circuses, organised writers' festivals and feminist conferences. In Uganda in 2002, a woman said to her, "Be careful, in Uganda lesbians are tortured." From 2003 onwards Susan has written numerous research papers and spoken on the subject of the torture of lesbians. At the FiLiA conference in 2019, she gave talks entitled “Bibliodiversity at the heart of radical feminist publishing” and “Unnoticed, unrecorded, unremembered: inscribing the torture of lesbians.”

Find Susan on Facebook.

Purchase Vortex here.

Want to hear more from Susan? Check out what she has to say in other FiLiA Podcast Episodes:

https://filia.org.uk/podcasts/2020/3/6/filia-meets-susan-hawthorne

https://filia.org.uk/podcasts/2020/4/7/violence-against-lesbians-filia-conference-2019

Transcript:

SL:  Welcome everyone to this episode of the FiLiA podcast.  My name is Sarah I'm one of the volunteers, and I am joined today by Susan Hawthorne, and we're going to be talking about her new book, Vortex the crisis of patriarchy, which was launched I think in November 2020 by Spinifex Press, Susan, thank you so much for joining us again on FiLiA podcast.  Can I ask you to please to introduce yourself and your work generally to any listeners who might not already be familiar with you.  

SH:  I was thinking about this before and it's really hard to come up with almost 50 years in a brief bio, but some of the things that were, have been important to me are that I joined the women's liberation movement in 1973, and it was like walking into a new universe, I suddenly felt like I had arrived, that I had come to a place where I existed and that I didn't feel like an outsider.  But over that almost 50 years, I have worked in a rape crisis centre as a volunteer that was my first bit of activism, apart from doing a bit of night-time graffiti.  I was in student politics.  I worked with unemployed people, people who'd been, young women and men, who had been unemployed for maybe a year or two, maybe more.  I worked with Arabic speaking women teaching them English.  I had Aboriginal students who were secondary school students but also then I went to work at university level for a year with Aboriginal students.  And then I got into publishing.  So I did quite a lot of different things on my way to get into publishing and I got a job at Penguin, where I, got the job I think because I was knowledgeable about women's writing, and they needed somebody, because Dale Spender had just said to them, I want to do this book series, and they wanted to do it, so they needed somebody who knew something.  And the irony was that I hadn't met Dale at that stage but then it turned out she was a great friend of Renata Carnes my partner at the time, so I didn't even know that this was happening. So I worked at penguin for four years. I had also been involved in running, women's writing, writers weeks and book festivals of various kinds, including in 1994 the International Feminist Book Fair. And we set up Spinifex in 1991. And of course that's been most of my time has been taken up either with co-running the press or writing or the literary things but I did find time to join a couple of women circuses also on the side which was great fun. I think that actually kept me sane in lots of ways, because you have to be fit and so, you know, you go, you go, you don't go to the gym, you go to the circus and you do fun things like aerials and hand stands and yeah, it’s great!  And I did my PhD while I was at the peak of my circus time, and again, that was, that was really good for me.  (laughs)  I know you think I'm weird.

SL:  No, I think it's brilliant, I think, I mean honestly part of me was really like oh my gosh, tell me more about this circus thing. But today, we're not going to be talking too much about the circus even though it makes an appearance in the book.  But um, we're gonna be talking about your book Vortex the crisis of patriarchy. And I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about why you wrote this book, and for the listeners who are, you know, hopefully going to be reading this book soon, what it's about. But could you outline some of, like the key messages of the book for our listeners, please. 

