Loretta Smith

To an observer I am simply a sleeping patient in a hospital bed in recovery. One of rows and rows and rooms full of us. But what small miracles are occurring? How do we right ourselves, our physical bodies, and bring the rest—psyche, soul, ether—into alignment? Protection is required lest one surfaces with fault lines …

Loretta Smith is renowned as the bestselling author of A Spanner in the Works, the biography of Alice Anderson, the ‘garage girl’. Now in Corpus in Extremis, Loretta shares the details of her own fascinating and incredible life; a life in which she has had to negotiate the pain, physical restrictions, and medical interventions of Osteogenesis Imperfecta, also known as brittle bone disease.

She shows that despite being a patient for a lifetime, she has survived, and even thrived with an imaginative brain more agile than her body. You will be charmed, challenged, and will laugh out loud at her wit and ingenuity and as she embarks on travel, engages in work, grapples with family and relationships and takes up creative endeavours, all while enduring continuous medical treatments.

Loretta explores what it is to reside in a body pushed to the extreme; what it is to be human, to be fractured, to be whole and to heal. She lucidly argues that nobody escapes being disabled, disenfranchised or othered in one way or another.

As long as we stand in light there is always shadow, always something to challenge truth, justice, knowledge, physical and mental wellbeing. As humans we are at once strong, yet vulnerable, immutable and forever changing.

Corpus in Extremis is an extraordinary story of survival and resilience against considerable challenges centred around Smith’s brittle bones. Despite all, she tells her memoir with vigour and good humour taking the ‘dis’ out of disability and wiping the floor with it.
—Sara Hardy, author of The Unusual Life of Edna Walling and A Secretive Life

This exquisitely written memoir tells compelling tales about broken bones and heartbreak, as well as about one extraordinary woman’s strong-willed and creative mind and quiet courage. While Smith navigates difficulties unimaginable to most of us in her everyday, she’s woven out of their painful threads such a vital story of a passionately lived life that I found it difficult to part with the book when it came to an end.
—Lee Kofman, author of The Writer Laid Bare and Imperfect

2024 | ISBN 9781922964076 | 200 pages

Merrilee Moss

In the nineteenth century Charles Dickens wrote his novels as serials; in the late twentieth century Merrilee Moss conjures up a new kind of serial fiction: of ghosts, of crime, of satire and of lesbian desire.

When the ghostly Fedora interrupts Julie Barnard's morning coffee in Brunswick Street, Julie's life is set to change. An out-of-work PI, Julie is seduced by Fedora's French accent and flamboyant hats, but soon discovers that wearing beautiful hats is a dangerous activity.

2001 | ISBN 9781922964496 | 88 pages

Sandy Jeffs

Sandy Jeffs was born in Ballarat in 1953. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1976, a time when recovery was seen as unlikely. She was in and out of institutional care for 15 years, including at the infamous Larundel Psychiatric Hospital.

Sandy was among the first to start speaking publicly about living with a mental illness, and much of her writing - including eight volumes of poetry - has been about her struggle to live a full life. She is well-known as a community educator, speaking to doctors and psychiatrists, at community health centres, and educational institutions. She has been honoured in the Victorian Honour Roll of Women, Her Place Women’s Museum, and with an OAM in 2020.

Flying with Paper Wings offers insights into madness – medical, social, personal – as well as disturbing reflections on its causes and its care. It is also a story of how poetry can become a personal saviour in the face of nearly irresistible forces. This edition is an updated edition based on the original text.

Read this exceptional book. It takes you beyond your own narrow terror towards something that might be called insight.
—Helen Elliott, The Age

Awards:

Highly Commended Certificate in the Human Rights Commission’s Non-Fiction Award 2010
SANE Book of the Year 2010
Shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year Award, 2010

MARCH 2024 | 9781925950946 | Paperback | 152 x 229mm | 278 pages

Laura Lecuona

Thousands of pages of books, millions of characters in tweets and hundreds of blogs have been devoted to explaining the distinction between sex and gender, but far from clarifying anything, bewilderment for ordinary people is only growing.

The concept of gender is central to a vaguely progressive-looking set of ideas based on the maxim that people possess a so-called ‘gender identity’. The real problem arises when this nebulous concept, bandied about with different and even incompatible meanings by different groups, is used as a prop to introduce policies that mark a huge setback for the rights of women and girls. The general public, watching the controversy from the sidelines, is confused by conflicting claims about whose rights are being infringed.

