Megan Clement

Megan Clement reviews 'No. 91/92: A Parisian bus diary' by Lauren Elkin

November 2021, no. 437 • 25 October 2021

The closest I have ever come to expiring from heat exhaustion was not during one of Melbourne’s oppressive summers. It was not in north-east Victoria as bushfire smoke choked the air and even the kangaroos abandoned the grasslands. The closest I have ever come was not even on the continent of Australia. It was on the number 26 bus as it crawled up the Rue des Pyrénées on a sweltering June day ... (read more)

'Covid-19 and the pass sanitaire' by Megan Clement

September 2021, no. 435 • 19 August 2021

I receive my first dose of the Pfizer vaccine in May, in the small town of Meaux, mostly notable for producing a luxurious variety of brie. I travel forty minutes from Paris by regional train, watching the city become the banlieue and the banlieue become the countryside, speeding towards something that for five months had felt like an impossibility. Friends in Europe had flown to New York and Kent ... (read more)

Megan Clement reviews 'The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing' edited by Hannah Dawson

June 2021, no. 432 • 26 May 2021

Where is home for a feminist? ‘I carry “home” on my back,’ wrote poet and theorist Gloria Anzaldúa in Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), a protective response to the many layers of discrimination she experienced as a queer Chicana woman. ‘Home’, for Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan, writing in the 1970s, was a place of confinement, where women’s movements ‘strongly resembled those of dom ... (read more)

Megan Clement reviews 'White Feminism: From the suffragettes to influencers and who they leave behind' by Koa Beck

April 2021, no. 430 • 23 March 2021

The most difficult thing for white, straight, able-bodied, middle-class, cis women to accept seems to be that feminism was designed for them. But the reality is that from a suffrage movement that forced Black marchers to walk at the rear to the ‘girlboss’ CEOs who bully their poorly paid underlings, the cause known as ‘feminism’ has long been dominated by the aspirations of an élite group ... (read more)

Megan Clement reviews 'Women and Leadership: Real lives, real lessons' by Julia Gillard and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala

September 2020, no. 424 • 21 August 2020

No Australian feminist is likely to forget the moment when Germaine Greer appeared on Q&A and declared that our first female prime minister should wear different jackets to hide her ‘big arse’. Greer, of course, has blotted her copybook many times before and since, but if we needed proof that a woman leader could not catch a break in this country, here was Australia’s most celebrated fem ... (read more)

Megan Clement reviews 'Recollections of My Non-Existence' by Rebecca Solnit

May 2020, no. 421 • 27 April 2020

Who better to shepherd us through a once-in-a-century pandemic than Rebecca Solnit? The prolific essayist, activist, and critic has long acted as a lodestar for progressives to follow in times of despair, providing encouragement to find Hope in the Dark (2004), as she did in a collection of essays after the beginning of the Iraq War, and demonstrating how human ingenuity can shine through in the w ... (read more)