SH:  I started writing it because a couple of overseas publishers wanted me to write a short version of my politics, which was the books written out of my PhD which is subtitle is Feminism Globalization and Biodiversity. And it was a great idea to write a short version, but I started doing it and discovered that actually I had new things to say, and that I didn't just want to rehash what I had written back in the early 2000s and too much have changed to just do that. I then got a two week residency in Bursa in Turkey, and that was really good, partly it was really good because it was Ramadan at the time we lived in this tiny little town called Gülözü.  There was nothing to do, absolutely nothing to do, so I had to write and I had had to do the work. It was good because even though it was only for two weeks, it gave me a lot of headspace time. And basically, I've worked out the structure of the book then, and realised that I wasn't, I wasn't rewriting an old book, I was writing a new book.  And some of the things that happened in between times, were that I had started to write again about disability, and I wanted, I wanted that to be really upfront in the book, because the two areas that tend to be left to the final chapters or left out altogether are issues around disability or anything about lesbians.  So, I wanted those to be key chapters in the book. I also wanted to have a chapter on violence against women and in particular prostitution and the way that that connects to militarism and globalization and all of those things.  I kind of rewrote some things from my World politics book in the chapter on bio-colonialism and bio-prospecting and I updated it, and I broadened some of the things, but a lot of that knowledge comes from working on my PhD in that area. Then I have a chapter called de-territoriality and that's about braking the spirit, and I've got land refugees and trauma. That was actually, I had nothing like that. Previously, I hadn't written in the area particularly but I had read very widely. And I wanted to draw together ideas about how colonisation is very much linked to the ways in which people suffer trauma. I wanted to talk about dispossession and being homeless in different sorts of ways. And that applies to refugees, it applies to colonised indigenous peoples, it applies to women who, who've worked in the sex industry so that brought together that whole range of things, and then an area that I've worked on a lot has been the torture of lesbians, and you know because I gave a talk on that a FiLiA, and that kind of built up and came out of the previous chapter and so I wanted to talk about the way in which lesbians are left out of the analysis, the way that we are raised and the ways in which these are acts of colonisation. Then I go on to talking about how the trans lobby has had a terrible effect on the women's liberation movement, and on women in general, and the ways in which it has been used to produce violence, and not just, I mean, physical violence but also verbal violence and changing, changing of the vocabulary. And I also wanted to talk about the money trials and once I started looking at the money trials with the trans lobby, I then went back through all of the chapters and looked at how it affected that, so that then that added to that side of things. And then, in a year in Australia in a year like 2020, I certainly could not ignore climate change, or what I now call climate catastrophe. And while I was writing the sections on the bushfires, it was actually happening. And every time I looked it up, the numbers, the huge areas of land that were being burnt were just increasing day by day, and I don't think any area has ever been burnt to such an extent, even the Amazon, I mean, just all across Australia, there were fires last year.  And then I've also lived in areas of drought, I grew up on the farm. My mother and I had long conversations about the drought and the effect on people, and I live in the tropics now where I've been through two category five cyclones, and I've also been in a flood also, in same area where my parents were so.  So there have been, you know, and I think most people in Australia have been through something, one of those things it's a flood, or it's a drought, or excessive heat, or fires, or cyclones. It's just the way of the country in a way, and we have a government who is completely, well, not oblivious to it but turning in the opposite direction and doing absolutely nothing.  And I feel very ashamed to have such a prime minister as the one that we have at the moment. And then I try to finish on a positive note in my book with a tactical sovereignty and the spirit of nature. 

SL:  Yeah, I mean I have to say it was a very wide ranging read, and I'm not sure I understood like quite all of it but it's one of those books that you read, and you want to go back to and you want to try and unpick various other things, because it's so rich, right, there's so many different layers even in just that introduction that you've given to us, but I thought what I'd do is start first of all with the title of the book, and to ask about this question of the term vortex that you define in two different ways in the book. And could you explain what you mean by conceptualizing this crisis of patriarchy as a vortex and how, how that ties in with, with this work.

SH:  The book is called Vortex because I woke up one morning and I said to Renate, the book is going to be called Vortex the Crisis of Patriarchy, she said but nobody will know what the word vortex means. So, I went off and I looked it up.  So, basically I found out that there were two possible meanings where I looked up which was a Cambridge dictionary. It was either a mass of water, air or water that spins around very fast and pulls objects into its empty centre, and in a literary sense, it means a dangerous or bad situation in which you become more and more involved, and from which you cannot escape, and I like the fact that there was an environmental meaning, and there was a literary meaning, because I wanted to incorporate both of those bits into the book, but they.. as I went on, the other thing that I discovered about the vortex was basically that it is, there is an emptiness, at the centre. And I think that that's one of the things that applies to patriarchy. And then they go around and accuse others you know like they say, of Australia that it was Terra nullius, you know, empty land. There's no such thing!  It had been filled with people for 65,000 years at least, possibly 100 possibly 120,000, years. This is typical, I mean patriarchy lies, creates distortions, and then acts on those distortions to dispossess people basically. And then I discovered that at the centre of all of the things that I was looking at, there was this kind of emptiness that I think is really important to remember. 

SL:  And I think maybe on the subject of emptiness, but one of the themes that in the book is this theme of the Cassandras, and the Trojan horse and of course the Trojan horse was thought to be empty. So I wondered if you could talk a little bit about, about that which runs through the whole book. 

