‘Who’s our Knight in Shining Armour?’ is republished here courtesy of the author. Click here to view more of Genevieve Craig’s work. Warm plum flowers caress you as you move through the bustling Jianguo Holiday Markets, surrounded by the seventeen female and one male journalist who are ready to receive the gender equality committee of Taipei and listen to NGOs on a five- day press tour. These powerful women use their voices to report on injustices and political affairs as their life’s work. So we ask: why is gender inequality still an issue? There is a thought that inequality is linked to the feeling of being powerless, where that voice is often a muted noise eventually fading to nothing. Thus, disempowered women say nothing and stop breathing life into their story. But how do we unpack power? Who is deciding the structures of power? Simply, let’s start with equality and Read More »
Many of the writers and works featured in Peril have been subject to low, medium and high-brow study and review. Below is a selection of media and academic reviews and responses to our work over the years, as well as a selection of festival and event appearances. 2019 ‘How The Family Law normalised cultural diversity on Australian TV’, Nathania Gilson, SBS Writer Nathania Gilson quotes current Editor-in-Chief, Mindy Gill, and Board Chair, Eleanor Jackson, in her article about how Benjamin Law’s The Family Law has changed the landscape of Australian television. 2018 ‘Defying the moment’, Beejay Silcox, Australian Book Review issue no.400 Writer and literary critic Beejay Silcox analyses Australia’s contemporary literary culture, discussing how magazines negotiate the opportunities and pressures of the current political and media climate. Silcox interviewed Peril‘s current Editor-in-Chief Mindy Gill, among other Australian literary journal editors. Lunchtime Lit: Online Publishing Futures, Emerging Writers Festival Current Editor-in-Chief Mindy Gill appears with Mascara Literary Review editor Read More »
Express Media is delighted to present Tracks a travelling pop-up program for young writers that brings the best of Express Media’s workshops, masterclasses, networking opportunities and special events to communities across Australia. On Saturday August 11, we’re bringing the Tracks program to Bendigo, partnering with Writers Victoria and Bendigo Writers Festival to take the best of Express Media right to your backyard. If you’re aged 14 to 25 and have a love of writing and storytelling, Tracks: Bendigo is an exciting day-long event just for you. 9am to 5pm, Saturday August 11 Bendigo Trades Hall 34-40 View St Bendigo, VIC 3550 The Bendigo Trades Hall is wheelchair accessible with a ramp at the entrance, and accessible bathrooms. BOOK YOUR SPOT NOW Tracks is free for Express Media members to participate in and attend. If you’re not a member already, Tracks: Bendigo costs $25 and includes membership to Express Media (normally $25) and Writers Victoria (normally Read More »
Born in Kuala Lumpur, Kevin Bathman is a visual designer, storyteller, curator, writer and social change advocate. He is interested in using creativity to address environmental, cultural and social justice issues, and believes that the arts is an untapped avenue for catalysing change. Kevin Bathman speaks with Tanushri Saha about representation in the arts, and the importance of creating spaces that reflect diverse cultural perspectives. Recently, Race Discrimination Commissioner Dr. Tim Soutphommasane said that those who are invested in cultural diversity and leadership “do so because they usually have ‘skin in the game’”. Do you think this is true of the arts? Personally, the reason I am invested in cultural diversity and leadership is because I live with this reality every day. It is not just a mantra that some people or organisations talk about achieving. When Dr. Soutphommasane says ‘skin the game’, I believe that those fighting for their Read More »
Can an overly honest person be a good magician? If you failed at something once should you never try again? And what’s with all these straight White men in Orientalist drag? Queer Lady Magician tells the story of my first love of stage magic, losing the love from failure, and revisiting my childhood passion as an adult. In the process of doing so, I am forced to confront my demons: impostor syndrome, fear of failure, trauma from emotional abuse. Interwoven with autobiographical storytelling are acts that politicize stage magic to question norms about magic and society: assumptions about people’s identities based on their appearance, gender stereotypes of (male) Magician and (female) Assistant, cultural appropriation in magic, and much more. Serious social and personal issues are tackled with humour, silliness, saltiness, and heartfelt sincerity. Through this show, I learn what it means to be a Queer Lady Magician, eventually taking ownership Read More »
