Feminism and Friendship

I first met Sneja Gunew at a Women’s Studies conference in Wollongong in 1981. Together with Louise Adler, she gave a presentation, ‘Method and Madness in Female Writing’, which made a challenging intervention into this gathering. Intervention was her preferred practice of intellectual responsibility and challenge her characteristic style. I joined the staff at Deakin in 1985-1986, and during that time Sneja and I became firm friends, and her work influenced mine considerably. As well as teaching literary studies at Deakin we both contributed to the interdisciplinary course, ‘Women and Social Change’, which led to Sneja’s editing the companion volumes Feminist Knowledge as Critique and Construct and A Reader in Feminist Knowledge. As well as her influential work on multiculturalism and her interventions into the rapidly developing world of feminist studies, Sneja took on the male establishment, mainly through a series of contributions to debates around the publication of Ken Ruthven’s Feminist Literary Studies (1984) and subsequently on ‘the new humanities’. On the brink of her departure for Canada in 1993 Sneja’s essay, ‘Feminism and Difference,’ again challenged any feminist work that claimed to speak for all women, including those minoritised in terms of race or class. Whether the issue was women’s liberation or multiculturalism, creative practice or cultural policy, Sneja always emphasised difference and diversity, and made it her business to deconstruct any assumptions of uniformity, or of a neutral speaking position.