SH:  I'm going to read a little bit right from the beginning of the introduction, which is an extract from a book I wrote back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and it goes, “We talk of Cassandra, the leaf is as important as knowledge for what is knowledge, if no one believes us. There have been many times when destruction could have been avoided. When the future was glaring at people. That was the fate of Cassandra, though her ears had been licked by a serpent, no one would believe her prophecies. They laughed at her story of the wooden horse and the city fell.  They laughed, even as they died. There have been many Cassandras, many of us.”  So, that draws on the story of Cassandra from Greek mythology and Cassandra was the daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba and Queen Hecuba was an extraordinary woman too. And they were having a mad war with the Greeks because Paris had run off with Helen, who was from Greece, Paris was a bit of an entitled young thing too.  And Helen actually didn't like her husband Menelaus so it was kind of good to get out, out from there. And she was a Spartan princess so she was pretty smart.  Anyway, during the war the Trojans were doing pretty well. And they, the Greeks didn't really know how they were going to defeat them because they couldn't bridge the walls, they couldn't get into the city and in order to win the war, they needed to get through into the city.  Edicius, who's a real smartass, he came up with an idea to deliver to the Trojans a horse, as an offering, and then, have all the great ships sail off, away from the shore because they've been there for 10 years you know almost as long as the war in Afghanistan, they've been there for 10 years and pretend to leave but instead of doing that, inside, inside this horse were a whole lot of soldiers and including Edicius as well. So they've, they've put the horse outside, they disappeared, and the Trojans thought, ah it's all over. And Cassandra said, no, it's not. Don't open those gates. Don't let the horse in she couldn’t specify why, but she said it would be really dangerous. Anyway, they did, because as usual men don't listen to women. So they opened the gates and let the horse in and the men in the horse just stayed still for however long they had to until it got dark. And once it was dark and everybody was in bed, they came out and they started to burn the city, they ravaged the city, and you know Cassandra could have said I told you so. But, of course, it was too late for that, and actually she was captured and taken as a slave by Agamemnon, who was the brother of Menelaus, you know, and so the story goes on, but she was not believed. And the reason, the reason why she wasn't believed was that in the temple at some point during the Trojan War, or that before the war, Apollo wanted to rape her. And she said, no.  And so, you know, this is the Metoo moment of Greek mythology.

She said no, and so he said, well, you know, I know you can see into the future, but nobody will ever believe you.  That's the story of Cassandra but, and, the Trojan horse, as I use it in the book, are instances where promises are made that say to women who are prostituted, and then they call it sex work, and they say you will be famous, you will be rich, you will be all of these things. And in fact, it all turns out badly because in fact what most women who, who are in the sex industry happen to, is that they get traumatised. Sometimes they get addicted to drugs, sometimes they are killed, sometimes, all sorts of terrible, bad things happen to them.  So, that's an example of a Trojan horse and it's true.  Many other instances in the book and I, I say when you're when you're reading the book, I say, this is a Trojan horse.  

SL:  Absolutely and I think it's, it's a very powerful thing to come back to in the way that you do, specifically, also because, in this case, the radical feminists or, usually the women speaking against something, are acting like the Cassandras. 

SH:  Yes and women, feminists, are never believed, I mean radical feminists have been saying a whole lot of things for a long time, and nobody ever listens.  I mean with, at Spinifex Press, we, at the beginning we would say to ourselves, we are always five years ahead.  Then we started saying we're always 10 years. We're now, you know, 20 and 30 years ahead because still nobody is listening.  And, as some of, you know, many of our authors have said things that have turned out to be correct. Surprise surprise.  The, I mean, radical feminists, have a very clear idea of structural violence, and the way in which those structures, work, and what, what it is that we need to do to change that. The main thing of course is to dismantle patriarchy. There's a really big job, and we have to dismantle capitalism, we have to dismantle racism and all of, all of the other oppressions that affect us.  

SL:  Yes, and I think certainly your book makes a really compelling case, not only outlining the problems but I think you add into it, a lot of kind of suggestions for how this could be done.  And I think that's a really nice thing to have in the work too because it can seem like these problems are almost insurmountable, at times. 

SH:  I think it's important to be creative. And I think it's important that we understand what we can do, and how we might bring our creativity to change the situation, to shift it sideways in different ways. And of course there's no single way because there are so many things that need to be done. And that's also important because radical feminists work in all sorts of different situations, you know we don't just go for equal pay, you know, that's part of our programme, an important part, but it's certainly not the only thing.

