Peter A Jackson

'That's What Rice Queens Study!' White Gay Desire and Representing Asian Homosexualities

I confess reluctance about contributing this essay to a collection on theatre, film, art and literature by Asian Australians. In part, I am concerned that the issue of how White gay cultures receive representations of Asian men may not interest a general audience. However, all Australian artists, writers, and academics engaged in presenting images and analyses of Asian homosexual men are viscerally affected by the contradictory ways in which their work is received by White gay audiences, and I suspect that those with little direct knowledge of this country’s gay cultures do not appreciate the intense power of the stereotyping that affects all gay researchers and artists working on gay ... read more.
 

Maya Linden

‘Loving certain human things’: Feminism, Sexuality and Women’s Interrupted Fictions

None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory …2This quotation from Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation raises many questions related to the problematisation and analysis of textual representations. While Sontag’s text dates from 1967 post-structuralist debate, the queries and complications it provokes remain pertinent to a contemporary re-evaluation of theoretical influences on fiction. In the light of critical theory and literary analysis, I propose that there can never be an ‘innocent text’ devoid of political stance or statement; that is, there can never be a text that neither confirms nor denies the intents of dominant ideologies but ... read more.
 

Clive Moore

Behaving Outrageously: Contemporary Gay Masculinity

Historians readily acknowledge that settlers in Australia carried ‘cultural baggage’ with them, which was unpacked and altered to suit the necessities of life in the antipodes. Historians have given less thought to forms of sexuality packed away in the immigrants’ ‘cultural bags’ and to the social construction of sexuality which has occurred as Australian society evolved over two centuries. ‘We are increasingly aware’, writes Jeffrey Weeks, ‘theoretically, historically, even politically, that “sexuality” is about flux and change, that what we so readily deem as “sexual” is as much a product of language and culture as of ... read more.
 

Max Nankervis

Our Urban Parks: Suitable Pieces of Real Estate?

Over the last decade or so much has been heard in Australian green politics of movements to save rural, wilderness parks from various encroachments; typically encroachments from logging or developments such as roads and leisure resorts. So significant has this become that there is a set of micro green politics among the factions and sections of the movement in general. At the same time, relatively little attention has been focused on the fate of urban open space; those spaces in the metropolitan and regional cities which range from a hectare of so in a suburban neighbourhood, often landscaped and arrayed with children’s play equipment, to large tracts of several hundred hectares used ... read more.
 

Arthur Saniotis

Embodying Ambivalence: Muslim Australians as 'Other'

This article explores the ways in which Muslim Australians are attributed with ‘otherness’, and how such constructions are articulated in social practices. More precisely, it sketches out how contemporary social constructions of Muslim Australians, and their social expressions, constitute a means of restoring existential control among non-Muslim Australians post–September 11. Generic misrepresentations of Muslims throughout the western world can be identified within the current Australian milieu, where many Muslim Australians are treated as pariahs. In this social context, orientalist tropes are selectively played out in the representation of Muslims in media and public ... read more.
 

Jeannette Delamoir

'It pulsates with dramatic power': White Slavery, Popular Culture and Modernity in Australia in 1913

The play The Warning opened on 22 November 1913 at the Little Theatre on Sydney's Castlereagh Street. Written by Australian playwright 'Henry Basnell', its subject matter — white slavery, or the trade in women for sexual purposes — was sensational. 'It pulsates with dramatic power', declared an advertisement in the Sydney Morning Herald.1 Two days later on the other side of the world, a featurelength film also dealing with white slavery, Traffic in Souls, premiered at Joe Weber's Theatre on the corner of 29th and Broadway in New York City. At first glance it seems to be an uncanny coincidence that simultaneous productions in far-distant cities could share their subject matter so ... read more.
 

Nell Musgrove

‘Filthy’ Homes and ‘Fast’ Women: Welfare Agencies’ Moral Surveillance in Post-Second World War Melbourne

Quiet suburban streets, white picket fences, Mum, Dad and the kids: these are the most popularised images of Australian domesticity in the post-second world war years, yet one must not forget that in the midst of the postwar prosperity that permitted increasing portions of the population to attain economic security, there were many Australians whose lives did not fit with this idealised notion of the ‘suburban dream’. The case files created by welfare workers provide some insight into the conditions faced by families in crisis, but, more particularly, the case files are also suggestive of the ways in which caseworkers perceived these families and the various pressures they ... read more.
 

Michele Grossman

Beyond Orality and Literacy: Textuality, Modernity and Representation in Gularabulu: Stories from the West Kimberley

Since the 1980s, a particular challenge for many Indigenous authors of collaborative life-writing has been how to manage their own textual agency so that this is not reduced either to mere ‘presence’ or marshalled as ‘evidence’ in the service of a non-Indigenous collaborator’s theoretical or professional agenda. A parallel challenge for non-Indigenous editors of such texts has been how to manage the realities of their role in ways that do not mimic strategies that disavow Indigenous textual agency and authority. Historically, editorial strategies have diminished or denied the role of Indigenous authors in the production of their stories as texts. Sometimes ... read more.
 

Richard Stone

Junk Mail: Printed Ephemera and Preservation of the Everyday

Everybody has received junk mail at some time. Brochures, leaflets, pamphlets, flyers advertising for shops, fitness classes, diets, real estate agents, take away food, local community events, government services, and seasonal events such as Christmas, Easter, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day. They can be stuffed into letter boxes, left under door mats, slipped into the morning newspaper, or jammed under windscreen wipers.1 Junk mail is variously regarded as a useful source of information, as something to pin on the home notice board for future reference, or as a reminder to shop at a certain outlet for a bargain. More commonly, however, junk mail is regarded as a nuisance, as ... read more.
 

Nessy Allen

Test Tubes and White Jackets: the careers of two Australian women scientists

Science has been largely the domain of men. This is particularly true prior to the 1970s and the women’s movement, which in various ways sought the acceptance and recognition of women in professional endeavours as well as in political activities. Before this, discrimination was instrumental in restricting the work of women, limiting their achievements and denying them recognition. But some exceptional women were able to overcome the cultural restrictions of their time. Two examples are Professor Nancy Millis, an industrial microbiologist, and Professor Beryl Nashar, a geologist, the subjects of this paper. While their careers were not set in a dramatic scenario of repression and ... read more.