Chindia was a project that comprised an exhibition, short films and an artist talk that was hosted as part of Sydney Chinese New Year Festival 2018 and presented across Gaffa Gallery and 107 Projects from 15 – 26 February 2018. The project addressed themes of culture and migration, particularly the experiences of the Chinese and Indian diaspora communities. The exhibition presented six artists, Anindita Banerjee, Anurendra Jegadeva, Guo Jian, Lilian Lai, Lucy Wang (Ru Xi) and TextaQueen who all featured in the artist talks. The program was accompanied by a screening of four short films around the same themes. The following is a conversation that occurred online between Sydney-based creatives, Sasanki Tennakoon and Tian Zhang in the weeks following their experience of Chindia. Both consider themselves 1.5 generation migrants, born elsewhere and migrating to Australia when they were quite young, and reflect on their own experiences through the scope of Read More »
Sancintya Mohini Simpson, in her recent exhibition Bloodlines, shown at Blak Dot Gallery as a part of Next Wave Festival, uses her interdisciplinary arts practice to address the trauma of memory at the intersection of race, gender and colonisation within her family. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, women from South Indian villages were forcibly taken, coerced, or tricked into leaving their homes for ‘better lives’ by the British to South Africa, to serve as indentured labourers on the sugarcane fields. Many women threw themselves overboard after being subject to rape and abuse. Those who survived were to suffer from harsh conditions as farmers or domestic workers. They were made to toil through pregnancy and sickness. Simpson pays homage to her matrilineal heritage, depicting scenes of South Indian women working the cane fields—their trauma, their labour—using miniature paintings on Wasli (handmade paper in jute). She learnt the art of miniature Read More »
This is part of a series of ekphrastic poems presented alongside ‘Hyphenated’ at The Substation. ‘Dreamlines’ responds to Andy Butler’s ‘Self Portrait of the artist after Gauguin x Koons x Louis Vuitton’ with LOUISE MEUWISSEN. Dreamlines Of Koons, of Vuitton. Of Gauguin’s women, the old unwavering gaze. Of luxury disguised as the unattainable, reflection of the bowerbird’s eye, ultramarine. Of myth, of money, of memory: Billie’s white gowns, white shoes, her white gardenias and white junk. Of the people who use us. Of how steadily things fail themselves, and how empty of remorse, of the moment before regret, our faces unrecognisable as replicas. Of the man who stands at the threshold of that life, who looks in and wants nothing. About the Artwork Self Portrait of the artist after Gauguin x Koons x Louis Vuitton with LOUISE MEUWISSEN 2018 Acrylic, varnish, metal on replica Louis Vuitton bag Dimensions variable Model Read More »
What do we all have in common? Bodies! How do our emotions and feelings go to shaping our concept of physicality? They’ll suggest some bold, sexy, artful, fluid-driven ways! Two performers emerge as a genderqueer conglomerate being, representing Sri Ardhanaareeshvara, the half-male half-female Hindu deity. Amidst smoke and a sparse, dimly lit stage, their movements are slow, fluid, elegant and hypnotic – mesmerising the audience at the Brunswick Mechanics Institute where we’ve gathered to watch an hour of ‘Bent Bollywood’, described as ‘a moving dance innovation of diaspora, gender, transgression and filth’. After Raina Peterson and Govind Pillai come to the end of their introduction, Peterson returns with a solo sequence called ‘Dust’, where gender is represented as the ‘dust’. Throughout their performance, ‘mudras’— gendered hand gestures from classical Indian dance and yoga—delicately tell a narrative of love and desire disintegrating, being celebrated, then move from progression to passage, through Read More »
Karma Dance makes its 2018 Midumma Festival debut with their original production, Bent Bollywood, an eclectic and libidinous dance show that combines the technical rigour of classical Indian dance with the camp theatrics of Bollywood. Featuring Karma Dance Co-Artistic Directors, Govind Pillai and Raina Peterson, Bent Bollywood showcases everything that is both weird and wonderful about queer performance art. Witness the treacherous imagination of the diaspora, the postcolonial rage of the subaltern, and the exuberant lust of the queers who would have written a much better “Kama Sutra” if only they’d been asked. Govind Pillai is one of only a few professional male practioners of Bharatanatyam, a genre of Indian classical dance expressing Hindu religious ideas and spritual themes traditionally performed only by women. Raina Peterson is a professional Australian practioner of Mohiniyattam, an Indian dance style that evokes a mythical enchantress of the Hindu god Vishnu who helps good Read More »