In this incisive book, Laura Lecuona sets the record straight by reviewing the origin of the current uses of the key term gender and exploring the main theories of transgenderism. She discusses what lies behind the claims about pronoun usage and warns about the consequences of promoting the recognition of so-called transgender children. She points out the collateral damage arising from this activism, from the perpetuation of sexist roles to limitations on freedom of speech. She dares to confront the accusations of transphobia that often inhibit those who question the foundations of this financially-driven and increasingly dominant ideology and shows the devastating effects transactivism is having on women, both socially and politically.

Gender Identity: Lies and Dangers is essential reading for the urgently needed conversation we need to have about whose interests are being served with the advancement of transgender ideology and what this means for women’s sex-based rights.

Laura Lecuona’s book is remarkable in scope and a dose of political sanity that is badly needed.

—Janice G. Raymond

FEBRUARY 2024 | 378 pages

What if heterosexuality wasn’t innate, but enforced and expected?
Can sexuality change?
Can any woman be a lesbian?

Bringing together women across cultures and generations – from lifelong lesbians exploring their experiences through a lesbian feminist lens, to women consciously leaving heterosexuality behind to embrace lesbianism – I Wish I Was a Lesbian addresses those questions and more. Once understood as the cornerstone of patriarchal control of women, any current political analysis of heterosexuality is now buried under an avalanche of essentialist ideas that serve to invisibilise its political nature and de-radicalise feminism. From autobiographical and theoretical essays to poetry and artworks, I Wish I Was a Lesbian defies taboo and silencing and reopens the conversation. It challenges the notion that heterosexuality is the natural and inevitable fate of most women.

There are many forces keeping women in heterosexual relationships. The latest is to accuse lesbians who have had previous relations with men of being ‘not real lesbians’, ‘pretenbians’ or ‘bisexuals’. But the idea that lesbians are ‘born that way’ is not based in either reality or science. There are no lesbian genes or lesbian brains. For women currently rejecting men and saying they wished they were lesbians but don’t know how to get there, this book offers a vital tool for political reflection and consciousness raising. It invites women everywhere to connect the personal with the political and to ask themselves the most radical question of all: “What is heterosexuality – and do I really want to be part of it?”

The feminist revolution made us the heroes of our own stories.
—Lynn Alderson

We are lesbians not because we cannot help it; we are lesbians because we want to be lesbians, despite all patriarchal obstacles. — Ananda Castaño

MAY 2026 | ISBN 9781922964311 | 302 pages

Kajsa Ekis Ekman
Translated by Kristina Mäki

A brilliant examination of the intellectually incoherent and anti-feminist character of gender identity theory

In this groundbreaking book, Swedish feminist and Marxist, Kajsa Ekis Ekman, traces the ideological roots of the new definition of woman. She shows how biological determinism is back – but minus the biology. So too are stereotypes: womanhood is no longer about having a vagina, but pink ribbons and dolls. Masculinity is no longer synonymous with having a penis but with war and machines. We are told being a woman is a gender identity that anyone can claim and that can only be determined by one’s own feelings.

In countries such as Norway, Canada, Argentina, Australia and New Zealand, self-identity laws have already been enacted that give anyone the right to change his or her legal sex. At the same time, the industry for gender reassignment surgery is growing at an unprecedented pace. Seven out of ten teenagers who seek interventions are now girls.

The new definition of sex has been hailed as progressive. But is it really? What ideology is expressed by it? What consequences will it have? And for whom?

FEBRUARY 2023 | 380 pages

Drew Hutton and Libby Connors (editors)

Why have liberal democracies with proud traditions of democracy and free speech become obsessed with hate speech laws and are anxious about offending citizens’ feelings? Is the issue of trans rights simply a matter of being kind to a minority group who already have the same rights as everyone else?

The writers and editors in Over the Rainbow examine how concerns about the welfare of a small minority have been turned into an ideology that challenges the rights of women, lesbians, and gay men, as well as gaining control of many of the institutions of our society. Even biology and science itself are under threat. A new set of ‘facts’ about sex and gender swept across the English-speaking world and Europe over the past decade disrupting Green and left parties’ long-standing commitments to the rights of women.