SL:  What I quite like is the way that, the description of yourself as a synthesizer, and being able to, kind of, put these things that could seem quite disparate, going from very different sources of knowledge, so, from describing your own experiences, for example, with epilepsy in Chapter two, which is entitled “Less than perfect medical wars against people with disabilities”, to kind of more, like problems with, let's say something like the Yogyakarta Principles in Chapter seven, which is, you know, Breaking the spirit of the women's liberation movement, the war against biology.  And so, I suppose one of my questions is, how did you choose what specific things you were going to focus on in your book, given that there's so much. And also, could you talk to us a little bit about some of the tables in your book that compare various different concepts. 

SH:  In terms of how I got to the particular chapters, I'm, most of them are, because I've been intensely interested in those areas, over a very long time.  In terms of the second chapter, I, having grown up with epilepsy and having tried to deal with that various times and my first book, looked at having epilepsy, but also being a lesbian and my readers, they came with, with different ways some said, I always knew you were lesbian, I didn't know about the epilepsy, and others would go, oh, I always knew that you had epilepsy, but I didn't know you were a lesbian. (laughs)  So, it was also that thing of, you know, can you belong to just one group, can you be oppressed in just one way?  No.  Most individuals are oppressed in multiple ways and, you know, that's something that radical feminists, have noticed a long time ago, even long before the word intersectional came along.  Then, I've been reading about prostitution for a long time, I've been working in different ways in the area of violence against women, starting with my Rape Crisis work, you know, when I first came into the women's movement and thinking about it and, and also writing a lot about, well about, about war, and the way in which war is used to create prostitution outside military camps and all of those sorts of things so, and that was actually the first chart that that I did for the book. And it started with columns, militarism, fundamentalism in the sex industry and I added later, capitalism, because I wanted to see if the military, fundamentalism and the sex industry shared anything, and that was what I discovered that they did, so working across the top the very first one the new recruit, so you're moving away from family and community. Well you have military bases.  With fundamentalism, you take in an already traumatized young man, often displaced, abused refugee and you put him in a place where all he hears is, is what's around, and it doesn't matter whether it's a Madrassa or whether it's a camp run by Daesh or others, and in the sex industry, you take in an already traumatized young, young women and men, displaced, drug addicted, abused, victims of war or violence.  And when I decided to add capitalism, I wasn't sure if that would work, but then I realized it did, and there I wrote, taking an overly protected young man who has a sense of entitlement, or traumatized young man who wants to make up for trauma. And then, you know, the, they all get provided with various kinds of dream of fame or wealth or whatever and, and the capitalist is, is promises of material reward, but so do the prostitutes.  And so the fundamentalists say, add promises of heavenly reward, and in militarism you add porn and so forth. And then you allow them to be available and there are all sorts of things that become available to you. If you live in that and so I just went on down the columns. And every time I found that they were pretty much the same, it's just a matter of emphasis really and it finishes with handout medals to dead heroes. For the capitalists give publicity to the super rich through Forbes 500 and rich lists, for the fundamentalist give publicity to the martyrs, and for the sex industry, make them believe that one day they can become immortalized, even snuff movie actors, a famous model for pornography or fashion.  So these are all the things that are on offer, it's not much.  I mean the Forbes 500 is certainly the best of them, but it's pretty scary really.

SL:  That one does make a really compelling case when you, you line them up like that.  I mean, I thought, a lot of these were really, very thought provoking because it, it's interesting to see them done in this kind of columnar fashion where you can just kind of, read across.

SH:  I’m floated often away into my thinking, in a way, because you know you're reading, reading, reading and you think then, oh god what's all this about?  So in a way I'm providing a bit of a map for what I was thinking and why I came to these conclusions, I guess.

SL:  Yes and it's definitely something that I found myself going back to, as a reader and it's something that, that is definitely something that I want to be kind of re-reading having read the full book because I have a feeling that this is one of those books that, like I said before, you want to then, in terms of having followed that journey, you then kind of want to go back and re-read the text, knowing what you know at the end, if that makes any sense because I think it follows that sort of interwoven structure where it will become like on a second reading a lot of different things will make even more sense. 

SH:  Yeah. 

SL:  Having followed your synthesizing through to the end of the book. 

SH:  Yeah and, I mean that's, that is how I think, you know, I'm also a poet and so as a person who writes poetry, part of that is finding patterns and synthesizing things and the like.  And in nonfiction, I mean it is something that is done in a lot of nonfiction, but in more academic nonfiction it tends to be more analytical. And I think we need both things and I think we need the analytical but I think we also need ways of synthesizing and ways of seeing the connections between things, to show that the ways in which people with disabilities are treated, is very similar to the ways in which indigenous people are treated, is really quite similar to how refugees are treated, and women and lesbians and the land, the whole planet.  

