Through the lens: the place of the sex worker in Soviet society during glasnost as depicted in Todorovsky’s Intergirl (1989)

Author: Dominique Jones Sub-editor: Lillian Gutteridge Image credit: Pyotr Todorovsky, Interdevochka, 1989. With the advent of glasnost (Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of governmental openness and transparency), the USSR underwent a ‘sexual revolution’.  As a result, discourses and popular culture portrayals of sexuality became increasingly prevalent. Nevertheless, the liberal nature of glasnost did not extend entirely to…

Unmasking the Many-Faced God: Dionysus as a Figure of Fluidity in Archaic and Classical Greece

Author: Tahlia Antrobus Sub-editor: Fergus Sinnott Image credit: A Bacchanalian Revel by R.A. William Etty, and The Priestess of Bacchus by John Collier. Of all the gods shrouded in mystery and possessing confusing mythos, Dionysus was arguably one of the most prevalent in ancient Greece. To the Greeks of the Hellenistic period, he was their culture – their…

Context and its Consequences: The Mystery of Median Art

Author: Bridget Bracken Sub-editor: Pamela Piechowicz Image Credit: Medes and Persians at eastern stairs of the Apadana, Persepolis. Wikipedia Commons. The Iron-Age Iranian peoples known as the Medes, and the classification of their art, are one of the most controversial topics in Near Eastern archaeology. Whether there is art that can be classified as definitively “Median” and…

Alleviating Anxiety with the Book of the Dead

Author: Bridget Bracken Sub-editor: Pamela Piechowicz Image Credit: A vignette in The Papyrus of Ani, from Spell 30B: Spell For Not Letting Ani's Heart Create Opposition Against Him, in the Gods' Domain, which contains a depiction of the ba of the deceased. Wikipedia Commons. The Egyptian Book of the Dead, or Book of Going Forth by Day, reveals…

Destroying to Replace: Witnessing Settler Transformations of Naarm/Melbourne

After less than 80 years since the first arrival of British settler-colonists, Melbourne was unrecognisable from the wetlands, forests of wattle, gum and lakes, creeks and rivers that had defined the landscape previously.