Carol Lee Bacchi
Personal Information
Description
Carol Bacchi is Professor Emerita of Politics in the School of History and Politics, University of Adelaide. She received her PhD in History from McGill University in 1976. Her PhD thesis on the ideas of the English-Canadian suffragists became the basis of her first book, Liberation Deferred? She migrated to Australia in 1976 and joined the Politics Department in 1984. Her major publications since that time include: Same Difference: Feminism and sexual difference (1990), The Politics of Affirmative Action: 'Women', Equality and Category Politics (1996), Women, Policy and Politics: The construction of policy problems (1999), Fear of Food: A diary of mothering (2003), Analysing Policy: What's the problem represented to be? (2009), (with Joan Eveline) Mainstreaming Politics: Gendering practices and feminist theory (University of Adelaide Press, 2010; available free online).
Books
Same difference
Challenging a common view of the women's movement as perpetually riven into 'sameness' and 'difference' camps, Same Difference highlights the political conditions which impel some feminists to argue in these terms. The implication of the analysis is that debates about sexual difference divert attention from important social issues such as how society is to reproduce itself and what kind of society we wish to create.
Women, policy, and politics
This book offers a powerful new approach to policy studies and encourages students to reflect critically upon the different ways in which policy problems are constructed within policy proposals. Bacchi applies her 'what's the problem represented to be?' approach to focus on a range of policy issues commonly associated with the issues of women's inequality: pay equity, antidiscrimination and affirmative action, education, child care, abortion, domestic violence and sexual harassment.
Mainstreaming politics
This book offers an innovative rethinking of policy approaches to 'gender equality' and of the process of social change. It draws upon poststructuralist organization and policy theory to argue that it is impossible to 'script' reform initiatives such as gender mainstreaming. As an alternative it recommends thinking about such policy developments as fields of contestation, shaped by on-the-ground political deliberations and practices, including the discursive practices that produce specific ways of understanding the 'problem' of 'gender equality'. Available free online from University of Adelaide Press.
Liberation deferred
This book offers an intellectual history of the English-speaking Canadian woman's suffrage movement. It argues that the motivations of a great many suffragists were affected by their membership in a social elite that saw the need to regulate society's future and hoped the family would remain the foundation of that future.
The ideas of the Canadian suffragists, 1890-1920
This is Carol Bacchi's PhD thesis which offers an intellectual history of the English-Canadian woman suffrage movement.
The politics of affirmative action
This book presents a comparative analysis of those countries reputed to be leading the way in policies for women, including affirmative action - the United States, Canada, Australia, Sweden, the Netherlands and Norway. Bacchi describes how conceptual and identity categories are given meanings and positioned in debate in ways which work to contain affirmative action.