Founded | 1991 |
---|---|
Founders | Renate Klein and Susan Hawthorne |
Country of origin | Australia |
Headquarters location | North Geelong, Victoria |
Distribution | self-distributed (Australia) Independent Publishers Group (North America) Gazelle Book Services (UK) [1] |
Publication types | Books |
Official website | www |
Spinifex Press is an independent feminist book publisher based in Australia. [2] [3] It was established in March 1991 by Renate Klein and Susan Hawthorne. It has over 200 titles in print and publishes both fiction and non-fiction that is innovative and controversial. [4] [5] It specialises in subjects of feminist interest including lesbian literature, women's health, writing by indigenous, Asian and African women and books discussing ecology, globalisation, violence against women, prostitution and pornography. Spinifex was one of the earliest Australian publishers to adapt to new technologies by offering a web-based catalogue and enabling on-line purchase of all titles. It has been publishing ebooks since 2006. [4]
Spinifex Press celebrated its 25th anniversary in September 2016 with a two-day conference for radical feminists culminating in the drafting of a radical feminist manifesto. [6] [7] In March 2021 Spinifex celebrated its 30th anniversary on Zoom with an event titled "Welcome to Country", showcasing Indigenous Australian writing. [8]
Authors are Australian and international and include Sheila Jeffreys, Melinda Tankard Reist, Finola Moorhead, Diane Bell, Merlinda Bobis, Beryl Fletcher, Unity Dow, Maria Mies, Rose Zwi, Fethiye Çetin, Dale Spender, Mary Daly, Janice Raymond, Vandana Shiva and Julie Bindel. [9]
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: CS1 maint: url-status (link)Ngiṉṯaka, also spelled Ngintaku, is a giant perentie lizard Ancestral Being from Aṉangu and Pitjantjatjara religion and mythology. It is associated with Angatja, an area along an important songline.
Diana E. H. Russell was a feminist writer and activist. Born and raised in Cape Town, South Africa, she moved to England in 1957, and then to the United States in 1961. For the past 45 years she was engaged in research on sexual violence against women and girls. She wrote numerous books and articles on rape, including marital rape, femicide, incest, misogynist murders of women, and pornography. For The Secret Trauma, she was co-recipient of the 1986 C. Wright Mills Award. She was also the recipient of the 2001 Humanist Heroine Award from the American Humanist Association. She was also an organizer of the First International Tribunal on Crimes against Women, in Brussels in March 1976.
Cyberfeminism is a feminist approach which foregrounds the relationship between cyberspace, the Internet, and technology. It can be used to refer to a philosophy, methodology or community. The term was coined in the early 1990s to describe the work of feminists interested in theorizing, critiquing, exploring and re-making the Internet, cyberspace and new-media technologies in general. The foundational catalyst for the formation of cyberfeminist thought is attributed to Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto", third wave feminism, post-structuralist feminism, riot grrrl culture and the feminist critique of the alleged erasure of women within discussions of technology.
Yenlin Ku is a prominent feminist involved in the women's movement in Taiwan.
Sheila Jeffreys is a former professor of political science at the University of Melbourne, born in England. A lesbian feminist scholar, she analyses the history and politics of human sexuality.
Theresa Wolfwood is the director of the Barnard Boecker Centre Foundation in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. She organizes, writes and speaks on issues concerning peace, social justice, women, globalization and human rights. She participated in the World Peace Forum in Vancouver and was an international election observer in El Salvador in June, 2006. She co-coordinates Victoria Women in Black.
Suniti Namjoshi is a poet and a fabulist. She grew up in India, worked in Canada and at present lives in the southwest of England with English writer Gillian Hanscombe. Her work is playful, inventive and often challenges prejudices such as racism, sexism, and homophobia. She has written many collections of fables and poetry, several novels, and more than a dozen children's books. Her work has been translated into several languages, including Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Chinese, Korean, Hindi and Turkish.
