Queer and Subjugated Knowledges: Generating Subversive Imaginaries 9781608053391, 1608053393

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BOOK SERIES: RETHINKING RESEARCH AND PROFESSIONAL PRACTICES IN TERMS OF RELATIONALITY, SUBJECTIVITY AND POWER

BOOK SERIES EDITOR: BRONWYN DAVIES UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE

QUEER AND SUBJUGATED KNOWLEDGES: GENERATING SUBVERSIVE IMAGINARIES Edited by

KERRY H. ROBINSON UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN SYDNEY and

CRISTYN DAVIES THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY

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COVER ART WORK Cityscape 1, 2011 Oil and mixed media on board By Kate Hansen http://katehansen.com.au/ Kate Hansen lives and works in Sydney, Australia and is currently completing a Masters of Fine Arts at Sydney College of the Arts, The University of Sydney. Her work is held in public and private collections in Australia as well as private collections in Canada, the UK and Hong Kong. Hansen’s work responds to the transiency and change associated with global cities. She collects much of her source material and documentation for the work in her travels, most recently in Sydney, Los Angeles, New York and Toronto. She gathers found objects, personal photographs, city maps and topographical drawings, extracting symbols, colours, shapes and movements identifiable with large urban centers. Rather than offering a direct representation of the city, the viewer is invited to get lost in both the empty and the cluttered corners of her canvases, making their own relationships with the works’ lines, content and texture.

CONTENTS

FOREWORD ..................................................................................................... i PREFACE ....................................................................................................... iii LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS ............................................................................. viii

INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................. 1 Kerry H. Robinson and Cristyn Davies

CHAPTER 1 ..................................................................................................... 9 LOSING HOPE, FINDING NEMO AND DREAMING OF ALTERNATIVES

Judith Jack Halberstam 1) The small, the local, the anti-monumental ........................................................................ 11 2) Pirates and perverts ........................................................................................................... 14 3) Low theory ......................................................................................................................... 17 4) Multitudes and monsters .................................................................................................... 19

CHAPTER 2 ....................................................................................................23 IMAGINING OTHERWISE: PERFORMANCE ART AS QUEER TIME AND SPACE

Cristyn Davies Elena Knox (Lull) in Lapdog ................................................................................................. 30 La Clique ................................................................................................................................ 36

48 ..................................................................................................... RESPONSE THE QUEER SPACE OF THE FREAK SHOW

Elizabeth Stephens

CHAPTER 3 ....................................................................................................56 LESBIAN MOTHERS, TWO-HEADED MONSTERS AND THE TELEVISUAL MACHINE

Kellie Burns The lesbian mother expecting-child ........................................................................................ 58 Beyond the binaries? ............................................................................................................... 62 (Lesbian) mother-monster-machine ....................................................................................... 64 Genders that don’t splatter, or, why we expect more from The L Word ................................. 68

74 ..................................................................................................... RESPONSE PREGNANTING AS IN CHEATING, FUCKING, LYING…THIS IS THE WAY WE LIVE

Katrina Schlunke Rhythm .......................................................................... 74 Pregnanting..........................................................................76 Breeding ........................................................................ 78 I just want to fuck all night long, fuck, fuck, fuck. .............79

CHAPTER 4 ....................................................................................................82 GRID FAILURE: METAPHORS OF SUBCULTURAL TIME AND SPACE

Robert Payne The skewed edge of the grid ................................................................................................... 83 Short-circuiting the grid ......................................................................................................... 90 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 95 Postscript ................................................................................................................................ 96

99 ..................................................................................................... RESPONSE IN PRAISE OF SHALLOW VIEWING

Melissa Jane Hardie 1. knots .......................................................................... 99 2. shallow .................................................................... 102 3. loss .......................................................................... 107

CHAPTER 5 .................................................................................................. 110 CHILDHOOD AS A ‘QUEER TIME AND SPACE’: ALTERNATIVE IMAGININGS OF NORMATIVE MARKERS OF GENDERED LIVES

Kerry H. Robinson Constructions of childhood and childhood innocence in western normative narratives of time and space ...................................................................................................................... 113 Children’s and parents’ readings of heteronormative images of childhood in media: contradictions in normative life narratives ......................................................................... 117 Childhood as queer time and space: creating spaces for different ways of being .............................125 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 128

132 ................................................................................................... RESPONSE HETERONORMATIVITY, CHILDHOOD AND INVISIBILIZED CONSUMPTION

Sue Saltmarsh

CHAPTER 6 .................................................................................................. 140 REANIMATING ADULTHOOD

Kate Crawford Not for grown-ups? Cartoon characters, pirates and superheroes .................................... 142 Married with children: normative adulthood ...................................................................... 147 Adulthood as affirmative becomings.................................................................................... 150 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 153

157 ................................................................................................... RESPONSE ANIMATED BECOMING

Peter Bansel Temporality, futurity and possibility .......................... 159 Subjectivity, instability and becoming........................ 160 Spatiality, bodies and the extra-human ...................... 162 Disorderly narratives and evolving imaginaries ....... 165

CHAPTER 7 .................................................................................................. 168 QUEERING HIGH SCHOOL AT SUMMER HEIGHTS

Susanne Gannon Jonah Takalua: Don’t look at my dick, sir, you’ll look like a poofta ................................. 171 Ja’mie King: I’d rather be a pedophile than a lesbian ....................................................... 176 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 181

184 ................................................................................................... RESPONSE SUMMER HEIGHTS HIGH: QUEER TIME AND QUEER PLACE IN AUSTRALIAN HIGH SCHOOLS

Bronwyn Davies

CHAPTER 8 .................................................................................................. 192 GAY INTIMACY, YAOI AND THE ETHICS OF CARE

Aleardo Zanghellini The yaoi/BL genre ................................................................................................................ 196 Yaoi/BL as a subjugated knowledge .................................................................................... 197 Yaoi/BL intimacy: the genre ................................................................................................ 200 Yaoi/BL intimacy: Loveless ................................................................................................. 205 Conclusions .......................................................................................................................... 208

212 ................................................................................................... RESPONSE YAMETE, O-SHIRI GA ITAI!

Kane Race Shapes of intimacy ...................................................... 212 The work of fantasy..................................................... 215

Acknowledgements ............................................................................................. 222 Biographical information ................................................................................... 223 Index ..................................................................................................................... 227

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FOREWORD Queerly Utopian Like many academics, I came into the profession full of a righteous sense of purpose, sure that I would produce work that would, if not change the world, at least change a few minds. I think I have managed to do that all right but in the process I have changed my own mind several times about why we do what we do and to what end. Social change, per se, is such a hard mission and transformation almost never happens all at once. And so, my more modest mission has become to unlearn all that I have been taught or at least to unlearn my own training, in order to be open to new knowledge that comes from unexpected sources. As academics receive training to think, write and teach, we also start thinking in ways that tend to reinvest in dominant ideologies and we often lose faith in subversive ones. We literally talk ourselves out of alternative political imaginaries by being so eloquent and persuasive about the totality of hegemony. And by the time our training is complete, many of us are more interested in gaining the recognition of our peers (by detailing the topography of the dominant) than in investing in the chimera of change and transformation. Michel Foucault’s advocacy, therefore, for subjugated knowledge as ‘disqualified knowledge,’ knowledge that lacks legitimacy and that cannot be turned into a ‘science,’ becomes more and more attractive as universities become more invested in marketing knowledge, in knowledge markets and in knowledge for profit. When we hold something back from the rigid protocols of our disciplines, when we let loose on a thought, a whim, a fancy, we leave the realm of rigor altogether and begin an intellectual trip into the utopian, the field of the possible if not probable. Like other scholars of the counter-hegemonic—thinkers like J.K. GibsonGraham, James C. Scott, Dean Spade, Rod Ferguson, José E. Muñoz come to mind—my desire to deconstruct dominant forms has waned over time and I find myself wanting to pay careful attention to the subversive, utopian and often queer and/or anarchist forms of cultural production and critique that emerge from the wreckage of casino capitalism and its attendant militarized forms. This conference, organized by Kerry H. Robinson and Cristyn Davies, Queer and Subjugated Knowledges: Generating Subversive Imaginaries was a real treat in that people rose so magnificently to the challenge of thinking outside of the frozen logics of us and them, power and the dispossessed, and for two days, we entered the realm of the queerly utopian to ponder the ‘what ifs’ of subversive imaginaries. It was truly an honor to engage and be engaged by such a magnificent group of thinkers, more importantly by such an amazing group of subversive scholars who have not yet abandoned the notion of ‘subversion’ to its deconstructive fate

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but are still willing to skip along with it wherever it may lead. I was lucky to skip a little while beside them and like them to head in a queerly utopian direction without ever needing actually to arrive. J. HALBERSTAM LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 2011

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PREFACE This book, Queer and Subjugated Knowledges: Generating Subversive Imaginaries, edited by Kerry H. Robinson and Cristyn Davies, is the third book in the series Rethinking research and professional practices in terms of relationality, subjectivity and power. It follows Sheridan Linnell’s book, Art Psychotherapy and Narrative Therapy: An Account of Practitioner Research, and Cath Laws’ Poststructuralism at Work with Marginalised Children. Queer and Subjugated Knowledges: Generating Subversive Imaginaries is a book that takes up the challenge of this series to find new ways of thinking and being. It opens up the space of queer knowledge as a dynamic and generative space, and reconceptualizes everyday interactions through the play of and with subversive imaginaries. It works to enable the reader to imagine things differently, not in terms of binaries which give dominance and credibility to the ‘mainstream,’ and abnormality or, at best, difference, or indifference, to others, but of a celebratory and defiant refusal of the hegemonic. Drawing on the work of cultural theorist Judith Jack Halberstam, the papers in this book develop a counter-hegemonic research practice through creative engagement with subjugated lives. This is an exciting work that responds to Halberstam’s call to engage in alternative imaginings in each of the contributors’ disciplinary areas: Education, Rhetoric and Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Performance Studies, Television and Media Studies, Animation, Sociology, History, Social Policy, Childhood Studies and Cultural Geography. This is a book about new ways of addressing justice and injustice, not from the viewpoints of those who judge others and find them wanting, but from an ethical space of openness and imaginative shifts. This book is, in a Deleuzian sense, not a moral exposition, but an ontology, a lived ethics. Deleuze points out that whereas morality involves judgement of the other, ethics rests on openness to the other and the possibility of oneself becoming different, of coming to know and to be differently: Morality is the system of judgment. Of double judgment, you judge yourself and you are judged. Those who have the taste for morality are those who have the taste for judgment. Judging always implies an authority superior to Being, it always implies something superior to an ontology. It always implies one more than Being, the Good which makes Being and which makes action, it is the Good superior to Being, it is the One…In an ethics it is completely different, you do not judge…Somebody says or does something, you do not relate it to values. You ask yourself how is that possible? How is this possible in an internal way? In other words, you relate the thing or the statement to the mode of existence that it implies, that it envelops in itself. How

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must it be in order to say that? Which manner of Being does this imply? You seek the enveloped modes of existence, and not the transcendent values. It is the operation of immanence. (1980, n.p.)

In such an ethics, the realization of one’s identity, through establishing the moral values with which to judge oneself and others, is not the point. The point is to become different from oneself, to evolve creatively in the space that is opened up. Each book in this series focuses on the relations between individual subjects and the social, discursive and spatial relations within which they are produced, and produce themselves, as subjects. Rather than being locked into liberal humanism’s relentless individualizing and pathologizing and judgementalism, poststructuralist theory seeks the ways in which we might break loose from the already known, habitual practices through which the familiar world is produced. It opens up the ethical possibility that we might produce difference in ourselves rather than sameness, and that we might open ourselves up to new knowledges and practices. From a poststructuralist perspective our individual agency is an effect of the ways in which we are constituted; it was not through our own agency that we were made what we are, but through our location within particular histories, relations and cultural practices. We are generally unaware of the way discourse works through us to create us in predictable, historically specific ways. Poststructuralist theory suggests it is the very conceptualization of the individual as primary, and as originary, that blocks this awareness. What Foucault rejects in phenomenology is the way it makes the individual subject its foundation, and sets out to “recapture the meaning of everyday experience in order to rediscover the sense in which the subject that I am is indeed responsible, in its transcendental functions, for founding that experience together with its meanings” (Foucault, 2000, p. 241). Foucault sees his own work, in marked contrast, as using experience to wrench “the subject from itself,” to find ways to make the subject “no longer itself” (2000, p. 241). He wants to annihilate the subject of phenomenology, the subject that endlessly repeats itself, that understands itself as its own origin—to dissolve it, through what he calls a “project of desubjectification” (2000, p. 241; see also Davies, 2010). Writing against the grain of the already-known is central to Foucault’s radical project of opening up the not-yet-known. He wants to write his way into new understandings of how we become, in one historical period or another, subjects. His books are, he says, “experiences aimed at pulling myself free of myself, at preventing me from being the same” (2000, p. 242).

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It is the possibility of this kind of difference, of radical social change, that is the driving force of his work. He seeks to open up an experience of modernity that generates a transformative effect. The work that has grown out of Foucault’s program of writing, and the writing of other poststructuralist scholars, has also had a second and more recent driving force. That is the advent of the intensified individualism of neoliberal governmentality. Capitalism, according to Deleuze and Guattari (1987), is schizophrenic. It needs to control its labour force in order to extract maximum productivity from it, while at the same time enhancing the production of new and creative ideas. It convinces individuals that they are free at the same time as it shapes them to be whatever capital thinks it wants. This madness of the modern capitalist state has had devastating effects on individuals and on the professions. The program of desubjectification is thus also aimed at the hyper-individualism of modern capitalism, that produces sameness and repetition under the banner of freedom. Poststructuralist researchers are not interested in representing a pre-existing order of things, but in changing how things are thought and thus how they are produced. Foucault’s book Madness and Civilization is, he says, a book that functions as an experience, for its writer and reader alike, much more than as the establishment of a historical truth…For one to be able to have that experience through the book, what it says and does need to be true in terms of academic, historically verifiable truth. It can’t exactly be a novel. Yet the essential thing…[lies] in the experience that the book makes possible…[This] book makes use of true documents, but in such a way that through them it is possible not only to arrive at an establishment of truth but also to experience something that permits a change, a transformation of the relationship we have with ourselves and with the world…in short, a transformation of the relationship we have with knowledge…[That transformation] is not just mine but can have a certain value, a certain accessibility for others, so that the experience is available for others to have. (Foucault, 2000, pp. 243–244)

Through coming to know differently, as writer, and as reader, Foucault shows how we might detach ourselves from the habitual repetitions of thought and practice through which we previously accomplished ourselves as predictable maintainers of the status quo. The individual is thus for Foucault, not the end-point of a process of subjectification, but the potential sticking point, the place where thought gets stuck. Writing is the medium through which both thought and the writer/reader can be changed. In terms of professional practice, what such writing does is to stop us in our tracks, since we can no longer run along the same rails, without thought. We

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must become ethically responsible for our everyday thoughts and practices. When correctional officers and social workers complained of Foucault’s Madness and Civilization: “The book is paralysing. It may contain some correct observations, but even so it has clear limits, because it impedes us; it prevents us from going on with our activity” (Foucault, 2000, p. 245), Foucault replied: My reply is that this very reaction proves that the work was successful, that it functioned just as I intended. It shows that people read it as an experience that changed them, that prevented them from always being the same or from having the same relations with things, with others, that they had before reading it. This shows that an experience is expressed in the book that is wider than mine alone. The readers have simply found themselves involved in a process that was underway…And the book worked toward that transformation. To a small degree it was even an agent in it. This is what I mean by an experience book, as opposed to a truth book or a demonstration book. (2000, p. 246)

Queer and Subjugated Knowledges: Generating Subversive Imaginaries is just such an experience/experiment book. It experiments with queer experiences and texts to write a transformative book, a book through which the authors transform both thought and themselves, and potentially their readers. They have engaged in an experience/experiment in writing that taps into a change already underway, taking it further, participating, in doing so, in a transformation of the field that they write about. They do not set out to produce the ‘truth’ about the nature of queerness, as if queer subjects were objects capable of being studied. Rather they open up new ways of imagining subjecthood itself. The book develops an ethical stance that is of profound importance. We are living in a time when re-thinking ethics is an urgent task (Wyatt and Davies, 2011). This book makes a significant contribution to that task. Foucault (2000) makes an important distinction between two kinds of knowledge: savoir and connaissance. Savoir involves doing work in order to know differently, and in the process, being modified through what one comes to know. Connaissance makes possible the knowledge of objects, that is, it makes those objects intelligible, while leaving the subject, the determinate knower, untouched. This book generates savoir—a knowledge of experimenting and experiencing life differently. BRONWYN DAVIES UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE BOOK SERIES EDITOR Rethinking research and professional practices in terms of relationality, subjectivity and power

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REFERENCES Deleuze, G. (1980). Cours Vincennes 12/21/1980. Retrieved February 10, 2010, from http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=190andgroupe=Spinoza andlangue=2 Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Athlone Press. Foucault, M. (2000). An interview with Michel Foucault. In J. Faubion (Ed.), Essential works of Foucault 1954–1984 (Vol. 3), Michel Foucault: Power (pp. 239-297). London: Penguin Books. Original interview conducted 1980. Wyatt, J., & Davies, B. (2011). Ethics. In J. Wyatt, K. Gale, S. Gannon & B. Davies, Deleuze and collaborative writing: An immanent plane of composition. New York: Peter Lang.

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Associate Professor Kate Crawford University of New South Wales Australia [email protected] Dr. Katrina Schlunke University of Technology Sydney Australia [email protected] Professor Bronwyn Davies University of Melbourne Australia [email protected] Dr. Robert Payne The American University of Paris France [email protected] Associate Professor Susanne Gannon University of Western Sydney Australia [email protected] Cristyn Davies The University of Sydney Australia [email protected] Associate Professor Kerry Robinson University of Western Sydney Australia [email protected] Dr. Melissa Hardie The University of Sydney Australia [email protected] Dr. Kane Race The University of Sydney Australia [email protected]

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Dr. Aleardo Zanghellini University of Reading UK [email protected] Dr. Peter Bansel University of Western Sydney Australia [email protected] Dr. Kellie Burns The University of Sydney Australia [email protected] Dr. Elizabeth Stephens University of Queensland Australia [email protected] Professor Judith Halberstam University of Southern California USA [email protected] Associate Professor Sue Saltmarsh Australian Catholic University Australia [email protected]

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Queer and Subjugated Knowledges: Generating Subversive Imaginaries, 2012, 1-8

INTRODUCTION Queer and Subjugated Knowledges: Generating Subversive Imaginaries engages with queer theory and critical theory to reconceptualize everyday interactions, events and practices. The book emerged from a symposium of scholars who came together to respond to cultural theorist Jack Halberstam’s call to engage in alternative imaginings in their own discipline areas to reconceptualize performances of subjectivity, relations of power and productions of knowledge. The symposium was held by the Narrative, Discourse and Pedagogy Research Node and supported by the College of Arts, University of Western Sydney, Australia. Over two days scholars presented papers engaging with Halberstam’s work, which makes new investments in the notion of the counter-hegemonic, the subversive and the alternative. For Halberstam, the alternative resides in a creative engagement with subjugated histories, an ecstatic investment in the subcultural and a defiant refusal of a dominant model of theory. Halberstam resists the tendency within cultural studies to produce ever more detailed maps of the hegemonic, and to subject itself to a particular mode of disciplinary authority. Halberstam suggests that Stuart Hall’s notion that theory is not an end unto itself but “a detour on route to something else,” (Hall cited in Halberstam, this volume) might lead us to a better model of cultural theory. This book is unique in its structure and approach to scholarship. Halberstam’s chapter leads the collection articulating her call for alternative imaginings and more serious engagement with subjugated knowledges. This discussion frames subsequent chapters, each of which is followed by a shorter response by another scholar. This dialogic structure provides for a dynamic interdisciplinary engagement. Working across Rhetoric and Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Performance Studies, Television and Media Studies, Animation, Sociology, History, Social Policy, Childhood and Youth Studies, Education, and Cultural Geography, scholars in this interdisciplinary text provide challenging new frameworks for generating knowledge. In chapter one, ‘Losing Hope, Finding Nemo and Dreaming of Alternatives,’ Jack Halberstam, in keeping with her earlier work on the gaps and fissures in dominant masculinity expressed as female masculinity and the disruptions of normative uses of time and space expressed by subcultural actors, argues for more serious engagement with subjugated knowledges. Halberstam also enacts public intellectualism, which she calls “low theory,” arguing for the necessity of producing both alternative knowledge formations and associated archives. She argues that the ‘alternative’ has been cast in academia as a utopian and potentially naïve Kerry H. Robinson and Cristyn Davies (Eds) All rights reserved - © 2012 Bentham Science Publishers

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project that fails to address issues of power. While ‘knowing’ or avant-garde texts tend to assume that their audiences are already engaged in theorizing and meaning making, she argues that “stupid” texts—that is, the popular convergence of apparent ignorance and vernacular knowledge—present viewers with open fields of play and allow for much broader interpretive practices for much wider audiences. Halberstam engages in “theories of the alternative” emerging from the popular, arguing they must be distinguished from “theories of the dominant.” Her work articulates a theory of the alternative as an oppositional but not an elitist practice and form of critique that contests dominant logics of power in the age of global capitalism. In chapter two, ‘Imagining Otherwise: Performance Art as Queer Time and Space,’ Cristyn Davies examines temporality and space in contemporary performance through the lens of queer theory. Performance art not only contests normative structures of traditional theatrical performance, Davies argues, but also challenges understandings of normative subjects, and the relation of the arts to structures of power. Davies argues that performance art, like queer theory, is frequently employed to deconstruct and denaturalize assumed allegiances between bodies and identities, spaces and practices, and norms and subjectivities. Focusing on two performances: local Sydney-based Australian performance artist Elena Knox ’s solo show, Lapdog, which fuses cabaret with poetry and physical performance, and Spiegeltent Productions’ global theatrical phenomenon, La Clique, inspired by a mélange of cabaret, new burlesque, circus and contemporary vaudeville, Davies explores narratives of resistance, counter-discourses, and alternative imaginings of gender, sexuality and socio-cultural life. Firstly, Davies analyses Knox’s performance, Lapdog, which attends to gender, sexuality and class as these categories affect the position of women in the service industries. Knox’s persona, Dolly, is a Barbie doll that breaks free from her Mattel Inc. box, but yet must still perpetually imagine herself elsewhere while she undertakes the mundane tasks required by the various apparatus of her ‘outfit.’ Throughout her performance she develops subversive techniques resisting the politics of consumption, while drawing attention to the heteronormative framework in which she has been explicitly designed to excel. Secondly, Davies analyses three performances included in La Clique: two pin-striped, pipe-smoking, acrobatic English gents in bowler hats, the erotically charged German bathtub acrobat, David O’Mer, and an American hula hoop act in which the performer subverts the notion of patriotism by playing The Star-Spangled Banner through vaginal contractions. In this tent of mirrors, performers queer normative boundaries through challenging bodily acts and practices to entertain, mesmerize and provide an audience with an alternative, seductive and chaotic imaginary world. Davies argues that such cultures of performance provide a critical context in which artists and audiences queer time and space by interrupting

Introduction

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heteronormative frameworks, intervening in consumptive practices, and providing alternative imaginings. Elizabeth Stephens offers a response to Davies’ paper. Framing her argument in the context of the nineteenth century freakshow, Stephens examines the radically different outcomes of the breaking of the fourth wall in the case of Crachami’s public exhibition. She argues that while such moments of queering can transform the theatre stage into a queer space, the consequences of such actions cannot be determined in advance. In chapter three, ‘Lesbian Mothers, Two-headed Monsters and the Televisual Machine,’ Kellie Burns brings Rosi Braidotti’s (1994) discussion of mothers, monsters and machines together with Halberstam’s (1995) discussion of the gothic monster in the slasher film genre to rethink representations of the lesbian mother in popular culture. Burns positions the lesbian maternal body within a broad set of discourses that conjoin the figure of the mother with the figure of the monster. The discussion begins with the character Tina Kennard’s expectant maternal body in season two of the television serial The L Word, highlighting the contradictions her ‘monstrous’ lesbian maternal body calls up for queer viewers. Burns argues that Kennard’s pregnant body, which is highly sexualized throughout season two, challenges the norms of motherhood and disrupts mainstream images of the fetishized lesbian subject. At the same time, however, Kennard’s experiences of becoming a mother uphold many of the traditional values of domesticity and reproduction, and unashamedly construct the lesbian mother as part of an elite, urban, cosmopolitan set. Rosi Braidotti’s critical framework opens up a place in which to ask how Kennard’s pregnant body refuses teleological linkages and relinquishes fixed sexed/gendered identities in favour of contradictions and flux. Halberstam’s framework for understanding the gothic monster extends our reading of Kennards’s body, pressing viewers to consider the ways in which some textual representations ‘splatter’ gender/sex binaries and refuse to recuperate what is in excess or lost in the act of ‘splattering.’ When analysed alongside Halberstam’s monsters that splatter, Kennards’s experiences of lesbian motherhood, despite the series’ attempts to unsettle the categories ‘mother,’ ‘lesbian’ and ‘lesbian mother,’ remain rather ‘splatterless.’ The elite cosmopolitan context within which these discourses of lesbian maternity are produced limits the extent to which her body challenges the norms of motherhood and/or unsettles the binaries that order sex and gender. Katrina Schlunke responds to Burns’ argument by suggesting that viewers participate in the contagion of critique by engagement with the global expectations that The L Word offers—specifically the pleasures of identification and fantasies of community. Queer viewers rule in and rule

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out what they do and don’t like, and participate with the program in rituals of making themselves up. She points to the series’ making public the collective invention of pregnancy wherein some possibility of maternal desire is removed from the individual, the couple and the domestic, and located into spaces where it can upset and challenge the ontology of a pregnant subject. In chapter four, ‘Short-circuiting the Urban Grid,’ Robert Payne explores a set of conceptual relations between ‘the grid,’ understood as an organizing structure for subjectivity and urban spaces, and subcultural identities and practices. Payne follows the lead of Halberstam in her project of disrupting normative constructions of time and space, which necessarily marginalize the recognizability of queer and subcultural production. His approach to metaphoric grid structures addresses the legibility and recognizability of instances of time or space that operate within subcultural practice to destabilize cultural and sexual norms. Payne reflects on the location and temporality of an example of street art in New York in terms of its skewed spatial relation to that city’s grid map, questioning how the work’s unsettling of conventional ideas of cultural production can speak to the spatial and temporal organization of place, property and propriety. In the second section of Payne’s chapter, he analyses John Cameron Mitchell’s film Shortbus, arguing that this film provides a means of imagining a time and space of queer possibility within the grid failure of short-circuit and black-out. Using the film’s literal rendering of these metaphors, Payne argues that Mitchell’s depiction of a salon of queer subcultural convergence evades heteronormative narratives of time and space and instead highlights the priority and the productivity of the immeasurable moment. Finally, building from the impetus of this concept of productive failure, he considers the potential of queer theory to release academic subjects from the strictures imposed by narratives of professional progress and institutional affiliation, ultimately questioning queer theory’s complicity in establishing further normative grids that may also stymie the legibility and recognizability of those operating at the margins of academia. Melissa Jane Hardie’s response takes up the notion of ‘shallow viewing’ which, she argues, “implies a tactic of transversality that promotes, in several crucial ways, another instance of ‘grid failure’.” Sharing her experience of consuming repeats of the Law and Order spin-off, Special Victims Unit on cable in non-chronological order and against the progressive logic of the seasons, Hardie argues that such an approach similarly interrupts those careful impositions of grid logic that are integral to network scheduling. In a nuanced rhetorical move, and in response to concerns raised by Payne, Hardie also provides a critique of the failure of institutional grids, specifically academia, and of the neoliberal employment

Introduction

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practices which permit the ongoing unconscionable ‘exploitation of casual and contract labour.’ These contracts, she argues, are ‘certainly not to the benefit of most regularly employed academics.’ In chapter five, ‘Childhood as a ‘Queer Time and Space’: Alternative Imaginings of Normative Markers of Gendered Lives,’ Kerry H. Robinson explores the queering of normative narratives of subjectivity and life development, disrupting the rigid and fixed linear boundaries between categories of childhood, adolescence and adulthood in terms of constructions of appropriate knowledge, life expectations and notions of citizenship. An analysis of Bill Viola’s video installation, Heaven and Earth (1992), as a form of what Halberstam calls ‘technotopia,’ is utilized to represent a different way of viewing the adult–child dualism. In this discussion, childhood is viewed as a queer ‘counter-public,’ where identity—especially gender and sexuality—and societal logics of development and maturation (Halberstam, 2005) can be challenged and reconceptualized. Within this context, hetero-normativity is challenged and the western adult–child dualism is destabilized. Childhood becomes a queer time and space in which hetero-normative categories of girl–boy and man–woman can be disrupted for more flexible and multiple interpretations of gender performance. Based on focus groups with children and interviews with parents and early childhood educators, Robinson explores children’s performances of gender, their understandings of sexuality, and their sexual knowledge. Sue Saltmarsh’s response to Robinson’s thesis provides an economic analysis of the heterosexual social order that Robinson highlights in the texts underpinning the research in her discussion. Saltmarsh points out that capitalism is reliant on this heterosexual social order. She argues that heteronormative rationalities governing the child–adult binaries are among the very practices that constitute and render capitalism discursively invisible. Saltmarsh argues that temporality, relationality and sexuality obscure the links between capitalist consumption and the gendered heteronormative order. In chapter six, ‘Reanimating Adulthood,’ Kate Crawford analyses how adulthood as a cultural category has been ordered according to the spatial and temporal scheduling of labour and reproduction, and assesses whether Pixarvolt films represent a challenge to these schema. By building on Halberstam’s idea of ‘queer time’ as an alternative to the heteronormative frameworks of adulthood (Halberstam, 2005) and Braidotti’s work on nomadic becoming (2006), Crawford maps out the evolving imaginaries of adulthood in late modernity. Crawford points out that, in her essay ‘Pixarvolt—Animation and Revolt’ (2007), Halberstam argues that certain

