In the last eighteen months three Australian feminist collections have appeared, each apparently addressed in its different way to the women’s studies market. Each title, or subtitle, is anxious to proclaim itself of the moment: Australian Women: Contemporary feminist thought (OUP); Contemporary Australian Feminism (Longman Cheshire); and now, only prevented by the limits of the print medium from flashing its red light, Transitions: New Australian feminisms from Allen & Unwin. To cultural analysts that extra ‘s’ will speak volumes.

Transitions developed out of a summer school held at the ANU in 1994 – an occasion for participants to address such thorny issues as the nature of (some) feminist theorists’ family romance with Nietzsche and Freud, Derrida and Deleuze, Lacan and Foucault. (Foucault rates three lines of index – twice that of his nearest contender.) ‘We are,’ say the editors in their introduction,