Alecia Simmonds
Biographic Data
| ID | 1354589 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alecia Simmonds |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alecia |
| FAMILY NAME | Simmonds |
| SIGNATURE | SIMMONDS A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Technology Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8204-2321 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 4 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 15 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Accommodating Women
Australian women were among the first in the world to receive electoral suffrage, yet it took until 1997 before they had full equality of jury suffrage. This article examines the debate around female jurors by focusing less on discourses of citizenship than on the subterranean spatial arrangements upon which equality depended. From concerns about jurors being locked up overnight, or “ladies” being forced into a jury box with “undesirables,” to th…
Book Symposium on The Emotions of LGBT Rights and Reforms
Do I feel proud?I reflected on this question recently while I gathered with several sweaty, strange, and gorgeous bodies on the streets of Washington DC for World Pride in June 2025.As I stood in the midday heat waiting impatiently amongst a crowd of thousands hoping to parade, the pink, blue, purple, yellow glitter began to trickle slowly down my face.I was an emotional mess and my sparkle reflected that.The beady glints of pink, blue, purple, a…
Author Meets Readers
The following is an edited version of an Author Meets Readers conversation held on 20 February 2025 at UNSW Sydney celebrating Ann Genovese’s book Feminist Jurisography: Law, History, Writing (Routledge, 2023). The event chaired by Mehera San Roque brought author Ann Genovese into dialogue with three readers, Ann Curthoys, Alecia Simmonds and Angela Kintominas
Rings of power
This article explores the gendered regulation of courtship by providing a legal history of the engagement ring across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bringing the relationship between love, law, material culture and gender into dialogue, I use actions for breach of promise of marriage to trace the life path of the ring from the private world of romance to the moral theatre of law, examining how the ring functioned as tangible proof of con…
Parallel lives
Parallel lives: Iain McCalman crafts an intimate history of Delia Akeley, a monkey and twentieth-century imperialism." History Australia, 19(4), pp. 818–819
Courtship, Coverture and Marital Cruelty
What would the history of intimate violence look like if we traced it through the civil courts rather than the criminal courts? How did legal categories relevant to civil proceedings, such as a promise, seduction, consent and coverture, interact to create violable female bodies? In a field heavily dominated by studies of criminal trials, this paper redirects scholarly attention to civil actions used by women in the past to protest male violence a…
Sex Smells
This article analyses representations of deodorising products in Australian women's magazines from 1880 to 1940 to examine how women were encouraged to fear their own smells and mistrust their own bodies. I argue that the transition to modernity witnessed a reduction in olfactory tolerance that fell along class and gender lines. Smells were imbued with new cultural meanings that served to reinforce women's subordinate status and to pathologise wo…
Transnationalism, Nationalism and Australian History
She Felt Strongly the Injury to Her Affections’
This paper examines the relationship between law, medical knowledge and romantic suffering in early twentieth-century Australia. Drawing upon a sample of breach of promise of marriage actions from 1824 to 1930, it argues that where the plaintiff’s pain was largely presumed in the nineteenth century, by the twentieth century mastering the language and performance of anguish became crucial to legal success. The less that women suffered socially fro…
Offshore
Australia’s policy of mandatory detention, in spite of the state-sanctioned secrecy surrounding it, has generated voluminous criticism and commentary ‒ from senate inquiries, court hearings, artwor
Empire by Treaty
Friendship, Imperial Violence and the Law of Nations
This article examines the interrelationship of friendship and violence in European juristic traditions and in British scientific voyaging in Oceania. Drawing upon Roman texts and natural law treatises, it shows how friendship, meaning hospitality and trade, appeared as a right asserted by imperial nations, often with the backing of force. Moving from jurisprudence to imperial practice, this article examines the coercive elements of cross-cultural…
Trading Sentiments
This paper explores the relationship between commerce, cross-cultural friendship and empire in the published Voyages of Pacific salt pork trader John Turnbull. Turnbull published two versions of his Voyages, the first in 1805 and the second in 1813. Through exposing the variations between the two versions of his Voyages and analysing the reception of each text in the burgeoning periodical literature at the time, I explore how his commercially ori…
Travel Writing And Empire
Australia Through Women’s Eyes , by Ann Standish (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2008, 336pp, $39.95pb). Publisher’s website: www.scholarly.info/book/9781921509070
Rebellious Bodies and Subversive Sniggers
This article challenges orthodox interpretations of the relationship between laughter and agency among women in nineteenth-century colonial Australia. It seeks to complicate functionalist accounts of laughter and play as always representing a working-class challenge to the imposition of middle-class values: not by denying such accounts, but by opening up debate on the relationship between laughter, class and place. While it is true that laughter …
Promises and Pie-Crusts were made to be Broke
(2005). ’Promises and Pie-Crusts were made to be Broke‘: Breach of Promise of Marriage and the Regulation of Courtship in Early Colonial Australia. Australian Feminist Law Journal: Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 99-120
Sex Smells
This article analyses representations of deodorising products in Australian women's magazines from 1880 to 1940 to examine how women were encouraged to fear their own smells and mistrust their own bodies. I argue that the transition to modernity witnessed a reduction in olfactory tolerance that fell along class and gender lines. Smells were imbued with new cultural meanings that served to reinforce women's subordinate status and to pathologise wo…