SL:  Because I think that one of the other things that you do very well in the book is to argue that these are not, they shouldn't be seen as completely separate issues, and that a lot of times, you know, someone might make a particularly good analysis of something but they'll miss out really quite relevant people or things, oftentimes, women or lesbians or basically all of the issues that you bring up in your book but they don't really kind of connect everything. 

SH:  And I also include quite a bit of autobiographical information because that's also part of it I mean this in a way is, is the book of my life in a sense. I mean, it does, it does follow through the different things that I've done and the connections that I've had, you know, like in the chapter on trans.  I first encountered this several decades ago, but was really, really hit by it when I was in the women's circus and suddenly this trans fellow wanted to join the women's circus and I say in the book that, you know, there are balances that you do where you stick your head between somebody’s legs. Well, and, and as well as that this circus had been set up to work with women who had been victims of sexual assault, at some point in their life. So suddenly they're saying, oh, we have to let him in, you know.  We have to let this trans guy in, well, this trans woman. Because it wouldn't be fair, but they had all these other rules that, that also kept people out, kept different groups of women out, and yet they were making this special thing for him and this was something that was happening in 2000.  So, what we've got now is a big escalation of what happened back then. 

SL:  I wanted to ask you a little bit more about, I suppose you've covered it to some extent already, but one of the things that, because I don't know very much about Australia so one of the things that was really interesting to me was learning about the context of kind of an Australian situation. And I was wondering how that has shaped your work, and specifically in terms of highlighting human rights violations against Aboriginal indigenous people, but also like you mentioned before, your own experiences I suppose of this kind of connection to very big natural events, shall we say, in terms of the fires that you were talking about before and the cyclones and the droughts and the flooding. So how is that sort of, you know, like do you think this, specifically Australia, has influenced your work in a particular way. 

SH:  Yes, definitely. I, where you grow up influences how you see the world. When I was a child, nobody ever mentioned the, the Wiradjuri people, who were the local people. There were a very large group of people who lived, almost all then across very large sections of New South Wales.  And it wasn't until after I’d left university, I have, had met a number of Aboriginal people. But it wasn't until becoming a feminist that I understood the politics of it better. And at one point I learned Warlpiri, which is central Australian Aboriginal language. I didn't learn it for very long, but it really had a huge impact on me, just in terms of understanding how words are put together, and the sounds, and what things are important like, like there's a verb that means that you're either going away or come and there's an ending on their endings, you know that indicate whether you're going away or whether you're coming towards, which is very useful if you're a group of people who move about from one place to another. And there are things like that so that certainly had an effect on me and then I worked with at university in Koorie teacher education programme for the first year.  I had also worked with Aboriginal artists, playwrights and authors and so forth so I mean over the years I have increased my knowledge and tried to contribute to the visibility, particularly of Aboriginal writers and that, you know, that's an important part of what I do, it's not the only thing but it's very important part. And then in terms of the natural environment I mean, in some ways, these things are connected because land or as Aboriginal people say, country, is an essential part of living in Australia.  And Aboriginal people have a sense, not of ownership of land, but as land as a relationship. And that, I think, you know, it's just it's a completely different way of looking at the world. If we all looked at land as a relationship, a whole lot of things would have to change, things, you couldn't have absentee landlords, for example, because, you know, you have a relationship with the land, that means you have to be there.  But in addition to that, Australia, does have this crazy climate, which is getting more and more catastrophic. We have much hotter days here now than we used to have. And we're expecting cyclones this coming season. We don't know when they'll come, but there are some forming out over the Pacific Ocean at the moment, and Fiji is being hammered.  It might come or it might hit the West Australian coast, we don't know. There have been big floods in the south of Queensland just the last couple of days and in northern New South Wales.  So it's already happening, and then we've had all these fires and floods.  And my parents used to own a farm in the near a town called Wagga Wagga, and I was there during a period when there was a big flood, and I don't hear the sound of flooding waters or know there's a flood coming without getting  palpitations, and thinking, gotta get out of here! And we're not hanging around.  I have been caught in a flood, once, a few years ago in North Queensland, that was pretty scary. 

SL:  And I think you're write in the book too, that you know that that sound and that experience stays in your body.

