Conference Talk

Activism, Change and Feminist Futures Conference 2026

I do love a good academic conference. They offer remarkable opportunities to network, receive constructive feedback on your work, test ideas in public, and occasionally find unexpected publishing opportunities.

For the past three years, I’ve attended only one conference a year—although I expect that to change come 2027. Last year, I was privileged to present at the School of Law and Social Sciences at Swansea University. It was the first time I had presented my work on sexual violence, and it marked an important shift in my research and writing.

This year, I’m excited to be presenting at the School of Law and Social Justice at the University of Liverpool as part of the Activism, Change and Feminist Futures Conference 2026.

Speaking at international conferences is a gift and an honour for many reasons. As an independent researcher, intellectual community is a must. It gives you somewhere to test difficult ideas, encounter people working through similar questions, and, perhaps most importantly, keeps you from screaming into the void.

This particular work is deeply personal.

I am the girl in the abstract—or rather, I was the girl in the abstract.

The diary at the centre of this research was written by me as an adolescent girl. It documented my experiences of a sexual relationship with a teacher and later became part of the machinery through which those experiences were investigated, interpreted and adjudicated. Decades later, I have returned to that same diary—not simply as its author, but as a researcher asking what happens when an intensely private object acquires an institutional life of its own.

My research therefore asks a set of complicated but interrelated questions:

What happens to a teenage girl’s diary as it travels from private self-expression, through the machinery of criminal justice, and back into the hands of the woman who wrote it?

Who has the authority to determine what a teenage girl’s diary means as it moves between autobiography, evidence, archive and scholarship?

And perhaps the question that sits most powerfully at the heart of the project:

What happens when the object once used to interpret the girl becomes the object through which the woman interprets the institutions that interpreted her?

There is something profoundly strange about becoming the scholar of an archive created by your younger self. The girl wrote the diary. The criminal justice system read it as evidence. And now the woman who reads it back.

Abstract

This presentation presents work that is set against the backdrop of the transformative 1990s in Australia, a pivotal and turbulent decade for young girls and women, marked by the emergence of third-wave feminism and shifting attitudes towards consent, sexual violence, and gender dynamics. A Literary Object of Rape Culture delves into the writings of an adolescent girl who documented her experiences of institutional abuse. Through a powerful and moving critical reading and insightful analysis of the diary entries, this work offers a nuanced exploration of institutional abuse through the contents of a salacious diary of a vulnerable 14-year-old girl.

Charting the journey of the diary from a literary object of self-documentation towards an object of criminal evidence and an object of rape culture, this work chronicles the cultural importance of the diary, the context of the problematic power dynamics of teacher/student sex, 1990s rape culture and the devastating legal, social, and psychological consequences of keeping a journal of rape. Arguing the diary acts as a critical precursor for the confessional nature of social media in the age of #metoo, drawing parallels with contemporary narratives shared on social media platforms.

The talk focuses on several themes relevant to institutional abuse that have been the focus of significant media, political, legal and policy scrutiny over the last few years in Australia, the United Kingdom/Ireland, Europe, and the United States of America. They include (i) male authority, (ii) power dynamics and patriarchal norms, (iii) Silence and Stigma, (iv) Gender roles, stereotypes, and traditionalism, (v) class- and slut-shaming, (vi) resistance and resilience. These central themes are linked by inter-connected sub-themes of victim-blaming attitudes unique to regional Australian communities, such as social dynamics that prioritised community reputation and loyalty over justice and accountability.  

Taking a sensitive and interdisciplinary approach, this work endeavours to honour the survivor's voice, providing nuanced analysis and intersectional perspectives to amplify the voices of Generation X (1965-1980) victim-survivors and aims to delve into the complex terrain of rape culture within the socio-political landscape of 1990s Australia. Ultimately bridging the divide between historical and contemporary narratives while highlighting the transformative power of survivor storytelling in offline and online spaces that will inspire collective action toward eliminating institutional abuse.