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films in the canon of contemporary animated features offer us visions of powerfully transformed worlds. In agreement with Halberstam, Crawford points out that in films such as Over the Hedge and Finding Nemo traditional normative structures are displaced in acts of revolution and transformation. These narrative themes, in Halberstam’s view, are rarely given such centrality in films explicitly made for adults. Crawford argues that the recent box office success of Pixar’s Wall-E attests to the continued popularity of animated children’s films amongst adults, a phenomenon which is cited in the popular media as a disturbing threat to ‘real’ adulthood. Peter Bansel responds to Crawford’s essay ‘Reanimating Adulthood’ by working with an iteration of revolution as turning, as a circular movement rather than as a linear trajectory. Bansel is interested in telling disorderly narratives that decentre the human at the same time as they articulate possibilities for becoming. His is also a move towards disrupting normative constructions of time, space and the subject, and articulating both ‘strange temporalities’ (Halberstam, 2005) and even stranger spatializations of human subjects. In chapter seven, ‘Queering High School at Summer Heights,’ Susanne Gannon looks at queer places and times on Summer Heights High, the hit Australian mockumentary television comedy, with a particular focus on the student characters in the series. The success of the program pivots on the credibility of the multiple performances of actor Chris Lilley as 16-year-old schoolgirl (Ja’mie King), 13-year-old Tongan schoolboy (Jonah Takalua) and drama teacher Mr G. Although Lilley’s performances can be read as ‘drag’ in their subversion and exaggeration of sex and gender norms, Gannon argues that beyond the bodies of Jonah and Ja’mie, subversive imaginaries are enacted in the narrative through the bodies of two minor characters, Ofa and Tamsin (not performed by Lilley). The student characters are traced through a series of scenes that take place in the very queer places of the boys’ toilets, the Year 11 formal and ‘Polyday’ celebrations. Gannon suggests that Lilley’s excessive performances of the characters draw attention to sexuality, gender, class and race in secondary schools, and not only to the operations of these striations of identity but also to their instability and contingency. She considers the ambiguities of parody, wherein Lilley articulates homophobia and racism at the same time as they are critiqued. Gannon also examines the operations of drag to show how Lilley’s performances of race and gender demonstrate that these are not sutured to particular bodies. The chapter details normative structures and processes as they manifest and are subverted in Summer Heights High. It also takes into account how notions of the ‘real’—real schools, real students, real teachers, real research, real bodies—complicate readings of this text. Gannon offers a tentative reading of the series as a site that begins

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to nudge viewers towards the sort of “queer time and place” that Halberstam (2005) advocates. In her response, Bronwyn Davies argues that Summer Heights High potentially moves further toward making a counter-public out of the everyday mainstream viewing public than is envisaged by Gannon. She suggests that the televisual text does this by its revelation of power as a performative masquerade. The program, Davies argues, makes the binaries male and female, masculine and feminine, black and white, straight and queer, elite and marginal inhabit the same space and at the same time, in general at Summer Heights High, and specifically at the site of Chris Lilley’s body. In chapter eight, ‘Gay Intimacy, Yaoi and the Ethics of Care,’ Aleardo Zanghellini takes up Halberstam’s invitation to creatively engage with subjugated knowledges, and does so for the specific purpose of rethinking gay intimacy. He argues that gay male models of intimacy appear largely polarized between a heteronormative quasi-marital paradigm and a counternormative hedonistic one. Zanghellini engages with texts belonging to the yaoi subculture, arguing that such an engagement may help promote an intrinsically valuable diversity of practices of intimacy. Yaoi subculture is a genre of Japanese comics and animation characterized by a thematic focus on male same-sex desire, but produced by heterosexual women for a heterosexual female audience. The epistemological horizon provided by yaoi, he argues, involves intriguing and significant differences from the marital and hedonistic models of mainstream gay culture across two main understandings of ‘intimacy’—intimacy as sex and intimacy as familiarity. Furthermore, Zanghellini argues, yaoi, being produced by women for women, is more likely to reflect an understanding of male same-sex intimacy premised on an ethics of care when compared to the models of intimacy emerging from within gay male culture. He points out that if the marital and hedonistic models reflect, in different ways, a quintessentially male way of conceptualizing intimacy, then decentring their dominance and making space for alternative scripts such as those offered by yaoi may enrich our conceptualizations of intimacy and afford a more balanced (less gendered) range of options in the realm of relationality. Zanghellini concludes that to the extent that subjugated knowledges such as yaoi offer normative and aesthetic horizons alternative to mainstream gay male intimacy (for example in the extent to which they appear to be informed by an ethics of care), they enable the project of re-envisioning male same-sex intimacy, intended as a Foucauldian ethical project in which the self critically and reflectively engages with moral codes.

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Kane Race’s response begins by querying whether a dichotomy that divides gay life into marital and hedonistic alternatives can adequately capture gay relations in their immanent unfolding. Suggesting a different approach, Race argues that yaoi, like other forms of queer eroticism, is doing something specific for its principal readers and producers. He argues that while we might take inspiration (erotic or otherwise) from yaoi’s representation of same-sex intimacy and from the creativity of its achievements, to situate it as a more desirable form of gay intimacy than those already being elaborated among gay men—especially on the basis that it is more ‘ethically appropriate’—may well be to neglect, both at home and abroad, the practical specificities and subversive operations of queer eroticism and fantasy itself. The authors of this book, as Halberstam commented in her foreword, took up a challenge to “think outside of the frozen logics of us and them, power and the dispossessed” and “entered the realm of the queerly utopian to ponder the ‘what ifs’ of subversive imaginaries.” This book, therefore, encourages its readers to also begin to think in new and different ways about everyday interactions, subjectivities, and relations of power that are taken for granted as the ‘real’ and ‘normal’ in their lives.

Queer and Subjugated Knowledges: Generating Subversive Imaginaries, 2012, 9-22

CHAPTER 1 LOSING HOPE, FINDING NEMO AND DREAMING OF ALTERNATIVES Judith Jack Halberstam University of Southern California

Abstract: For Halberstam, the alternative resides in a creative engagement with subjugated histories, an ecstatic investment in the subcultural and a defiant refusal of a dominant model of theory—one that Halberstam considers to be at odds with cultural studies—which devotes itself to the production of ever more detailed maps of the hegemonic and to a particular mode of disciplinary authority. In keeping with her earlier work on the gaps and fissures in dominant masculinity expressed as female masculinity or the disruptions of normative uses of time and space expressed by subcultural actors, and in recognition of the work represented here in this volume, Halberstam argues for more serious engagement with subjugated knowledges, tries to enact a current of public intellectualism that she calls ‘low theory,’ and argues for the necessity of producing both alternative knowledge formations and their archives. Keywords: Alternative, subjugated, subcultural, low theory, failure, knowledge, queer, Halberstam, public intellectualism, cultural studies.

In

a book project on ‘alternative political imaginaries’ once humorously titled Dude, Where’s My Theory, but now titled The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP, 2011), I have been trying to produce, identify and enact alternative modes of knowledge production associated with queer modes of being. I realized that my title ran the risk of preventing my book from being taken seriously, but it, like a lot of ‘Dude, Where’s My…’ titles in recent years, did attempt to grapple with the popular convergence of apparent ignorance and vernacular knowledge that occurs in unlikely and seemingly ‘stupid’ texts (like Dude, Where’s My Car, for example). In recent years, the ‘alternative’ has been cast in academic studies as a utopian and potentially naïve project that fails to address the ‘real’ engines or issues of power. While ‘knowing’ or avant-garde texts tend to assume that their audiences are already engaged in theorizing and meaning making, ‘stupid’ texts present viewers with open fields of play and allow for much broader interpretive practices for much wider audiences. My intent in my book on failure is to engage and participate in ‘theories of the alternative’ that emerge from the popular and that can and must be distinguished from ‘theories of the dominant.’ Hence this study articulates a theory of the alternative as an oppositional but not an elitist practice and form of critique that contests dominant logics of power in the age of global capitalism.

Kerry H. Robinson and Cristyn Davies (Eds) All rights reserved - © 2012 Bentham Science Publishers

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In academia, many of us love to imagine ourselves in relation to rubrics like ‘alternative’ or ‘subjugated’ knowledge (Foucault, Society Must Be Defended) but few are willing to give up on the legitimizing practices that the academy demands—demonstrating expertise, authorizing one’s project by citing the same names that everyone else cites, referencing the agreed upon archive for that topic. It is those very practices, Foucault suggests, that produce the hierarchies of knowledge production that ensure that dominant knowledge is reproduced and that other forms of knowing become ‘disqualified’ in the same process. If we are to get serious about subjugated knowledges, we have to break with some of the formulaic methods of academic legitimization. The Queer Art of Failure elucidates certain counter-intuitive epistemologies and it does so with reference to several popular archives: perhaps the most meaningful archive for this book is the ‘pixar’ genre of animated films for children. Indeed, the full-length animated feature is the privileged text in my study and becomes the launching pad for the counter-knowledges I explore. And so my epistemological frames—failure, forgetting and stupidity— emerge from an extended engagement with the narrative, the aesthetic and the production process of pixar films. Each chapter of my study uses a counter-intuitive form of knowledge in conjunction with a set of non-elite texts to explore new possibilities for pedagogy, politics and practice. In my conception of ‘alternative political imaginaries,’ the alternative embodies the suite of ‘other choices’ that attend every political, economic and aesthetic crisis and their resolutions. Queerness names the other possibilities, the other potential outcomes, the non-linear and non-inevitable trajectories that fan out from any given event and lead to unpredictable futures. Our present, our ‘now,’ is saturated already with the lost hopes for a better tomorrow produced by earlier generations. And rather than add to that burden, we might think creatively with the oppositional aspirations of earlier movements. Using just such a temporality for thinking about transformation, in his book on the Black radical imagination titled Freedom Dreams, Robin Kelley traces a genealogy of Black protest and resistance and he notes that it is not the success or failure of earlier movements that counts but instead their “legacy of possibility.” He writes: “in the past there have been movements that may not have succeeded in terms of our definition of success, but they have left us a very powerful legacy of possibility” (Kelley, 2003, p. 58). The notion of a legacy of possibility, to amplify Kelley’s words, refuses the narrow either/or logic of success and failure and favors instead the enabling notion of living with the conditions of possibility that earlier movements made possible.

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For me, the alternative resides in a creative engagement with subjugated histories, an ecstatic investment in the subcultural and a defiant refusal of a dominant model of theory—one that I consider to be at odds with cultural studies—which devotes itself to the production of ever more detailed maps of the hegemonic and to a particular mode of disciplinary authority. Stuart Hall’s notion that theory is not an end unto itself but “a detour on route to something else” might lead us to a better model of cultural theory than current “theory capital T” does (Hall, 1991, p. 43)—and so we should conjure a Benjaminian stroll or a Situationist ‘dérive,’ an ambulatory journey through the unplanned, the unexpected, the improvised and the surprising. In keeping with earlier work of mine on the gaps and fissures in dominant masculinity expressed as female masculinity or the disruptions of normative uses of time and space expressed by subcultural actors, and in recognition of the amazing work represented here at this conference, I will argue for more serious engagement with subjugated knowledge; I will also try to enact a current of public intellectualism that I call ‘low theory’; and I will argue for the necessity of producing both alternative knowledge formations and their archives. In this short essay, I resist the conventional notion of a chapter with one overarching argument, and I will present a nomadic journey through what I consider to be our current (not new, not different, not completely other but simply current) critical vocabulary for ‘alternative thinking.’ This critical vocabulary will be supplemented by examples that I consider to be neither allegorical nor definitive, neither apt nor necessarily most appropriate: the example for me is random and interchangeable and should be quickly replaced by another and another. Similarly, the vocabulary (not keywords but just some words) is idiosyncratic and incomplete by its very nature and it awaits amplification by you, by us, by the project we are presumably all engaged in this weekend. 1) The small, the local, the anti-monumental The problem with any search for alternatives may well be one of scale— nothing seems big enough, grand enough, expansive enough and so Marxists dismiss queer cultural performance politics as ‘minor’ or too local, as concerned only with the body, as limited in every way. And the search goes on for the big answer to the big problems; the multitude are offered as the answer to empire in much the same way that the working class was the big answer to capital in another era. But while I will return to the question of ‘multitude’ later, for now let’s stay with the small and the insignificant, the tiny steps that lead to transformation rather than the grand gesture that pronounces it as a fait accompli. In fact, there are plenty of historical antecedents for an alternative politics grounded in seemingly irrelevant action. The Situationists, for example, invested much hope in the politics of the everyday, the ‘celebrated aimless strolls,’ for example, that were

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supposed to create and sustain a kind of urban disorientation and that were subject to chance encounters. These ludic encounters are revived in Samuel Delany’s queer map of the city in Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, where he also wanders aimlessly and engages in anonymous sexual encounters, often with homeless men, who represent for him not simply poverty and abandonment but also an active refusal of the ethos of stability and place that modern life demands (Delany, 2001). Delany does not romanticize the homeless men he tricks with, nor does he cast them as the most aggrieved victims of neo-liberal boom/bust economies; instead he casts them as the protagonists of a drama that persists beneath the homonormative surface of gentrification and the corporate instinct for tidying up the city. For the scales of the small, the local and the anti-monumental, we might look to 2007’s documenta art festival, a compendium of what one critic in The New York Times called: “unmonumental objects and installations by undersung, not to say unknown, artists” (Cotter, 2007, p. 1). The show was actually a fantastic treatise on an alternative to the art market and to celebrity, the abundance of activist art movements around the world and the possibility of creating conversations between and among them and across their historical and political moments. And so, documenta 12 juxtaposed the 1960s work of the Argentine artist Graciela Carnevale, famous for inviting people to an art show and then locking them in the gallery and waiting to see whether people would take action to release themselves, with the performance piece of Sanja Ivekovic who, in 1979, taped herself masturbating on her balcony in Belgrade while a parade for President Tito took place on the street below. Both art works, in different contexts, reference a politics of escape: they attend to the enclosure or exposure of the body and they define the small, symbolic gesture as a provocation to violence. One of the centerpieces of documenta 12 was Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s sculpture, ‘Template,’ a spiraling wooden form made of old pagoda doors and ruined houses. This piece literally collapsed during the storms that buffeted Europe that year, dramatizing both what the show named ‘productive failure’ and a sense of what we could call ‘intelligent art’— objects that actively make meaning over time separate almost from human intention. This piece began as a tower and collapsed upon itself, mimicking other collapsing towers of this century, and in its collapse, it became a spiral. Here the monument refuses its own role and defines an antimonumentality, an ambivalent and collapsing relation to the past, a refusal to stand for history’s victors. Artists and writers and theorists have in recent years attempted to articulate the ways in which nineteenth century notions of race, space, desire and

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difference took root in the fertile ground of the newly invented notion of a natural and god-given heterosexuality. As many theorists are have argued, sexuality was a nineteenth century invention of medical discourse and in the guise of scientific rational description, sexologists like Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis produced models of the natural and the unnatural, normal love and pathological desires, and in the process heterosexuality emerged as a subset of normative identity. The naturalization of heterosexuality and the heterosexualization of nature, in fact, twinned perversion and the unnatural but also unwittingly gave rise to a counter-discourse within which queerness couples with anti-capitalism and anti-colonialism to undermine the imperial politics of nature. documenta 12 extended an engagement with what I call ‘productive failure’ further by showcasing the work of Austrian queer artist Ines Doujak. Doujak’s installation, ‘Victory Gardens,’ makes a powerful statement about this tangled web of power, politics, medicine, nature, gardens and contemporary bio-theft and bio-piracy. The installation, which was showcased in a makeshift glasshouse that served as one of the venues, is a flower bed planted with seed packets that provide not gardening tips but information about the ransacking of Latin American eco-systems by Western industrial nations. This work thematizes contemporary corporate bio-piracy and places it firmly within the history of colonial expansion, and then counters it with an exuberant model of biodiversity. The installation creates a discourse about the dialogue between the local and the global, the sexual and the corporate, the transsexual and the transnational. As anyone who has visited botanical gardens knows, the collection, classification and analysis of the world’s flora and fauna has gone hand in hand with various forms of colonial expansion and enterprise. The seemingly rational and scientific project of collecting plant specimens from around the world and replanting them in the colonial metropole masks conquest with taxonomy, invasion with improvement and occupation with cultivation. And so, nineteenth century colonial enterprise was invested both in ‘discovering’ land but also in re-territorializing it through the transplantation of crops and people. The colonial encounter with the Other and with other landscapes, in other words, involves first the depiction of the landscape as empty or uncultivated and next the repopulation and replanting of it. Here, mercantile enterprise and heterosexual reproduction mutually articulate capitalist logics of multiplication and the manipulative and exploitative machinations of business take cover behind the gloss of nature. Doujak also gives information on the seed packets about biodiversity, hermaphroditic plants, and transsexing fauna, and she decorates the packets with images of drag kings and queens in order to reference the theme of biodiversity and bio sexual diversity in particular. As Doujak’s two-sided

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seed packets imply, the business of plant reproduction can cut both ways and so, while the mercantile zeal of the colonial scientist or the pharmaceutical giant leads him to ransack the earth for useable and saleable plant-life, these criminal actions can be countered by other, perverse relations to both biodiversity and piracy. The collages that decorate the seed packets in ‘Victory Gardens’ beautifully mirror the work of grafting and transplanting upon which all gardens depend. The collage, a format that literally places foreign elements in conversations within one frame, lends itself to multiplicity and unpredictability—the collages, garden-like in their arrangements, allow lots of different themes to compete for the eye’s attention and so in one striking image, a transgender figure sits astride his female sexual partner’s back and the leather of his boots echoes the leather straps that lace her torso. The female partner, mimicking a horse, carries her master on her back and holds the reins within her mouth as an exuberant tail extends out from her ass. The S/M image, a vivid and literal tableau of the erotic power relations that run through all colonial encounters, is framed by a gorgeous margin of plants and flowers and sits against a backdrop of a tapestry of birds, fences and mythical creatures. This garden arrangement of flowers, humans and animals asks us to see a dense matrix of power and aesthetics stretching across the dreams of Edenic paradises and the wild materiality of bodies and blossoms. As we are pulled into the collage, as we feel touched or repulsed, aroused or annoyed by the S/M spectacle of queer power, we are also invited to consider how we too are implicated in environmental collapse and the pillaging of the third world by the first. Will diversity signal the survival or the extinction of the species? Will you ride or walk? How does your garden grow and upon whom do you feed today? Doujak’s ‘Siegesgärten’ assures us that in the battle to cultivate and tame, control and exploit, plant life has its own solutions and that in the end, the flowers will bloom and fade and the weeds will always win. 2) Pirates and perverts What else is criminal activity but the passionate pursuit of alternatives? Shahrzad Design Collective (Zurich/Teheran)

As Ines Doujak’s work implies, piracy can cut both ways: obviously, her ‘Victory Gardens’ reference the long rapacious history of the colonial theft and transplantation of flora and fauna. And indeed, ‘biopiracy’ is the name for what Doujak refers to as “the practice by which genetic or biological resources are being patented and used without the consent and financial compensation of the land of origin, the local communities or the indigenous peoples who previously maintained and used those resources” (Doujak, 2008, p. 23). But her work also turns biopiracy back on itself and counters

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corporate plundering with the kind of local knowledge that leads to the cultivation of precious alternative medicines in the first place. Piracy, in fact, might not be the best term for corporate crime given that, as Peter Linbaugh and Marcus Rediker have shown, the history of pirates is part of a complex history of anti-capitalist struggle. In their book: The Many-Headed Hydra : Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, social historians Linebaugh and Rediker trace what they call ‘the struggles for alternative ways of life’ that accompanied and opposed the rise of capitalism in the early seventeenth century (Linebaugh and Rediker, 2001). In stories about piracy, dispossessed commoners and urban insurrections, Linebaugh and Rediker detail the modes of colonial and national violence that brutally stamped out all challenges to middle-class power and that cast proletarian rebellion as disorganized, random and apolitical. Linebaugh and Rediker refuse the common wisdom about these movements (i.e. that they were random and not focused on any particular political goal). They emphasize instead the power of cooperation within the anti-capitalist mob and they pay careful attention to the alternatives that this ‘many headed Hydra’ of resistant groups imagined and pursued. The Many-Headed Hydra is a central text in any genealogy of alternatives because, to return to Robin Kelley’s point, it refuses to accede to the myth of Herculean capitalist heroes who mastered the female monster of unruly anarchy and instead it turns that myth on its many heads to access “a powerful legacy of possibility” (Kelley, 2003, p. 58). The book dialogues with Stuart Hall’s cogent reminder that “the more we understand about the development of Capital itself, the more we understand that it is only part of the story” (Hall, 1990b, p. 180) and with Doreen Massey’s critique of certain grand Marxist narratives by David Harvey and others within which “capital always wins, and it seems capital can only win...” (Massey, 1994, p. 140). For Linebaugh and Rediker, capital is always only part of the story and it must be matched by complex stories of the non-inevitability of capitalism: the wide range of resistance with which capitalism was met in the late sixteenth century—there were levelers and diggers who resisted the enclosure of the public land or commons; there were sailors and mutineers and would-be slaves who rebelled against the captains’ authority on ships to the new world; there were religious dissidents who believed in the absence of hierarchies in the eyes of the Lord; there were multi-national ‘motley crews’ who engineered mutinies on merchant ships and who sailed around the world bringing news of uprisings to different ports. And finally, Linebaugh and Rediker flesh out the alternatives that these resistant groups proposed in terms of how to live, of how to think about time and space, of how to inhabit space with others and of how to spend time separate from the logic of work.

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The one absence in Linebaugh and Rediker’s compelling account of ‘hydrarchy’ concerns the lusty legends of female pirates—these were mostly cross-dressed women, some of whom, like Mary Reade, had been raised as boys and had chosen to live in adulthood as men, others like Ann Bonny who married into piracy, but all of whom made common cause with male pirate crews. In the one paragraph devoted to female pirates in their chapter on ‘Hydrarchy,’ Linebaugh and Rediker note that piracy obviously appealed to women who were seeking to flee from the ever-narrowing sphere of social action for women at that time. But the history has been used in a queer context as an archive of variant gendering. And homosexual males were certainly part of the pirate lore, given the homosocial world of the mariner and the connection that still prevails between piracy and sodomy. Indeed, even the recent Hollywood treatment of pirates in Pirates of the Caribbean casts a very camp Johnny Depp in the lead role. Pirates of the Caribbean and Johnny Depp’s perversity notwithstanding, piracy rhymes with a number of other contemporary terms for oppositionality: bandits in South East Asia, terrorists in the Middle East, thugs in early twentieth century India. So, if we were to extract a method from Linebaugh and Rediker’s it would be a piratology, a ransacking of historiography to find alternate logics of wealth, circulation, commerce and distribution and a revision of the narratives about mutineers and pirates that relegate such insurrectionists to the criminal margins of history. And pirates still live among us as those forced to create informal economies in what Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd have called ‘the shadows of capitalism’ (Lloyd and Lowe, 1997). To give one example of informal economies which spring up in the shadows of capital and certainly in the wake of political suppression, we can turn to the lively economies that emerge in and around checkpoints in Israel. In 2007, I visited Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, and when I went with the Israeli, feminist and queer activist group Machsom Watch to witness at the checkpoints, I saw these informal economies in action—taxi services, coffee stands, food stands and stalls selling both necessaries and frivolous toys. In an essay on ‘The Importance of Thugs: The Moral Economy of a Checkpoint,’ Rema Hammami explains the oddly contradictory nature of the checkpoints for Palestinians. On the one hand, the checkpoints control and organize, limit and funnel the activities of everyday life. On the other hand, the checkpoints become a zone of activism and resistance, a place where “collective punishment simultaneously creates collective experience, activity and meaning” (Hammami, 2006, p. 28). Indeed, she eloquently writes: Checkpoint workers constantly subverted physical boundaries: at night they stealthily pushed concrete blocks a few more inches apart

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to make way for horse carriages, or trampled the edges of newly-made dirt barriers so that porter carts could get to the other side. And through both necessity and ingenuity, they reclaimed the space of the checkpoint from being purely a site of oppression and brutality into one where livelihood, social life and even sociability could be recovered. (2006, p. 28)

3) Low theory The possibility of other modes of being has always been one of the dreams of cultural studies and the commitment to theorizing alternatives arose as a kind of intellectual mission in early cultural studies. We might situate cultural studies in opposition to high theory and argue for a low theoretical approach. In his essay on ‘The Use of Gramsci for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,’ Stuart Hall (1990a, p. 413) remarks, almost casually, that he wants to disagree with a comment that Althusser makes about Gramsci whom Althusser characterizes as someone who has “insufficiently theorized hegemony.” Hall, like Gramsci, was and is very interested in the idea of education as a popular practice and in his work he does precisely what he ascribes to Gramsci—namely, he manages to operate “at different levels of abstraction” (Hall, 1990a, p. 413). Hall quickly knocks back Althusser’s critique of Gramsci in this essay and then he reminds us that Gramsci’s concepts “were quite explicitly designed to operate at the lower levels of historical concreteness” (p. 413). Hall similarly is not ‘aiming higher’ and missing, he is aiming low in order to hit a broader target. Here we can think about ‘low theory’ and why we are so committed to the ‘high’ in high theory, a kind of Frankfurt school notion of high as difficult, dense, complex. Low theory then refers to the activity of looking for a knowledge from below, from the popular or even the multitude as opposed to legislating knowledge from on high in a process that abstracts, universalizes, generalizes and always results in a kind of vanguardism. The critical vocabulary of ‘low theory’ includes: Virtuosity: this is a term taken from Paolo Virno’s A Grammar of the Multitude and it references a form of speech that is not scripted, that in fact cannot be scripted (Virno, 2004): the virtuoso performance, Virno implies, does not allow for the product to be separated from the act of production and it renders meaning as something that often derives from social scripts but that can also sometimes be authored spontaneously and without a script in surprising and moving ways. Virno defines virtuosity as “an activity without an end product…an activity which finds its own fulfillment (that is, its own purpose) in itself,” and an activity which “requires the presence of others” (p. 52). Building on a musical notion of virtuosity, Virno proposes political action as a form of virtuosity and virtuosity as a form of politics. I

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am attracted here to the term primarily for the way it allows for modes of production (performance) that escape their own logics and cannot be reperformed except as a new form of virtuosity. Virno’s recasting of virtuosity reminds us that while actors perform from scripts, their best performances come when they leave the script behind, not necessarily deliberately but because they get literally carried away. Escapology: Escapology, or what Virno calls ‘exit’ (Virno, 2004) and what Hardt and Negri call ‘exodus’ (Hardt and Negri, 2005) is the art of imagining a way out; it is the practice of refusing the structure and performing the alternative. Daphne Brooks in Bodies in Dissent casts escapology as the knowledge of the former slaves, those people who have known both captivity and freedom and who see the structures within ‘freedom’ that make it a trap as well as a destination (Brooks, 2006). Bodies in Dissent constructs a critical methodology for the historical analysis of resistant performances by African Americans from the period of antebellum slavery to the early twentieth century. Using an impressive array of primary materials culled from archives in the US and the UK, Brooks reconstructs not only the contexts for African American performance but also the reception of these stagings of ‘embodied insurgency’ and the complex meanings of the performers’ own bodily histories, biographies and risky theatrical endeavors. Like Joseph Roach in Cities of the Dead (1996), in her study Brooks must craft a critical methodology capable of retrieving lost performance cultures, negotiating their aesthetic complexity and rendering their meaning to both black and white audiences in the US and the UK. Roach’s work forms a backdrop for some of Brooks’ energetic recreations of nineteenth century African American transatlantic performance and she takes from him the notion that culture reproduces itself through performance in the mode of ‘surrogation.’ In the process of inhabiting a role, the actor or sub-cultural performer incorporates a tradition of performance, and she activates a whole new set of political meanings and references. The body of the performer thus becomes an archive of improvised cultural responses to conventional constructions of gender, race and sexuality and her performance articulates powerful modes of dissent and resistance. Brooks, as part of this critical methodology, reads productively: in other words, she reads the theatrical texts in her archive along the axis of propulsive transformation and seeks, through patient historical contextualization and inspired textual analysis, to locate in each text sites of aesthetic and political possibility. As instances of escapology, Brooks productively reads Henry ‘Box’ Brown’s act of mailing himself to freedom in a small wooden crate, Adah Isaacs Menken’s theatrical performances of hybridized embodiment, a Post-Reconstruction era production of gothic race in R.L. Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1898), moving panorama theater, and other extravagant