A response to Tanya Thaweeskulchai’s A Salivating Monstrous Plant Tangela, Vine Pokemon #114 Type: Grass Weight 35.0 kg Height 1.0m Gender classifications (binary) : male, female. Tangela’s vines snap off easily if they are grabbed. This happens without pain, allowing it to make a quick getaway. The lost vines are replaced by newly grown vines the very next day. I try to imagine that this belletristic discourse mass-grouping is really by Tangela, from Pokémon GO, or that Tangela is pretending it is ghostwritten. If we entertain these possibilities as real, perhaps it’s intended for a scientist, or loved one. I imagine them to be a dancer, or a wordsmith struggling with creative taxonomies. The person who defaced this copy of the your potentially open-secret autobiography could identify with that latter label-occupation. It’s probably to a lithe, unapologetic dancer – there is something in them that embodies space – Read More »
It’s time for a special mid-week playlist this week on You Don’t Sound Asian. Our third playlist, ‘We’re Queer Here’ – a deliberate namesake of our current Peril edition – sees us broadening our scope to include tracks by a diverse range of queer, trans and gender non-conforming Australian musicians of colour. Why today? Because, as you’re likely aware, today is the day the result of Australia’s national same-sex marriage plebiscite is announced. It’s safe to say that anxiety is hanging in the air for most, if not all, queer Australians today. Because of the cruelty and precariousness of this entire messy debacle, it feels a little lose-lose: no matter what, queer Australians like myself are still going to be confronted by the fact that there is some percentage of fellow citizens who believe we are second-class, and do not deserve the same rights as them. It’s just a matter Read More »
We spoke with Jean Tong in the lead up to her latest production, Romeo is Not the Only Fruit, which you can catch at The Butterfly Club from the 14th-16th of November as a part of the Poppy Seed Theatre Festival. Could you talk a little about DisColourNation, and how Romeo is Not the Only Fruit evolved out of that collective? Romeo Is Not The Only Fruit was initially developed through DisColourNation, a theatre collective of people of colour that focuses on amplifying diverse voices and experiences. The first show the collective created was The Unbearable Whiteness of Being, which interrogated the absence of people of colour onstage. I included that show in Tastings 2016, a showcase of nine original works, and Unbearable Whiteness was challenging, brave, and resisted by all the people who needed to be pushed. I was drawn to working on Romeo Is Not The Only Fruit because Read More »
Where will you be this afternoon at 4.30pm AEDT? Hopefully, like us, you’ll be tuned to Channel 31 where Peril Board Member, multidisciplinary artist, producer and curator, Raina Peterson will be talking with the crew from RMITVs Offbeat. Offbeat is a daily, youth-focused cultural program and we’re delighted to be talking to them today about all things Queer Here. Not only is Raina’s artistic and political engagement as a curator a fascinating insight into contemporary Asian Australian arts practice but, depending on where the conversation leads us, we hope to have a chance to talk about some of the incredible artists that we will be featuring at the event – and also the underlying rational for why we might gather together. As an online magazine, we spend much of our time connecting with people in the ether – so these people-to-people moment mean a lot to us. These are chances Read More »
Bold, Rebellious and Stereotype busting! Seven female voices performing a repertoire of songs that will shatter your understanding of Indian classical music forever! ………………………………………. THE COLOUR OF DESIRE presented by URBAN LAYAS is a two hour exploration of female desire in South Asian music and poetry, through a unique combination of vocal, instrumental and dance performances by some of Melbourne’s emerging artists. From fun and frivolous to deeply romantic and even tortured, The Colour of Desire reclaims female sexuality in all its hues, puts it back in the bodies and voices of real women, and engages with the question of the gap between the sexually liberated female voice in music and contemporary representations in everyday life. “Our aim is to use poetry and performance to engage audiences in a powerful and long overdue conversation about gender equality and cultural sexual repression, and, in particular, give agency to women of South Read More »
Rainbow Alert! Presented by Peril Magazine and the City of Melbourne as a part of Digital Diasporas – we are delighted to invite you to a night of queer art and performance. All year we’ve been working hard to support queer artists from diverse cultural backgrounds to make and share new work as a part of our rolling edition, We’re Queer Here. And now we’re ready to share it with you live and IRL. Join us at Art Play on Transgender Remembrance Day for a night of art, performance, perspectives, solidarity and community that celebrates the diversity of the LGBTIQ communities of colour across Melbourne. Interrogating place, home, identity, belonging, culture, race and sexuality, We’re Queer Here puts the queer human, body and thinking at the foreground of a night of art, collusion, creativity and community. While content will contain adult themes and discussion (we will provide guidance for self-curating Read More »
