This interdisciplinary study critically revisits the Australian print media???s engagement with Helen Garner???s controversial work of ???non-fiction???, The First Stone (1995). Print news media engagement with the book, marked by intense discursive contestation over feminism, has been constituted both by feminists and other critics as a significant cultural signpost. However, the highly visible print media event following the book???s publication raised a plethora of critical questions and dilemmas that remain unsatisfactorily addressed. Building upon John Fiske???s work on media events as sites of maximum visibility and discursive turbulence (Fiske: 1996), this study re-theorises the public dialogue following The First Stone???s publication in terms of four constitutive elements: narrative, celebrity, audience, and history and conflict. Through an analysis of these four diverse yet interconnected aspects of the media event, I create a critical space not only for its limitations to emerge but also the frequently overlooked possibilities it offers in terms of the wider feminism and print media culture relationship. As part of its central aim to refigure The First Stone media event, this thesis argues against prior characterisations of the debate as constitutive of either a monologic articulation of conservative, antifeminist voices or an unmitigated attack on its author by a homogenous feminism. In particular, I use this media event as indicative of the sophistication and complexity of media engagement with contemporary feminism, despite both continued derision and overly simplistic celebration of this relationship. Texts subject to analysis here include: The First Stone, various ???mainstream??? media representations and self-representations of three ???celebrity feminists??? (Helen Garner, Anne Summers and Jenna Mead), letters to the editor of newspapers and magazines, ???popular??? feminist books by Kathy Bail and Virginia Trioli, and a number of media texts in which those claiming a feminist subject position and those sympathetic to feminism act as either news sources or columnists/commentators. Although Garner???s narrative is throughout identified to be deeply problematic, I argue that the media event it precipitated provides valuable insights into both the opportunities and the constraints of the print media-feminism nexus in 1990s Australia.

This interdisciplinary study critically revisits the Australian print media???s engagement with Helen Garner???s controversial work of ???non-fiction???, The First Stone (1995). Print news media engagement with the book, marked by intense discursive contestation over feminism, has been constituted both by feminists and other critics as a significant cultural signpost. However, the highly visible print media event following the book???s publication raised a plethora of critical questions and dilemmas that remain unsatisfactorily addressed. Building upon John Fiske???s work on media events as sites of maximum visibility and discursive turbulence (Fiske: 1996), this study re-theorises the public dialogue following The First Stone???s publication in terms of four constitutive elements: narrative, celebrity, audience, and history and conflict. Through an analysis of these four diverse yet interconnected aspects of the media event, I create a critical space not only for its limitations to emerge but also the frequently overlooked possibilities it offers in terms of the wider feminism and print media culture relationship. As part of its central aim to refigure The First Stone media event, this thesis argues against prior characterisations of the debate as constitutive of either a monologic articulation of conservative, antifeminist voices or an unmitigated attack on its author by a homogenous feminism. In particular, I use this media event as indicative of the sophistication and complexity of media engagement with contemporary feminism, despite both continued derision and overly simplistic celebration of this relationship. Texts subject to analysis here include: The First Stone, various ???mainstream??? media representations and self-representations of three ???celebrity feminists??? (Helen Garner, Anne Summers and Jenna Mead), letters to the editor of newspapers and magazines, ???popular??? feminist books by Kathy Bail and Virginia Trioli, and a number of media texts in which those claiming a feminist subject position and those sympathetic to feminism act as either news sources or columnists/commentators. Although Garner???s narrative is throughout identified to be deeply problematic, I argue that the media event it precipitated provides valuable insights into both the opportunities and the constraints of the print media-feminism nexus in 1990s Australia.