Over the Rainbow brings together writers in the fields of community services, therapy and medicine, politics and theory, workplace and sporting culture, the arts and law to explore the stultifying impact that dogmatic adherence to trans ideology has had on everyday life and culture. Together they articulate the underpinning theory and philosophy of gender ideology as well as to explain how these ideas were applied within organisations to override free speech and shut down dissent. This new dogma has embedded itself across the English-speaking world and this book includes writers from the USA, Canada and the United Kingdom, as well as Australia to illustrate its rigidity and negative impacts on civic culture. Free speech and civil society organisations have been essential to the success of representative democracy. The writers in this book hope to contribute to a re-opening of civic discourse.

SEPTEMBER 2026 | 9781922964458 | 328 pages

Robin Morgan

She inspected her knitting. “A yarn imagines itself, you know,” she murmured,” from separate strands. Every story is made of strands, too, of worlds that keep unfolding simultaneously along the same yarn. You can spot one at a time or, rarely, a multitude swarming—though no yarner can ever glimpse both the individual tale and the swarm at the same moment. Imagination can conceal while it reveals. Sooner or later, though, everything gets used.”

In Parallax, Robin Morgan’s most radiant prose, spare but sensuous, welcomes you into her dazzling imagination. This is a story about storytelling––a set of shorter tales which, like Russian dolls, nest and fit together to reveal a larger one.

A fable for the future, a prediction about the past, Parallax is a luscious story that enfolds you and demands immediate rereading the moment you finish, a story that surprises you and invites you to play with the patterns inside its paradoxes, a story whose characters will accompany you for the rest of your life.

2019 | 192 pp

Sheila Jeffreys

In this blisteringly persuasive and piercingly intelligent book, Sheila Jeffreys argues that women live under penile imperialism, a regime in which men are assumed to have a ‘sex right’ of access to the bodies of women and girls.

She reasons that the ‘sexual revolution’ that began in the 1960s unleashed an explicit male sexual liberation and that even now, under current laws and cultural mores, women do not have the right to self-determination in relation to their bodies.

Sheila Jeffreys argues that the exercise of the male sex right has mainstreamed misogynist attitudes and so-called sexual freedom has meant the freedom of men to use women and children with impunity.

The power dynamics of sex, rather than being eliminated, has been eroticised, supported by state regulations and structures that have further entrenched male domination. And while men’s sexual fetishisms such as BDSM and transvestism have been normalised, women now have to fight as their spaces are being erased and their voices silenced in a faux inclusivity that has ‘naturalised’ sexual harassment.

Sheila Jeffreys contends that women’s human rights are profoundly harmed and sexual violence is used more than ever to enforce social control of women.

This is a sobering and brilliant analysis of the modern predicament of women that is impossible to ignore.

SEPTEMBER 2022 | 376 pages

Renate Klein

What happens when an old radical lesbian feminist has an idea of publishing a collection of her papers? She looks at her writings and despairs. She has written too much. The idea gets shelved. Fifteen years later, she revisits the project. But it is worse now because she has written more … But being stared down by her publisher she gets a grip and (painfully) pares down her oeuvre to a manageable size.

This then is a skeleton journey through Renate’s life and her survival in patriarchy. The book starts with her passion for autonomous Women’s Studies as an intellectual necessity and radical feminist research methodology to give women a voice. And why men don’t belong in Women’s Studies classes. Next, she documents her immersion in a critique of reproductive technologies as a member of FINRRAGE. We hear about the exploitation of a desire in IVF followed with problems of egg ‘donations’, cloning, and of course the human rights violation of women and children in surrogacy. A critique of the illusion of ‘choice’ – endorsed by liberal feminists – has to be in the book and with it papers on long-acting contraceptives. Necessary warnings about the unethics of hormone replacement therapy and the French abortion pill RU 486 are included too.

As a feminist women’s health activist, Renate Klein has always been concerned about the fact that women are our bodies and that reproductive technologies in tandem with postmodern and queer theories result in the fragmentation and dismemberment of women: from the one an egg, from the other a uterus … this erasure of women is helped by dissociation and a belief in delusions – such as the assault on women’s existence by transgender ideologues.

Aged 80, Renate Klein continues her quest for the liberation of all women, whatever age, sexuality, abilities and wherever we live. She is ‘not dead yet’ and hopes this collection will stir young women into action to continue the crucial rebellion against the system of patriarchy before it fully crushes women, animals and nature.

SEPTEMBER 2025 |  ISBN 9781925950977 | 473 pages