Hobbes and Corneille on Political Representation

In this essay, I compare the meaning of political representation in Hobbes’ Leviathan and Corneille's Cinna. For both authors, a monarch is a “representer” and representation is a necessary condition of effective sovereignty. However, the term “representation” means something entirely different in Hobbes and in Corneille. For the former, it means acting and speaking in the name of a multitude and in its absence; for the latter, it means acting and speaking in the presence of a political public, with the intention to impress this audience. I would like to argue that our late modern (or postmodern) conception of sovereignty can be seen as being (unconsciously) based on the conjunction of Hobbes’ and Corneille's different notions of representation.     

Point Chev boys and the landscapes of suburban memory: autobiographies of Auckland childhoods

This article uses a comparative analysis of two autobiographical texts to consider the ways in which the emotions and the imagination inform a sense of place. These autobiographies recount boyhoods in Point Chevalier, an Auckland suburb which embodies much that is emblematic of the mythology of early- to mid-twentieth-century childhoods in New Zealand. Both a modern suburb in a fast-growing city, and a richly particular coastal environment, it makes itself available as the setting for a childhood of the national imaginary. But as each of these narratives crosses the suburban terrain it produces a different understanding of what it meant to grow up as a male then, and there: in Halfway Round the Harbour Keith Sinclair never questions the fit between boy and place, or the certainty of his belonging and his identity; Peter Wells in Long Loop Home recalls a tumultuous boyhood increasingly marked by the threat of exclusion and intense family conflict. Between the two opposing trajectories of these texts, other possibilities are glimpsed. Place is created here by gender, sexuality and class; and masculinity is shaped and positioned differently for each of these boyhoods and the men who reflect on them. The affect of place marks the difference between these two Point Chevs.     

Rooms of Their Own: Public toilets and gendered citizens in a New Zealand city, 1860‐1940

Differences in the provision of public toilets for men and women point to the gendering of citizens. In the later nineteenth century, provision of public toilets in the city of Dunedin centered on the management of male bodies as the meaning of 'public decency' was transformed, while women were catered for as consumers. By the beginning of the twentieth century, when provision for women became a public issue, it was debated in terms of women's special character as citizens. The bodily and spatial characteristics of public and private were renegotiated around this issue: as women became more public, toilets became more private. This article draws on debates about the sexed and gendered body in public space, maternal citizenship, the civilising and modernising of landscapes and bodies, and shifting conceptions of privacy and public.     

Poverty,Dependence and ‘Women’: Reading Autobiography and Social Policy from 1930s New Zealand

This essay explores the construction of ‘women’ in New Zealand during the 1930s, when the social legislation of the First Labour Government was being formulated and enacted. It examines the documentation produced by the legislative process in relation to the autobiographical texts of John A. Lee and Mary Isabella Lee, arguing that there are parallel conflicts in each set of texts. There is a series of double movements: the offer of the state’s protection to women is at the same moment a gesture of defence; ‘women’ are simultaneously constructed as ‘helpless’ and—not so overtly—as needing to be controlled.