SH:  Yes. Yes. Yes, it does. It's like, also a cyclone I've been through one of them and I remember hearing something like a cyclone and just sliding down a wall in an art gallery.  And, you know, realizing that this was still my reaction to that, I wouldn't label it trauma but I would, I would say it was a visceral reaction in the sense, it was a bodily reaction, and I wouldn't call it trauma to a huge degree because I laughed about it fairly soon afterwards. And with the friend that I was at the Art Gallery with, she kind of looked at me and went what's going on?  But in terms of post the cyclone that had caused that, in terms of the post cyclone, people up here, we just talked endlessly for about six months, and we didn't talk about anything else, for about six months and I think that is a response to trauma, some people were really traumatized. Some people just needed to talk, so people react differently. 

SL:  Thank you, that makes a lot of sense and I think it is one of those things that is really, because of this kind of imagery of the, of the vortex and things spinning out of control and the degree to which it inflicts harm. So, given the fact that there is a, link to that climate change and the sorts of events, it does seem to me like that's an additional source of, let's say, trauma than or traumatic events, being inflicted because of this patriarchal force. 

SH:  The reason I wouldn't call it trauma was that in all those instances where I was in a dangerous situation, I was able to come through it reasonably well.  It doesn't mean that the house wasn't damaged or whatever, but I didn't sustain any injuries I mean that's different from people who've been saved through an earthquake that tremors and tremors and tremors and, you know, they're completely rattled for months and months because they can't sleep and things like that, or people who’s houses have burned down and their next door neighbour has died in the fire, you know that’s, there's a different level of trauma there I think that needs to be respected. Not every strong experience is traumatic. I think we need to be able to tell the difference between what is trauma and what, what is just going through a really incredible experience in your life and learning something from that. 

SL:  Thank you for clarifying because I think there was new answers are really important to understand too. So I'm going to move on to my next question, which is, so as a reader I felt the crescendo, the kind of most like, hard hitting chapter was chapter six, which was Colonisation, Erasure and Torture: Wars against lesbians, although I thought that the whole book was very kind of urgent and had a lot of insightful analyses and was written with a very kind of like we do need to do something about this. I thought this was definitely the most kind of viscerally hitting chapter, and also the one where I felt like you spoke very much directly to the reader in a different way maybe then, in some of the other chapters because you ask us directly questions whether we care about the torture of lesbians, and I'm going to quote you now “if campaigns for the safety of lesbians cannot be shaped and many of us have borne the brunt of attacks from both our enemies and those we thought were our allies, then what are we fighting for when we take up any social justice issue? Are we wanting just partial freedom? Freedom for some and not for others? If this is so, what are we changing, are we serious. And so I was wondering if you could talk to us a little bit about the significance of that statement, and indeed Chapter Six as a whole, and why you frame attacks on lesbians, as the canary in the mine. And why does it seem like there is such an, a lack of interest which means that there is a kind of extra urgency in you raising this for, for the reader. 

