We dedicate this piece to those special women in our lives. Happy Mother’s Day, Mum(s). * ‘For nine years I grew up in a single parent-child household, but our home never felt empty. Mum’s chicken and lamb roasts were legendary and we always had plenty of friends to fill the seats around the dining room…
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Catch up on all the feminist news from all around the world this week on Lip! Here’s how to help the effort to find the missing Nigerian schoolgirls. Seriously, a judge actually thought it would be a good idea to send this rapist to do community service at a rape crisis centre! Read about…
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The Wood of Suicides by Laura Elizabeth Woollett is intensely engaging, thought-provoking and disturbing. The psychosexual exploration of obsession, seduction, and power dynamics in relationships looks at attachments that transgress social boundaries. The Wood of Suicides is loosely based around the Greek myth of Apollo and Daphne. The god Apollo, a powerful and great…
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Just as the Melbourne International Comedy Festival departs, the cool change has come over and suddenly everything is looking a little greyer and a whole lot less funny. Luckily for me, I was able to assuage the post-MICF blues and catch the last performance of the MICF incarnation of That Sexy Show. Taking on…
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When I was in Kathmandu, Nepal in January 2014, I went to a shop called Local Women’s Handicrafts, and I met Nasreen Shekh. A friend of mine, Beth Collins, had been told about Nasreen’s shop by another Australian. On the program, the two of us had seen a lot of gender discrimination and women…
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Everyone knows that complex and empowering female characters are difficult to find in mainstream films. But there are some who have stood out and become the changing faces of feminism in cinema. In this monthly column, Jade Bate looks at her favourite film heroines who are strong, empowering and kick ass. In my opinion, the…
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In the ever-present and isolating world of social media, we sometimes get caught up in our own headspaces. Don’t deny doing the typical thing, that I have often done, when receiving a Facebook event or seeing a Tweet about a not-for-profit cause or someone’s theatre show that they need you to help fund with Pozible,…
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I must confess, I have not taken the bus in a while. I drive now. This is not a confessional. This was not written on a bus. Growing up in Taipei—a city of laudable public transportation—I took the bus often. We took Bus 220 south, across the bridge over the canal, and then disembarked shortly…
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Recently my local cinema ran a Disney Princess film festival. The festival showed some of the Disney Princess classics: The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Brave, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and my personal childhood favourite, Sleeping Beauty. At eight dollars a pop,tickets were cheap and the audience members, predominantly young girls, were…
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Dear Canberra, where have you been hiding your stylish self all this time? Eye opening is the best way to describe my experience of Fashfest 2014’s closing night. The venue, lovingly called Fashfest HQ, nestles onto the Canberra International Airport. Its industrial design, modern look and kaleidoscopic displays of light offered the perfect backdrop…
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If you’d asked me a fortnight ago where I’d be right now, sitting in a beautiful park overlooking Sydney’s Bondi Beach probably wouldn’t have been my answer. But it’s true – and I’ve got the sunburn to prove it. You may be asking yourself a few questions right now. 1) Who are you? 2) How…
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Is this novella the history of a deluded spinster who lusts for a little boy, or is it the tale of a respectable, selfless woman struggling against forces of supernatural evil? The answer is not so simple: The Turn of the Screw by Henry James is famously an irresolvable exercise in ambiguity. It’s a trap,…
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We’ve come a long way from the princess in the tower – women, I mean. We make our own decisions now and stand up for ourselves more – and better – than we ever have before, and with more political muscle. Yet we must still be vigilant; there are those who, under the guise of…
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It seems like everyone is addicted to fitness and healthy eating these days. Once labelled ‘lazy’, our society, with its fixation on health and fitness, sure has come a long way. But when is it too much? Orthorexia is the latest – yet unofficial – term for being overly obsessive with clean eating and exercising….
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