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scenes of African American ‘embodied insurgency.’ In each chapter there are breathtaking moments of interpretive virtuosity, precisely of the kind that Virno’s notion of virtuosity might imagine. In her reading of Henry ‘Box’ Brown’s various recastings of his own slave narrative, for instance, Brooks reads the image and the trope of the box itself to propose how and where Brown’s narrative escapes the ventriloquism of his white editor. She argues that the image of the crate “operates suggestively as an act of narrative combat” (Brooks, 2006, p. 74) and she locates the crate firmly within the history of what she calls Henry ‘Box’ Brown’s ‘antislavery activism.’ Openness: Another word in our vocabulary of alternatives might be ‘openness.’ Here I add a non neo-liberal understanding of ‘openness’ to my idea of ‘low theory’ and again I draw upon the work of Stuart Hall. Hall (1990b) develops a notion of openness in his idea of a Marxism that comes ‘without guarantees,’ that remains open and improvisational and that can adapt rather than form an orthodoxy. Openness is also a feature of the work of collaborative theorists J.K. Gibson-Graham who argue that Marxist theorists in particular have participated in the production of capital as a totalizing account of economic activity that allows for nothing to stand apart from capitalism and admits to no alternatives—that indeed closes down both the definition of capital and the possibility of opposition (Gibson-Graham, 2006). For Gibson-Graham, the more we theorize the economy as total, dominant and ubiquitous, the more we make it so—why? Because, as we know from Foucault, there is no truth separate from the discursive formations that prop up truth claims and so our own discursive productions can, performatively, produce capitalist hegemony just as our own participation in concepts like man, woman, gay and lesbian, can produce those as ‘identities.’ Openness here, as in Agamben, implies a kind of arena of possibility within which surprising and non-economic relations between things, between humans and things, humans and animals and humans and machines can evolve. For their part, Gibson-Graham propose that instead of resigning ourselves to capitalist hegemony we should began to pay attention to the multiple ways that people engage in non-capitalist and noncorporative behaviors. 4) Multitudes and monsters The Hydra, like a cyborg for Haraway and Braidotti and like a ‘networked swarm’ for Hardt and Hegri, constitutes a monster of the many—that which cannot be unified, cannot be controlled, cannot be predicted. Monstrosity is actually a major component of multiplicity—opposition to the one, the coherent, the organic. Corporate capitalism cannot be countered by cosmopolitanism, queer or otherwise. Instead, as Hardt and Negri argue, the

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multitude is a better concept than the universal citizen presumed by cosmopolitanism. Hardt and Negri define the multitude as: the many in their differences—not the people, not the singular group ruled by the state—the many are the singularities and differences that re-emerge when the state fails, as it always does, to represent their interests. Using the analogy of bees or ants, Hardt and Negri combine organic with inorganic to come up with the notion of a ‘networked swarm’ of resistance with which the ‘sovereign state of security’ must contend (Hardt, 2005). The ‘networked swarm,’ unlike the planetary humanist or the cosmopolitan subject, offers no unitary enemy, no obvious target; instead, it is elusive, ephemeral, in flight. Kingpins I want to turn in conclusion to an installation titled ‘The Great Undead’ by Australian drag king group The Kingpins. Whether vampire or ghoul, werewolf or witch, the great undead has always been queer. The undead as a concept proposes a queer form of non-hetero reproduction: the vampire, for example, reproduces him or herself by biting his or her victim, by penetrating the body through new holes and by transforming the living into the undead. The great monsters of history—Dracula, Frankenstein, Alien, Mr. Hyde—have all emerged through a perverse mixing of the live and the dead, the forgotten and the expired, the original and the remix. In ‘The Great Undead,’ The Kingpins mix themselves into a variety of pseudoheroic 1970s backdrops modeled on the 1960s/70s aesthetics of psychedelic rock and deco-inspired utopias, and they people their mythological universe with hybrid creatures, indigenous Australian animals and warrior princesses to rival Frank Frazetta’s babes in neo-primitive, urban jungle wear. The Kingpins’ alternative mythologies are cut and pasted from a variety of cultural sources including pop, social history, urban legends, world cinema and so on. The Kingpins work collaboratively to stall the art market myth of solo, marketable genius that props up so much of the consumer frenzy in the era of hedge fund collectors. They work across media, across cultures and they excavate the recent past for signs of the decline of futurity: for example, The Kingpins build upon the music video for David Bowie’s ‘Let’s Dance’ and they rework what was already a strange combination of pop and apocalypse. Bowie’s video is set in the Australian outback and it recasts the story of the red shoes that force a young girl to dance to her doom. In Bowie’s rendition, the girl and her family dance out to the edge of their back of beyond realm and witness the mushroom cloud of nuclear obliteration on the near horizon. The video turns, at this point, from a whimsical piece of verité to a melancholic ode to pre-apocalyptic abandon. And it is this mood that sets the stage for the fantastical, the other-worldly practices of The Kingpins’ new show.

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In what they call cultural narratives of death and disappearance, such as the impending disappearance that lurks behind the ‘Let’s Dance’ video, The Kingpins launch a hard hitting political critique of the politics of ‘life’ from the place of the ‘undead.’ In the era of Bush-Blair-Howard hawkism, militant anti-immigrant politics join hands with a militaristic enforcement of ‘democracy’ around the world. While the first world gorges on ‘life,’ on its own practices of security and survival, the third and fourth worlds pay the price and become the undead. While prisoners sit indefinitely in Guantanemo Bay, refugees remain lost in the bureaucracy of asylum law, American soldiers return time and again to Iraq to fight a war against civilians, whole new populations become ‘undead,’ stranded between life and death, between undocumented and illegal, human and animal. The Great Undead, for The Kingpins, become a queer population of humans and monsters, lost to time, to consumption, to capital, to discipline. Georgio Agamben’s (1998) theorization of ‘bare life’ as a kind of minimal form of survival that camps and prisons impose upon the body echoes through the Kingpin fabulations. Refusing the reduction of the live–dead binary to rich– poor, citizen–nomad, free–enslaved, The Kingpins seek out the spaces between and unexpected possibilities. Invoking the best tendencies of queer theory, The Kingpins turn to the banal, the popular, the whimsical to answer to the grim, the religious, the hyper-masculine politics of life. To be undead is to refuse the terms of life in the military, neo-religious metropole. In conclusion—I am arguing for the recognition of the great undead among us, the alternatives, the surprising convergences of the popular and the avant-garde, the aesthetic and the political, the small and the dangerous.

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REFERENCES Agamben, G. 1998. Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. (D. Heller-Roazen, Trans.). Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Brooks, D. (2006). Bodies in dissent: Spectacular performances of race and freedom, 1850–1910. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cotter, H. (2007, June 22). Asking serious questions in a very quiet voice. The New York Times: Art Section, p. 1. Delany, S. (2001). Times square red, times square blue. New York: New York University Press. Doujak, I. (2008). Siegesgärten. Wien: Schlebrügge. Foucault, M. (2003). Society must be defended: Lectures at the College De France, 1975– 1976. (D. Macey, Trans.). New York: Picador. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006). The end of capitalism (as we knew it): A feminist critique of political economy. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Hall, S. (1990a). Gramsci’s relevance for the study of race and ethnicity. In D. Morley, & K. H. Chen (Eds.), Stuart Hall: Critical dialogues in cultural studies. New York: Routledge. Hall, S. (1990b). The problem of ideology: Marxism without guarantees. In D. Morley, & K. H. Chen (Eds.), Stuart Hall: Critical dialogues in cultural studies. New York: Routledge. Hall, S. (1991). Old and new identities: old and new ethnicities. In A. D. King (Ed.), Culture, globalization and the world system (pp. 41-68). London: Macmillan. Hammami, R. (2007). The importance of thugs: the moral economy of a checkpoint. Jerusalem Quarterly, 22/23, 16-28. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2005). Multitude: War and demoncracy in the age of empire. New York, NY: Penguin. Kelley, R. (2003). Freedom dreams: The black radical imagination. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Linebaugh, P., & Rediker, M. (2001). The many-headed Hydra: The hidden history of the revolutionary Atlantic. Boston, MA: Beacon. Lloyd, D., & Lowe, L. (Eds.). The politics of culture in the shadow of capital. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Massey, D. (1994). The political place of locality studies. In D. Massey, Space, place and gender (pp. 125-145). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Virno, P. (2004). A grammar of the multitude: For an analysis of contemporary forms of life. S. Lotringer (Ed.). (J. Cascaito, A. Casson & I. Bertoletti, Trans.). New York: Semiotexte.

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CHAPTER 2 IMAGINING OTHERWISE: PERFORMANCE ART AS QUEER TIME AND SPACE Cristyn Davies The University of Sydney

Abstract: This chapter imagines performance art as queer time and space. Performance art not only contests normative structures of traditional theatrical performance, but also challenges understandings of normative subjects, and the relation of the arts to structures of power. Focusing on two performances: Australian performance artist Elena Knox’s solo show, Lapdog, which fuses cabaret with poetry and physical performance, and Spiegeltent Productions’ global theatrical phenomenon, La Clique, inspired by cabaret, new burlesque, circus and contemporary vaudeville, Davies explores narratives of resistance, counterdiscourses, and alternative imaginings of gender, sexuality and socio-cultural life. In her performance of Lapdog, Knox attends to gender, sexuality and class as these categories affect the position of women in the service industries. Her persona is a Barbie doll that breaks free from her box, but still perpetually imagines herself elsewhere while she undertakes the mundane tasks required by the various apparatus of her ‘outfit.’ Throughout her performance she develops subversive techniques resisting the politics of consumption, while drawing attention to the heteronormative framework in which she has been designed to excel. Performed on a larger scale, La Clique includes two pin-striped, pipe-smoking, acrobatic English gents in bowler hats, an erotically charged bathtub acrobat, and an American hula hoop act in which the performer subverts the notion of patriotism by playing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ through vaginal contractions. In this tent of mirrors, performers queer normative boundaries through challenging bodily acts and practices to entertain, mesmerize and provide an audience with an alternative, seductive and chaotic imaginary world. Elizabeth Stephens responds to this chapter. Keywords: Performance, performance art, queer, time, space, cabaret, burlesque, gender, sexuality, La Clique, Lapdog, Elena Knox, Spiegeltent.

“Life

changes fast. Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant,” American novelist and essayist Joan Didion writes in her memoir of the deaths of her husband and daughter, The Year of Magical Thinking (2005, p. 3). Didion’s spare prose maps just how quickly the ordinary instant is transformed by crisis. As part of the 2007–2008 season, the Sydney Theatre Company staged Didion’s theatrical adaptation of her memoir. i Robyn Nevin’s Didion is a skillful portrayal of a meticulous, meditative, grief stricken woman testifying to two mortal shocks—one instantaneous and the other prolonged—occurring within weeks of each other. The audience becomes privy to the details of the sudden collapse at the dinner table of Didion’s husband of forty years, John Gregory Dunne. We also learn that in the weeks leading up to Dunne’s massive heart attack, the couple had been keeping vigil at their comatose daughter’s bedside. For Didion, “time is out Kerry H. Robinson and Cristyn Davies (Eds) All rights reserved - © 2012 Bentham Science Publishers

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of joint” (Shakespeare, trans. 1994, 1.5.211); the death of her husband and the social death of her daughter leaving her finely tuning the details of her daily routine to escape a vortex of loss and grief. On rising out of her coma, suffering short-term memory loss, their daughter Quintana can’t retain the news that her father is dead, and so Didion finds herself in a loop, repeating the awful news at each meeting, until her daughter, too, dies. Forty minutes into the performance on April 14, 2008, the ordinary experience of the theatre-goer became the stuff of extraordinary circumstance. From the front row a woman’s voice rose over that of the performer. “Mum!” she cried—then, “Is there a doctor? Is anyone a doctor?” Immersed in the drama of the monologue, transported by Nevin’s Didion, a few moments passed before I realized that this wasn’t part of the play. An older woman had slumped over in her seat, apparently unconscious, while her daughter was frantically trying to shake her awake. What was being played out in the front row was a kind of reversal of the play’s dramatic events. Clutching her chest in astonishment, Nevin stood frozen on the stage, as taken aback by events as the audience. She too had become a spectator. Responding to the initial cry for help, a man and a woman from different places in the amphitheatre moved swiftly to tend to the older woman who was now lying, unconscious, on the stage. The stage manager emerged from behind the curtain, and called for the house lights to come up. From somewhere back in the theatre a man yelled that he was turning on his mobile phone to call an ambulance. At some point while all this was happening, Nevin left the stage—I became aware of her absence, but not of her departure. We were ushered out, clearing the auditorium so that the paramedics could do their work. We stood in little groups in the foyer, not holding to those groups we’d arrived with. Strangers asked one another what they thought had happened, and others stood alone, looking, every so often, at their watches. It took twenty minutes for the ambulance to arrive. (I was struck by the irony: in the play, it takes five minutes for the ambulance to arrive at the apartment after Didion’s husband has collapsed.) Minutes went by. Then the loud speaker pinged into life, and we were asked to return to the theatre. When Nevin came back on stage, she wasn’t in character—she couldn’t get back in character until she’d talked through the uncanny shared experience. She reassured us that the ending for the woman who’d collapsed had not been an unhappy one.ii She wanted us to hold onto that, to keep it close while returning to Didion’s experience of mortality. Hers, after all, was a story to which the ending was anything but happy. Explaining the structural precision of the play, the ebb and flow of Didion’s language, Nevin told us that “in order to continue with the performance, to become Didion again,” she’d need our “help.” There was a general nodding

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of heads, words of support murmured. Then, turning her back to the audience, Nevin skipped back a few lines before the point at which she’d been interrupted. In again becoming Didion, she entered an alternative place and time—a place and time different from the one she’d first taken us to. This time, we had shared, and been shaken by, an experience of the real. For the remainder of the performance, I experienced a heightened awareness of my immediate surroundings: the loud ticking of the watch worn by the woman sitting beside me; the nervous rustling of spectators fidgeting in their seats. I felt restless and took a few deep breaths in an effort to resist the contagious anxiety circulating among the audience. Registering that anxiety, a woman a few rows ahead left her seat abruptly, running a few yards to the end of the aisle, where she doubled over with nausea, and vomited. A friend ran out to check on her, and then both left the theatre. My concentration drifted in and out of the fictional world offered by Nevin, and the audience around me seemed as rattled and scatter-headed—all of us trying to focus, to give ourselves over to Nevin’s performance. *** In the moment when the woman collapsed in the front row of the performance of The Year of Magical Thinking, so too did the fourth wall—that theatrical convention usually maintained by performer and audience in proscenium theatre as an aid to the suspension of disbelief—collapse, creating a queer time and space effecting different kinds of relation, connectivity and collaboration. In the instance re-told above, interrupting the flow of the one-woman realist play taking place onstage became imperative in an effort to save the life of the spectator whose health had failed in the front row. The consequences of engaging (accidently or deliberately) in such queer time and space are unpredictable—that is, in such moments viewers and performers have the capacity, amongst other choices, to reinstate norms, or to destabilize and unsettle normative practices. In my argument to follow I imagine performance art more generally as a queer time and space; that is, not only does performance art contest normative structures of traditional theatrical performance, but so too does it challenge understandings of normative subjects, and the relation of the arts to structures of power (Davies, 2008). Performance art, like queer theory, is frequently employed to deconstruct and denaturalize assumed allegiances between bodies and identities, spaces and practices, and norms and subjectivities (Davies, 2012). The relation between space and place in performance is significant, and functions in multiple ways including the physical places of performance as they exist in the wider social space of the community, the space of interaction between performers and spectators, the energized space of the stage when it is occupied and rendered meaningful by the presence of the performers, the

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organization of stage and offstage, the fictional places that are represented or evoked within or in relation to all these physical areas, and interacting with all of them, the space of verbal reference. (McCauley, 1999, p. 7)

Within the context of this discussion, I have chosen to use the term ‘space’ because of my interest in the ways in which spatial practices function and change in performance art, particularly as both performers and spectators inhabit and mediate space in often unconventional ways. Although theatre and performance art are quite different operations, the ways in which performance art as a medium contests both normalized everyday practices and conventional theatrical understandings of time and space was clarified for me by my extraordinary experience at The Year of Magical Thinking. The circumstances under which these new relations of time and space emerged were forged in crisis, the terrible catalyst for a queering of distinctions between theatrical and supposedly ‘real’ time and space. As Gay McCauley (1999, p. 5) suggests, theatre “is a social event, occurring in the auditorium as well as on the stage, and the primary signifiers are physical and even spatial in nature.” The crisis of illness, played out in the front row, heightened what is at stake more generally— and more banally—in performance. This social engagement that is spatial and physical is highly mediated by theatrical convention embodied in the habitus of performers and audience, both usually subject to the discipline inherent in this socio-cultural exchange. In this instance, the distinction between fiction and reality—between ‘real’ time and space and theatrical time and space—left many audience members disoriented about temporal and spatial relations. Like other members of this audience, I found myself merging the real-time narrative with the dramatic narrative, for our experience of this distinction was further complicated by the play’s contraction of space (personal, national, theatrical) and time (narrative, story, real)—that is, the truncation, re-ordering and treatment of the autobiographical: a script based on real events. The eventful occasion prompted me to consider the productive possibilities of queer space and time as it is employed in performance art—a genre that artists often use to contest theatrical convention and expectation. In many contexts, performance art resists neoliberal governmental practices in which there is an expansion of market space and time because performers are not easily substituted; performances are usually based around the cult of the performer, and their experience, physical ability, or personal critique, which structures the performance (Davies, 2012). Performance art often appeals to a niche audience, which can limit both the duration of the run of the performance, and also affect the choice of performance spaces, which are frequently smaller in audience capacity so as to increase intimacy between performer and audience (rather than increasing the size of the

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performance space to enhance the potential for maximum financial returns) (Davies, 2012). Performance art intervenes in normative constructions of time and space, and frequently disrupts heteronormative logic. This is not to say that performance art is an exclusively queer art form, but rather to acknowledge that it has been easily accessible to historically marginalized groups such as feminists and queers because practitioners often employ the body and skills of a solo performer, using material from everyday life, with a focus on the body in time and space, often turning toward autobiographical explorations (Carlson, 1996; Davies, 2008a, 2012). Therefore, performance art of this kind is often less expensive to produce than more traditional theatre, and involves self-devised work in which some performers draw on personal experience to offer socio-political and cultural critique of pressing issues (Davies, 2008a). Since the 1980s, an important element of performance art has also been physical performance inspired by a reflexive consciousness of the performing act that related to the traditions of circus and clowning (Carlson, 1996). Performance artists with physical training (from circus to dance and theatre skills) have subsidized their meagre incomes by performing for passers-by at tourist hotspots, or performing as part of nomadic traveling variety entertainment troupes, or within large scale spectacles with ‘new circuses’ (the most famous international contemporary example being Quebec’s Cirque du Soleil). Performance art emerged as a form in major cities in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia during the 1970s and 1980s (not coincidentally following civil rights campaigns, and paralleling women’s, and gay and lesbian rights movements), gaining recognition as a critical alternative medium of avantgarde experimentation. The conceptual art movement (within the visual arts), body art, circus and vaudeville, as well as street demonstrations and protest marches influenced work produced by performance artists. RoseLee Goldberg (1988) describes performance art as work that may be presented solo or with a group, that includes lighting, music or visuals made by the performance artist, or in collaboration, and performed in art galleries, museums, or other alternative spaces, such as a theatre, café, bar or street corner. Unlike traditional theatre, the performer presents him/herself in what Hans-Thies Lehmann (1997) refers to as ‘now-time,’ with the content of the performance rarely following traditional plots and narratives. Like queer theory that emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which understands identities as neither fixed nor stable, but as fluid, dynamic, contradictory and constructed, performance art emerged out of postmodernism, and has become a critical medium through which disenfranchized or marginal subjects might create performances to carry socio-political messages to audiences.

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Halberstam’s (2005) scholarship, and the work of other scholars of queer theory that addresses queer time and place, have been a significant development in queer studies, and one critical to the formulation of my theorizing of performance art (Jagose, 2002; Edelman, 2004; Freeman, 2007). Halberstam’s innovative intervention in In a Queer Time and Place (and throughout her scholarship more generally) is in changing the rules of critical engagement. Halberstam (2007, p. 182) imagines that her work is “part of a much smaller project, one that asks little questions, settles for less than grandiose answers, speculates without evidence, and finds insights in eccentric and unrepresentative archives.” Halberstam practices epistemological vigilance by reflecting on the conditions of her socio-cultural and political context and provides a reader with a timely critique of subcultural lives and practices. Offering the reader an alternative temporal and spatial framework that refuses heteronormative logics of reproduction, normative family structures, locations, movements and identifications, Halberstam denaturalizes time and space not only as it is conceived and embodied in modernity (during which time became structured by industrial regulation contributing to innovations such as the formation of the forty hour working week) but so too does she contest universalizing inconsistent claims “on behalf of white male subjects theorizing postmodern temporality and geography” about relations between time and space (Halberstam, 2005, p. 4). For Halberstam (2005, p. 6), postmodernism is both crisis and opportunity—“a crisis in the stability of form and meaning, and an opportunity to rethink the practice of cultural production, its hierarchies and power dynamics, its tendency to resist or capitulate.” Halberstam’s archive and critical approach demonstrate why a strategy of reading that prioritizes subcultural lives, practices and texts can be productive for the analysis of contemporary life, rather than the mere continuation of methods that prioritize making ever more detailed maps of the hegemonic. Positing queer studies as one method for imagining existing alternatives to hegemonic systems, Halberstam (2005) offers a new framework for conceptualizing alternative imaginaries. In imagining performance art as a queer time and space, I also draw upon David Román’s (2005) notion of the ‘contemporary’—that is, the figuring of the present as a time in which an audience imagines itself within a fluid and nearly suspended temporal condition, living in a moment not yet in the past, and not yet in the future. Influenced by Walter Benjamin’s practice of historical materialism, Román (2005) takes up Benjamin’s (1969) “time of the now” through which Benjamin, not unlike Michel Foucault (1984), understands history as a complex constellation of shifting relations and events, rather than as a narrative of progress in which each period sequentially improves upon the next. Refuting the charge of presentism, Román (2005, p. 12) argues “performance both embodies Benjamin’s time

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of the now and exploits it to great effect” because it is “set in an intimate and yet unpredictable relation to the historical past.” Elizabeth Freeman (2007, p. 163) sees in Benjamin’s construction of history, and its influence, “a potentially queer vision of time—its wrinkling and folding as some minor feature of our own sexually impoverished present suddenly meets up with a richer past, or as the materials of a failed and forgotten project of the past find their uses now, in a future unimaginable in their time.” Not unlike Halberstam, Román (2005) refuses a logic of the reproductive, and its mandate, that styles the contemporary as a pivot point among a time of ‘generation’—indebted either to the past or bound to the future, both of which, he claims, privilege heteronormative models of cultural reproduction. For Román (2005, p. 15), these models (indebted to the past or bound to the future) “value the contemporary only as the product of already legitimate cultural traditions or as the potential ideal for an imagined future.” Following Halberstam’s (2008) rethinking of Michel Foucault’s (1986) notion of a heterotopia—as an alternative history of space—I understand performance art to be a heterotopia that queers space and time, providing opportunities to rehearse new forms of sociality. Unlike those utopias understood as ideal societies which, according to Foucault (1986, p. 24), have “no real place” and are fundamentally “unreal spaces,” heterotopias are simultaneously a symbolic and a real contestation of space that shifts over time in response to socio-cultural and political changes effecting the governance of space (examples of such spaces include prisons, hospitals, and cemeteries). As Nikolas Rose (1999, p. 32) argues, governable spaces “are not fabricated counter to experience; they make new kinds of experience possible, produce new modes of perception, invest percepts with affects, with dangers and opportunities, with saliences and attractions.” Performance art regulates its subjects, such as performers and audiences, differently to traditional theatre, a difference that can be understood through Foucault’s (1977) concept of discipline and Bourdieu’s (1990, 1993) notion of habitus. Foucault’s perception of discipline as a set of skills and knowledges which we must successfully accomplish relates to the ways that audiences are disciplined by theatrical convention, and through selfregulation (for example sitting quietly and still in their seats during the performance). In performance art, spectators are often encouraged to take up a different habitus, that is, to shift their usual embodied attitudes and dispositions to effectively engage in the alternative imaginings offered by the performer.

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Performance is vital to current national enquiries and debates and also has a role in shaping national imaginaries (Davies, 2008a; Román, 2005). Challenging hegemonic discourses in the United States that position the performing arts as marginal to national concerns, Román (2005, p. 1) argues that some contemporary performance in the US does position audiences as critical subjects, and by so doing provides a framework within which to rehearse new forms of sociality in an era nervously conformist. Queerness, therefore, “becomes most useful as an interpretive category, when placed in relation to particular social contexts, historical moments, and cultural surrounds” (Román and Meyer, 2006, p. 167). In order to weigh the heterotopic operations of performance art as queer time and space, I’d like to discuss the work of Sydney-based Australian performance artist Elena Knox (in particular her one-woman show, Lapdog), and the Spiegeltent Productions’ global theatrical phenomenon, La Clique. iii Knox’s solo performance, Lapdog, fuses cabaret with poetry and physical performance to critique constructions of gender, sexuality and class, particularly as those categories affect the position of women in the service industry (Davies, 2004; Knox and Davies, 2008a). La Clique brings together an international ensemble of physical performance and circus artists inspired by a mélange of cabaret, new burlesque, circus and contemporary vaudeville. La Clique’s performers entertain audiences by constantly testing the physical limits of their bodies, while simultaneously dissecting and interrupting gendered and sexual relations. These performance artists engage narratives of resistance, counter-discourses, and alternative imaginings of gender, sexuality and socio-cultural and political life. Their performances may also be used as a pivot to consider the role of the performing arts in reconstituting the zone of sexual and gendered citizenship, and as spaces that contribute to the development of queer counter-publics (Davies, 2008a).iv Elena Knox (Lull) in Lapdog Performing her solo show at the theatre within the Old Fitzroy Hotel in Sydney’s Woolloomooloo, Knox (known as Lull) wrote, directed, performed and produced Lapdog—a critique of the gendered and sexualized neoliberal subject rewarded for being ultra efficient and super flexible within the casual workforce. v Neoliberal technologies aim to ensure a radically free market including maximized competition and free trade achieved through economic deregulation, elimination of tariffs, and a range of monetary and social policies favourable to business and indifferent toward poverty (Brown, 2003). A neoliberal mode of governance employs techniques and procedures in which the state produces supposedly rational, autonomous, responsibilized subjects, forms of citizenship and behaviour, and a new organization of the social through self-regulation rather than repression or punishment (Brown, 2003; Burchell et al., 1991). Citizens are encouraged to take responsibility for

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their own behaviours, practices and wellbeing and to absorb the costs and consequences of their own choices and actions. Thus the irony of Knox as sole performer (one-woman-band) should not be lost; she becomes the flexible neoliberal subject of her own critique in order that the ‘show go on’ in a climate of limited funding for solo performance art.vi

Lull (Elena Knox), Lapdog. Photographed by Anand Kumar.