SH:  Well, I think, probably because this, I have lived as a lesbian since my early 20s, I'm now in my late 60s, and as a result of that I have experienced the world in a particular way. It's an experience that is different from what people of my same age group experience if they're heterosexual.  There, there are many, many differences, one of which is for quite a lot of lesbians there is a sense of shame. And I don't mean that, I mean that in the sense that it's often really difficult to be upfront, as a lesbian. Lots of women think, will I lose my job? If I come out, this is certainly the case back in the 1970s and 80s and 90s, little less so now, but that's also because us lesbians have been doing a lot of groundwork during that time.  And I think there is still quite a bit of nervousness, and many lesbians about being out. Certainly, the same sex marriage laws have done something, but what bothers me about that is that it, it homogenises us. And I think that one of the reasons that that gets passed is because lesbians and gays have great parties, you know, let's go along and have a great party.  And it bothers me that that could be a reason, and as well as that, when I was in Uganda in 2002, and I went to a session, called radical feminism in Africa, and I thought, ah, fantastic, I was really thrilled. And in that session I asked a question about what's going on for lesbians, I can't totally remember my question. But after the session a woman came up to me, all I know is that her name was Christine, she said, be very, very careful, in this country, they torture lesbians. Now I, I had heard of lesbians being incarcerated and called mad. I had heard that lesbians were beaten up on the streets, but I had not at that point, heard about lesbians being tortured. And when she said that to me, I thought to myself, I think I have to do something about this and so I started slowly writing about it and so from 2003, up ‘til, well, I mean, it continues in a way not, not as intensely. But through certainly the next 15 or so years I did a lot of research on what happened to lesbians in different countries and, and I mean it is truly appalling the ways in which lesbians are treated, not only by the so called prison guards, but also by other prisoners so if there are men in the same prisons, often the lesbians will be targeted to be raped.  In South Africa, in the Western Cape. So, so many lesbians have been targeted to be raped, in order to convert them from being lesbians. Now the distorted thinking there, really is too much for me, I think if you rape a woman, do you really think that she's going to want to have sex with men? It just doesn't make sense, but a lot of stuff doesn't make sense, and hundreds, probably by now thousands of lesbians in the Western Cape have been raped “corrective rape” is what it's called. And it's the only instance where I saw a programme on TV in Australia, talking about that, that's the only example in the mainstream media that I have seen about the kind of level of violence meted out against lesbians. And often, you know when, when a lesbian is killed, it's not made clear that she's a lesbian whereas when a gay man is killed, it's always, always because it was gay. The media don't want to use the word lesbian and a lot of young people don't want to use the word lesbian, but I think it's a fabulous word, probably the most powerful word in the English language, and I will continue to use it for myself and I will continue to write about lesbians, and I will continue to try and do what I can to make it a more obvious, subject to talk about, but I haven't had any mainstream media interest in my book and I suspect that's probably one of the reasons why, that and the following chapter on trans, but I had to, I had to have the chapter about lesbians first, so that people could see where, where this is coming from and draw their own conclusions. I don't want to tell people how to think, I want people to think for themselves, I want them to think about what are the ramifications of lesbians being erased, lesbians being cut out of political discourse. What does that do? If we can't talk about the experiences of lesbians, well, what sort of society are we in? Just as, as I said, are we serious? Do you care? And then I have finished the chapter with how to interview lesbian refugee, and all the things you need to be aware, you know, and I think that brings up a lot of issues too like what sorts of assumptions are you making and I've written in the chapter about lesbian refugees and that huge difficulty that they have been recognized that even as lesbians, you know, if they have a child, oh well you're obviously not a lesbian. Yes.  So, and my friend Consuelo Rivera Fuentes, you know, I mean, her work in this area is just incredible in her writing about her experiences in Chile in the 1970s under the Pinochet regime, extraordinary, extraordinary work. And I think what enormous courage. She had a) to, to get through that and b), to be able to write about it and speak about it. Yeah.  She's my heroine.  

SL:  Yeah, I mean she's amazing. And I think we've actually, we have the honour of podcasting her as well, at the FiLiA conference but that was incredible panel.  Yeah, no, she's brilliant. But so are you Susan, and thank you for all your work in this area, and for that chapter, honestly.  I think I've kept you for quite some time. So I'm going to try and, and ask, maybe if you would consider reading us one of the poems in your book?

SH:  Well, I'm going to read two poems, I’m going to read one that's more happy. And one that's not so, um, so these are both poems in the very final chapter which is called “Sovereignty in the spirit of nature” and the chapter opens with a poem called Sibyls and it's from my book Blueprint land, and the Sibyls were the great prophesies of, of Rome, and you can see them in the Sistine Chapel.

“Phemonoe the poet 

says it's time to cease 

prophesying 

the future is now 

time is 

turned on itself

there

then 

here 

now 

the known a memory

the knowable invented

our million mouths singing”

So I'm trying to say, you know, we really need to do this together. Cassandra prophesied, but we need to act.  And I think whatever we do, we should do it together.  And then right at the end of my book, I have a sort of poem (laughs) called You can never get enough.

“You can never get enough 

from capitalism 

from tech 

from porn 

from prostitution 

from industrial farming 

from the animals and plants you want to turn into super producers from animals in transhuman experiments 

from forests 

from the drying rivers 

from the oceans and land you intend to mine 

from underground artesian basins 

from war torn countries whose oil you want 

from prisons for profit 

from the bodies injured by technical advances 

from the defeated whose women and children you want 

from the body you want to harvest or transform 

from all of us 

from the planet the sky the air we breathe”

That's really a bit of a summing up of my book, in a way.

SL:  Yes. They are both beautiful.  I suppose I should try and finish on a bit of a positive note. And I was wondering what sort of, well given that's how you end too, what sort of general advice, you might have for feminists, of how we get to the place that you hope for. Because at the end, you give us this beautiful vision that I really like I wish, yes let's live, let's live in that place, but how, how would we begin to sort of tip this. 

