Reading Institutional Women: A Nexus Approach to Bourdieu, Summer Heights High, and the Fiction of Elizabeth Jolley

Abstract

The essay uses Bourdieu’s theories to show the ways in which some key female characters in institutions in Lilley’s Summer Heights High and Jolley’s fiction support the workings of institutional patriarchal power. In the final section, the author draws on the concept of ‘heterotopia’, in order to discuss the ways in which ‘these texts contest masculine institutional paradigms, and explore the limits and possibilities of the alternative views offered by these fictions’ (74).

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Published 1 October 2009 in Manifesting Australian Literary Feminisms: Nexus and Faultlines. Subjects: Critical reception, Critical theories & approaches, Feminism, Social structure, Women, Elizabeth Jolley.

Cite as: McLean Davies, Larissa. ‘Reading Institutional Women: A Nexus Approach to Bourdieu, Summer Heights High, and the Fiction of Elizabeth Jolley.’ Australian Literary Studies, vol. 24, no. 3-4/, 2009, doi: 10.20314/als.a1ea7404cf.