Fusing cabaret with poetry and physical performance, Knox’s postmodern style is self-reflexive, incorporating intertextuality, pastiche, fragmentation, and non-linear narrative refusing resolution. Lapdog is structured around fourteen songs written and composed by Knox that she performs cabaret style. Writing about cabaret as cultural history, Román (2005, p. 197) argues that cabaret performance constitutes a gendered genre and practice, and a contested space that throughout its history has showcased the woman singer. Román’s focus is on the ways in which cabaret performance preserves and sustains the American songbook, but Knox’s performance suggests a genre of cabaret without such ties of obligation. Knox writes her own lyrics and composes her own songs—these acting as a counterdiscourse to dominant narratives about class, ethnicity and gendered and sexual life. Cabaret is not simply a genre or site of performance but also as a mode of performance, characterized by fluidity and improvisation, intimacy and contact, immediacy and spectacle—a mode that confuses distinctions between performer and spectator (Vogel, 2000, p. 35). Throughout her performance, Knox regularly addresses the audience, making jokes,

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responding to audience comments, and involving spectators within the action of the world she creates. Vogel (2000, p. 35) suggests that “the promise of a live performance organizes cabaret as a social space, and the performing has always already begun before the billed performers make an entrance.” Since Lapdog’s venue is a theatre beneath a local pub with two bars and a bistro, patrons are encouraged to partake in the hotel’s services before and after the show. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner’s (1998, p. 558) concept of queer world making which “has required the development of kinds of intimacy that bear no necessary relation to domestic space, to kinship, to the couple form, to property or to the nation” is realized throughout Knox’s performance by her direct address to the audience, her improvised responses to their comments, her movement beyond the stage and into the amphitheatre, and her general performance style. Understanding performance art of this kind as a queer time and space provides an opportunity to reconceptualize alternative forms of relation both personal and political. Warner (2002, p. 56) argues that these intimacies do bear a necessary relation to a counter-public—that is, a counter-public “enables a horizon of opinion and exchange; its exchanges remain distinct from authority and can have a critical relation to power; its extent is in principle because it is not based on a precise demography but mediated by print, theater, diffuse networks of talk, commerce, and the like.” Knox uses performance art, and the mode of cabaret, combined with physical theatre, to create and develop a counter-public that critiques the demands of neoliberal heteronormative culture. In her program bill, Knox provides a definition of the word lapdog: “noun: a dog small and tame enough to be held in the lap; informal: one eager to do another’s bidding, especially in order to maintain a position of privilege or favor,” thus drawing attention to the performative—the ways in which a worker must ‘act’ (in both senses of the word) to maintain ongoing employment in a casualized workforce.vii Knox’s adopted persona, Dolly, is a Barbie doll that breaks free from her hot-pink Mattel Inc. box, expecting to enjoy the pleasures of the heteronormative social script that promises an endless wardrobe, boutique props, with matching campervan, a pony, and Ken.viii Creating a counter-discourse to the narrative of heteronormative and capitalist success implicit in Mattel’s line of accessories, Knox’s lyrics to ‘Dollhouse’ offer an alternative take on the good life: In the dollhouse the windows are small In the dollhouse the ceilings are low In the dollhouse you can’t move at all In the dollhouse you can’t even breathe For Dolly (Knox), the heteronormative framework literalized by the dollhouse is suffocating, allowing no room for movement or alternative imaginings. Barbie’s creator, American businesswoman Ruth Handler, was

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inspired by her daughter’s desire to give her paper cut-out dolls adult roles despite their having infant bodies (Lord, 2004). Sensing there was something in this dissatisfaction with the (restricted) infant body and the yearning to play with an adult doll with more figurative agentic power, Handler developed Barbie prototypes in an effort to persuade her husband (co-founder of the Mattel toy company) that an adult-style doll could be a success.ix While traveling in Europe, Handler located a German doll, Bild Lilli—the ultimate working girl who knows what she wants and will use her sexual prowess to achieve it. Barbie and her genetic sisters were designed to show young girls that they could take on any role. Amongst other professions, Barbie holds a pilot’s license, operates commercial airliners (whilst also serving as a flight attendant!), is a doctor, astronaut, and races a sports car. Alternatively, Knox’s Dolly is stuck in casual contracts undertaking secretarial duties, supermarket and parking station cashier responsibilities, stripping in men’s clubs, and playing mediocre music in local bands.x Barbie is the ultimate successful ‘portfolio worker,’ that is, she’s discursively characterized by her mobility, flexibility, multi-talents and entrepreneurial skills and is represented by Mattel in narratives styling her as an agentic subject, exercising the liberal freedom offered by second wave feminism. The portfolio worker is constituted within discourses of freedom, choice and self-invention (Bansel, 2007, p. 286). In his astute analysis of the mechanics and effects of neoliberalism, Peter Bansel (2006) points out that the collapsing of the concept of choice with that of free choice (carried out by autonomous agents who are rational, responsible subjects) is a powerful fiction. Throughout her performance, Dolly (Knox) reveals a mismatch between the master-narrative of the successful heteronormative neoliberal subject personified in the figure of Barbie with the ‘Dolly’ whose underdeveloped skills, limited educational opportunities, and working class background combine to show how facile is the promise both of neoliberal self-fashioning and ‘the good life.’

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Lull (Elena Knox), Lapdog. Photographed by Robert McFarlane.

Knox’s Dolly exemplifies Halberstam’s theorizing of the productive potential and sign of failure ; she resembles the figure of the failure as resistant to capitalist frameworks and aligned with queer modes that encourage ‘non-conformity, anti-capitalist practices, non-reproductive life styles, negativity,’ and ‘critique’ (Halberstam, 2008). Throughout her performance, Dolly (Knox) develops subversive techniques resisting the politics of consumption, while drawing attention to the heteronormative framework in which she has been explicitly designed to excel. In ‘White Trash,’ Dolly (Knox) sings of seeing replicas of herself in shop windows. These iterations of her ‘dolly self’ image are reminiscent of that other ironic iteration: the structure of the scene within a scene (in this case, within Sam Mendes’s caustic portrayal of American family life in American Beauty). And every time I pass myself in a shop window I see that scene within a scene within American Beauty a plastic bag ballerina Balanchine-ing against a brick wall— am I known for my plasticity? for my ability as landfill?

In her critique of the Brandon archive, Halberstam cites Newitz and Wray who define white trash as “white people living in (often rural) poverty” and “a set of stereotypes and myths related to the social behaviours, intelligence, prejudices, and gender roles of poor whites” (Halberstam, 2005, p. 28). In Lapdog, Dolly (Knox) inhabits ‘transuburbia’—an environment littered with strip-joints and kitsch bars, punctuated by endless shopping malls and small businesses. In her lyrics, Dolly (Knox) refers to that darkly sublime moment in American Beauty—the plastic bag, caught in a lilting eddy of air, that conveys so much of the complexity and irony of the film’s title. Dolly is

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more concerned about her future as landfill, familiar with contemporary environmental politics that will see her recycled and spat out as another plastic object. Knox puns on plasticity, revealing to an audience the glitches in her performance; she is unable to master her prop (an electric bass guitar too big and heavy for her) with the finesse we might expect, and in her exotic dancer’s persona so too does she get comically stuck in an awkward backbend, suggesting that she may not quite be the flexible subject required within a neoliberal environment. While Barbie represents Halberstam’s under-standing of heteronormative commonsense which “leads to the equation of success with advancement, capital accumulation, family, ethical conduct, [and] hope,” Dolly represents queer time and space (Halberstam, 2008, n.p.). Queering neoliberal time and space, Knox’s work provokes alternative readings of a life characterized by economic rationalism, and the adoption of techniques and practices in which the state produces self-regulating, rational and autonomous subjects. Knox disrupts understandings of time as conceived through neoliberal discourse, demonstrating the links between heteronormative nuclear family values (regulated by reproductive logics) and a neoliberal time and space that is regulated by state implemented policies and procedures embodied by self-regulating citizen-subjects. Knox also debunks the myth of success attached to heteronormativity, with its promise of pleasure by adherence to the regulatory demands of normative gender and sexual desire, heterosexual reproduction, and traditional family values. Knox requires that her spectators hold ‘real’ and theatrical time and space together, so that at key moments during the performance spectators knowingly become performers and the performer consciously becomes spectator. Knox encourages her audience to occupy the time and space set off by crisis in the anecdote that begins this paper, to forge alternative kinds of relation, connectivity and collaboration. She

Lull (Elena Knox), Lapdog. Photographed by Leonard Choice.

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also reconceptualizes the ways in which citizen-subjects are gendered and sexualized within neoliberal regimes, providing a counter-discourse to the construction of the autonomous female entrepreneur who is supposedly privy to a spectrum of personal and professional choice. Now I shall move to a quite different example of performance art as a heterotopia queering time and space, by examining the transgressive mélange of performances in La Clique; its performers re-imagining the scope, range and power of the body. La Clique A performance on a much grander scale than Knox’s Lapdog, and within the famous hand-hewn Spiegeltent, La Clique, a collaborative show developed for The Famous Spiegeltent by David Bates, Brett Haylock, Markus Pabst and its performers in 2004, features an international cast who has performed in Sydney and internationally.xi Bates conceived of La Clique after seeing an assortment of otherwise uncategorizable acts performed by artists for street audiences, in queer and fetish clubs, and at festivals around the world (Bailey, 2006). One of the things these works shared was their brevity: but while the time of such performances was truncated, the evoked space—by the performers use of the body—had great scope. Bates realized that there were “many fabulous artists that have 5 to 12-minute acts” and that those artists had “nowhere else…quite…right to place their work” (Bates cited in Dessau, 2007, n.p.). La Clique would therefore be the perfect context—where performers who “absolutely shine in ten minutes” would not be “forced to do 70 minutes that they don’t have” (Dessau, 2007, n.p.). Bates and Haylock unite the acts through the use of a very queer master of ceremonies, Mario—Queen of the circus—who wears a studded leather biker’s jacket and leather chain cap, entering the stage on a unicycle to Queen’s power ballad ‘We Are The Champions.’ The artistic directors use a series of overlapping and interconnected acts, with inspiration drawn not only from traditional theatre and circus (clowns, jugglers, acrobats) but also from the “modern world of MTV video, with its series of dreamlike, abstract, surrealistic images that provide a mesmerizing if undefined continuity” (Carlson, 1996, p. 123). However, unlike MTV, La Clique’s liveness and deliberately collaborative framework positions spectators’ responses as crucial to both the carnivalesque atmosphere and the continuation of the show. This is exemplified when Mario throws himself into the crowd, body surfing in the round through the audience (with Queen playing at full bore) until he is returned to the stage. Bates and Haylock’s innovation is located in their alternative reconceptualization of the time and space of the street and club performer whose opportunities for both recognition and notoriety are effectively repositioned within the context of

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La Clique (and in the instance I will discuss, La Clique’s being contextualized within the Sydney Festival).xii La Clique’s acts are a play on the genre of circus performance that accentuates difference, linking ethnic and gendered difference to bizarre and unusual physical acts, but it does so with a subtle twist. Critiquing discourses from nineteenth century performance (particularly as these discourses were played out in the sideshow and dime museums) through which non-normative bodies were understood within a contemporary context, Elizabeth Stephens (2006, p. 486) argues that non-normative “bodies are not simply exhibited or put on display on the sideshow stage, but are rather performed as the unstable—indeed, destabilizing—product of the dynamic interrelationship between performer, audience and theatrical space, in an ongoing process of un/fixing competing ideas about abnormal corporeity.” While conventional discourses about the non-normative body are invoked in La Clique, performers subvert the dominant discourses through which their bodies might typically be understood. La Clique’s lineup includes two pin-striped, pipe-smoking English gents in bowler hats performing a balancing act, erotically charged German bathtub aerialist David O’Mer, juggling comic and MC Mario Queen of the Circus, Yulia Pykhtina the Russian hula hoop beauty, cabaret stand-up circuit performer Mikelangelo, sword swallowing comic Miss Behave, extraordinary Norwegian contortionist Captain Frodo, Canadian Cabaret Décadanse (Serge Deslauriers and Enock Turcotte) performing the ultimate queer puppet show for adults, and American skating comic Amy G. In this tent of mirrors, performers queer normative boundaries by invoking dominant discourses about non-normative bodies from the nineteenth century that still have resonance, by employing challenging bodily acts and practices to entertain, mesmerize and provide an audience with an alternative, seductive and chaotic imaginary world. These performances are made even more spectacular and are located within a history of queer space and time by being staged within the Spiegeltent in Sydney’s Hyde Park, and are contextualized under the rubric of the 2008 Sydney Festival.xiii The Famous Spiegeltent is an intimate, mobile, nomadic structure in which time is suspended and space transformed, with its ornate style and fantastical aesthetic gesturing to the force of its history—Marlene Dietrich sang ‘Falling In Love Again’ on its stage in the 1930s. From the moment spectators form a queue to secure their unreserved seats, the theatrical experience begins as staff from the show mill around decked out in 1940s dresses and three-piece suits. They all model the signature pork pie hat, which originated in the mid-nineteenth century for women, and was later worn by jazz and blues musicians and comics like Buster Keaton. Brett Haylock comments, “La Clique and indeed the tent itself, telegraph the

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performers’ transgressive intentions at the front door and then deliver the goods during the course of the show at every turn” (Haylock, 2008, email to Cristyn Davies). The tent’s beveled art deco mirrors, nine metre circular oak dance floor, and red velvet canopy evoke the elegance of European bohemia. Employing a classic device of the circus so that the audience becomes backdrop to each act, performance is staged in the round. The Spiegeltent encourages theatrical voyeurism so that spectators are able to see the affective responses of others which in turn affect their own responses: audience members display gaping mouths of disbelief, cringes of horror, and the unabashed laughter of delight. Spectators also sit around the perimeter of the venue in booths and at small café tables cabaret style, consuming alcoholic beverages while the show goes on. It is no accident that the first act in the Sydney 2008 show satirized British upper class masculinity. Functioning within the homosocial spectrum, the two British gents (who are actually Melbourne based Hamish McCann and Denis Lock) fitted out in pin-stripped suits perform a series of precarious balancing acts that involve intimate proximity with each other’s body. While homosociality is commonly taken as referring to same-sex relations and interactions that are not of a romantic or sexual nature, Eve Sedgwick (1990) argues that the boundaries between the social and the sexual are indistinguishable—making the connection between homosociality and homosexuality relational and more complex than commensically bargained for. Occupying the figure and brandishing the props (The Times, a tea cup, a cane, a bowler hat, a pipe) of quintessential bourgeois British gentlemen, these acrobats satirize intimacy, and the mores forbidding it, with their bizarre contortions and balancing acts, and the strange places at which their bodies interlock. Often mistaken for Englishmen on their travels by North Americans because of their accents, McCann and Lock conceptualized their act during breaks while on tour with a large show in Japan. They wanted to perform classic comedy with a mix of high and low concept, and goofball recognizable characters that they instantiate, only to subvert the cliché. The success of this act is dependent not only on the demands of strength, balance and timing, but also on their subverting notions of personal space, public intimacy between middle class men, and their dependence on each other to fulfill their desires. While this homosocial relationship might be understood as normative, these ‘English gents’ queer their citizenship by comically subverting British allegiances to patriotism by stripping down to Union Jack underpants. The pleasure generated by this act of stripping has little to do with its sexualization, and much to do with both the comic portrayal and subversion of patriotism, the deconstruction of nationhood embodied in the British male middle class citizen, and the obvious pleasure that both performers gain from each other. xiv As Australian men satirizing the embodiment of bourgeois masculinity epitomized in stereotypes of British

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colonial power, this act offers a critique of masculinity as it intersects with class, nation, gender and sexual orientation. As an audience, we don’t expect bourgeois British men to perform a strip act, and certainly not for the purposes of disrupting patriotism. As pointed out previously, performance art reconstitutes the zone of citizenship not only by pushing the accepted boundaries of proximity, relationality and dependence, but also by recreating these boundaries. McCann and Lock disrupt class, heteronormative, gendered and sexualized citizenship by caricaturing the colonial powers’ desires for the colonized to mimic the morals, values and practices inherent in British bourgeois masculinity.

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Hamish McCann and Denis Lock, La Clique, Spiegeltent International Pty Ltd.

The middle of La Clique is punctuated by a very different characterization of masculinity and physical prowess. Aerialist David O’Mer’s performance begins with him walking to the front of the stage to a claw-footed bathtub, and immersing himself, still half-dressed, in its waters. O’Mer embodies currently dominant notions of ideal masculinity—he is darkly handsome, with the body of an elite gymnast and dancer. But in this he also evokes an older ideal of beauty: that of the Olympian, or the matador; a strength conveyed by power of the elemental. In his performance, he plays into conventional narratives of erotic desire while simultaneously satirizing the ways in which such heteronormative desire is constructed. Spurting water out of his mouth, he suggests a combination of the perfection represented in Michelangelo’s ‘David,’ the frivolity of the fantastical characters in Bernini’s Trevi Fountain, and the force of Melville’s Moby Dick. In O’Mer’s shrewd offering to his audience of a narrative based on an understanding of the complexities of his audiences’ desires which are queered across gender, sexual orientation, generation, class and ethnicity, we see an operation not unlike Halberstam’s (2005, p. 28) analysis of the way that Brandon Teena deliberately deploys and exploits middle class ideals of respectable masculinity and romantic notions of manhood.xv To the

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score of Nina Simone’s ‘In the Dark,’ O’Mer winds the two black straps suspended from the ceiling around his arms, and—perfectly balanced, the stress visible only in his spectacularly formed muscles—he pivots, and twists, and holds his dripping body above the bath in a erotic aerial act. This heightened display of muscularity, as Peta Tait (1998) argues about female circus bodies, could suggest a parody of masculinity, or musculature drag. Extending Tait’s argument which focuses on the female body performing muscular drag, I’d like to suggest that the male body in aerial performance also produces a muscular spatiality that challenges presumptions “that the material properties of bodies might be socially received as ambiguously sexed” and gendered (Tait, 1998, p. 60). O’Mer’s body is an exaggerated representation of dominant ideals of masculinity, understood through musculature display and movement, pointing to the performative dimension of gender apparently made real through repetition. O’Mer’s movements are a combination of playful aerial ballet, gymnastics and sexually provocative gestures. Clad only in a pair of wet loose blue denim jeans, every muscle in his upper body is defined under the hot stage lights. Not only does his act thrill and amaze because it exceeds expectations of a body’s capacity for movement, but so too does O’Mer make visible the performative dimension of gender and sexual desire. As he spins his body, O’Mer sprays water over the audience who cheer and scream with both pleasure and desire. m

David O’Mer, La Clique, Spiegeltent International Pty Ltd.

While the sexual metaphor is not a complex one—O’Mer’s performance mimics the structure of male ejaculation, or the money shot—the desire he elicits from the audience is palpable. This is a carefully regulated corporeal style, the sort recognizable to, and in, Judith Butler’s (1990, 1993) theory of gender performativity—in which she is careful to distinguish performativity from performance, suggesting that gender is not subject to voluntarism.

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O’Mer’s deployment of gender seems in this way deliberative, performative in performance. The artificiality and fragility of this performance of masculinity became apparent in O’Mer’s offstage appearance on the Spiegeltent dance-floor where he seemed more reserved and far less confident. As Halberstam pointed out in her timely analysis of masculinity, “excessive masculinity turns into a parody or exposure of the norm” (Halberstam, 1998, p. 4). Halberstam’s Female Masculinity not only created a discursive space through which masculinity could be read in relation to the female body, but also drew attention to the utterly performative and prosthetic qualities of masculinity, frequently embodied by the figure of the action hero (Davies, 2008a, 2008b; Halberstam, 1998). Self-consciously queering iconic representations of masculinity, O’Mer’s performance points to the inherent contingency and performativity of masculinity. His onstage performance was so successful that through word-of-mouth across both place (Melbourne and Sydney), and time (2007 in Melbourne, and 2008 in Sydney), many spectators purchased tickets to La Clique just to see him, with the season selling out before the show arrived in Sydney. So too did Amy Gordon’s final performance act in La Clique earn her notoriety. Deconstructing patriotism through comedy, Amy G’s most infamous and affecting performance in the show has her addressing the audience wearing an elegant black evening gown and black heels, with an evening bag slung over her shoulder. Doing her “best to appear as conservative and nice as possible—like the senator’s wife making a presentation to the ladies auxiliary after the bake sale,” Amy G varies the delivery of her speech slightly to suit each venue or event (Gordon, 2008). She narrates her disappointment in the lack of American family values in La Clique, and in doing so her intention is to bring into clear light of consciousness a moral element of the show that she feels is missing: Good evening. It’s come to my attention that this show is rather silly, and lacking in American family values. Laugh it up, I’ve traveled, I’ve heard the jokes, but as an American, I just don’t always understand them. First let me congratulate the Australian people on your successful coup d’état. It gives us hope. It’s “election” time in the states, which is very exciting—for some reason. There are some surprises—Barack Hussein Obama has a chance in hell—and Hilary Clinton has made a comeback by using the most powerful tool at her disposal, the power to use big loaded words like change and change. Personally I think it shows poor taste for a frontrunner to be out begging for spare change but nobody asked me about campaign finance reform. It’s especially embarrassing since our “elected” leadership worked so tirelessly to associate America with big loaded guns, torture and debilitating economic and moral bankruptcy. I don’t want to give the impression I don’t support my government’s greedy, violent idiot whims, when in fact I share their profound patriotism.

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But mine is difficult to express in any words. I appreciate the opportunity to share it with you tonight, in song.

Using satire to deconstruct the stereotype that Americans lack attunement to subtlety and nuance, Amy G queers time and space by employing the trappings of middle class femininity, and the persona of a conservative senator’s wife, to offer a biting critique of American political life. She situates her critique within an Australian context after the election of the Rudd Labor government, making clear her wider political sentiments: for this “senator’s wife,” Hilary Clinton’s political platform offers nothing more than keywords dressed up in exorbitant campaign finance. Attending to the Bush administrations’ positioning of America within a morally questionable culture of violence (associated, at least symbolically, with a particular kind of masculine performance dependent on props that annihilate difference to produce sameness: “big loaded guns”), Amy G leaves behind empty rhetoric, queering the time and space of patriotism, particularly as it intersects with appropriate performances of gender, sexuality and citizenship. Lowering the microphone to groin level, Amy G turns her back to the audience, drops her black knickers to her ankles, removes a kazoo from her brassiere, and warms it in her hands before inserting it underneath her dress. She takes a while to position the kazoo in just the right place, with her remarkably mobile face suggesting satisfaction that she’s hit the right note. Standing with her arms out like a conductor, she tunes her instrument like any good musician in an orchestra, before playing ‘America the Beautiful’ using vaginal contractions. Producing two more kazoos from her evening bag, Amy G puts one in her mouth, and another kazoo in her anus, playing the patriotic song in three-part harmony.

Amy G, La Clique, Spiegeltent International Pty Ltd.

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Amy G narrates the dominant representations of the heteronormative moral citizen subject, and then debunks these sentiments with a subversive physical performance. Literalizing the colloquialism ‘Up Yours,’ she shoves the conservative right-wing cultural agenda up every available orifice, queering the politics of space and place, and the time of American patriotism. In this act, which Amy G calls kazoochee, American values are literally repositioned and replayed in the queerest space, and within a timeframe regulated with expertise by Amy G’s bodily rhythms. Her act of resistance points to alternative imaginings of class, gendered and sexual citizenship, by presenting as a middle class elegant woman who uses toilet humour with skill and finesse to present a timely critique of American political and cultural life. When, set off by crisis, the fourth wall collapsed during my viewing of The Year of Magical Thinking, the temporal and spatial relations between those present was altered, effecting new kinds of connectivity and collaboration. The performer, spectators, and theatre-makers shared an intimacy structured by a new mode of engagement dependent on holding together in the one space and time multiple and even opposing conventions and behaviours mediated by different regulatory practices. In performance, like medicine, timing is everything. So too in both disciplines does the location—the space in which the action takes place—instrumentally affect an event. The mode of engagement offered within performance art is critical; it provides a structure that cues its inhabitants to take up, even if temporarily, different kinds of relation and alternative practices. The dramatic force of the acts in La Clique rests both in their brevity, and in the performers’ mobilization of the body in such a way that its politics of possession, dispossession and use are thrown into question, and changed—in and for that moment; in and for that audience. In this way the brevity belies the act’s force: the potentialities of its space exceeds that of its time. In Lapdog an inversion of a different kind occurs through its burlesque queering of the dictates of the neoliberal workforce that its subjects be ‘plastic,’ malleable, disposable. The temporality of the work itself: from song to song, quick prop change to prop change, costume change to costume change, satirizes the very neoliberal time in which the performance plays out.

i The performance season of The Year of Magical Thinking, directed by Cate Blanchett, ran from December 31, 2007, and was extended from March until April, 2008. ii The woman who collapsed was in a diabetic coma and was able to be effectively treated by both medical practitioners in the audience, and later, the paramedics. iii Lapdog was performed January 7–21, 2007 at the Old Fitzroy Hotel in Sydney’s Woolloomooloo. This critique is based on Lull’s opening night performance on January 7.

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iv I’d like to draw attention to the explicit brief of Cirque du Soleil whose mission is not just to entertain audiences, but also to improve global citizenship: “Cirque du Soleil has chosen to involve itself with people and communities, and to reach out to a growing number of people with the aim of improving the quality of life for all human beings…In the pursuit of its dreams and in its business practices, Cirque aspires to position itself in the community as a responsible agent of change…This commitment to social responsibility is central to the organization’s business strategies and management methods. Global citizenship at Cirque du Soleil is founded on the conviction that the arts, business and social initiatives can together contribute to a better world” (retrieved March 4, 2008 from http://www.cirquedusoleil.com/World/en/au/about/citizen/intro.asp). v Lull’s performance art has been staged in Australia, Berlin, Athens, New York and Wales. Showcases include Women and Theater Program (New York University), Magdalena Project (Wales), Centre for Performance Research (UK), Studio (Sydney Opera House), Performance Space (Living Museum of Fetishized Identities, La Pocha Nostra), Peats Ridge Festival and Cockatoo Island Festival. She has appeared for Ensemble Theatre, Stables Theatre, Darlinghurst Theatre and in Jane Campion’s Holy Smoke. Her works have been broadcast on ABC, published by Vagabond Press and supported by the Literature, New Media, Theatre and Music Boards of the Australia Council for the Arts. Her video art screens internationally. She is a member of pop duo Actual Russian Brides (www.actualrussianbrides.com) and director of Lull Studios (www.lull.tv). vi In her program notes, Knox (Lull) acknowledges development funding from Playworks, the Myer Foundation and the Australia Council for the Arts, but this particular production phase was principally funded by Lull and Lean Productions (company of Lapdog’s designer Tom Rivard). vii Knox (Lull) also provides an alphabetical list of synonyms for lapdog: “adulator, apple polisher, back scratcher, bootlick, brownnoser, crawler, cringer, doormat, fan, fawner, flatterer, flunky, footlicker, glad-hander, gofer, groupie, handshaker, instrument, lackey, lickspittle, minion, parasite, politician, puppet, slave, sniveler, spaniel, sponger, stooge, toadeater, truckler” (Lapdog program notes, 2007). viii Designed by architect Tom Rivard, Dolly’s ‘carton,’ Dolly Carton, is made of wood and includes built-in lights, motors and sound equipment as well as a retractable disco catwalk. Philophonic designed and implemented the electronics, motors and sounds. Rivard and Philophonic operated Dolly Carton in performance. The overall height when assembled is 2700mm and, with its chimney that emits glitter steam, about 2850mm. Barbie has had over forty pets including cats and dogs, horses, a panda, a lion cub, and a zebra. She has owned a wide range of vehicles, including pink convertibles, trailers and jeeps. ix The adult-style Barbie doll released in 1959 was followed by the inaugural child beauty pageants that began in the United States in the 1960s. The beauty pageant stages contradictory discourses about childhood innocence and the construction of the child whose appearance is sexualized through the clothing she wears, her movements, gestures, facial expressions, the application of make-up and her representation of self through music and dance styles. x NASCAR Barbie belonged to The National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, which is the largest sanctioning body of stock cars in the United States. xi David Bates already owned the ornate, extravagantly mirrored Belgian 1920s Famous Spiegeltent with a capacity for 350 people, which can be flat-packed away for travel. The authentic antique structures all came out of the Flemish part of Belgium but had many different builders. The Famous Spiegeltent was built in 1920 by Oscar Mols Dom and Louis Gorr. With an inner core made of 3,500 pieces of wood and steel coated in 1000 mirrors, the structure is designed to foster intimacy. Markus Pabst is the creator/owner of David O’Mer’s bath routine.

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xii The Sydney Festival is Australia’s largest arts and cultural event. The festival was established in 1976, and runs for three weeks every January. The program features classical and contemporary music, dance, circus, drama, visual arts and public lectures and attracts about one million people annually. xiii Named after Hyde Park in London, Sydney’s Hyde Park is home to the ANZAC War Memorial and Pool of Remembrance, a statue of Captain Cook, Sandringham Gardens, and an Obelisk. These monuments, gardens, and statues signify both the history of Sydney’s (and Australia’s) colonial development and a narrative of its sacrifice in war. xiv Tom Murray, ‘On the Street,’ Edmonton Journal, July, 2008. Hamish McCann: “You'll occasionally get an insecure guy in the crowd yelling at you to ‘put your clothes back on,’ but they can be shut up fairly easily. I’ll just tell them that it’s OK if they’re dealing with certain feelings, that at the age they’re at they’re still experimenting. The thing is, usually by the end of the performance they’ll be the ones leading the applause” (retrieved July 10, 2008 from http://www.canada.com/ edmontonjournal/news/culture/story.html?id=e8230bd9-f632-4312b1d7-6b47bea2e1d6). xv Brandon Teena was a trans man portrayed by Hilary Swank in Boys Don’t Cry (1999).