Guess what!? Peril has a brand new, shiny Soundcloud channel. You Don’t Sound Asian is a celebration of Asian-Australian bands and artists – and more broadly, Asian musos worldwide – who are absolutely killing it. Music often gets left out of the ‘arts and culture’ bracket – which is interesting, considering it is one of the most pervasive art forms present in our day-to-day life. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who does not hear some form of music every day, even if they haven’t actively sought it out: music is everywhere. And this is just one of the many reasons that when it comes to cultural representation, music is ever so important. Within Australia’s music industry, there’s a gradually increasing conversation around diversity of race, gender and sexuality. We’ve finally gotten past the point of denial, and many people in the industry are sheepishly beginning to admit that yes, Read More »
It’s hard to deny that passing is a privilege. Read rightly or wrongly, in certain times and certain places, I am white, cisgendered, straight, monogamous, femme. As my pregnancy advances, the possibility of stealth evaporates. I google, “masc of centre maternity wear”. I doubt a checked flannel or trilby could save me now. My mother attends my wedding, to a man I love, who loves me too. I try to release myself from the feeling of sadness at her joy at getting what she has wanted for so long, at last. I want it too. I am almost a good Filipino daughter. After years of disapproval, and despite my deepest fears, she votes yes. All the known things separate. Still, we don’t invite my Filipino relatives to the wedding. To avoid the embarrassment of their knowing that my brother won’t attend. Because he is too disapproving of me, my “lifestyle” or my Read More »
For those blessedly under the proverbial rock, or perhaps deliberately shielding themselves from Australian media, the Australian public is currently being surveyed on the matter of marriage equality. Most now in Australia will have received their survey information, many have already returned their response, but the debate and campaigning continues as to whether or not same sex couples in Australia should have the right to civil marriage. Within this public debate – protracted, loud, emotive and challenging as it is – lie important questions as to the kind of society Australia wishes to foster, what it values, how it negotiates change, and where it may be going. Against that backdrop, you may ask: where does Peril stand? For Peril, when we consider this debate, we return to our vision, mission and principles, the why and wherefore of our organisation and its work. Developed by successive members of our board, editorial Read More »
Queer and always queering: The resilience of LGBTIA+ Filipino-Australians Adolfo Aranjuez was 15 when he moved to Melbourne, Australia from the Philippines in 2003 with his older sister. As a child growing up in upper-middle-class Manila, Adolfo remembers developing an interest in cooking and sewing, taking up dance and cheerleading at school instead of more traditionally male-centric interests. As he entered adolescence, conversations started to revolve around masculinity and becoming a man. Without the direct influence of his parents, he forged his own way of thinking and behaving, borrowing aspects from both his old and new cultures. As someone who has “always been unashamedly progressive and ambitious” Adolfo says he was able to detach from some of the traditional aspects of Filipino culture, “particularly obedience, shame and indebtedness.” Interwoven here is the complex dynamic between the physical space and culture of the Philippines and Australia, and the personal notion Read More »
TRANSTRAVAGANZA: the Performance offers a sample platter of new work by five of Melbourne’s most talented trans and gender diverse artists. First, whet your appetite with Elija Montgomery’s participatory photographic work exploring monstrosity and humanity. Then, sink your teeth into Raina Peterson’s contemporary Indian dance performance that traverses liminal genders in Hindu art and culture. Get your fill of absurdist theatre with Dove Quinn and Leon Andon’s physical theatre adaptation of Eugene Ionesco’s The Chairs. Finally, cleanse your palate with Luca Lovejoy’s thoughtful and charming cabaret performance, before finishing off with Yelris’ multi-sensory buffet of non-binary electro-poetica beats, words, and Asian gender bending visuals. TRANSTRAVAGANZA: the Exhibition is a collection of works from Melbourne/Narrm-based trans and gender diverse (TGD) artists that shines a spotlight on the beauty and diversity of TGD experience. The exhibition features works by Tama tk Sharman La hole, Dawn Iris Dangkomen, Erin Swift, and Elija Montgomery. Read More »
