Email this article Ghosts in the Machine: Women and Cultural Policy in Canada and Australia
Edited by a Canadian communications scholar and an Australian art historian, Ghosts in the Machine: Women and Cultural Policy in Canada and Australia provides the reader with an overview of many of the issues that preoccupy feminist writers on culture. Writing from the perspectives of two different countries, the questions raised by the contributors nevertheless share a number of parallel interests and demonstrate a common concern over the institutional obstacles still facing women cultural producers. To this end the essays cover a broad spectrum of issues. Monika Kin Gagnon examines three recent conferences organized by artists of colour in Canada and traces the resistance of mainstream cultural organizations to requirements that they address cultural difference within and outside their membership beyond paying lip service to cultural diversity. Andra McCartney looks at experiences of women electroacoustic composers and their navigation of assumptions about women and technology. Annette Van Den Bosch rehearses the disadvantaged position of women cultural producers in the art market and argues that the role of policy must be to redress this imbalance by repositioning women through education, grants, and the marketing of their work. There are also more expository essays on the development of cultural policy in Australia by Andrea Hull, and on the importance of a broadly based and more forward looking conception of cultural planning by Deborah Stevenson.
Two principal themes run through the essays collected in Ghosts in the Machine: first, the issue of representation both as an investigation into images and as a theorization of proportionality and relative institutional power; and second, the place of gender in the operation and writing of cultural policy. The exploration of "images" of women appears in two investigations of the consonance between women and the landscape traditionally theorized in writing on the nation. Brenda Longfellow argues that the traditional trope of woman as a cipher for the nation is disrupted in works by two women filmmakers: Canada's Joyce Wieland and Quebec's Lea Pool. Elizabeth Gertsakis contributes a beautiful photo-essay juxtaposing tourist images of Australian waterfalls with photographic portraits of women at the turn of the century.
The majority of the essays, however, centre on the familiar story of the small number of women artists and curators in large institutions, and the paucity of women participants in the cultural policymaking process. Many of these essays examine, often from a first person perspective, the experience of women in these marginal positions. They are chronicles of rightly felt frustration with the slow pace of transformations in social values that prevent women from obtaining recognition as artists, and the resistance from institutions that see questions of gender solely as demands from one more interest group.
The second theme that runs through the essays in Ghosts in the Machine is the place of gender in
policy. The sense that one gets both through the analysis provided in these essays and through
reading policy documents themselves is that gender is absent both as a category of difference and
as a fundamental consideration in the formulation and enactment of cultural policies. In many
cases, policy actively ignores the question of gender. As Patricia Gillard demonstrates in her
essay chronicling her experience as the sole woman sitting on Australia's Broadband Services Expert
Group, even when the impact of a set of policies on women is discussed at some length, the content
of that exchange not only fails to make the minutes of the meeting, but has absolutely no impact on
subsequent Committee discussions or on the resulting policy document. The feeling of frustration
experienced by Gillard is echoed by many women who sit alone on various committees as the
"representative female" and are expected to take on all responsibility for introducing the question
of gender (but who are then castigated for constantly bringing the subject up).
Even where it is not actively ignored--an action which presupposes awareness--gender is often not
raised as an issue in the formulation of cultural policy. This occurs particularly within national
contexts such as Canada and Australia where the object of policy is the production of a citizenry.
The citizen here is defined not as an individual, but as a role to be occupied and a series of
values and beliefs to be enacted as part of the broader project of nation-building. The location
and characterization of citizenship in values and duties seems to counter the inclusion of the
markers of difference that emerged as a result of the centrality of identity politics to cultural
production of the past few decades. As Van Den Bosch comments from Australia: "What is distinctive
about the new policy agendas is that the politics of difference that characterised the 1970s and
early 1980s have been eclipsed. The questions of gender ethnic, and cultural difference have been
replaced by the old agenda of national identity" (p. 226). Similar returns to the traditional
rhetoric of nation-building as a collective practice of undifferentiated citizens have occurred in
Canadian cultural policy, particularly as a strategy to counter demands for political and cultural
sovereignty from Quebec and First Nations.
Within this context, Jennifer Barrett considers the changing mobilization of terms to define
audiences of both policies and cultural institutions. Using the example of museums, she notes the
abandonment of the vague and generalizing term "public" in favour of the commonalities and
relations of kinship evoked by "community." This institutional appropriation of the discourse of
the local and of the political self-determination characteristic of those constituencies which
designate themselves as communities, can be seen as part of a broader strategy which seeks to
emphasize the public's relationship to the nation as a process of affective investment.
In a similar way, Barbara Godard's mapping of concepts of aesthetic value and the social good
traces the shifts in address in Ontario Arts Council policy documents from 1963-64 and 1992-93 in
terms of their differing formulations of provincial citizenship: a conception of audience (of a
"we") increasingly framed in terms of diversity. As both Barrett and Godard argue, an attention to
the language of diversity does not necessarily entail a commitment to promoting the expression of
difference in policies governing the production of culture. The return to discourses of
nation-building that characterize recent policy documents in Canada and Australia indicate that the
shared values of national citizenry will hold greater appeal than any other instance of identity
formation. As Barrett comments in her assessment of the Australian government's recourse to a
rhetoric of community arts, the goal of cultural policy is "to democratize culture, as opposed to
promoting a culture of democratic diversity and difference" (p. 150).
As a feminist and as a scholar researching cultural policy and its constitution of citizenship, I
have conflicting responses to this collection. On the one hand, I acknowledge and deplore the
continuing underfunding of women cultural producers in large, "recognized" institutional spaces,
the increasing wage disparity between male and female artists, and the under-representation of
women on Boards of Directors of cultural organizations and on policy committees. On the other hand,
because I already know the statistics, and am fully aware of the arguments put forward as solutions
to these representational issues (employment equity, a re-evaluation of women's traditional
artistic production, education and training programs), I want other issues to be raised that
address more directly the absent presence of gender in the language and politics of cultural
policy. In other words, approaching this collection, I was looking for a discussion of ways in
which feminist theory might foreground gender as an articulating term within an analysis of
cultural policy in Canada and Australia.
Alison Beale's essay comes closest to opening the door for future research in this area. She writes: "Cultural policy is an important case because it concerns the explicit enunciation of relations between groups in society and thus in turn affects the kind of support and recognition that discourses and symbolic constructions of gender will receive. Policy is an agent of gender, not merely its reflection" (p. 233). Beale's consideration of feminist theorizations of the state and accompanying interventions in public policy governing pornography and prostitution demonstrates how deep any analysis of cultural policy as a technology must go. A rhetoric of consumer choice, attention to employment equity directives, and raising awareness of the gendered assumptions of what constitutes cultural production of (national) importance is not enough of an intervention by feminists in the way in which cultural policy is formulated. A broader involvement with public policy issues which underscored the operation of gender would include a consideration of the imbrication of questions of cultural production and policy with economic concerns enabling a more pointed contribution of feminists to the cultural policy debates.
The prominence of policy in recent cultural studies research in Canada and Australia is an interesting case study in the erasure (or ignorance) of gender from the study of cultural policy. With the key orchestrators of the policy moment in cultural studies literally in their own backyards, it is surprising that the essays included in this collection do not engage more directly with the terms of the debate, and this points to the absence of gender not only in the policy documents themselves, but in its scholarly analysis. Consideration of possible strategies of intervention within this debate that would foreground policy as a technology of gender would be an important contribution to further studies of cultural policy in Canada and Australia.