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REFERENCES Bailey, P. (2006, February 17). The Anti-Cirque du Soleil. Retrieved March 5, 2008, from http://www.cbc.ca/arts/theatre/clique.html Bansel, P. (2007). Subjects of choice and lifelong learning. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 20(3), 283-300. Benjamin, W. (1969). ‘Theses on the philosophy of history,’ Illuminations: Essays and reflections. H. Arendt (Ed.). (H. Zohn, Trans.). New York: Schocken. Berlant, L., & Warner, M. (1998). Sex in public. Critical Inquiry, 24(2), 547-566. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice. (R. Nice, Trans.). Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (1993). Sociology in question. (R. Nice, Trans.) London: Sage Publications. Brown, W. (2003). Neo-liberalism and the end of liberal democracy. Theory and Event, 7(1), section 1. Burchell, G., Gordon, C., & Miller, P. (Eds.). (1991). The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality with two lectures by and an interview with Michel Foucault. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of ‘sex’. New York: Routledge. Carlson, M. (1996). Performance: A critical introduction (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. Davies, C. (2004). The poetics of hip hop: Elena Knox in dis Miss!. Southerly, 64(3), 117129. Davies, C. (2008a). Proliferating panic: regulating representations of sex and gender during the culture wars. Cultural Studies Review, 14(2), 83-102. Davies, C. (2008b). Becoming sissy. In B. Davies (Ed.), Judith Butler in conversation: Analysing the texts and talk of everyday life (pp. 117-133). New York: Routledge. Dessau, B. (2007, November 3). Beyond burlesque. The Times. Retrieved January 2, 2008, from http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/related_features/celebrate_ sydneys_summer/article2771464.ece Didion, J. (2005). The year of magical thinking. London: Harper Collins. Dinshaw, C., Edelman, L., Ferguson, R. A., Freccero, C., Freeman, E., Halberstam, J., et al. (2007). Theorizing queer temporalities: a roundtable discussion. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 13(2-3), 178-195. Edelman, L. (2004). No future: Queer theory and the death drive. Durham: Duke University Press. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (1st American ed.). (A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, M. (1984). The history of sexuality (Vol. 1). (R. Hurley, Trans.). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Foucault, M. (1986). Of other spaces (Des espaces autres). (J. Miskowiec, Trans.). Diacritics, 16(1), 22-27.

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Freeman, E. (2007). Introduction. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 13(2), 159176. Goldberg, R. (1988). Performance art: From futurism to the present. New York: H.N. Abrams. Halberstam, J. (2005). In a queer time and place: Transgender bodies, subcultural lives. New York: New York University Press. Halberstam, J. (2008). Notes on failure. Unpublished paper. Jagose, A. (2002). Inconsequence: Lesbian representation and the logic and sexual sequence. Ithica: Cornell University Press. Knox, E. (2007). Lapdog. Unpublished performance manuscript. Knox, E., & Davies, C. (2008). An easy alliance. In Artistic bedfellows: History and discourse in collaborative art practices. H. Crawford, & L. Fellmann (Eds.). New York: UPA/Roman & Littlefield. Lehmann, H. T. (1997). Time structures/time sculptures: on some theatrical forms at the end of the twentieth century. Theaterschrift, 12, 29-47. Lord, M. G. (2004). Forever Barbie: The unauthorized biography of a real doll. New York: Walker & Company. Mendes, S. (Director). (1999). American beauty [Motion picture]. United States: Dreamworks. McCauley, G. (1999). Space in performance: Making meaning in theatre. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Román, D. (2005). Performance in America: Contemporary U.S. culture and the performing arts. Durham: Duke University Press. Román, D., & Meyer, R. (2006). Introduction. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 12(2), 167. Rose, N. (1999). Powers of freedom: Reframing political thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sedgwick, E. (1990). Epistemology of the closet. Berkeley: University of California Press. Shakespeare, W. (1994 [1603]). Hamlet. S. L. Wofford (Ed.). Boston: St. Martin’s Press. Tait, P. (1998). Fleshed, muscular phenomenologies: across sexed and queer circus bodies. In Body Show’s: Australian viewings of live performance. P. Tait (Ed.). Amsterdam: Rodopi. Stephens, E. (2006). Cultural fixations of the freak body: Coney Island and the postmodern sideshow. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 20(4), 485-498. Vogel, S. (2000). Where are we now?: queer world making and cabaret performance. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 6(1), 29-60. Warner, M. (2002). Publics and counterpublics. Zone Books: New York.

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RESPONSE: THE QUEER SPACE OF THE FREAK SHOW Elizabeth Stephens University of Queensland

Although rarely examined within the context of queer performance spaces, freak shows, along with those who have performed as professional freaks on their stages, are in many ways spaces of intensified queerness, in which queerness itself is extended to incorporate a range of non-normative bodily practices that are not always or primarily sexual. The shows feature nonnormative public practices, such as performers who hammer nails up their noses or swallow swords; the performers have a wide range of bodily types (including unusual congenital conditions); the shows usually take place in culturally marginal sites like entertainment districts in insalubrious or disreputable inner-city locations or geographically marginal ones on the outskirts of town, such as Coney Island. While the public exhibition of people with unusual anatomies has a very long history, the origins of the freak show can be traced to the first decades of the nineteenth century.i At this time, a thriving culture of commercial exhibitions catered to an intense public interest in the display of human ‘curiosities,’ such as giants, dwarves, conjoined twins, bearded ladies, professional fat men and human skeletons. During the spring of 1824, one of London’s most popular exhibits was that of the ‘Sicilian Fairy,’ Caroline Crachami, a nine-year-old girl of exceptionally small and delicate stature who, for the entrance fee of a shilling, could be viewed in the private Bond Street exhibition rooms of one ‘Dr’ Gillian. ii As the Morning Chronicle of May 8, 1824 reported, daily attendance rates at this exhibition often numbered in the hundreds, and included medical specialists and members of the aristocracy as well as the general public. Such exhibitions were spaces in which high and low culture, professional and popular audiences, official and subjugated knowledges met—perhaps collided—in volatile and unpredictable ways. While the exposure of Crachami’s frail body to a press of curious onlookers was consistent with an established set of exhibition practices in the nineteenth century, it was also a sign of its expansion: like his slightly later American counterpart P.T. Barnum, Dr Gillian offered his audiences, for the price of an additional shilling, the opportunity to enter the exhibitory stage and touch Crachami’s body as well as to stare at it from a distance. The account of one such inspection in the Literary Gazette provides a detailed record of what such handling might entail. I found that the real height of Miss Crachami is nineteen inches and a half; the length of her foot (Cinderella was a nobody!) three inches and one-eighth; and the length of her fore-finger (she would not give me the wedding one) one inch and seven eighths!!! Having thus gone

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my lengths, I was allowed to go my rounds; and they follow: Round the head, twelve inches three-eights; round the waist, eleven inches and a quarter; round the neck (only think of taking such a creature round the neck!) five inches and three-eighths; round the ancle [sic], three inches and a quarter; and round the wrist, two inches and seven sixteenths!! These are, bona fide, the measurements of this most extraordinary Human Being. (Anonymous, 1824, pp. 316–317)iii

Despite the overheated sentimentality of this account, its tone of sexualized violence is nonetheless unmistakable: the reference to Crachami’s “wedding finger” (capriciously withheld) combined with the instruction to “think of taking such a creature round the neck!” suggests that being offered up to strangers’ hands and eyes in Dr Gillian’s private exhibition rooms was perhaps not the safest of environments for a frail nine-year-old girl with a debilitating medical condition. While her appearance in the space of commercial exhibition halls proved an economic windfall for her dubiouslycredentialed exhibitor, it also exposed Crachami to “a crush of curious eyes and hands,” as Paul Youngquist recognizes (2003, p. xi). And indeed, within two months of first being exhibited, Crachami was dead. “Between her cough and her constitution, exhibition proved too much,” Youngquist writes. “But death didn’t put an end to her attractions. In some ways, death perfected them, since now the Sicilian Dwarf could be subjected to a medical examination of the most intimate kind…[T]he Royal College of Surgeons acquired the little cadaver…Today, nearly two centuries later, her tiny skeleton is still on display” (2003, p. xiii).iv In this way, the incursion of Crachami’s audience onto the space of the exhibition stage, which had such fatal consequences for the performer, provides a counterpoint to the example examined at the start of Davies’ paper, which turns on the queer consequences of the breaking of the fourth wall of the theatrical space. In Davies’ example, the breaking of that fourth wall, during a performance of The Year of Magical Thinking by the Sydney Theatre Company after a member of the audience became dramatically unwell, represents a queer moment that interrupts the normal functioning of the theatre’s representational space. For Davies, the (temporary) suspension of the performance, and its eventual continuance in a charged and intensified atmosphere, “creat[es] a queer time and space effecting different kinds of relation, connectivity and collaboration.” Davies’ subsequent argument “imagine[s] performance art more generally as a queer time and space…[N]ot only does performance art contest normative structures of traditional theatrical performance,” she writes, “so too does it challenge understandings of normative subjects, and the relation of the arts to structures of power.”

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As the radically different outcomes of the breaking of the fourth wall in the case of Crachami’s public exhibition and the performance of The Year of Magical Thinking forcefully remind us, while such moments of queering can transform the theatre stage into a queer space, the consequences of such actions cannot be determined in advance. This is a point that Judith Butler emphasizes when discussing queer performance strategies in the context of parodic enactments of gender: “Parody by itself is not subversive,” she cautions in Gender Trouble, “and there must be a way to understand what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive, truly troubling, and which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony” (1990, p. 139). For this reason, nonnormative or denaturalized gender performances should be seen as “neither an efficacious insurrection nor a painful resubordination, but an unstable coexistence of both,” she reiterates in Bodies That Matter (1993, p. 137). As Butler recognizes, the consequences of queer strategies remain— necessarily, and by definition—open-ended, always retaining the potential to reinforce, rather than challenge, normative representational or epistemological assumptions. In this paper, then, drawing both on Davies’ account of the potential of live arts performances to constitute a queer space along with Jack Halberstam’s theorization of this in In a Queer Time and Space (2005), I will examine how such instabilities of meaning function within the space of the freak show. This aspect of the freak show—its semantic volatility—can be traced to its earliest incarnation, and indeed appears so internal to its discursive and institutional emergence that we might consider it one of the defining characteristics of the freak show itself. In what is widely regarded as the first incarnation of the recognizably modern freak show, the first exhibition by the American showman P.T. Barnum was that of an African-American woman, Joice Heth, who he originally advertised as the 161-year-old former nursemaid of George Washington. When Barnum toured with his exhibit to Boston, however, he found himself accommodated in a exhibition room right next door to the most celebrated popular curiosity of the 1830s— Johann Maelzel’s automaton chess-player (2001, p. 8). Soon afterwards, ‘anonymous’ notices started appearing in the local press, questioning whether Heth really was the prodigiously old woman Barnum claimed her to be, or whether she was, in fact, an automaton herself (2001, p. 8). “What made Barnum’s new (and seemingly counterproductive) marketing scheme innovative,” argues James Cook in The Arts of Deception: Playing With Fraud in the Age of Barnum, was his recognition that “artful deception was never a hard and fast choice between complete detection and total bewilderment, honest promotion and shifty misrepresentation, innocent amusement and social transgression. Rather, Barnum suggests, it was precisely the blurring of these aesthetic and moral categories that defined his

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brand of cultural fraud and generated much of its remarkable power to excite curiosity” (2001, p. 16). For this reason, “artful deception in the Age of Barnum routinely involved a calculated intermixing of the genuine and the fake, enchantment and disenchantment, energetic public exposé and momentary suspension of disbelief” (2001, p. 17). It is this cultural indeterminacy I want to draw attention to here, and its potential to queer attempts to produce particular kinds of bodies (either as normative or non-normative) that would have a fixed and stable identity or function. The instability of meaning in the freak show, an instability that emanates from the spectacularization of the non-normative body on the freak show stage, is in this respect akin to the “interpretive mayhem” (1995, p. 2) Jack Halberstam identifies in the body of the monster in gothic fiction in Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Monsters are “meaning machines,” Halberstam writes (1995, p. 21). “The monster always represents the disruption of categories, the destruction of boundaries, and the presence of impurities” (1995, p. 27). This makes the monster, like the freak, and like the performance artists Davies examined in her paper, a figure in and through which meaning can be destabilized. As Tromp and Valerius recognize in the introduction to a recent volume on the British Victorian freak show: Freak shows attracted audiences by inviting the public to engage in epistemological speculation. Was the Feejee Mermaid a fake? Was the bearded lady really a man? Audiences paid for the opportunity to take a look and decide for themselves. Significantly, this interrogatory practice made freak shows volatile interpretive spaces that repeatedly called the boundary between the imaginary and the real into question, and by extension challenged the authority of discourses like medical science to name and explain the significance of the human body. (2008, p. 8)

The examples of queer performance examined in Davies’ paper parallel this instability, by appropriating and redeploying normative understandings of the body in contestatory ways. Thus Elena Knox’s Lapdog critiques conventional cultural assumptions about both gender and neoliberal economics precisely by rendering them grotesque, while the burlesque and circus-influenced La Clique both invokes “conventional discourses about the non-normative body” while simultaneously “subvert[ing] the dominant discourses through which the body might typically be understood.” In these performances, as Davies has shown, bodily norms are challenged by being represented as always-already freakish. There is clearly an enormous and enabling queer potential in such a strategy, and it is one we see fully exploited in the contemporary freak show. Indeed, it is for this very reason, I would argue, that the past decade

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has witnessed such widespread re-emergence and re-invention of the traditional nineteenth-century freak show. Contemporary freak performers, like some of the acts Davies examines, mobilize conventional stereotypes about the anatomically different in self-reflexive ways explicitly intended to problematize normative cultural assumptions about them. When sideshow performers such as Jennifer Miller, Mat Fraser and Katy Dierlam include critiques of the historical construction of the ‘bearded lady,’ the ‘seal boy’ and the ‘fat lady’ during their acts, they force the audience to acknowledge a disparity between the theatricalized, and thus constructed, figure of the professional freak and the performer temporarily playing that role.v We see this in the way Fraser, who has also filmed a documentary on the history of the freak show, framed his show Sealboy: Freak as a reflection of the life of Stanley Berent, just as Dierlam, as ‘Helen Melon,’ provided a history of Dolly Dimples, “the most famous Fat Lady” at Coney Island during the 1930s, as part of her act (Mazer, 2001, p. 268). If performers like Fraser and Dierlam choose to take on such roles, it is precisely because they recognize how important and determining a function these play in the way bodily difference is understood in the popular sphere. At the same time—and as a result—many freak show performers are acutely aware that, as Butler noted above, denaturalizing or contesting dominant understandings about nonnormative embodiment does not instantaneously produce dramatic cultural shifts in these. The career of Jennifer Miller, director of New York’s queer performance group Circus Amok, who lives offstage as a woman with a beard and performs onstage as a bearded lady, exemplifies this. Of her time performing at the Coney Island Sideshow, Miller explained that she had “always had this image of the bearded lady as kind of this little icon sitting on my shoulder, you know, battling with me and how I was seen in the world.” Performing as a bearded lady at Coney Island, she reflected, provided the opportunity “to meet this person, this image, this history that I had been in dialogue with, sort of face to face” (Warner Brothers, 2004). As Miller here recognizes, traditional nineteenth-century sideshow figures like that of the bearded lady continue to circulate in the popular imagination, operating as an interpretive framework and as the dominant cultural fiction through which her own body is understood.vi Miller’s decision to ‘take on’ this figure is clearly motivated by the same kind of queer performance practices Davies examined in her paper: the freak show provides a space in which to confront and interrogate the image by which Miller’s own body is popularly understood. Thus, while as ‘Zenobia’ Miller allowed herself to be represented as both a bearded lady and a ‘freak,’ she also incorporated into her act feminist critiques of the history of shaving and the construction of the bearded lady figure itself.

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It is important to note, however, that Miller’s approach is effective—in the sense that she’s enjoyed a successful career, with Circus Amok continuing to stage popular annual performances while also receiving arts funding and media support—precisely because her critique of the relationship between performative categories of non-normative embodiment, their historical construction and their lived experience, occurs on a stage. The freak show stage has a long history of being a space in which meaning is contested and which audiences are prepared to find confronting in thrilling ways. This is the whole point of the freak show, paradoxically enough: it is a space in which people expect to have their expectations unsettled, where they know that knowledge will be destabilized. The contemporary freak show stage at the same time maintains a fourth wall between performer and audience that can be transgressed only at the invitation of the performer his/herself. It is precisely this separation between the audience and performer that provides the necessary degree of safety for those who step upon it. We might think about what happens when the body of the monster, the freak, the gender performer moves out of the space culturally recognized as a stage—about subjects like Brandon Teena, whose fate Halberstam discusses at length in In a Queer Time and Space, who, like Crachami, suffered fatal consequences of the removal of that fourth wall. Accordingly, the fluidity and indeterminacy of meaning that results from the fourth wall’s removal is not everywhere and always a good or positive thing. For this reason, we need to look always at the complex inter-relationships in which knowledge and meaning about the body is produced and resisted, to take fully into account the wider discursive fields in which this takes place. It is precisely because queering normative systems of knowledge can work both with and against queer subjects that it is imperative to identify those spaces and times in which it is safe to do so, and in which their considerable potential might be most productively realized.

i

Most cultural historians of the freak show date the popularization of this term to the exhibitions of P.T. Barnum, which began in the USA in the 1830s. Mark Chemers, for instance, notes that although Barnum himself never used the word ‘freak,’ his exhibitions of anatomically unusual bodies as a series of types—the bearded lady, the dwarf or giant, the pinhead, the albino, the nondescript, etc.—would come to define the ‘freak’ as a new category of public exhibit and the freak show as a new kind of spectacular space (2008, pp. 1–9). ii Crachami, whose condition was later diagnosed as ‘primordial microcephalic dwarfism,’ was the daughter of an Italian musician, Louis Emmanuel Crachami, who was employed at the Theatre Royal in Dublin. Crachami entrusted the nine-year-old girl to Gillian’s care after having received assurances she would receive medical care for both her congenital condition and her consumption in London (Bondesan, 1997, pp. 204–215). iii Although this article was unattributed, Jan Bondesan attributes it to William Jerden, who had a noted interest in Crachami, having visited her several times and bought her gifts, including a doll and a ring (Bondeson, 1997, p. 208).

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iv In the pursuit of his business interests, Gillian profited from the interest of Sir Everard Home, first President of the Royal College of Surgeons. On her death, Gillian sold Crachami’s body to Home, who conducted an autopsy and then mounted the skeleton for exhibition. Both Bondesan and Youngquist note that Crachami’s parents were not advised of her death, and arrived in London to find the dissection of her remains already underway. Despite their protests, her body remains on display in the Hunterian Museum in London, where it is displayed next to that of Charles Byrnes, the ‘Irish Giant’ (who famously also went to great lengths to avoid having his body bought by anatomists on his death, also to no avail). v For further accounts of the role of these critiques in their acts, see, respectively, Adams, 2001, pp. 219–227; Kuppers, 2004, pp. 31–48; and Mazer, 2001, pp. 257–276. vi Although the history of exhibiting hirsute women can be traced back to much earlier than the nineteenth century, the figure of the bearded lady is a more recent invention.

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REFERENCES Adams, R. (2001). Sideshow U.S.A: Freaks and the American cultural imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Anonymous. (1824, May 8). Morning Chronicle. Anonymous. (1824, May 15). Sketches of society. Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences etc., 8, 316-317. Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. London & New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of ‘sex’. New York: Routledge. Chemers, M. (2008). Staging stigma: A critical examination of the American freak show. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Cook, J. (2001). The arts of deception: Playing with fraud in the age of Barnum. Cambridge & Massachusetts: University of Harvard Press. Halberstam, J. (1995). Skin shows: Gothic horror and the technology of monsters. Durham & London: Duke University Press. Halberstam, J. (2005). In a queer time and place: Transgender bodies, subcultural lives. New York & London: New York University Press. Kuppers, P. (2004). Disability and contemporary performance: Bodies on edge. New York: Routledge. Mazer, S. (2001). ‘She’s so fat…’: facing the fat lady at Coney Island’s sideshows by the seashore. In J. E. Braziel, & K. LeBesco (Eds.), Bodies out of bounds: Fatness and transgression. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tromp, M. (2008). Victorian freaks: The social context of freakery in nineteenthcentury Britain. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Warner Brothers. (2004). Freaks: the sideshow cinema. On T. Browning (Producer & Director). Freaks [DVD]. United States: Author. Youngquist, P. (2003). Monstrosities: Bodies and British romanticism. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press.

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Queer and Subjugated Knowledges: Generating Subversive Imaginaries, 2012, 56-81

CHAPTER 3 LESBIAN MOTHERS, TWO-HEADED MONSTERS AND THE TELEVISUAL MACHINE Kellie Burns The University of Sydney

Abstract: This chapter brings Braidotti’s (1994) discussion of mothers, monsters and machines together with Halberstam’s (1995) discussion of the gothic monster in the slasher film genre to rethink representations of the lesbian mother in popular culture. It positions the lesbian maternal body within a broad set of discourses that conjoin the figure of the mother with the figure of the monster. The discussion begins with Tina Kennard’s expectant maternal body in Season Two of the television serial The L Word, highlighting the contradictions her ‘monstrous’ lesbian maternal body calls up for queer viewers. Her pregnant body, which is highly sexualized throughout Season Two, challenges the norms of motherhood and disrupts mainstream images of the fetishized lesbian subject. At the same time, however, her experiences of becoming a mother uphold many of the traditional values of domesticity and reproduction and unashamedly construct the lesbian mother as part of an elite, urban, cosmopolitan set. Braidotti’s nomadic reading of mothers, monsters and machines troubles viewers’ desires to read Tina’s body as entirely normative or necessarily transgressive. This critical framework opens up a place to ask how her pregnant body refuses teleological linkages and relinquishes fixed sexed/gendered identities in favour of contradictions and flux. Halberstam’s framework for understanding the gothic monster extends our reading of Tina’s body, pressing viewers to consider the ways in which some textual representations ‘splatter’ gender/sex binaries and refuse to recuperate what is in excess or lost in the act of ‘splattering.’ Katrina Schlunke provides a response to this chapter. Keywords: Lesbian mother, monster, The L Word, pregnancy, cosmopolitan, Braidotti, gothic, machines, televisual, motherhood, nomadic.

Some time ago at a local café I was sitting with a group of lesbian women who, moments from being seated, began to discuss Showtime’s late night lesbian drama The L Word, then in its fifth season of screening. During a lengthy debate about each character’s new fashion, hairstyle and partner choice(s), the conversation became gridlocked over one of the serial’s main characters, Tina Kennard (Laurel Holloman). Some background: throughout Season One, Tina and her partner Bette are constructed as the ideal lesbian couple. Bette, played by Jennifer Beals, is the director of the California Arts Centre and Tina is a committed child literacy advocate. Their airtime is focused primarily around their efforts to ‘make a baby’ via donor insemination. We follow their relationship through the trials of finding a donor, trying (and failing) to conceive, finally getting pregnant, experiencing an unfortunate miscarriage early in the first trimester and the grieving following their loss. The stresses of trying to have a child coupled Kerry H. Robinson and Cristyn Davies (Eds) All rights reserved - © 2012 Bentham Science Publishers

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with a demanding curatorial itinerary find Bette feeling alone in her current relationship with Tina and navigating a lusty affair with the museum’s contracted carpenter Candace. Season One ends with the program’s most stable couple destabilized, disrupting the serial’s normative narrative about lesbian relationships and sexualities. It was Tina’s character in the second season that seemed to be causing these café acquaintances much agitation. Tina’s character undergoes a series of significant transformations in Season Two, one of which we learn about in the opening vignette of Episode One. The episode begins with a close up shot of Tina in what appears to be a doctor’s surgery. Tina’s opening monologue—“I can’t believe this is happening”—slowly pieces together for the viewer what has transpired ‘between seasons.’ The camera angle shifts to reveal that she is in the office of Dr Wilson, the gynaecologist introduced in Season One when she and Bette were inseminating. Tina is undressing at a pace that matches her deflated, almost hypnotic tone of voice, and as she does she explains to Dr Wilson that she “did this” because she thought she had “a certain degree of security,” she thought she and Bette “were solid.” The camera cuts to bedroom shots of Bette and Candace and when it returns to the doctor’s surgery the viewers’ suspicions are confirmed: unbeknownst to her friends or her passionately detached ex Bette, Tina is four months pregnant and is planning on having the child on her own. A long shot of Tina in her bra and underwear reveals how pregnant she really is. In a gesture of dismay, she slaps and grips her stomach like a robust beach ball and shrugs, “it just sorta, um, popped.” I think it was Tina’s embodiment as a ‘popped’ pregnant lesbian mother that agitated my company that afternoon in the café. I found this very quite peculiar; it was not Tina’s decision to have a child that sat uneasily with the group, nor was it her initial decision to have the child on her own without involving Bette. It was not the endless talk of sperm donors, nursery accessories, child-rearing, or other such topics that uphold a particular brand of heteronormative consumerism. Instead, what these women felt irritated by was that the audience was continually invited to gaze at Tina’s (very) pregnant naked body. Second only to Shane, the L Word character who practices serial non-monogamy, Tina was written into some of the most intimate and explicit sex scenes in Season Two. It was the sexualization of the expectant body, more specifically the expectant lesbian body, that seemed to evoke a level of unease with these otherwise voyeuristicallyfriendly queer women. As I sat back to check my own levels of comfort around the aforementioned sex scenes involving Tina, I heard one woman say: “it is not that I think there is anything wrong with a pregnant woman having sex; I don’t know, it

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is just not what I’d expect on a sexy lesbian television drama!” It is to this notion of expectation that this paper turns. I want to consider, first, the notion of the lesbian subject expecting-child, and second, the expectations we carry with us as viewers and consumers of queer television texts. In doing so, and in the spirit of this edition, I want to open up a critical space for theorizing the mediated lesbian maternal body and suggest a new way of reading lesbian popular cultural texts like The L Word that spend a great deal of time upholding the values of domesticity and reproduction and that unashamedly construct the lesbian mother as part of an elite, urban, cosmopolitan “creative class” (Halberstam, 2005, p. 15). Rosi Braidotti’s (1994, 2006) model of feminist nomadic subjectivities offers a useful starting point for thinking the lesbian body expecting-child outside existing theoretical frameworks. Traditionally the lesbian mother is theorized as either entirely (hetero)normative or necessarily transgressive. Braidotti’s nomadology, more specifically her conceptual constellation mothers-monsters-machines, offers a critical framework for tracing the nonlinear, complex and multi-layered nature of categories like ‘woman,’ ‘lesbian’ and ‘mother.’ I then return to Tina’s body and more broadly to the expectations queer/lesbian audiences bring to representations of lesbians on television. Here I introduce Halberstam’s discussion of quite different kinds of queer monsters and queer machines and argue that Tina’s maternal monstrosity must be theorized against the broader narrative backdrop that upholds the binarized distinction between normal and abnormal. The lesbian mother expecting-child Andrea O’Reilly, Marie Porter and Patricia Short (2005) argue that since the early years of the second wave feminist movement, motherhood has been a highly contested terrain. A woman’s childbearing capacities made her vulnerable not only to the disciplinary mechanisms of the medical sciences, but also to the criticisms of her feminist sisters. Motherhood was thought to maintain normative power relations between men and women and to uphold the prevailing discourse that procreative heterosexual coitus and the heterosexual family constituted the ‘norm’ against which all other sexual practices, desires and kinships were defined. Motherhood was also said to extend the misogynist efforts of men (and male dominated institutions such as science and medicine) to define women through the biological and to thus uphold their ‘natural’ status as fragile, passive receivers (of penis, sperm, child, medical treatments, etc.). Having children tied women to the domestic/private sphere and therefore limited their economic opportunities and social freedoms. Even when women chose to stay in full-time or parttime work they would inevitably take on a larger portion of the household managerial tasks and child-rearing responsibilities than their husbands.

