in the strange position of offering an introductory text to a subject whose very existence is being challenged and redefined... At times we have been stunned by the disagreements and tensions involved in different approaches to feminism and to women’s studies.

There is a hint of the wringing of hands: have the contributors gone too far in unpacking the central terms and concepts of feminist politics? Does the book enact women’s studies’ textual mass suicide? Any editor will recognise and sympathise with the pre-publication history of negotiations that this evokes.

Since the politics of identity are increasingly coming under suspicion, Transitions’ identity crisis is indeed of the moment, and flashing danger signals for fields of study historically linked with emancipatory practices. An identity crisis is also present in terms of the target readership. Transitions, as the editors’ own anxieties imply, seems less sure than the other two recent feminist collections about that readership: is it speaking to other academics or to students? Or, in the way that is increasingly the case in the cultural studies field, and suggested in the choice of cover, are the publishers hoping to widen the market beyond the academy?

Some of the differences between contributors could be traced to a tension between the pedagogical desire to provide complex material in an accessible and engaging way (to both formal students and an interested larger public), and the professional, academic imperatives to publish scholarship. From an educational perspective, three chapters stand out as being written with a readership in mind, without assuming advanced specialisation in the field. They offer originality within some explanatory frameworks, rather than focusing on the minutiae of a specific research project. These are Anna Yeatman’s ‘Interlocking oppressions’, Ien Ang’s ‘I’m a feminist but … “Other” women and postnational feminism’, and Zoe Sofia’s ‘Of spanners and cyborgs: dehomogenising feminist thinking on technology.’

Though different in politics, topics, and approaches, they share a facility for writing that reaches out to the reader opening up difficult concepts: ‘This is a thumbnail sketch of what I think this category oppression implies,’ says Yeatman, moving the reader briskly but generously along. Her analysis is interwoven with glimpses of her own intellectual engagement, ‘Surprisingly ... there is scarcely any critical reflection on the key categories,’ she observes, and you can see the inflection of the eyebrow before she proceeds to rectify the omission. Interesting for its discussion of the terms of political emancipatory analysis, it also provides a valuable, quietly passionate contribution to the debates about the compatibility of political practice and poststructuralist theory.

The editors follow Yeatman’s chapter with Ien Ang’s. Ang addresses Yeatman directly, reflecting as ‘a woman of Chinese descent ... suddenly ... in a position in which I can turn my “difference” into intellectual and political capital, where “white” feminists invite me to raise my “voice”, qua a non-white woman’. From the relatively familiar and safely distant terrain of Black American writer bell hooks, Ang turns to a more confronting speculation of the white specificity of Australian feminism. She compares the contradictions of Australia’s official adoption of ‘multiculturalism’ while asserting its own nation statehood, with those of white feminism’s gestures towards difference: ‘Feminism functions as a nation which “other” women are invited to join without disrupting the ultimate integrity of the nation’. Ang points out that (white) feminists, even when trying to be reflective about our own racism, tend to construct ourselves as the centre, so that for example the inter-relationship of Aboriginal and ‘Asian’ Australians is never noted.

Incidentally, it would be nice to think that each contributor had attentively read the other chapters. Julie Ewington (‘Number magic: the trouble with women, art, and representation’) might, had she read Ang, have reconsidered making her solitary reference to indigenous women: ‘Nor should we neglect the art forms being developed by Aboriginal women ... ’.

Zoe Sofia’s chapter roams entertainingly and informatively through some of the discourses of new technologies. Like Yeatman’s and Ang’s chapters, this one wears its learning lightly, presenting its credentials in the field but offering explanatory anecdotes and other grounding devices. Its subject matter may seem, of all of the chapters, to link most closely to the cover illustration – a speculative female figure with insect torso in flight above an urban map of Australia – but Sofia’s analysis remains in touch with the mundane and material. Her final paragraph returns to feminism as a politics of change, to the vocabulary of ‘strategies’ and ‘empowerment’, and issues a challenge to ‘(t)he convenient notion that technologies are gender neutral’.

Transitions offers particular problems to the writer of a short review: the eleven chapters and their authors whom I haven’t yet mentioned are too diverse to bundle up into a generalising paragraph. I share with the editors the anxiety of categories breaking down. The remaining chapters include historical perspectives of various Australian cultural icons and practices, revisions of the fields of music, art, social policy, writing, and psychology, and some more purely theorising revisioning of concepts and methods that have informed feminist thinking. Several established names like Susan Sheridan, Sophie Watson, Jill Julius Matthews, appear with those of newer theorists and researchers. Rosemary Pringle’s chapters, ‘Destabilising patriarchy’ offers a fitting conclusion, a provisional book-end to a diverse collection. While its title may suggest the final coup de grâce to the feminist project in taking apart one of its central terms, Pringle ends by arguing for its conversion from noun (patriarchy) to adjective (patriarchal), reaffirming the value of process over product – perhaps the only point of agreement between these fifteen chapters. And perhaps this is the nexus knitting up all these transitory feminisms into a loose confederacy that can still provide subjects for women’s studies.

In the seven years between Transitions and its predecessor, Crossing Boundaries, which Barbara Caine also co-edited, there can be seen a generational shift away from an optimistic attachment to remapping, into a chronic uncertainty about whether any mapping is a viable enterprise. The cover of Transitions suggests where the insect-woman is coming from, but there’s no indication of her destination. The same lack of direction haunts the book in terms of its readers: while some contributors seem to have a sense of who their readers may be, others seem to be sending their words along with the insect woman out into the void.