Queensland School of Continental Philosophy

It was Camus who said “we have art in order not to die of life.” Though Camus’ absurdist theory of art was first established in The Myth of Sisyphus, his consideration of the role of the artist in politics takes greater shape in 1951’s The Rebel. For Camus, in the political sphere, art toes the balance between simply recording or escaping reality – it must stylize it without succumbing to its horrors. Chris Killip’s photo series, In Flagrante, has been called one of the most important works of photographic journalism in English history; visually documenting the lives of the English working class through the era of de-industrialisation.  For Killip, his photographs are not so significant – “The photographs can tell you more about me than about what they describe. The book is a fiction about metaphor.” Killip rejects that his work is a documentary – the struggles of de-industrialisation only coincidentally appear. In this presentation, I will argue that Killip’s In Flagrante represents Camus’ ideal work of art inasmuch as it “disputes reality and does not hide from it.” Firstly, by outlining Camus’ idea of art, (as it appears in The Rebel); then through discussion of In Flagrante; and an analysis of this work through the lens of Camus’ philosophy.

For two decades, I have worked as a model and TV commercial actor. My experiences in this field have brought with them a very singular insight into the gendered expectations placed on girls and young women, particularly in relation to what I have seen as a perverse desire to at once sexualise and infantilise femme-presenting people. Now, as a teacher of girls and young women, I see those same expectations continuing to shape and distort understandings of Australian girlhood – only today, young women face the rise of toxic masculine culture, and a resulting backlash against feminism. One aspect of this contemporary aversion to identifying as a feminist is what one of my students has labelled Femmenism: a nostalgic reappropriation and approbation of conservative visions of the feminine, like that of the housewife. Cultural theorist Angela McRobbie calls this phenomenon postfeminist nostalgia, and notes how popular media revives gender roles like the ‘trad wife’ as seemingly innocuous lifestyle choices. As these roles are represented as empowering performances of personal expression and rebranded as aesthetic preference, they are difficult to critique: does feminism have any right to tell women what they should and should not find tasteful, desirable, and/or liberating? In this paper I will argue that the phenomenon of Femmenism is enabled by a collective, cultural amnesia of the painstaking work of generations of women and feminist activists who came before us. In a digital era marked by renewed anxieties around gender and the radicalisation of young people into regressive worldviews, it is vital that we revisit the work of our feminist predecessors and explicitly teach the values of feminism. In doing so, we will be intentionally modelling a reimagining of possibilities for female subjectivity for Australian girls today.

In this talk, I ask the question: how does imagining the future, particularly in the form of dystopian cinema, promote ethical subjectivity and political agency? Through two cinematic case studies I seek to illustrate that imagining the future through dystopian cinema enables ethical subjectivity and political agency through proleptic engagement with fear. By developing Mark Currie’s conception of prolepsis (the evocation of a future event), I give an account of the multi-layered temporal destabilisation that occurs when we imagine dystopian futures and place them in dialogue with our present. Additionally, by studying Indigenous conceptions of time, particularly through the work of Kyle Powys Whyte, I elucidate the ethical implications of disrupting linear and unidirectional time. In the first case study, I examine On the Beach (1959) and situate the film in the broader context of the Cold War to explore the film’s contribution to the political movement against nuclear proliferation. In the second, I discuss how the contemporary fears of totalitarianism and environmental degradation are present in Night Raiders (2021) and show its significance as a piece of Indigenous storytelling which deals with past harms, present struggles, and futures threats.

Bio: Conor Jedam is a casual academic from the School of Historical & Philosophical Inquiry and ambassador for the Critical Thinking Project at The University of Queensland. He completed a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Philosophy in 2025. His thesis explores the connections between the utopian impulse, prolepsis, hope, fear, agency, and Indigenous temporalities to explain how the practice of imagining and telling stories about dystopian futures allows for ethical subjectivity and political agency. His philosophical interests include feminist philosophy, environmental philosophy, aesthetics, and philosophy of fiction. Conor’s other philosophical activities include reviewing for the latest edition of Exordium, UQ’s Student Philosophy e-Journal, and presenting at the 2025 ASCP Conference at The University of Melbourne. 

Contemporary culture contains a range of figures that portray women as irritating enforcers of rules: the nagging wife, the overbearing mother, the “Karen,” the HR officer, or the bureaucratic administrator. These figures appear across both private and institutional contexts, yet their relationship has rarely been analysed systematically. This paper examines the historical and ideological conditions that produce these stereotypes. Drawing on materialist feminist social reproduction theory, political economy, and ideology critique, I analyse how the expansion of managerial governance under neoliberal capitalism has coincided with the feminisation of administrative and social-reproductive labour. As activities historically performed within households (child discipline, behavioural regulation, and emotional management) have increasingly been organised through institutions, the everyday interface between individuals and bureaucratic regulation has become increasingly feminised. I argue that frustrations with the diffuse constraints characteristic of neoliberal bureaucracy are often personalised through encounters with institutional agents and, when those agents are feminised, resentment toward impersonal systems is displaced onto women as a class. Where the “nagging wife” personifies the everyday enforcement of patriarchal norms within the household, contemporary figures such as the HR officer personify the feminised institutional interface through which bureaucratic rules are enacted. In both cases, women perform regulatory labour that reproduces systems they played little role in creating. Contemporary stereotypes of working women therefore represent a historical shift in misogynistic imagery: from the nagging woman of the household to the nagging woman of the workplace.