Electric Girlhoods: ACMI Alice in Wonderland Event

I'll be part of an event to coincide with ACMI's Winter Masterpieces Wonderland exhibition on Tuesday 15th May at 6:30 pm.  The event is titled: Electric Girlhoods and Alices Past and Future

Alice was first brought to life by Lewis Carroll, but she's sparked imaginations and been immortalised on screen many times since.

Join film critic and author Alexandra Heller-Nicholas in conversation with Dr Michelle Smith (Monash University) and Dr Dan Golding (Swinburne University of Technology) as they discuss these 'electric' Alices and the unique representations of girlhood across time, space and media, exploring historical significance, contemporary potency and what Alice might mean in the future.

A photo from the event

Feminism Today talk, 'We are the 50%' seminar series

This is more rightly a talk about anti-feminism, and the challenges faced by feminists in light of the insidious forms that anti-feminism now takes. It was delivered as part of Deakin University's 'We are the 50%' series on 17 August 2015.


Feminism Today - 'We are the 50%' seminar series talk by Dr Michelle Smith, Deakin University from Michelle Smith on Vimeo.

Upcoming Talk: "What if Popular Culture Wasn't Sexist?"

I have another public talk approaching on 13 November. With Julia Gillard's recent misogyny speech in parliament, the Destroy the Joint campaign's success,  and the debate about women's freedoms in response to Jill Meagher's rape and murder coalescing to produce renewed discussion about sexism, it's an ideal moment to consider why sexism is still endemic in a country with formal equality. I want to think about how popular culture not only reflects cultural beliefs about how men and women should be, but how it helps to socialise us into accepting sexist limitations as the natural order of things. In particular, I'll be talking about how popular culture for young people contributes to producing sexist attitudes and beliefs. Can we expect sexism to be eradicated without changes in film, television, fiction and social media?

Video: Girls, Sex, and Popular Culture Talk at the Wheeler Centre

Lunchbox/Soapbox Talk: From Prim to Pole Dance (4 October)

I'll be speaking at the Wheeler Centre, at the State Library of Victoria, on Thursday 4 October in the Lunchbox/Soapbox series. The program for the rest of the year includes Clementine Ford and Catherine Deveny. My talk is entitled "From Prim to Pole Dance: Girls, Sex and Popular Culture." I'm attempting to inject a bit of historical context into recent media discussion about the "sexualisation" of girls. So let's see what happens when we juxtapose the Girl's Own Paper with A Current Affair exposés about girls out on the prowl in skimpy dresses.