Friendship, Imperial Violence and the Law of Nations
This article examines the interrelationship of friendship and violence in European juristic traditions and in British scientific voyaging in Oceania. Drawing upon Roman texts and natural law treatises, it shows how friendship, meaning hospitality and trade, appeared as a right asserted by imperial nations, often with the backing of force. Moving from jurisprudence to imperial practice, this article examines the coercive elements of cross-cultural…
Promises and Pie-Crusts were made to be Broke
(2005). ’Promises and Pie-Crusts were made to be Broke‘: Breach of Promise of Marriage and the Regulation of Courtship in Early Colonial Australia. Australian Feminist Law Journal: Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 99-120
Rebellious Bodies and Subversive Sniggers
This article challenges orthodox interpretations of the relationship between laughter and agency among women in nineteenth-century colonial Australia. It seeks to complicate functionalist accounts of laughter and play as always representing a working-class challenge to the imposition of middle-class values: not by denying such accounts, but by opening up debate on the relationship between laughter, class and place. While it is true that laughter …
Travel Writing And Empire
Australia Through Women’s Eyes , by Ann Standish (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2008, 336pp, $39.95pb). Publisher’s website: www.scholarly.info/book/9781921509070
Trading Sentiments
This paper explores the relationship between commerce, cross-cultural friendship and empire in the published Voyages of Pacific salt pork trader John Turnbull. Turnbull published two versions of his Voyages, the first in 1805 and the second in 1813. Through exposing the variations between the two versions of his Voyages and analysing the reception of each text in the burgeoning periodical literature at the time, I explore how his commercially ori…
Friendship, Imperial Violence and the Law of Nations
This article examines the interrelationship of friendship and violence in European juristic traditions and in British scientific voyaging in Oceania. Drawing upon Roman texts and natural law treatises, it shows how friendship, meaning hospitality and trade, appeared as a right asserted by imperial nations, often with the backing of force. Moving from jurisprudence to imperial practice, this article examines the coercive elements of cross-cultural…
Empire by Treaty
Offshore
Australia’s policy of mandatory detention, in spite of the state-sanctioned secrecy surrounding it, has generated voluminous criticism and commentary ‒ from senate inquiries, court hearings, artwor
Transnationalism, Nationalism and Australian History
She Felt Strongly the Injury to Her Affections’
This paper examines the relationship between law, medical knowledge and romantic suffering in early twentieth-century Australia. Drawing upon a sample of breach of promise of marriage actions from 1824 to 1930, it argues that where the plaintiff’s pain was largely presumed in the nineteenth century, by the twentieth century mastering the language and performance of anguish became crucial to legal success. The less that women suffered socially fro…
Courtship, Coverture and Marital Cruelty
What would the history of intimate violence look like if we traced it through the civil courts rather than the criminal courts? How did legal categories relevant to civil proceedings, such as a promise, seduction, consent and coverture, interact to create violable female bodies? In a field heavily dominated by studies of criminal trials, this paper redirects scholarly attention to civil actions used by women in the past to protest male violence a…
Sex Smells
This article analyses representations of deodorising products in Australian women's magazines from 1880 to 1940 to examine how women were encouraged to fear their own smells and mistrust their own bodies. I argue that the transition to modernity witnessed a reduction in olfactory tolerance that fell along class and gender lines. Smells were imbued with new cultural meanings that served to reinforce women's subordinate status and to pathologise wo…
Parallel lives
Parallel lives: Iain McCalman crafts an intimate history of Delia Akeley, a monkey and twentieth-century imperialism." History Australia, 19(4), pp. 818–819
Rings of power
This article explores the gendered regulation of courtship by providing a legal history of the engagement ring across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bringing the relationship between love, law, material culture and gender into dialogue, I use actions for breach of promise of marriage to trace the life path of the ring from the private world of romance to the moral theatre of law, examining how the ring functioned as tangible proof of con…
Author Meets Readers
The following is an edited version of an Author Meets Readers conversation held on 20 February 2025 at UNSW Sydney celebrating Ann Genovese’s book Feminist Jurisography: Law, History, Writing (Routledge, 2023). The event chaired by Mehera San Roque brought author Ann Genovese into dialogue with three readers, Ann Curthoys, Alecia Simmonds and Angela Kintominas
Accommodating Women
Australian women were among the first in the world to receive electoral suffrage, yet it took until 1997 before they had full equality of jury suffrage. This article examines the debate around female jurors by focusing less on discourses of citizenship than on the subterranean spatial arrangements upon which equality depended. From concerns about jurors being locked up overnight, or “ladies” being forced into a jury box with “undesirables,” to th…
Book Symposium on The Emotions of LGBT Rights and Reforms
Do I feel proud?I reflected on this question recently while I gathered with several sweaty, strange, and gorgeous bodies on the streets of Washington DC for World Pride in June 2025.As I stood in the midday heat waiting impatiently amongst a crowd of thousands hoping to parade, the pink, blue, purple, yellow glitter began to trickle slowly down my face.I was an emotional mess and my sparkle reflected that.The beady glints of pink, blue, purple, a…
Sociology (11 works) · Political science (10 works) · History (9 works) · Art (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Australian History and Society (7 works) · History (6 works) · Law (5 works) · Literature (5 works) · Ancient history (3 works)