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Motherhood, feminists warned, was bound by the disciplinary discourses of science and medicine that reinforced women’s role as an inferior other, not only because men dominated these disciplines, but again, because they defined the male body and heterosexual sex as the norms against which all others, including women, were defined and managed. Jana Sawicki (1991) explains that within the radical feminist critique of science and medicine there was much suspicion about the role that technologies, especially reproductive and fertility technologies, played in extending the disciplinary control of women’s sexual freedom. They warned that reproductive technologies such as basic gynaecological procedures and/or artificial insemination were extensions of men’s desires to be central in the processes of reproduction and procreation and acted as strategies to keep women estranged from their own bodies. There was a sense that the phallus, the penetrative extension of men, was replaced with a series of discrete, machinic implements that shifted the forms of discipline and control enacted on women’s bodies. Radical feminism adopted the mantra that biology need not be a woman’s destiny, warning women to take seriously the violent ways in which reproduction and domesticity function as mechanisms of patriarchal social control. Refusing motherhood became central to disrupting the power relations between men and women that maintained men’s status as the keeper of the public sphere—head of the family and the breadwinner—and bound women to their place within the private sphere. Tied as it was to the normative sex/gender order, and thus to compulsory heterosexuality (Witting, 1992), motherhood was deemed at odds with the figure of the lesbian. For radical feminists, lesbians represented the vanguard in reproductive choice and social freedom; they chose to opt out of the heterosexual matrix and this refusal disrupted the normalizing link between gender, sexuality and family. Furthermore, being a lesbian unsettled the logic of consumer capital that bound the maternal body to her husband, her family and the domestic sphere. The idea of the lesbian mother was thus thought to undo the hard work of those who had fought to secure non-procreative relationships as legitimate and equal. Since then, a great deal of feminist writing has attempted to reclaim the image of mother as an important symbol of strength and to differentiate between the category of ‘mother’ and the experience of motherhood (Oakley, 1981; O’Reilly, 2004; O’Reilly et al., 2005; Rich, 1976; Roiphe, 1996; Sawicki, 1991; Umansky, 1996). Sawicki (1991) argues that many of the critiques of motherhood position women as helpless, passive victims and fail to acknowledge that motherhood can be an empowering and liberating experience for women, straight or otherwise. Following Foucault (1995), Sawicki argues that power never operates in singular or simple ways. Women’s experiences of reproduction and childbirth are complex and

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varied and therefore cannot be understood uniformly. While she concedes that reproductive technologies link women’s bodies to the logic of consumerism and expose women to regulatory and disciplinary agencies (whose central function is often controlling populations), she also points out that [t]hese technologies create new subjects…they create the possibility of new sites of resistance. Lesbians and single women can challenge these norms by demanding access to infertility treatment. (Sawicki, 1991, p. 85)

Here Sawicki emphasizes that some disciplinary forces can simultaneously act as sites of power, resistance and security. In this case, while reproductive technologies are born out of a medical history that constructs maternal bodies as passive, docile bodies, these technologies can also act as sites of resistance to broader forms of social control. For instance, reproductive technologies can in fact unsettle the tidy relationship between the maternal body, heterosexuality and biology by reconstituting who the mother can be (e.g. single, lesbian, infertile) and what choices she can make around her body (e.g. to conceive in the absence of a man). A growing body of work attempts to offer a more complex picture of lesbian maternity and of same-sex parented families (Clarke, 2002; Dunne, 2000; Laird, 1999; Nelson, 1996; Ryan-Flood, 2002, 2005, 2009; Thompson, 2002; Weston, 1997). This work counters earlier scholarly interventions that were primarily concerned with ensuring that children raised by same-sex couples developed ‘normal,’ healthy ideas about their sexuality and were suitably socialized. It focuses on the different and diverse ways in which lesbian mothers (re)construct notions of motherhood and of family (Ryan-Flood, 2002). The work of social scientist Gillian Dunne (2000), for instance, has been central in carving out a critical space within which to consider the construction of the lesbian mother against broader meanings of gender and sexuality. For Dunne, the lesbian mother disrupts normative models of motherhood. Lesbian mothers trouble the normalized linkage between childrearing and biology and therefore challenge the image of lesbian women as barren, non-procreative and childless. Lesbian families are empowering and subversive models of family because they redefine the normative gender order and shift the way that gender acts to organize domestic spaces. One of Dunne’s central arguments is that lesbian families disrupt normative patterns of domestic labour. In her interviews with lesbian mothers in the UK, Dunne found that many of her participants shared domestic duties more equitably than research suggests heterosexual couples do. Dunne suggests that children with two mothers grow up differently as these families are less likely to lock their family into the rules of gender/sex norms. Lesbian families challenge the organization of labour within and outside of the household and introduce children, other

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family members, neighbours, teachers, and so on to alternative constructions of gender and sexuality. Dunne also suggests that mothers who choose to co-parent with gay men provide their children with male role models who challenge hegemonic models of masculinity and unsettle the idea of the man/father as head of the family. Research like Dunne’s is important because it refuses the discourse of sameness that aims to normalize queer families and erase differences between queer and straight families. It provides a space where queer families can be read as intelligible families outside the (hetero)norm. However, Dunne’s arguments also oversimplify the multiple ways in which one is a mother, queer or not. While many children from same-sex parented homes might well learn different lessons about the organization and institutionalization of gender norms and labour, Dunne seems to assume (just as the women in the café did) a great deal about who the lesbian subject is and how gender is used to organize same-sex parented households. In drawing comparisons as often as she does between same-sex families and heterosexual families, she collapses the myriad ways lesbians can be mothers and thus upholds the very dialectical logic (masculine/ feminine; male/female) she suggests these ‘alternative’ families undo. This overlooks the ways in which single mothers, teenage mothers, cooperative family structures and some heterosexual parents also challenge the normative family model and the ordering of gender within and outside the domestic sphere. Moreover, Dunne seems to imply that all lesbian mothers are mothers in the same way and that they all necessarily, just by being lesbians, prioritize the task of disrupting the normative operations of domesticity and family life. Despite the status of gays and lesbians having changed dramatically in the past three decades, one cannot assume that all same-sex parented households have the time and resources to prioritize the tasks of ‘disrupting traditional labour roles’ and/or ‘providing an alternative formulation of gender.’ If one does, one risks, again, stabilizing and singularizing the categories ‘mother,’ ‘woman’ and ‘lesbian,’ and positioning gender as the primary mode through which domestic space or labour is negotiated. More weight needs to be given to the ways that cultural difference, class and geography, not just gender or sexuality, frame the parenting priorities of queer families. Finally, motherhood can also function to normalize lesbians’ lifestyles. Victoria Clarke (2002) suggests that some lesbian mothers, in their efforts to fit in as outsider mothers and in order to protect their children from homophobia, work very hard to normalize their family unit, emphasizing their likeness to the norm rather than their differences. If Bette and Tina’s baby-making efforts on The L Word are anything more than just a silly television representation then it must be said that for some lesbians,

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motherhood functions as a mode through which their lives become socially acceptable and provides entry into a number of fashionable modes of urban cosmopolitan consumption (e.g. SUV child-safe vehicles, fancy strollers that fit in the SUV, nannies, private schooling, etc.). Halberstam (2005) suggests that time and space are always already normalized through the heteronormative trappings of family, domesticity and reproduction. There is a great deal to be gained from organizing one’s life (temporally and spatially) in sync with these norms. For Lisa Duggan there are material gains associated with living according to the rhythms of family and domesticity. She argues that the commodification of gay and lesbian difference in the past three decades has resulted in a “privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption” (2003, p. 50). Bonnie Mann (2007), a lesbian mother of three children herself, makes a similar point, arguing that while one can speak of the lesbian mother, there is no such thing as lesbian motherhood. For Mann, motherhood functions as the normalized institution held together by certain truths about what it means to be a mother. Mann explains that her decision to have children has meant accepting that the sameness she gets from being a mother supplants her difference as a lesbian woman. Moreover, Mann suggests that when her embodiment does register her as different from the normative image of ‘the mother,’ this difference comes to function as “a symbol for normality and a vehicle through which liberal heterosexuals [can] reaffirm their own tolerance, their willingness to see [lesbians] as the same” (Mann, 2007, p. 152). Beyond the binaries? In making sense of the images of lesbian maternity offered in The L Word, I want to shift the questions we ask about lesbian mothers beyond the transgressive/oppressive debate. I want to shift the focus of analysis away from the question of whom the lesbian mother is to ask what the lesbian body does. That is, I am interested in how the lesbian body functions as a multiply-constituted construct that opens us up to a number of affective responses from straight parents, non-parenting lesbians, schools, the state or, in the case of The L Word, television viewers. I am interested in the knowledge and discourses produced, consumed and/or overlooked around the lesbian maternal body. Braidotti’s feminist nomadology invites a new way of understanding the very complex set of desires and ways of being ‘lesbian,’ of being ‘mother’ and of having a ‘family’ (queer or not). Braidotti’s work invites us to understand women’s bodies as something more than just other to the male body. Braidotti, here drawing on the work of Deleuze, invites us to think about sexual difference in positive terms and about the category of woman

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through the figuration of becoming-woman. Becoming-woman, like all becomings, shifts ‘woman’ from the grips of dialectic thinking inherent in identity-based categories and allows it to make multiple and irregular connections to other forces and intensities. We are still able to offer a critique of the ways in which normative discourses attempt to keep certain bodies marginalized or otherized, only we do so from a different starting point, at a different speed and on a different line of flight. Categories of identity such as ‘woman,’ ‘mother,’ ‘lesbian’ or ‘lesbian mother’ are not defined solely against what they are not—man, father, straight, childless lesbian—instead, these categories are understood to be in constant collision with a variety of discursive forces in multiple, irregular ways. The concept of becoming points us to transformation, impermanence and flux rather than relying on stabilities or essences. In Braidotti’s terms: Becoming-woman is the affirmation of difference, meant as a multiple and constant process of transformation. Both teleological order and fixed identities are relinquished in favour of a flux of multiple becomings. (1994, p. 111)

For the purposes of this paper and for my initial questions around Tina’s pregnant body on The L Word, the idea of becoming shifts the presuppositions we bring to the lesbian maternal body. Becoming-woman does not entirely abandon the question of what Tina’s body contains or disallows, however, it shifts our thinking such that we seek out the lines of force that cause some of us to sit uncomfortably with her sexualized ‘expectant body.’ The ethos of becoming is not constrained by the conventions of belonging—to the categories woman, mother, lesbian, lesbian mother, television representation of lesbian. Instead, Tina’s body, as ‘popped’ pregnant lesbian mother, represents a new critical opening, a shift, a transformation, a trajectory that demands motion and refuses the fixity of everyday thought. The nomadic impulse of Braidotti’s becoming-woman is extended in her conceptual constellation, mothers- monsters-machines. Braidotti brings together the discourses that surround these seemingly unrelated terms and asks how they intersect. In doing so, Braidotti illustrates how feminist nomadic thinking is practiced and how ‘in practice’ it shifts our approach to understanding sexual difference. Clarifying how the nomadic linkages she makes are different in kind from those made using traditional philosophical frameworks, she states: “A nomadic connection is not a dualistic or oppositional way of thinking but rather one that views discourse as a positive, multilayered network of power relations” (1994, p. 76). The “con/dis-junctions” (1994, p. 93) Braidotti traces between mothers, monsters and machines are Deleuzian; they are rhizomatic, they chase the irregular operations of power along non-linear lines of flight to understand how sexual difference is produced and governed. In doing so, Braidotti

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makes new, hitherto unthinkable connections between these three discursive terms. The section below overviews these lines of flight and then asks how a lesbian mother’s body might factor into this alternative figuration. (Lesbian) mother-monster-machine In asking how discourses of mothers, monsters and machines intersect, Braidotti first clarifies how she defines each of these terms. By mothers Braidotti is referring to the “maternal function of a woman” (1994, p. 77) where both woman and mother operate as discursive categories produced by the socio-political and bio-cultural worlds that represent them. For Braidotti, machines refer to the various mechanisms and technologies that produce and govern intelligible bodies and lives. A machine is to Braidotti what a dispositif is to Foucault (Deleuze, 1992) or an assemblage is to Deleuze and Guattari (1987). Finally, when she refers to monsters Braidotti is referring to the bodies and lives of those ‘others’ whose difference affirms the positive status of the human-norm. The body of the monster, she explains, is marked by great ambivalence; it is at once fascinating and fearful, an “object[s] of aberration and adoration” (1994, p. 77). In making sense of how these three discursive terrains relate, Braidotti offers a nomadic survey of the various ways in which the history and philosophy of the biological sciences (as machinic assemblages) have defined and managed the body of the monster alongside the sexual difference of women and of the maternal body. Beginning her discussion with Aristotle (384BC–322BC), she maps some of the ways in which women’s bodies and the figure of the feminine have been produced as mysterious monstrosities, deemed abnormal and other than human. For Aristotle, the human norm was defined as masculine and reproduction was controlled by the plight of the male sperm cell making its way triumphantly to the passive site of the female gamete. The female sex cell was discursively positioned as a passive recipient and a woman’s uterus an inactive receptacle for the incubation of the zygote. The boy child was a normal, successful progeny, whereas reproduction that resulted in the birth of a girl child was deemed incomplete and abnormal and it was the mother’s incubatory deficiency that was to blame for these abnormal births. Girl children thus inherited the ‘monstrous other’ status of their mothers. In defining sexual difference in dialogical terms, the male subject position retained its status as ‘normal’ through the perpetual association of the female body with the abnormal, monstrous other. Within the dualistic system [of phallogocentric epistemologies like Aristotle’s], monsters are, just like bodily female subjects…figure[s] of devalued difference; as such, it provides the fuel for the production of normative discourse. (Braidotti, 1994, p. 80)

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Women’s role in reproduction, more specifically their capacity to carry and give birth to the monster-child, operated as evidence of women’s ‘natural’ monstrosity and of their ‘naturally’ irrational soul. This early system of misogyny, Braidotti explains, relied on women’s monstrosities to be understood as part of their ‘natural make-up’; if they were natural, so too were the rules and norms that governed sexual difference. Braidotti argues that the pregnant female body unsettles the logocentric system of dualities that governs the boundaries between the normal male body and the body of the female other. The pregnant body morphs into something other than what the norm prescribes for the female body. Its ‘natural’ monstrosity shifts and is re-shaped throughout gestation. The pregnant body thus threatens to disrupt the steady order of things; it makes an in-between body that exists somewhere between “holy and hellish” (Braidotti, 1994, p. 81), fascinating and horrific, object of worship and object of terror. The act of slipping in-between, of morphing, of being outside the norm/other duality thus had to be rearticulated as the point of women’s difference to the norm. Through the growth of psychoanalytic renderings of the subject, the maternal body became central to the fantasy of sexual difference. The mother’s body in its ambivalence became the figure of abjection that exceeds the recognizable (human/male) norms or, in Braidotti’s words, [i]t is because of this phallogocentric perversion that femininity and monstrosity can be seen as isomorphic. Woman/mother is monstrous by excess; she transcends established norms and transgresses boundaries. She is monstrous by lack: woman/mother does not possess the substantive unity of the masculine subject. Most important, through her identification with the feminine she is monstrous by displacement: as sign of the inbetween areas, of the indefinite, the ambiguous, the mixed, woman/mother is subjected to a constant process of metaphorization as ‘other-than.’ (1994, p. 83)

Braidotti traces some of the ways in which the ambivalence attached to the feminine became central in philosophical and scientific renderings of the monstrous figure. She begins with the Greeks and Romans whose monsters were distinctly anti-maternal. In their combined greatness and disorder, monsters were positioned as non-human, that is, not born of a woman. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, monsters were linked to the changeability of the female imagination. Women were said to have the capacity to imagine something and then materialize this ‘something’ through childbirth. This power meant that women could imagine certain evils about sex or reproduction and then reproduce these through their monstrous offspring. She notes that the emergence of a distinct science of monsters (teratology) came at a time when the ability of men to be able to make their own monsters was vital to reinstating the completeness and

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naturalness of the human (male) norm. The fantasy of creating a child born outside the female body prevailed throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with alchemists preoccupied with the scientific production of life in jars and Petri dishes. These scientific fantasies of extra-bodily life that rely on male masturbation and creation, Braidotti insists, resonate in contemporary discourses of test tube babies and in vitro fertilization. Monsters were rendered disembodied, artificial, disposable, contained and controlled. Braidotti ends her nomadic exploration of mothers, monsters and machines with an exploration of what she calls “the age of the freaks ” (1994, p. 91). She maintains that while the body of the monster has always been subjected to the gaze, at the turn of the twentieth century the body of the monster became a freakish body that was commodified and placed on display as a spectacle of sorts. Freak shows popularized the figure of the monster by displaying ‘abnormally’ formed bodies alongside the bodies of animals and/or the bodies of racialized (often indigenous) others. Science and medicine, she explains, thrived on these displays of difference and used them to solidify knowledge about what constituted the normative (male, white, able) body. More recently, Braidotti explains, the figure of the freak has operated in an almost fetishistic way as a figure of non-conformity and social rebellion. In the reclamation of the monster as freak, the ambivalence (holy and hellish) that has long governed the monstrous other has all but died. At the same time, the discourse of the monster as freak, or what Braidotti calls becoming-freak, enjoys a much wider dissemination, making its way into almost every crevice of contemporary living. In contemporary culture, Braidotti concedes, monsters are everywhere. What then does this nomadic exploration of mothers, monsters and machines tell us about what the lesbian maternal body does? What happens when the maternal body is a lesbian body, and thus a lesbian monster? What happens when the masculinist scientific/reproductive machines become fertility/insemination machines? What happens when the body of the lesbian mother-monster expands, morphs, shifts, flaunts its self-conscious artificiality? It is fair to say that the body of the lesbian has been historically produced and governed alongside discourses of monstrosity. Lesbian subjectivities are linked to the figure of the outcast, the freak, the queer, and these depictions of otherness have been used to solidify heterosexual femininity as the norm. The lesbian’s outsider status has been used to justify the marginalization and exclusion of lesbians from various social institutions (e.g. church, military, marriage, political life, schools) and lesbian ‘lifestyles’ are produced alongside discourses of fear, defining what most parents do not want their children to be exposed to, or to become. The lesbian monster is threatening, untrustworthy and disruptive to the steady order of things.

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Like the heterosexual mother-monster that Braidotti describes, the lesbian mother-monster occupies the space of the in-between. Once pregnant, the lesbian body becomes a disfigured maternal body and a disfigured lesbian body. The maternal body which is understood to be sexually off limits is occupied by a subject who is always already sexualized. At the same time, the lesbian mother-monster’s position as a lesbian within her own queer context is unsettled, for her body refutes the idea of the lesbian body as barren and infertile. She moves swiftly between various polarities: heterosexual/homosexual, artificial/natural, very-clearly-lesbian/not-lesbianenough. While the ambivalence and irrationality associated with the normative mother-monster is traditionally balanced by her rational-minded husband, the lesbian monster conjoins with another irrational monstrosity and morphs into a two-headed monster. This two-headed creature is doubly ambivalent and can take up twice as much space in the discursive realm of family and of related institutions. Tina Kennard’s (Laurel Holloman’s) body on The L Word engenders this type of layered ambivalence. The series challenges the idea of the desexualized maternal body by writing Tina into fairly graphic sex scenes. Throughout Season Two a series of contradictions are materialized at the level of Tina’s monstrous body—naked, masturbating, having sex. The sexualization of her pregnant body challenges the norms that govern the maternal body, particularly because the type of sex she is having is lesbian sex. At the same time, while Tina’s maternal lesbian body challenges what constitutes normal and acceptable motherhood, this representation emerges at a time when lesbian monsters are, borrowing Braidotti’s figuration, becoming-lesbian freaks. That is, lesbian motherhood is gaining greater visibility and is associated with a range of elite, cosmopolitan consumptive practices (Burns and Davies, forthcoming). So while Tina’s body as the lesbian maternal other does in fact challenge the normal/abnormal dualism that orders the subject positions woman, mother and lesbian, there is something else operating around her body that needs to be further explored. Halberstam’s (1995) Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters offers a useful way to further understand Kennard’s lesbian maternal body. In many ways Halberstam’s work extends Braidotti’s nomadic project around mothers, monsters and machines, by paying particular attention to the production of monster discourses in the gothic novel and in various contemporary horror film genres. In the final section of this paper I summarize some of Halberstam’s thoughts around the changing role that certain types of contemporary monsters play in repudiating gender norms and calling attention to their artificiality. In doing so, I offer some additional reflections on how Tina’s body falls short of what viewers might ‘expect’ from representations of lesbian motherhood on television.

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Genders that don’t splatter, or, why we expect more from The L Word Halberstam (1995) traces the ways in which the gothic novel and contemporary horror films act as technologies that construct certain types of monsters. Like Braidotti, Halberstam suggests that the monster figure operates as a way of solidifying the position of human-norm. Gothic novels, Halberstam argues, produce the perfect figure of negative identity. Monsters have to be everything the human is not and, in producing the negative of human, these novels make way for the invention of human as white, male, middle class, and heterosexual. (1995, p. 22)

While twentieth century horror films offer different kinds of monsters, Halberstam argues that they extend the monster-making project of the nineteenth century gothic novel. Many of these films still assign the monstrous role to the body of the ‘other’ (monsters are often, for example, represented as racial or class outsiders) and very often the monster is male and his victims are women. Women are otherized not through their monstrous capacities, but rather through their vulnerability to the monster. Women are often violently and brutally raped, killed and discarded by the films’ monstrous characters. Traditional feminist readings of horror films argue the genre is inherently sexist and misogynistic, however Halberstam calls on queer and feminist viewers to adopt a new and more active way of watching and analyzing these texts. She generates new ways of reading sexual difference and understanding female spectatorship outside psychoanalytic theories of the look/gaze. She suggests that while queer and feminist readers must recognize the relationship between gender, sexuality and violence, they can also formulate alternative modes of viewing that reconfigure the relationships between monsters and the normative gender order. Of particular interest to this paper is Halberstam’s discussion of monsters in the modern slasher/splatter film, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (Hooper, 1986). She argues that in this particular genre, the ‘final girl’i often occupies a rather ambiguous gender position and often manages to avoid getting killed. In most slash/splatter films the female victims are “properly gendered ‘human’ bodies, female bodies, in fact, with all the conventional markings of femininity” (1995, p. 141). ‘Proper’ and ‘true’ femininity is eliminated, it ‘splatters’ in this particular film genre. In contrast, having a body that defies traditional gender norms allows the character to survive, even thrive. These characters disrupt the normative horror-film sex/gender order and unsettle the relationship between the masculine monster figure and his feminine victim. The heroine in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is Stretch (Caroline Williams), a local DJ who engenders everything the idealized feminine

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subject is not—“a white trash bitch with a chain saw” (Halberstam, 1995, p. 143). As Halberstam points out, Stretch’s gender performance not only resists traditional representations of ideal femininity, it falls outside the binary logic that differentiates the feminine ‘female’ body from the masculine ‘male’ body. [Stretch] represents not boyishness or girlishness but monstrous gender, a gender that splatters, rips at the seams, and then is sutured together again as something much messier than male or female. (1995, p. 143)

While other female characters in slash/splatter films possess bodies that splatter, the gothic heroine in Chainsaw 2 has a gender that splatters. Stretch occupies a space in-between the norms that govern the male/female gender binaries and thus a space outside the monster’s typical victim profile. Having an ambiguous gender that refuses the logic of binaries is ultimately what allows Stretch to defeat the family who are ravaging the town with a series of violent massacres. In a series of strange scenes involving Stretch and one of the main monstrous characters, Leatherface (Bill Johnson), Stretch puts on the skin of one of the killers’ male victims and in doing so undoes the monster/victim relationship that has organized the plot up until that point in the film. According to Halberstam, in becoming-monster Stretch does three important things. First, in putting on a male victim’s face, she materializes the act of ‘splattering’ gender and in doing so reveals the artificiality of sexual difference. In Halberstam’s words: “[g]ender, Chainsaw 2 suggests, is skin, leather, face, not body, not internal mechanics, certainly not genitalia” (1995, pp. 52–53). Second, Stretch opens up a space where she can become the ultimate monster figure and she does this at the end of the film by violently killing the last of the Sawyer family with her own chainsaw. She becomes the gothic heroine by assuming the position of the monster rather than the hapless victim. In doing so, she transforms the position of the hero in the gothic text and disrupts the binary system that orders the relationship between monster/victim and feminine/masculine, calling attention to the constructedness of these binaries. Stretch’s character also calls attention to the altogether suspect practice of constructing monstrosities out of the body of the other. We witness the becoming-monstrous of a woman, which does not automatically mean that she must compromise herself, sacrifice her voice, or give up her hard-won gains to a man. The chain saw massacre in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2…is a massacre of Stretch’s making. (Halberstam, 1995, p. 143)

The face-offs between Stretch and the Sawyers and the final outcome of Chainsaw 2 resist “the axes of male and female, feminine and masculine, and [demand] that horror be read backwards through the history of horror and forward through the potential of horror” (1995, p. 157). Like Braidotti’s

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nomadic reading of mothers, monsters and machines, Halberstam’s recuperation of the contemporary gothic heroine is achieved by making irregular connections between the ‘female’ body, monsters and the machinic technologies that normalize these categories in binary terms. Let’s return then to Tina’s body on The L Word and to the conversation that day in the café. By placing Tina’s body alongside Braidotti’s reading of mothers, monsters and machines, this chapter has argued that her pregnant body refuses teleological linkages and relinquishes fixed gendered identities in favour of contradictions and flux. The nakedness and sexualization of Tina’s body bring together a multiplicity of intensities that shake ‘motherhood,’ ‘lesbian’ and ‘woman’ out of the strongholds of phallogocentric thought and set them in motion within a particular televisual context. We might, however, take this analysis one step further and ask how Tina’s pregnant body figures against the discourses of monstrosity explored in Halberstam’s work. Although Halberstam’s analysis of gender, sexuality and monsters belongs to a very particular history of monster-making and to a very particular (moving) image genre, I am interested here in the practice or method she mobilizes in shaping her analysis. Like Braidotti, Halberstam points to the possibility of recuperating the something else or other-than of binary thinking. In having a gender that splatters strictly defined gender binaries, Stretch in Chainsaw 2 avoids the fate of the traditional female horror film victim. There is something in the momentum and potential to splatter that Tina, as an expectant mother-monster, and the Bette-Tina twoheaded mother-monster, simply do not have. There is a fixity and certainty about their bodies and their lifestyle that remain impalpable and immoveable (at least in terms of their respective roles in the reproduction/ procreative narrative thread) outside the binaries that order notions of difference. In the glamorous Los Angeles context within which the storylines play out, and as part of a recent television history that defines the queer body as the ultimate neo-liberal, global consumer (Burns and Davies, 2009), the moments of rupture and flux engendered in/by Tina’s maternal body are mediated within the broader narrative that is so very splatterless. While the show attempts in its own way to disrupt the norms that define lesbian motherhood, it resurrects as many monsters (and thus ‘others’!) as it attempts to disarm. There are certainly moments when Tina’s sexualized body onscreen challenges the norms of what a lesbian body and/or a maternal body can do. Bette and Tina’s break-up reminds viewers that some women choose to have children on their own outside conventional parenting arrangements. The biracial child born from Tina’s white lesbian body attempts to press the politics of mixed-race families. However, the broader context within which these moments of disruption and flux are played out is obsessively preoccupied with the strict divisions that demarcate sexuality, class, race and geography within a city like LA. Bette and Tina’s

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‘unconventional’ child sharing arrangements are reduced to arguments about the merits of Montessori versus private school education and who will pay for the nanny. The program’s engagement with issues of race and ethnicity are couched within a broader neo-liberal model of assumed equality that erases the subtle operations of racial and class oppression. Finally, Tina’s post-natal body is instantaneously transformed into a taut, supple, thin physique, a bodily ideal the program unashamedly promotes with its cast of slim, conventionally feminine ‘lesbian’ characters. The monstrosity offered by the lesbian maternal body (and the sexualization of this body) is thus swiftly supplanted by a set of bodily and lifestyle norms coveted by a very select and privileged class of young urbanites. Lesbian motherhood on The L Word is clean, effortless and affordable. It is fair to say that our L Word mother -monsters never really splatter at all and that the norms that govern ‘woman,’ ‘mother’ and ‘lesbian’ are never really disrupted in any sustained manner. As a result, viewers’ expectations of something else, their desires for something other-than from this ‘lesbian’ television text are never truly met.

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Halberstam borrows this term ‘final girl’ from Carol Clover. See Clover, C. (1992). Men, women and chain saws: Gender in the modern horror film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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REFERENCES Bothwick, P. (2003). Mothers and others: An exploration of lesbian parenting in Australia. Sydney: Jam Jar Publishing. Braidotti, R. (1994). Nomadic subjects: Embodiment and sexual difference in contemporary feminist theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Braidotti, R. (2002). Metamorphoses: Towards a materialist theory of becoming. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Braidotti, R. (2006). Transpositions: On nomadic ethics. Cambridge: Polity Press. Burns, K., & Davies, C. (2009). Producing cosmopolitanism sexual citizens on the L word. Journal of Lesbian Studies, 13(2), 174-188. Clark, V. (2002). Sameness and difference in research on lesbian parenting. Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, (12)3, 210-222. Clover, C. (1992). Men, women and chain saws: Gender in the modern horror film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Deleuze, G. (1992). What is a dispositif? (T. J. Armstrong, Trans.). In Michel Foucault philosopher (pp. 159-168). New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis: Minnesota Press. Duggan, L. (2003). The twilight of equality: Neo-liberalism, cultural politics and the attack on democracy. Boston: Beacon Press. Dunne, G. (2000). Opting into motherhood: lesbians blurring the boundaries and transforming the meaning of parenthood and kinship. Gender & Society, (14)1, 1135. Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. (A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Vintage Books. Halberstam, J. (1995). Skin shows: Gothic horror and the technology of monsters. London: Duke University Press. Halberstam, J. (2005). In a queer time and place: Transgender bodies, subcultural lives. New York: New York University Press. Hooper, T. (Director). (1986). The Texas chainsaw massacre 2 [Motion picture]. United States: Cannon Films. Laird, J. (1999). Lesbians and lesbian families: Reflections on theory and practice. Irvington, NY: Columbia University Press. Mann, B. (2007). The lesbian June Cleaver: heterosexism and lesbian mothering. Hypatia, 22(1), 149-165. Nelson, F. (1996). Lesbian Motherhood: An exploration of Canadian lesbian families. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Oakley, A. (1981). From here to maternity: Becoming a mother. Hardmondsworth: Penguin. O’Reilly, A. (2004). From motherhood to mothering: The legacy of Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. O’Reilly, A., Porter, M., & Short, P. (Eds.). (2005). Motherhood: Power and oppression. Toronto: Women’s Press.

