Abstract
Sharp and provocative, Germaine Greer (1939-) is a feminist public intellectual whose worldview was inspired by the bohemian and anarchist groups of the 1960s-70s. Born in Australia, she moved to the UK in 1964. Parallel with her academic career as a lecturer, she was active in the London counterculture scene, including writing for Oz underground magazine and serving as cofounding editor of Suck, subtitled “the first European sexpaper” (Kleinhentz, 2018; Wallace, 2013). In both Oz and Suck, which combined words and visual images to an equal degree, Greer called upon women to know their sexuality and use it in their struggle for equal rights, and served as a counterweight to the male-dominated editorial desk. In Oz, this was particularly true in a special issue where her theory that “encouraged women to explore the variations of their own heterosexuality in the name of women’s and sexual liberation” (Le Masurier, 2016, p. 28). In Suck she gave practical critical sexual information. In both magazines, the combination of Greer’s texts and creative, humorous, and subversive drawn and photographed illustrations – including her own nude photos – made for a unique and revolutionary sex education message, much of it silenced at the time, and still sorely needed. In this study, I examine Greer’s texts and the attached illustrations in Oz Suck, within the theoretical framework of critical visual literacy and critical sexual literacy, addressing the question: How these image-texts serve as essential sexual pedagogy materials for women?
Presenters
Ya'ara Gil-GlazerSenior Lecturer and Head of the Education through Art Program, Department of Education and Department of Multidisciplinary Studies, Tel Hai Academic College, Israel
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2023 Special Focus—Literary Landscapes: Forms of Knowledge in the Humanities
KEYWORDS
Image-text; Sex Edcation; Germaine Greer; Counterculture; Oz magazine; Suck magazine