Dale Spender is an Australian feminist scholar, teacher, writer and consultant. In 1983, Dale Spender was co-founder of and editorial advisor to Pandora Press, the first of the feminist imprints devoted solely to non-fiction, committed, according to the New York Times, to showing that "women were the mothers of the novel and that any other version of its origin is but a myth of male creation". She was the series editor of Penguin's Australian Women's Library from 1987. Spender's work is "a major contribution to the recovery of women writers and theorists and to the documentation of the continuity of feminist activism and thought". In the 1996 Australia Day honours, Spender was awarded Member of the Order of Australia "for service to the community as a writer and researcher in the field of equality of opportunity and equal status for women".
Diane Robin (Di) Bell is an Australian feminist anthropologist, author and activist. She is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C, USA and Distinguished Honorary Professor of Anthropology at the Australian National University, Canberra. Her work focuses on the Aboriginal people of Australia, Indigenous land rights, human rights, Indigenous religions, violence against women, and on environmental issues.
Donna M. Hughes is an American academic and feminist who chairs the women's studies department at the University of Rhode Island. Her research concerns prostitution and human trafficking; she was a prominent supporter of the campaign to end prostitution in Rhode Island, and has testified on these issues before several national legislative bodies. She sits on the editorial board of Sexualization, Media, and Society, a journal examining the impact of sexualized media.
Kathleen Barry is an American sociologist and feminist. After researching and publishing books on international human sex trafficking, she cofounded the United Nations NGO, the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW). In 1985 she received the Wonder Woman Foundation Award for her strides towards the empowerment of women. She has taught at Brandeis University and Penn State University.
Eva Knowles Johnson is an Aboriginal Australian poet, actor, director and playwright.
Julianne Pierce is an Australian new media artist, curator, art critic, writer, and arts administrator. She was a member of the groundbreaking group VNS Matrix. She went on to become a founding member of the Old Boys Network, another important cyberfeminist organisation. She has served as executive director of the Australian Dance Theatre and is Chair of the Emerging and Experimental Arts Strategy Panel for the Australia Council. Pierce was executive director of the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) from 2000 to 2005, based in Adelaide, and was Executive Producer of Blast Theory from 2007 to 2012, based in Brighton in the UK.
Finola Moorhead is an Australian novelist, playwright, essayist, poet, and reviewer. Her topics include women and writing, switching between reality and fiction, with themes of subversion and survival. Moorhead participates in the women's liberation movement, and during the 1980s, she was a radical feminist. As a result of a challenge she wrote a book without male characters.
Zelda Fay D'Aprano was a feminist activist living in Melbourne, Victoria.
Stephanie Dowrick is an Australian writer, Interfaith Minister and social activist. She is the author of more than 20 books of fiction and non-fiction, five of them best-sellers. She was a publisher in Australia and the UK, where she co-founded The Women's Press, London.
Susan Hawthorne is an Australian writer, poet, political commentator and publisher. Together with Renate Klein, she is co-founder and director of Spinifex Press, a leading independent feminist publisher that celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2016 in Melbourne with a festival of radical feminism. She and Klein were named winners of the George Robertson Award, which recognises publishers with 30 years or more service to publishing.
Renate Klein is an Australian academic, writer, publisher, and feminist health activist. Klein was an associate professor in women's studies at Deakin University until her retirement in 2006, and with Dr Susan Hawthorne, she co-founded the independent feminist publishing company, Spinifex Press in 1991. She is herself the author and editor of 14 books, many of which explore reproductive technologies and the medicalisation of women.
Cathie Koa Dunsford is a New Zealand novelist, poet, anthologist, lecturer and publishing consultant. She has edited several anthologies of feminist, lesbian and Māori/Pasifika writing, including in 1986 the first anthology of new women's writing in New Zealand. She is also known for her novel Cowrie (1994) and later novels in the same series. Her work is influenced by her identity as a lesbian woman with Māori and Hawaiian heritage.