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Rich, A. (1976). Of woman born: Motherhood as experience and institution. New York: Newton. Roiphe, A. (1996). Fruitful: A real mother in the modern world. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Ryan-Flood, R. (2002, October). Disruptive (m)others: lesbian reproductive decisionmaking in Sweden and Ireland. Workers Out conference, University of Sydney, Australia. Ryan-Flood, R. (2005). Contested heteronormativities. Sexualities, 8(2), 189-204. Ryan-Flood, R. (2009). Lesbian motherhood: Gender, families and sexual citizenship. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Sawicki, J. (1991). Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, power, and the body. New York: Routledge. Sullivan, M. (2004). The family of woman: Lesbian mothers, their children and the undoing of gender. Berkeley: University of California Press. Taylor, J., Layne, L., & Wozniak, D. (Eds.). (2004). Consuming motherhood. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Thompson, J. M. (2002). Mommy queerest: Contemporary rhetorics of lesbian maternal identity. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Umansky, L. (1996). Motherhood reconceived: Feminism and the legacies. New York: New York University Press. Weston, K. (1997). Families we choose: Lesbians, gays, kinship. Irvington, NY: Columbia University Press. Witting, M. (1992). The straight mind and other essays. Boston: Beacon Press.

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RESPONSE PREGNANTING AS IN CHEATING, FUCKING, LYING…THIS IS THE WAY WE LIVE Katrina Schlunke University of Technology Sydney

This response is an attempt to engage with Kellie Burn’s paper and The L Word within the context of this collection that arose from the Halberstam Symposium. What follows is neither a critique or review of Kellie’s paper but instead a work arising from, responding to, reacting with, delighting in Burns, Halberstam and The L Word, to say something about the pregnant lesbian, particularly the figure of Tina in The L Word. If there is a model to this experiment in thinking and writing it is Ready Steady Cook or versions of other television cooking competitions, where two cooks are given a set of ingredients in front of a live audience and asked to imagine and produce a dish from them in a limited amount of time. This is a response then that is already highly contextualized, deeply contingent and we will see what we will see. This is not a paper that arises from the fan subject. I had not seen any of the second series of The L Word, which features Tina’s pregnancy, until purchasing the whole series to write this paper and so that fictional sitcom becomes here a critical source that was usually watched while commuting (sometimes awkwardly so). Apologies to The L Word fans for this use of their series but the ethical point in thinking like this is to see what might otherwise arise, to imagine what else might be said, about the pregnant lesbian body of Tina. Rhythm Each episode of the second series of The L Word begins with the theme song, which goes like this (if you know the tune you should sing it): The L Word, Season 2 theme song Girls in tight dresses, who drag with moustaches Chicks driving fast on bikes with long lashes Women who long love lost, women who give This is the way; it’s the way that we live Talking, Laughing, Loving, Breathing, Fighting, Fucking, Crying, Drinking,

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Writing, Winning, Losing, Cheating, Kissing, Thinking, Dreaming. This is the way; it’s the way that we live. It’s the way that we live...and Love!i

My emphasis here is on the middle section with its list of ways of living and loving: Talking, Laughing, Loving, Breathing, Fighting, Fucking, Crying, Drinking, Writing, Winning, Losing, Cheating, Kissing, Thinking, Dreaming—for its effort at an expansive, inclusive vocabulary of possibility and, underlying this, of choice. We are all different (lesbians); we are all the same (lesbians). The words must not be heard without the driving syncopation TAlking, LAughing, LOving, BREAthing, FIghting, FUcking. Hear for a moment the faint difference in the work of these words if we add others in. Talking, Birthing, Fighting, Gestating, Fucking, Conceiving. Notice how a ghostly temporal relationship, putatively heteronormative, almost instantly appears. Talking leads to birthing, fighting is a result of gestating, and fucking produces conceiving. The wild melee of multiple connections that was Laughing, Loving, Breathing, Fighting, Fucking becomes driven through with foundational linearity, a social and normative order of connection that has already been decided upon. But remember this is The L Word and so each of those pregnancy related words—Birthing, Gestating, Conceiving—in this context also defies any easy ‘and so’ ‘and then’ idea of time. Birthing is a business fraught with the added management of heterosexual and coupled assumptions in the hospital and medical system and gestation sounds here rather alien and perhaps frightening to a straight audience—all these women bringing forth more of themselves. (And of course gestating is not a word very often used around pregnant women perhaps because of its traditional association with animal husbandry and biological science.) Conceiving is also understood to be different within The L Word world, hardly a ‘natural’ flow from fucking, although the access to sperm of choice and suitable, sensitive medical attention is shown to be easily available to these well-off, middle class lesbians. The work that the energetic list, Talking, Laughing, Loving, Breathing, Fighting, Fucking, Crying, Drinking, Writing, Winning, Losing, Cheating, Kissing, Thinking, Dreaming does is to provide a set of actions that not just lesbians participate in. These are soft sitcom universals and this point is particularly made by the inclusion of ‘Breathing.’ It is both a call to an expanded lesbianhood—we are all different, we are all the same—and a potential bridge to all people—to all those who breathe per se.

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Birthing, Gestating, Conceiving therefore do not fit this order. All three of those verbs mark a specialist difference of sexual and medical acts as well as the exclusive female body. (Or sporadically female body, as the later sequence showing the pregnant transgendered body of Max shows.) But within the heartening ideology of The L Word with its wonderfully utopic drive it will I am sure only be a matter of the series spreading far enough and wide enough for those words (plus Wedding) to be seamlessly added to the show’s list of what unites all humans rather than divides us. The realities of domestic labour and sheer attention needed by small children (referred to by Burns) are here leapt over, as the child produced by the pregnant lesbians in The L Word does not isolate the mothers back into the silence and isolation of suburbia but is a touchstone for the community. Their child fills the depressive with hope, the butch with maternal softness, the lonely with love and so on and so on. Pregnant is not here an adjective but in the classic Deleuzian manoeuvre a verb. We need to think about ‘to pregnant in a community of lesbians’; we need to see not what a pregnant lesbian body might represent but what pregnanting produces. Pregnanting Pregnant when used in a sentence such as ‘the pregnant woman sleeps’ is used as a passive, knowable, visually explicable quality about which others speak. We know she is pregnant because we see the shape of the stomach, the number of months that equals a certain size of bump, and because others let us know—that woman, perhaps that lesbian woman, is pregnant. This visual and linguistic control of the body and the temporal closure upon it makes of ‘pregnant’ a knowable and normative state. To render that otherwise is to attempt to break up a linguistic, visual and social state to make you notice the becoming of pregnancy as Burns incites us to do. Noticing that becoming should also let us see the potentially febrile field of desire in which ‘pregnanting’ emerges. Pregnanting here becomes one of the positive ‘desiring machines’ of Deleuze and Guattari that arise out of the energetic sociality and transgressiveness of capitalism and so remain partially captive to that system, but nonetheless attempt to liberate desire from the family and the individual. Deleuze and Guattari’s ideal ‘revolutionary machine’ would actually achieve that, but what is it that Tina and The L Word do? Pregnanting rather than pregnant is a set of multiplicities. It appears and disappears, joins and collapses connections and bodily stances. Burns has already spoken of the body of Tina but in the lesbian pregnancy, the baby ‘we’ (two mothers and more) make, the marks of carrying and creating are in the costs of insemination, decisions about sharing and the material

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invention of a specific baby space. In the example of Tina and Bette as expectant mothers the changes of one mother are through swelling, growing independence, more aggressive sex, a short relationship with a richer and even more controlling girlfriend and a final determination to make a home. For Bette it is recognition of her immaturity, an embrace of therapy (for herself), the collapse of her work, the death of her father and earlier on, a turn to smoking and drinking and what I think we are meant to understand is one last one night stand with a stranger in another city. The L Word like some suitably overstretched LA limousine extends ‘pregnant’ into sets of emotional, affective, desirous forces all pushed into a small community. In that making public of, and insistence upon, the collective invention of pregnancy lies some possibility of maternal desire being removed from the individual, the couple and the domestic sphere, and put into spaces where it can upset and challenge what a pregnant subject is. And given the televisual nature of all the performances each ‘individual’ act is also a public act. So seeing a horny pregnant woman, watching discussions of insemination and imagining the pleasures of heavy breasts and popped tummies as extended props for sexual play are all succeeding in the once imagined revolutionary project of Deleuze and Guattari of imagining desire otherwise.ii But what may have been revolutionary in the 1970s and 1980s are now scenes always about to be—absorbed? adapted? consumed?—into an order of toleration and consumerist connection, all within an assumed global politic where the right to buy, conceive, and be ‘lesbian’ is intertwined with American values and even American government. (Note photo of Clinton in office of lesbian lawyer representing Tina in separation proceedings with Bette.) The potential public confrontation of the pregnanting lesbians is rehearsed at a cafe cum stage space called ‘The Planet.’ Is this Planet another womb? Another site or state of expectation? But remember how Burns so very well put it: As I sat back to check my own levels of comfort around the aforementioned sex scenes involving Tina, I heard one of my friends say: “it is not that I think there is anything wrong with a pregnant woman having sex; I don’t know, it is just not what you’d expect on a lesbian television program!” It is to this notion of expectation that this paper turns.

The expectation that The L Word seems to be trying to produce is the takeover of the planet, American style, one rich suburban colony at a time until we are one hundred per cent certain that lesbians are everywhere doing everything that is seen to matter in a stylish, deeply middle class, sex filled way. It is a fabulous, empowering fantasy. Produced while America was itself pounding its way into and across the planet one middle eastern, oil strategic country at a time it could also be

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seen as rather chilling. So also is the occasional way that the figure of the lesbian is held up (in that other planet, the American nation) as epitomizing the opposite figuration to that of the imagined woman-hating, queer-killing, Islamic fundamentalism. (I wonder if every queer in America had their security rating raised when the enemy became this non-Christian fundamentalism?) Pregnant with their persuasive possibility, there is a scene where the L Word gang sit around with Gloria Steinem and seem to decide that ‘choice’ is where it is all at. ‘Choice,’ the only toastable victory of feminism and lesbianism on the planet, at The Planet. Pregnant is one more of these choices, as is having sex while pregnant, trying to have aggressive sex while pregnant and or indeed not getting pregnant at all. The problem with choice is that it flattens out the cultural terrain and destroys the vitality of lived and unavoidable difference. There is no room for an ethical community in political terms in such a place but there is a contagious spread of expectation throughout the viewing world of this show. This is pregnanting, not only the becoming of pregnancy but also the becoming of the world as understood primarily through same sex (lesbian) desire, aesthetics and modes. After series two ‘we’, that is all self-identified lesbians, will expect all L Word pregnant lesbians to have various kinds of sex, as well as become famous curators, or meet ‘out’ tennis stars or have Civil Rights leader parents and so forth and so on. This is not just a rise in expectation—it will be a wave of expectation. No gymbot, no writer, no community radio announcer, no woman walking in the street pregnant or not will be safe from our expectation of what ‘we’ can do with ‘them.’ And they all want it. From us. Because we are rich and worked out and good at sex and so therefore interchangeable with any other figure of desire more or less, give or take intolerance. The lavender menace rises again in stilettos, groovy hair and real estate to die for. But it’s no longer a political menace because it’s generically desired. Desiring, Satiating, Buying, Selling, this is the way we live, and come to be loved within queer absorbing capitalism. Breeding A term sometimes used to describe straight people with or without children is ‘breeders.’ The expression was introduced to me by a gay man who as a high order of aesthete himself was able to invest in the term both a powerful sense of the gross, endlessly replicating world of heterosexual suburbia and some hint that we others were made for better things. It is an expression shot through with some order of misogyny and perhaps some claim to the environmental moral high ground. Nothing worse these days than winning an argument about how little or large your carbon footprint is then by asking how many children a person has. Or perhaps what is worse is the floating idea that the world really doesn’t need any more babies, particularly western world babies, of any kind. A classic case, perhaps, of ‘just when the lesbians

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get to make the babies nobody (or only the environmentally unfit) will want babies anymore.’ But breeders by their very form of interaction make babies without thought, without particular care or engineering. All heterosexuals are hereby making a world of battery humans simply because they can’t help themselves. And the mark of their endless excess treads the Earth in a monotonous glut of straightdom. As an insult, the longing in the despising of that word ‘breeders’ is positively baroque but so is the exquisiteness of the barb. Heterosexuality is simply not refined enough to excite the world. And why not? In part because there is not enough choice. In the heteronormative mode there is wife and husband, mother and father. In the queer world, if you are wealthy enough, your choices are smart sperm, black sperm, white sperm, tall sperm, short sperm, known sperm and unknown sperm. As fathers there are gay boys, straight boys, donors, brothers of partners, weekend dads, etc. Choice, which in a straight world is a mode driven and motivated by consumerism is in the world of lesbian conception a mode arising from the excess of pregnanting. Choice is here not modern or capitalist but natural, a mark of processual becoming in its very vocabulary of choice. Tina and Helena and Bette with the acquiescence of friends teach us about how to act with, upon and under the pregnant body if we need to or want to learn such things in such ways. As watchers of the various sex scenes we join in pregnanting through rejoining and refining desires, through the dismissal and embrace of the show as a show and through processes of dispersal and reproduction. Dispersing and reproducing we catch the wave of expectation. Breeders we may become, but breeders bursting with choice that figure and figure again the time and space of the ‘ordinary family.’ I just want to fuck all night long, fuck, fuck, fuck. The very pregnant Tina says those words to Helena, her wealthy, controlling new girlfriend, and just after she has had reunifying sex with her old girlfriend. We assume, I think, that this is a direct attack on Helena’s control and a mark of the process of Tina becoming pregnant, becoming capable, experiencing new intensities as she is coming into her pregnant self. As she is demanding to fuck with Helena she is pushing her very pregnant body against Helena, pulling and pushing her against walls and demanding, demanding that she, Helena be fucked by this powerful pregnant force. We read the emotional impetus for this from the aforementioned act of reconciliation, the new strength of deciding when and with whom Tina will fuck—she who before this had never slept with any woman but Bette. But the demanding, pregnant, powerful Tina in the pushing pregnant body lets us think for a moment about a female body that when pregnant is not weakened but is full, powerful—larger and stronger than in its previous life. Helena tries the words ‘hysterical,’ ‘hormonal,’ but Tina is unstoppable and

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finally Helena, unable to cope, runs away and Tina, alone, cries ‘what am I doing, what am I doing?’ Talking, Laughing, Loving, Breathing, Fighting, Fucking.

The extension of the body that comes into being in pregnancy becomes in this instance something of a battering ram. The weight and force of the womb distending the stomach pushes into the world to make particular kinds of demands. They frighten capital (Helena); they seduce the seducer (Bette). The world answers back in the relocation and organization of lips and hands to cover, shake and shudder this unreliable expansiveness to cum and become with it. That said, the cinematography is traditional, the angles coy and contained. All sex in The L Word is seemly and mostly beautiful. Like the clothes and shoes, it is appropriately accessorized and aestheticized in its middle class, sometime soft porn form. But remember the rhythm: Talking, Laughing, Loving, Breathing, Fighting, Fucking, etc.

The shot of that, the sight of this, the feelings of pleasure, the feelings of shame, disperse us throughout the show. The rhythm is built through simulation and the hyperreal: as a contagion of American capitalism, as flows between straight and queer ideas of pleasurable viewing and as one more act we can do—The L Word is simultaneously highly affective and deeply forgettable. Secured by the American sitcom form, by serialization, the constant expectation leaves us constantly conceiving and reconceiving, birthing and forgetting until the same time, next week. Pregnanting disturbs that generic temporality. The pregnant body like the small child cannot be put on hold for a season or a week without noticeable change occurring or without care continuing. The pregnant lesbian body within The L Word carries a particular ‘reality’ effect. We see, ‘live,’ a real body, a real ‘lesbian’ body that may help extend the expectation that everything we see is not just television but bits of our own lives. The womb as seen through the distended tummy is where we could have come from, where our mothers wanted a lesbian child to be born on a planet where we would be welcomed and given babychinos as our cultural right. And that pregnant site may be the body of our children’s children. In this way Tina’s body is past, future, present—one moment of extra-televisual space and time that hums with a different order of queer force. This is queer reproduction, queer endurance through traditional, even conservative, means. Or is it? The instability of the womb as guaranteeing the queer

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nature of anything is fraught. The womb is where everything comes from— homophobe and homosexual. Only while the woman pregnant is a pregnant lesbian is there a promise of queerness—the child is no guarantee at all of queer reproduction. But in pregnanting, inseminating ourselves, with the global expectations that The L Word offers, with its pleasures of identifications and fantasies of community, we participate in the contagion of critique. We rule in and rule out what we like and don’t, we participate with the program in rituals of making ourselves up. We are all pregnant all of the time in this queer way—we conceive and carry out ourselves. Tina’s pregnant body is good to think with. It’s not definitive or ‘enough’ if we desire a promise of constant queer disruption but as a new kind of tool in a world where desire is public and proliferating but hardly revolutionary, viewing, desiring, thinking her body—that pregnant lesbian body—is to think of a state that is desirous and singular all at once. So here we go: Loving, Breathing, Fighting, Fucking, and Viewing, Thinking, Pregnanting.

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Retrieved January 1, 2011 from http://www.asklyrics.com/display/Betty/ The_L_Word_Season_2_Theme_Song_Lyrics/372187.htm ii Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2005). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (R. Hurley, H. R. Lane, & M. Seem, Trans.). Minneapolis: Minnesota Press.

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CHAPTER 4 GRID FAILURE: METAPHORS OF SUBCULTURAL TIME AND SPACE Robert Payne American University of Paris

Abstract: This chapter explores a set of conceptual relations between ‘the grid,’ understood as an organizing structure for subjectivity and urban spaces, and subcultural identities and practices. In this context of metaphoric grid structures, the discussion is concerned with addressing the legibility and recognizability of instances of time or space that operate within subcultural practice to destabilize cultural and sexual norms. The discussion first reflects on the location and temporality of an example of street art in New York in terms of its skewed spatial relation to that city’s grid map, questioning how the work’s unsettling of conventional ideas of cultural production can speak to the spatial and temporal organization of place, property and propriety. In the second section, a reading of John Cameron Mitchell’s film Shortbus provides a means to imagining a time and space of queer possibility within the grid failure of short-circuit and black-out. Using the film’s literal rendering of these metaphors, the chapter argues that Mitchell’s depiction of a salon of queer subcultural convergence evades heteronormative narratives of time and space and instead highlights the priority and the productivity of the immeasurable momentary. Finally, building from the impetus of this concept of productive failure, the potential of queer theory to release academic subjects from the strictures imposed by narratives of professional progress and institutional affiliation is considered, ultimately questioning queer theory’s complicity in establishing further normative grids that may also stymie the legibility and recognizability of those operating at the margins of academia. Melissa Jane Hardie provides a response to this chapter. Keywords: Grid, grid failure, Shortbus, time, space, subcultural, queer, place, John Cameron Mitchell, short-circuit, heteronormative.

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chapter aims to explore a set of conceptual relations between ‘the grid,’ as an organizing structure for subjectivity and urban spaces, and subcultural identities and practices. In approaching the grid as a literal and figurative spatializing concept, I am examining the productive possibilities of metaphors to reorient our thinking on certain conventionalized and naturalized notions, particularly those of time and space. This in itself is not a new project; much scholarly attention has been paid to unpacking the inherent figuration of standardized views of time and space and therefore to the normative ideological packing of them. In part, my aim is to question what is at stake in trying to work with alternative metaphors or in reading certain literal phenomena alternatively as metaphors. I am concerned with the legibility and recognizability of instances of time or space that operate within subcultural practice to destabilize normative structures. In doing so, I am following the lead of Judith Jack Halberstam (2005) in her project of Kerry H. Robinson and Cristyn Davies (Eds) All rights reserved - © 2012 Bentham Science Publishers

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disrupting normative constructions of time and space which necessarily marginalize the recognizability of queer and subcultural production. In particular, I attempt to take up Halberstam’s call to recognition of the “strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices” that she argues characterize how queer subjects operate beyond normative modes of being (p. 1). Also drawing on Michel Foucault’s (1978) notion of the “grid of intelligibility” as a diagram of power, and Michel de Certeau’s (1984) attempt to illuminate tactics of resistance within this model of control, I will discuss two examples of grid failure, the temporality and spatiality of which might offer openings of queer subcultural possibility. As discussed by Certeau and others, the urban grid system of New York and other cities provides a structural model that risks totalizing social and cultural regulation of urban spaces and their inhabitants. My approach to these two instances of grid failure is therefore an attempt to prise open the rigid lines of the urban grid in order to illuminate queer spatial juxtapositions and strange temporalities unacknowledged in normative accounts of place. I first reflect on the location of an example of street art in New York in terms of its skewed spatial relation to that city’s grid map, questioning how the work’s unsettling of conventional ideas of cultural production can speak to the spatial and temporal organization of place. In the second section, a reading of the film Shortbus provides a means to imagining a time and space of queer possibility within the grid failure of short-circuit and blackout. In taking this somewhat meandering approach, I am inspired by Halberstam’s description of her own recent work as a project in which she “asks little questions, settles for less than grandiose answers, speculates without evidence, and finds insights in eccentric and unrepresentative archives” (cited in Dinshaw et al., 2007, p. 181). While the texts I discuss may be linked only by geography and by conceptual relation to forms of grid structure, I hope not to work to reinstall the primacy of the grid but to borrow something of Halberstam’s critical audacity to find a way out of grid logic. The skewed edge of the grid It’s around 1 a.m. and I’m sitting in the front window at Florent—the New York City institution of late-night dining and drinking on Gansevoort Street in the Meatpacking District. The place is full. I’m on a date with The Russian (whom I realize I’ve unconsciously nicknamed in homage to Sex and the City). We’re both drinking cosmopolitans. Many of the other patrons are also gay male urban types although the crowd is somewhat mixed. We look out across the street at several meatpacking premises. In a few hours they will come to life, as truckloads of carcasses arrive and

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truckloads of packed meatgoods are despatched. The smell of raw meat, already faintly noticeable in the street’s atmosphere, will intensify. Throughout this time, a steady human traffic will also move through this street and those around it. People leaving nearby bars and nightclubs will carouse, stumble and clip-clop their way along the cobblestoned streets into cabs, to the subway and into the night. Others will be coming to or from work. Many of them will take refuge in this diner. On a wall on one of the meatworks directly across from where we sit is a large piece of street art, standing out strikingly from its grimy grey and graffiti tag-covered surrounds. It is a paste-up—a graphic head-andshoulders illustration of a woman in hijab, printed on a large sheet of paper and pasted to the wall. It is boldly monochromatic and beautifully detailed. The woman stares back at us, unmoved and even glamorous—a strong, penetrating return gaze. It may be a look of accusation or judgment, perhaps one of defiance. Like the eyes of the Mona Lisa following the viewer around the room, she will not turn away. When I look at the work close up, I notice that it has been modified by hand. Someone has written their tag on the woman’s forehead, and with the same coloured marker both eyes have been crossed out and four vertical lines like stitches have been drawn across her lips. Closer up again, a faint Hitler moustache is noticeable. These dialogic, even oppositional inscriptions of gender and ethnicity seem to constitute the face as an ironic reminder of US post-9/11 surveillance and cultural hegemony. She is neither exactly the face of the repressed “Arab Other” (Poynting et al., 2004) nor of stereotypical menace but represents the assertion of a new politics of visibility from a space of marginality. Several months later, a colleague and I decide to use my photograph of this artwork in a publication we’re working on. Hoping to be able to correctly acknowledge the artist, I start to research the work and who might have produced it. But a number of other, more theoretically interesting enquiries start to take over. How appropriate is the concept of unitary authorship for this kind of work, given the possibly concealed conditions in which it was produced and the modifications made to it possibly later and possibly by someone else? Whose property is it, and of what kind? We want to respect the intellectual property of the artist or artists but has the work itself trespassed upon the legal property of its physical location? Does one take precedence over the other? Before long, I succeed in my quest of attribution, but the identity of the artist now seems overly to fix the work’s interpretive possibilities. I start to think about temporality as it relates to the production and longevity of street art. The semi-permanence of paste-ups challenges accepted notions of the preservation of artworks as intact and long-lasting objects. Their exhibition in public space opens them to possibilities of damage, decay and unauthorized modification; in other words, to an

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indefinite continuity of incompleteness. When, therefore, is their time of production? And if it can be assumed that much street art is produced clandestinely, outside the frame of public surveillance—that it seems just to appear, as if overnight—by what logic can these fugitive moments be measured? The Meatpacking District has undergone significant economic and cultural transformations in recent history, as no doubt attested by my own cosmosipping presence in the neighbourhood that night and many other occasions of shopping and dining. Magazine articles and tourist guidebooks partly lament and partly celebrate the fact that key elements of the area’s gritty history have been all but forgotten in the flurry of warehouse conversions and high-end boutique and restaurant openings during the last ten or so years. It is now, they say, echoing Sex and the City, one of New York’s ‘hippest’ neighbourhoods. Once dominated by meatworks, fewer and fewer continue to operate there. A number of significant venues of queer subcultural nightlife have shut down, including a famous S&M club and a men’s leather bar, among others. Also mostly gone is the street trade of transgender sex workers, for which the area was, until very recently, also well known. In this sort of account of local transformation, the hegemony of capitalist interests effects a wholesale takeover of older working class and subcultural investments in the area, particularly in this case by leveraging these very forms of cultural capital to give the area its market edge. The possibility for ongoing expressions of opposition or resistance—concurrent with that which is opposed or resisted, or arising in the future—is easily overlooked, but especially when viewed only through the selective temporal frame which, as Halberstam (2005, p. 7) has argued, constructs the inevitable progress of capital accumulation. Rather than a process of cultural erasure taking place, the neighbourhood’s mix is perhaps more indicative of a postmodern spatial juxtaposition in which various activities and industries sit alongside one another, albeit with shifting boundaries and mutual tensions. But following Halberstam’s critique of postmodern geography, only by paying attention to the temporalities which construct understandings of a space—by what temporal logic it is produced as a particular kind of space—can we successfully begin to redraw normative mappings (pp. 9–10). The subcultural practice of the paste-up may offer a useful lead here, in that it can be interpreted as a metonymy for overlapping temporalities—for the semi-permanent, palimpsestic cultural layering of space. The indefinite incompleteness of an artwork that continues to be altered by new hands suggests a co-productivity open-ended in authorial and temporal terms.

