FW: [csaa-forum] Fat Pizza

[Jon Stratton]

    Hi Jonathan,
          This review--which I have to say I haven't read--appears to
buy into a longstanding myth that southern European cultures are more
matriarchal than northern European cultures.  I don't know the specific
origins of this myth, or indeed if there are any, but it seems to work
in conjunction with the racialised hierarchy within Europe that placed
northern European culture at a higher level of civilisation to southern
European culture.  This was legitimated on a colour grading that
considered northern Europeans more 'white' than southern Europeans.  The
civilisation assumption was, of course, that patriarchy was more
civilised than matriarchy.  This functioned in evolutionary terms where,
for those who believed that there ever had been a matriarchy (Bachofen
is the reference here), it was replaced by patriarchy.
   Given the 'white Australia' anxieties of the 1950s (and later!!) it
doesn't surprise me that somewhere somebody invoked the old matriarchy
fears.  All the more because Australia has always placed women much
lower in the social order than (even) Britain--speaking here in the
general terms of, let us say, a cultural imaginary.  If I remember this
is a point in Summers' _Damned Whores and God's Police_.  
   What the above begins to touch on is the complicated gendering of
immigrants to Australia--this is of especial importance now in respect
of the perceptions of 'asylum seekers.'.  But I am moving away from your
question. 
    As an aside, the combination of race/ethnicity and sex, and
sexuality (for example, the very anxious emphasis on heterosexuality),
in Fat Pizza is certainly worth thinking about!!
Jon 
       

-----Original Message-----
From: csaa-forum-bounces at darlin.cdu.edu.au
To: CSAA discussion list
Sent: 14/09/04 7:17
Subject: [csaa-forum] Fat Pizza

In a review of the film Fat Pizza, Michael Kitson asks 'So why do all 
the girls regard Fat Pizza with such horror?' and he offers the 
following answer:

'Apart from the calories, I reckon it's because although patriarchal 
Australia got a kick in the 1970s with both Germaine Greer and the 
influx of matriarchal cultures, the irony is that a matriarchy still 
lets its eldest son run wild and the daughters of these cultures have 
had enough of their pampered brothers. Spit on me if I'm wrong.' (25)

Without wanting to spit on Kitson, I'm intrigued by this idea of 
immigration to Australia as an 'the influx of matriarchal cultures' 
though I'm unsure how to follow it up?

I know that in Donald Horne's The Lucky Country there's reference to 
'An American West Coast American Professor of Psychology' who 
characterised Australia as a 'matriduxy' because 'more often than not, 
Mother is the decision maker in the Australian home' (86) but then that 
hardly helps. And I don't see anything about matriarchal or patriarchal 
cultures in Ronald Taft's essay on 'The Myth and Migrants' in Peter 
Coleman's Australian Civilization which was the one place I thought 
such ideas might have played out.

I'd be grateful for any ideas or suggestions for sources for what 
Kitson is on about? Perhaps I should be reading social theory from the 
1970s or 1980s - but which?

Best wishes

Jonathan


Horne, Donald (1964) The Lucky Country: Austrtalia in the sixties, 
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Kitson, Michael (2003) 'Surprisingly tasty  Fat Pizza', Metro, 137: 
22-27
Taft, Ronald (1962) 'The Myth and the Migrants' in Australian 
Civilization: A Symposium, edited by Peter Coleman, Melbourne: F.W. 
Cheshire.


Dr Jonathan Bollen
School of English, Communication & Theatre
University of New England
Armidale NSW, Australia

Postal: 413 / 6 Belvoir St, Surry Hills NSW 2010, Australia
Telephone: +61 2 9690 2846
Mobile: +61 4 2237 6346
Email: jbollen at pobox.une.edu.au

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