SH:  Well, when I first joined the women's movement, I joined a consciousness raising group.  At that stage, I had no idea what a consciousness raising group and nor did any of the other women, but we got to, we had heard that what you do is, you get together and you talk to one another for maybe an hour a week, so we did that, it was at university, and lunchtime on a Thursday or a Wednesday or something like that, some of us got together and we started to talk about our lives. And when you talk about your lives in a group like that, you actually start to figure out, oh that happened to you too, did it?  Oh, you mean it's not just me? And I think that was a great lesson for all of us at that point, and I stayed in, I moved, over the year I think I moved to another consciousness raising group or the people change because people left, women left the University and things like that. And I think I'd probably stayed in consciousness raising groups for five, six years not quite sure anymore. They then transformed into writing groups and so on and so on and so.  Now what I'm saying here is, we all know more than we think we know. And the thing about being in a group, sometimes it leads to activism. Sometimes it leads to creativity. Most of the people I know who were in consciousness raising groups went off and did something, it didn't matter what they did, but they did something and they generated that energy for doing things through, through being in consciousness raising groups.  I was in another group of some years later, there were just three of us and one woman was an artist and another woman was a mathematician, and I was just starting to write my first novel.  And we had a fantastic time, we've just, we've talked, we just talked endlessly about our own obsessions. And, you know, that was, that was fantastic. After a few years, we ran out of conversation and then we went and did Aikido classes together. So, you know, these things happen, things change. And then we stopped altogether at some point we got bored with Aikido. We've felt we were good enough or who knows, who knows I can't remember anymore. But what I think that that coming together, talking, doing, acting, believing in yourself, understanding that this is, it's systemic, that our analysis has to cover the systemic ways in which things happen. And you do discover that you are not the only person feeling these things, and young feminists and young lesbians these days, they don't seem to have it, and just get out, find two other people, three others, four others. Start a group, start talking, that's what I would say, I think it's the best thing, and those of us who are in our 60s, I mean, you know, we've been there, done that, but we all remember how important that was and many, many women in my age group are still involved in different group activities, it's a bit hard where I live because it's in the rural country area and there are not a lot of lesbians nearby. But I have a lot of contacts  through email and zoom and all sorts of other ways these days, phones.

But we don't, you know one of the best places for women over 50, let's say, it is just an arbitrary thing, sort of arbitrary, Facebook is great for women over 50, because we don't do all that stuff that happens for the 15 year olds who are on Facebook. And, I mean, that's very tough and I know a lot of women, a lot of younger women who left social media because they can't deal with the violence of it, and the rudeness and all of those things the verbal violence. Yeah.

SL:  So the answer is to go speak to other women.

SH:  Yep, absolutely, regularly.

SL:  Well I think that's definitely sound advice for sure. Thank you so much for talking to us today and for women who are interested in your book, and your work where can they go to find out more? 

SH:  It depends a little bit on what country you're in. So let's start with Britain, in Britain and in Europe, you can contact Gazelle book services, and they have all our books. You can even look up Spinifex, and trawl through our various books, but you can put the word Vortex in, or you can put my name in, and the book will come up and you can order either directly from them, or you can insist that your local bookshop order them that's a good way to do it, or you can just, you know, go through the various online retailers who I won't give any extra promo to. If you're in North America, that is, USA, Canada and Mexico, then you can go to ipgbook.com, and do the same thing, just look for the book, and you can order directly or through book shops or online. Now if you're not in those two areas, UK, Europe and North America, then Australia is the place to come to, you come to the Spinifex website, which is www.spinifexpress.com.au We do regular mailings to Australia and New Zealand. We are more than happy to send copies elsewhere. There is a postage charge of course, we can't really help that. But you can you can find our books there, and even no matter where you are, you can sign up to our newsletter. Subscribe to Spinifex newsletter that is, cos that gives you all the details and keeps you informed and we're starting to do new things we have, we actually have a new website this year, it is completely different from how it used to be. And, yeah, it's, it's great. So we're quite pleased that 2020 has knocked us out.  And you can follow us on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. You can also follow me on Facebook. I do a little bit of Instagram and Twitter but Facebook really is better for me. I like to be able to have words, and not just pictures, but I don't, I, on Twitter I really just retweet but if you tweet something nice to me there, I'll probably retweet it (laughs) might take me a week or two to see it, whereas Facebook I'll see every day.

SL:  Thank you so much and I do recommend subscribing to the newsletter I am subscribed and it is lovely, and thank you so much Susan Hawthorne for joining us and talking about your book, and, of course, all of your work in so many different areas. Thank you. 

SH:  Thank you.

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