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Without the overt claims to commercial or civic interests of an advertising billboard, retail signage or city notice, the paste-up contributes to a semiotic production of space on behalf of less visible and less authorized interests. Like other graffiti, however, it may be no less a territorial claim, but one expressed within a subcultural economy unsanctioned and unrecognized by dominant commercial or civic structures. In these ways, the paste-up visibly instantiates Certeau’s (1984) theory of everyday culture as spatial practice, as the tactical appropriation of institutionalized place. Like Certeau’s examples of reading as poaching and walking in the city, street art offers a means of resistance to cultural dominance through individualized practices of evasion: “multiform, resistant, tricky and stubborn procedures that elude discipline without being outside the field in which it is exercised” (p. 96). The multiple implications of appropriation are of special interest to me in the context of street art’s unstable relation to ideas of property. The paste-up is an appropriation of public space and of private property, as well as an expression of intellectual property whose public location and material modification mean it necessarily relinquishes unitary creative ownership. Questions of the propriety of appropriation are equally relevant here, in terms of how subcultural practices may challenge established ‘proper’ uses of space, ‘proper’ adherence to law, ‘proper’ acknowledgment of morality and ethics. Certeau’s terminology of the ‘proper’ (propre) situates a convergence of meanings in relation to the propriety and property of place, where the stability and structure of proper place is distinct from the individualized and tactical practice of space. Adopting the phenomenological terms of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Certeau describes these appropriations of place as “practices that are foreign to the ‘geometrical’ or ‘geographical’ space of visual, panoptic, or theoretical constructions” and that belong to “an ‘anthropological,’ poetic and mythic experience of space” (p. 93). In this view, a “migrational, or metaphorical, city thus slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city” (Certeau, 1984, p. 93). In their use of this theory, Bryan Reynolds and Joseph Fitzpatrick (1999) outline Certeau’s complication of the space/place distinction where he discusses cartography as the geographical rendering and fixing in knowledge of particular uses of space. They argue that the official sanction of the map-making process involves a proprietorial over-writing of earlier spatial practices: The forgetting of these original spatializations, their erasure from the increasingly geographical (and geometrical) maps, makes it possible for maps to become arbiters of what is “proper”—makes it possible, in short, for spatial constructions to be perceived as “places.” (Reynolds and Fitzpatrick, 1999, p. 69)

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The point at which an “original” use of space becomes a “proper” marking of place is clearly one of political and ideological contingency. Certeau distinguishes between the narrative basis of early cartographic methods, reflecting stories told about personal orientations to space, and the ways in which later conventions act as “tables of legible results” (p. 121). On whose terms are these results tabulated, within what logic, and to whom are they legible? What happens to those forgotten spatializations erased from view, and particularly in the present discussion those produced by queer and subcultural subjects? What traces remain and how might they recognizably re-emerge? Reynolds and Fitzpatrick go on to suggest the concept of “transversal power” as a means to throwing hegemonic structures into crisis. Their reading of Certeau begins with the idea that the plural, cultural practice of space is a “‘cutting across’ of boundaries” or a series of tactical movements of “transversality” (Reynolds and Fitzpatrick, 1999, p. 63). Such practices directly challenge the ideologically driven apparatuses, emblematized by the cartographic impulse, which aim to contain individuals within the bounds of ‘subjective territory.’ Each subject belongs in his or her proper place, mapped on to what Foucault (1978) calls “a grid of intelligibility of the social order” (p. 93). Transversality explicitly acts to cut or cross the lines of geometrically normalized subjectivity, “to deviate from the vertical, hierarchicalizing and horizontal, homogenizing assemblages of any organizational social structure” (Reynolds and Fitzpatrick, 1999, p. 74). Because transversal territory “contains all the possibilities that are precluded or excluded” by the apparatus of subjective territory, Reynolds and Fitzpatrick argue that it may be shaped by an ethics of remembering or “anamnesis”: “a recollection of the spatial practices that the creation of maps attempted to forget” (p. 74). When looking at a street map of Manhattan, two main things about its arrangement of urban space become more visible. First, like in many other cities around the world, the vast majority of streets are organized into a strict geometric grid. In place in New York since the early nineteenth century, this system divides the city into rational geographical and conceptual blocks and imposes a rigid control over such things as the flow of traffic and the shape of buildings, with resulting implications for the city’s commercial and social life. Paula Geyh points out how this grid also operates to regulate in a theoretical sense. The “intelligibility” that it facilitates “in terms of both navigation and surveillance” works to normalize and discipline the life of the city (Geyh, 2006, n.p.). In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, the grid is an effect of the “striation” of space: “a process of capture of flows of all kinds, populations, commodities or commerce, money or capital, etc.” (cited in Geyh, 2006, n.p.). In their distinction

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between striated and smooth space, Deleuze and Guattari (2004) conceive the former as produced by dynamics of “allocation” according to “determinate intervals” and the latter by “distribution” in open space according to “frequencies” (p. 530). In contrast to smooth spaces such as the sea, they write, “the city is the striated space par excellence” (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004, p. 531). The striation of space may operate similarly to the apparatus of power that is the grid in the work of Foucault, especially in how social subjects are positioned by these operations. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault (1977) in fact uses the word “distributions” to describe disciplinary techniques which construct individuals as “docile bodies” within a particular space, including “enclosure,” “partitioning,” the creation of spaces as “functional,” and classification by “rank” (pp. 141–146). The regulated placement of subjects within mechanized, disciplinary spaces aims to ensure their productivity but also their intelligibility as distinct kinds of subject. As Certeau (1984) writes of Foucault’s theory, such discipline involves “the miniscule and ubiquitously reproduced move of ‘gridding’…a visible space in such a way as to make its occupants available for observation and ‘information’” (pp. 46–47). Panoptic control is the most well-known realization of this theory, including its application in various spaces not limited to prisons, and perhaps encompassing the self-regulation of bodies within the urban grid. Moreover, as Foucault elaborates in History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (1978), the “grid of intelligibility” that mechanizes and disperses power as “a substrate of force relations” works to regulate the discursive production of sexual subjects as a question of “social order” (p. 93). Judith Butler (1990) underscores the centrality of gendered subjects to this order as part of her extension of the concept of the grid of intelligibility in Gender Trouble’s formative discussion of “the heterosexual matrix.” A second feature of the street map of Manhattan, noticeable at a few points and often at the edges of the island, is where the grid structure is loosened or becomes skewed. Parallel lines start to merge or cross. Lines intersect at other than ninety-degree angles. Straight lines turn a dog-leg. The Meatpacking District is one part of the map that appears almost to be falling off the grid or perhaps tacked on as an incomplete afterthought. Like the neighbouring West Village, it is a skewed edge that represents the failure of the grid to achieve complete regularity. In making these observations, I want to avoid totalizing any actual or figurative effects that the grid structure may have on the majority of Manhattan’s urban space or its inhabitants; similarly, I want to avoid singling out the Meatpacking District as somehow unique only because of its spatial orientation to this grid. Of course subcultural formations are not limited to irregular parts of the map, and are as likely to flourish in exactly the areas that might appear to be in

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alignment with sociocultural norms. What I want to explore, however, is how the idea of a skewed edge of the grid—a vulnerability in the grid’s rigidity—might metaphorize an alternative way to conceive urban space and particularly the non-normative practices, cultures and subjects that inhabit it less visibly or legibly. Where the regularity of a grid structure demands subjects within it be recognized according to normative modes of intelligibility, as the more recent work of Butler (2004) has underscored, how can this systemization of identity and culture be thrown into crisis? Butler writes: The question of what it is to be outside the norm poses a paradox for thinking, for if the norm renders the social field intelligible and normalizes that field for us, then being outside the norm is in some sense being defined still in relation to it. (2004, p. 42)

That the subject is inaugurated in relation to a field of norms, as Butler argues, rather than prior to the imposition of norms, and may performatively reiterate the normalization of this field, could suggest a kind of gridlock. The possibility of producing queer space beyond this field and without a necessarily secondary or appropriative relation to the grid becomes a significant theoretical challenge. But following Halberstam (2005), alternative temporalities emerge here as a means to redrawing the hegemonic mappings of space that privilege “proper” places and actively forget queer and subcultural identities and practices, which we might call the “improper” (and here I’m also drawn to the implications of the French propre being used to mean “clean”). While the spatial juxtaposition of meatworks, high fashion, fine dining and queer sex cultures characterizes the Meatpacking District, the unequal recognition of the timing of these productions of space directly affects how the location comes to be known in official discourses. The “proper,” writes Certeau (1984), “is a victory of space over time” whereas the tactics of the improper depend on seizing momentary opportunities, rendering them fleeting and pragmatic and perhaps evasive of authority (p. xix). Street art, for instance, may often be produced under the cover of darkness, beyond the normative temporal frame of regular daily commerce or in moments stolen from it. Public sex cultures may flourish in spaces shunned by heteronormative propriety and outside of what is sometimes called ‘family time.’ And as a result, both may fail to register in conventional histories of place. Elaborating on Reynolds and Fitzpatrick’s (1999) concept, anamnesis suggests the possibility of recognizing and restoring the various subcultural layers overwritten by the grid-map of the proper. This remembering of the cultural forgotten involves a disruption of proper histories of place which have necessarily been written selectively, working to exclude the improper. More pressingly, though, anamnesis might require expanding the

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temporality of the momentary so that what must be recognized as full and significant queer and subcultural productions is not squeezed into a normative historical account of place as mere blips in time. Halberstam’s (2005) conception of “subcultural historiography” is one such temporal reframing. As she writes in relation to examples of musical subcultures such as queer punk and drag king boy bands, the “project of subcultural historiography demands that we look at the silences, the gaps, and the ruptures in the spaces of performance, and that we use them to tell disorderly narratives” that can upset “neat models of narrative history” (Halberstam, 2005, p. 187). In the second half of this paper, I will focus on one film’s representation of an improper sexual counter-public, depicted as occurring very much outside of easily definable time and space. In particular, I will elaborate on the metaphoric productivity of the film’s representation of a different kind of grid failure—black-out—as a precious capsule of queer possibility, timeless and heterotopian. While it can be argued that the film ultimately acquiesces to conventions of orderly narrative, its illumination and celebration of the disorderly and the improper offers hope for queer futures in the face of normative pressures. Short-circuiting the grid In a much cited passage, Certeau (1984) opens his essay ‘Walking in the City’ with a description of the effect of viewing the grid of Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center. Such an elevation of the viewer allows him or her a kind of critical distance, he suggests, transforming “the bewitching world by which one was ‘possessed’ into a text that lies before one’s eyes.” The viewer assumes the position of “a solar Eye, looking down like a god,” thereby achieving what Certeau characterizes as an age-old “desire to see the city [which] preceded the means of satisfying it” (1984, p. 92). As discussed earlier, Certeau employs this spectatorial position to draw a distinction between the rationalized machinery and strategy of “the Concept-city,” and out of view, way down below, the “contradictory movements that counterbalance and combine themselves outside the reach of panoptic power” (p. 95). His direct reading of Foucault’s theories of mechanisms of discipline invites us to recognize everyday cultural productions that transverse the lines of normative grids. The opening sequence of John Cameron Mitchell’s 2006 film Shortbus takes a somewhat different aerial view of New York, depicting the city as clearly post-9/11 and in a sense post-theoretical. The film steps into the symbolic space opened up by the fall of the World Trade Center, a space prefigured in Certeau’s (1984) statement that “[t]he Concept-city is

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decaying” (p. 95), but also in his likening of the 110th floor spectator to Icarus “ignor[ing] the devices of Daedalus in mobile and endless labyrinths below” (p. 92). By illuminating individual narratives of subcultural, underground involvement, Shortbus explores some of the emotional implications of the US’s own Icarian fall from audacious heights, and also urban sex cultures in the aftermath of the infamous ‘clean up’ of New York as led by former mayor Giuliani (Berlant and Warner, 2005). Beginning with a close-up of the face of the Statue of Liberty—popularly conceived as visage of hope for the US nation and so many immigrants—the camera pans across a model of the cityscape, as if in free flight, into one then two unidentified apartment windows, and again over the tops of buildings to the site of the destroyed World Trade Center and an adjacent hotel room. Between flights, the viewer is witness to three moments of explicit erotic coupling in these private spaces: a man and a woman have noisy and vigorous sex in various parts of their apartment, including on a piano; a dominatrix lays out an array of sex toys and begins to flog her young male client until he ejaculates on a Jackson Pollock copy on the wall behind him; and a man videos himself auto-fellating while another man watches through a telephoto lens from his apartment across the street. The camera movement in this sequence works as a somewhat conventional filmic device to suggest links between disparate characters and narratives in a large urban setting; nonetheless, it is also this movement which disperses the characters from a central point of reference as localized individuals rather than idealized subjects of a panoptic gaze. As the sequence continues, sharp editing and non-diegetic music (Anita O’Day singing ‘Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t My Baby’) draw each of the scenes into a joint momentum, rhythmically pushing the encounters to an inevitable, simultaneous climax (and only male climax, it is worth pointing out). The characters are in this way woven into a common narrative examination of sexuality, especially in relation to disappointment, failure and alienation: the three opening sexual climaxes are all followed by their participants experiencing some negative affective aftermath. And so the film’s narrative convergence of the sexually disappointed, failed and alienated is achieved through their attendance at the underground club Shortbus. As its ambiguously gendered host Justin Bond explains the name, “You’ve heard of the big yellow school bus? Well, this is the short one. It’s a salon for the gifted and challenged.” The euphemistic inclusiveness of these descriptors marks the club as prototypically if not didactically queer, and the film indeed depicts a space where bodies, identities, genders and sexualities intermingle with no recourse to heteronormative propriety. Most obviously in the Sex Not Bombs room, the viewer is witness to an orgiastic display of various kinds of unsimulated sexual acts being performed by various kinds of bodies. “It’s not your average Friday night sort of event,”

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deadpans host Justin, “but people seem to be enjoying themselves.” The hanging question of post-9/11 hope which is central to the film’s characterization and emotional tenor is explicitly addressed in this scene when Justin attributes an apparent influx of young people to the city and the Shortbus salon to the event of 9/11: “It’s the only real thing that’s ever happened to them.” This account alters the conventional queer urban migration narrative that Halberstam (2005) critiques in her essay ‘The Brandon Archive’ and particularly the theme of metropolitan ‘coming out’ as the arrival at a point of subjective authenticity: “the full expression of the sexual self in relation to a community of other gays/lesbians/queers” (p. 36). For the salon’s somewhat jaded host, authenticity is instead located in loss and crisis—in a sense, the failure of the metropolis. The Shortbus salon’s appeal is clearly due to the alternative social and sexual possibilities it offers; it constructs a time and space apart from any sense of the outside. As such, the narrative trajectory of the three main protagonists with whom the film opened is now more evidently a movement away from the ideological construction of sexual disappointment, failure and alienation and towards a space of queer relief and potential. And crucially, this is a space located less rather than more visibly within the metropolitan context—a counter-narrative to the “metronormativity” that Halberstam (2005) argues produces a “conflation of ‘urban’ and ‘visible’ in many normalizing narratives of gay/lesbian subjectivity ” (p. 36). Gay/lesbian or not, each main character sits uneasily with regard to the heteronormative structure of personal relations that they feel nevertheless binds them. Sofia, a couples counsellor, becomes obsessed with achieving her first orgasm in order, she believes, to feel more correctly female and to save her marriage to Rob (who himself cannot express his desire to be an S&M submissive). Severin, the over-orgasmic dominatrix, is unable to find satisfactory human connection and longs to take a year out by herself just to make art. And former hustler James struggles to conform to his boyfriend Jamie’s model of monogamy, and the couple starts to include a third young man into their relationship. While the Shortbus salon localizes a sense of opportunity for all of these characters to overcome some kind of personal challenge, and while it is narratively constituted as a central hub through which their lives come to intersect, it is also depicted as a marginal and decentralized space in relation to its urban and social surrounds. The club is filmed mostly in interior shots which work to cloister it from the outside world, particularly in a scenographic sense through a lack of windows and exterior lighting. It is an exterior shot that first introduces the viewer to the club, via Sofia’s first visit, but the venue appears as little more than a closed door into an old warehouse in a dark, semi-industrial Brooklyn street somewhere not far

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from the Brooklyn Bridge. In other words, despite the inclusion of this landmark in the first flying-transition shot that brings us to the club, Mitchell deliberately avoids more specific localizing references in dialogue or image, in order, I suggest, to propose Shortbus’ inability to be recognized on the grid : invisible to the radar. The film’s refusal to precisely map the club feeds into a wider shroud of unrecognizability, especially in terms of what I have called the improperness of practices and identities that find a home within it. In this way, the club is self-consciously depicted as a queer space in the sense outlined by Halberstam (2005): a venue of “place-making practices within postmodernism in which queer people engage,” and one “enabled by the production of queer counterpublics ” (p. 6). As Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner (2005) have written in their discussion of sexual cultures and counter-publics in New York and other cities, queer culture “has almost no institutional matrix for its counterintimacies” and depends instead on “ephemeral elaborations in urban space and print culture” (p. 203). It occurs, we might say in following, off or between the lines of the heteronormative grid of intelligibility that governs dominant contemporary cultures. And while it is true that queer sexual cultures are frequently relegated to marginal times and spaces—or recognized only as marginal—what counts as marginal or ephemeral and by what temporal and spatial logic it is measured are pressing questions. Halberstam proposes that queer subcultural involvement challenges the heteronormative “institutions of intimacy” at the center of Berlant and Warner’s (2005) essay “by delaying the onset of reproductive adulthood” (p. 153). Queer ephemera, spaces and counter-publics need not be recognized only as marginal, therefore, if an estrangement from normative temporalities is attempted, if fugitive moments of subcultural production are not automatically viewed as a secondary appropriation of normative time but as primary to their own temporal logic. A queer subcultural anamnesis such as this aims to restore to wider and clearer view the temporal layers of spatial production that have been forgotten or overwritten, considered inconsistent with ‘proper’ historical accounts. So it is with this idea of the expansion of the momentary in mind that I want also to suggest the Shortbus salon’s provision of a queer temporality in addition to its construction of queer space. Most obviously, queer time is evident in conjunction with the film’s representation of the club as a capsule of queer space: what takes place inside occurs out of step with the outside world, out of time. Each of the main characters is shown to live partly according to normative temporal logics of work; that is, they have day jobs, but their presence in the club is not depicted as secondary to these conventional schedules. Rather, because the club is centralized as their narrative hub, it predominates the temporality proposed by the film. As

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Halberstam (2005) writes of queer subcultures, the club allows its participants “to believe that their futures can be imagined according to logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience— namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death” (p. 2). Moreover, Mitchell’s direction of the club scenes allows them what I would call a spaciousness of time: a sense of languor untroubled and unrushed by the ticking of clocks elsewhere. In particular, the final, joyous club sequence that ends the film expands an accidental moment in time into a wide-open culmination of the narrative development towards queer hope and possibility. This ultimate scene is foreshadowed earlier in the film by three brief instances of minor relief of pressure for key characters, coinciding with ‘brown-outs’ or threatened disruptions to the city’s power supply. This device punctuates the narrative at key points in character development, and intimates future crisis. The first occurs during James and Jamie’s counselling session with Sofia. Jamie has left the room so James can speak to Sofia in confidence, but he rushes back in when the lights dim and the electricity crackles. Sofia explains to Jamie that they “were making some progress” in his absence, which leads to his petulance about also wanting “a breakthrough.” Sofia slaps Jamie and then apologizes by disclosing that she is “pre-orgasmic.” The second brown-out happens in the Shortbus club, coinciding with Severin’s first attempt to connect with Sofia, and James and Jamie’s selection of the young Ceth as their threesome partner. Ceth himself has just shared an intimate moment with the elderly former mayor of New York, whose presence in the club seems to be part of an attempt to selfredeem after a career capitulating to heteronormative pressures. The third brown-out accompanies Sofia’s violent release of frustration after unsuccessful sexual experiments in the club with Severin, with Justin, and with a vibrating egg. And a final brown-out leading into a total city-wide black-out occurs as Severin finally achieves a human connection with Rob who has become her sub, as James allows his stalker Caleb to anally penetrate him after Caleb rescues him from a suicide attempt, as Jamie watches the suicide video James has been compiling, and as Sofia begins to imagine her orgasm. I am critical of a problematic teleology that seems to structure the three central character arcs and has the effects of equating Severin’s sex work with human disconnection, attributing Sofia’s problems to being preorgasmic, and virtually reducing James’s imperviousness to love to his refusal to let anyone anally penetrate him. Each of the brown-outs is included to indicate a gradual release of pressure that will finally culminate in the characters’ wholeness, a device which risks deferring to normative explanatory narratives. But the black-out scene that does eventuate,

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however, resists the temptation to resolve these trajectories categorically and instead depicts the characters in a time and space of temporary but not finite contentment, pregnant with the possibilities of queer becoming rather than succeeding. If narrative coherence is achieved, and some may argue it is, it is one that renders less coherent the relationships propelling the narrative. The club’s enclave of queer liberatory and celebratory potential is confirmed in this final sequence in an elongated moment of almost naïve simplicity as if out of time and space, independent of the grid. As candles are lit and acoustic music played, our main characters appear to find hope and understanding in new erotic combinations, while we imagine chaos, confusion and inconvenience ensue elsewhere. Finally, after several long minutes of this calm and productive release, the extended black-out scene achieves a bizarre emotional peak when a marching band appears out of nowhere. The club erupts in the rousing chorus “We all get it in the end,” and a song that opened the scene as a quiet elegy to disappointment becomes a noisy, ironic anthem to non-normative sex. The black-out scene is Mitchell’s fictionalized version of New York’s actual power grid failure in 2003, which removed all electrical supply from the city and other parts of the northeastern US for several days. Understood as a massive short-circuiting of the grid, this event is figuratively resignified in Shortbus as opportunity rather than crisis. Like the skewed edge of Manhattan’s street grid which I take as a conceptual emblem of the productive possibilities of systemic vulnerability, the opportunity of blackout is in its prising open of a small space of the unexplored that may be suggestive of alternative being. My reading aims once again to reimagine instances of the literal within an alternative metaphorical framework and within a logic inspired by Halberstam’s troubling of heteronormative temporalities. In the face of conceptions of family and reproductive time, clear distinctions between youth and adulthood, productive life schedules and conventional narratives of progress, Mitchell’s film isolates and inflates a moment of systemic failure that offers possibilities of challenge to all of these structures. It recodes black-out as illumination although not completely as clarification, bringing to visibility a queer subcultural scene whose recognizability has been hindered by grid logic. In doing so, the film contributes to the project of queer counter-publics imagined by Berlant and Warner (2005): “to support forms of affective, erotic, and personal living that are public in the sense of accessible, available to memory, and sustained through collective activity” (p. 203). Conclusion Asked in a roundtable discussion to account for the turn to concepts of temporality in her work, Halberstam (2007) traced moments of personal

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experience in which she felt at odds with normative timing and narratives. She writes: Queer time for me is the dark nightclub, the perverse turn away from the narrative coherence of adolescence—early adulthood—marriage —reproduction—child rearing—retirement—death, the embrace of late childhood in place of early adulthood or immaturity in place of responsibility. It is a theory of queerness as a way of being in the world and a critique of the careful social scripts that usher even the most queer among us through major markers of individual development and into normativity. (cited in Dinshaw et al., 2007, p. 182)

I reflect on my own vexed relation to normative temporalities in writing this paper: an institutionally unaffiliated academic struggling to make peace with the ambivalence of not being and perhaps not wanting to be folded into a normalized narrative of professional future; where my failure so far to be successfully plotted on the academic job grid feels far more like crisis than opportunity; where taking time out to be in New York must be rationalized to myself and others as career development; and where I come to recognize an increasing attachment to inhabiting timelessness in dark nightclubs. The inspiration of Halberstam’s work is to invoke theoretical challenges as alternative ways of being and doing more than just of thinking. And yet, as subjects ‘passionately attached’ to the grids of academic discourse and theoretical convention, as Butler might have it, the possibilities of taking up such a challenge seem unevenly distributed among subjects, the stakes of engagement unevenly pitched. A further challenge of queer theorization must therefore be to recode failure as productive and crisis as opportunity— that the being and doing of queer academic subjectivity not be rendered intelligible only according to the same grid structure that queer theory aims to dismantle. Postscript More than two years after the first version of this chapter was written, I officially became an institutionally affiliated academic. Not merely tenured to the institution, as the US university system would label me, I now benefit from the unusual stability offered by French labor law under which I signed a contrat à durée indéterminée—literally, a contract of indeterminate duration. This was an unavoidably validating step; my crisis of professional legitimacy appears over, my failure indeterminately left behind. And yet what kind of intelligibility have I signed up for, what kind of subject am I recognized to be, and for what duration, when I find myself folded into the demands of administrative structures not to generate open-ended opportunities for intellectual growth but to tighten and replicate grids of normative academic

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measurement? “You’re good at grids!” This was the tongue-in-cheek plea for solidarity from my colleague in a meeting today, both of us hijacked into mastering a discourse of ‘learning objectives,’ ‘assessment instruments’ and ‘metrics of measurement.’ Cleansed of the messy productivity of failure, the short bus no longer welcomes passengers here.

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REFERENCES Berlant, L., & Warner, M. (2005). Sex in public. In M. Warner, Public and counterpublics. New York: Zone Books. Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (2004). Undoing gender. New York: Routledge. Certeau, M. de (1984). The practice of everyday life. (S. Rendall, Trans.). Berkeley: University of California Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2004). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. (B. Massumi, Trans.). London: Continuum. Dinshaw, C. et al. (2007). Theorizing queer temporalities: a roundtable discussion. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 13(2-3), 177-195. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. (A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Pantheon. Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality (Vol. 1). (R. Hurley, Trans.). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Geyh, P. (2006). Urban free flow: a poetics of Parkour. M/C Journal, 9(3). Retrieved April 8, 2008, from http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/06-geyh.php Halberstam, J. (2005). In a queer time and place: Transgender bodies, subcultural lives. New York: New York University Press. Mitchell, J. (Director). (2006). Shortbus. [DVD]. United States: Hopscotch Entertainment. Poynting, S. et al. (2004). Bin Laden in the suburbs: Criminalising the Arab other. Sydney: Institute of Criminology. Reynolds, B., & Fitzpatrick, J. (1999). The transversality of Michel De Certeau: Foucault’s panoptic discourse and the cartographic impulse. Diacritics, 29(3), 63-80.

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RESPONSE IN PRAISE OF SHALLOW VIEWING Melissa Jane Hardie The University of Sydney

They shut me up in Prose— As when a little Girl They put me in the Closet— Because they liked me “still”— Still! Could themself have peeped— And seen my Brain—go round— They might as wise have lodged a Bird For Treason—in the Pound— Himself has but to will And easy as a Star Abolish his Captivity— And laugh—No more have I— Emily Dickinson

1.

knots

Robert Payne’s essay ‘Grid Failure’ offers multiple scenarios for the failure of grids. Orienting his work through an assemblage of New York City locations Payne takes his hint from Halberstam’s venture to find “insight in eccentric and unrepresentative archives” (Halberstam, 2005, p. 2). Payne’s essay draws attention to the way in which critical analyses of modes of control situate the grid as metaphor to speak of regulation, prohibition, normalization and totalization, adducing Foucault and Certeau in particular for their work in identifying logics of the grid against which Halberstam’s “strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices” (2005, p.1) move to queer time and space. Payne’s contemplation of “forgotten spatializations erased from view” pursues the metaphor of “transversality,” a politics of cutting across the “proper” construction of place within grid logic by interposing “tactical movements” which speak to that “plural, cultural practice of space” particularly prone to disrupt Foucault’s “grid of intelligibility of the social order.” Payne finds a concrete yet labile exemplification of these practices in the failed grid of New York City itself, an isolated city centred by a grid, yet one whose grid fails at the edges. This metaphor itself perfectly exemplifies the temporal disjunction of the logic of the grid, as well as its spatial realization: grid failure on the island of Manhattan archives the life of the island both before and after a logic of proper place has been imposed.

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Payne refers to Halberstam’s practice of “critical audacity” from which his paper will “borrow”; here we find an alternative genealogy that wrests imitation and inheritance from the logic of “family time” and reconfigures academic inheritance as only marginally generational and so marginally generative (with the ambiguity marginality implies). ‘Borrowing’ itself can be construed in this context as an act of affinity rather than as an ‘anxiety of influence’; to borrow implies reciprocity (both in the act of loan and the act of return), a transitory acquisition of an item, style, or attitude that is neither taken on as an authentic posture nor subject to the logic of oedipal completion; borrowing implies mimetic contact where the logic of the gift is supplemented by a gesture that, precisely, situates the loaned attribute in a certain temporal and spatial relation that implies grid failure. The Oxford English Dictionary defines audacity as “boldness, daring, intrepidity; confidence; bold departure from the conventional form; daring originality.” From Thomas Browne it derives another definition, “boldness in the concrete, a bold creature.” Such a definition performs that slippage between the literal and the figurative that Payne presses throughout his paper, a kind of oxymoronic collapse of the abstract with the concrete that seeks to impress itself as metaphor precisely by recourse to a figuration of the literal. The co-axes of literal and figurative (denotative and connotative) signification fail to plot this audacity on their grid. Conjuring “boldness in the concrete” allows me to figure the personification of audacity not as a registration of subjective authenticity but as a way to speak to the practice of taking serious the “eccentric and unrepresentative.” This is not to fold all such spatial practices into a generalized discourse of subversion but to instance the topographical knottiness of what happens to the lines of grids when they come to tangle: they are impossible to flatten, although they may be, I will argue, shallow. The tangle Payne constructs is first encountered in the concrete form of the paste-up as an artwork that throws into relief the inherent instability of assignations of public and private space; authorship and its concomitant ethics and moralities; the impossibility of fixing the work of art. The pasteup exemplifies “boldness in the concrete,” a trespass that metaphorizes problems of time and space in a decidedly concrete (though not fixed) form. This exemplary citation is followed by an analysis of Shortbus, a film that proposes that grid failure, implicitly a symptom of the traumatized landscape of New York City post-9/11, itself constitutes a moment of potential liberation. My reading of the film would interpose another grid failure amongst those so meticulously detailed by Payne, the failure of the therapeutic frame, constituted as a grid by virtue of its dependence on a discrete segmentation of everyday life and whose failure is marked by the first of the brown-outs that will punctuate the film. Sofia, therapist for

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James and Jamie, responds to Jamie’s demands by slapping him, an exemplary instance of the dictum that “when you touch the patient, therapy is over,” (Ruddick, 2000, n.p.) though not the usual context in which this adage is invoked. The failed therapeutic grid finds its ‘audacious’ substitute, its almost literal metaphor, in the “the club as a capsule of queer space” (Payne), a quasitherapeutic location whose name, Shortbus, also makes ironic play out of the collectivity of a “salon of the gifted and challenged” (Mitchell, 2006). The ambiguous category ‘gifted and challenged,’ both singular and plural, cluster of attributes and list of participants, anchors a relationship between these two qualities as an essential revaluation of the paradox of queer audacity, creating a space of sexual practice outside the traditional therapeutic frame (strictly bound by place and time). At the same time, I would argue, the finale of the film, a frenetic and lengthy rendition of the anthem-like ‘We All Get It In The End,’ revises this original critique of the therapeutic frame not to offer a logic of substitution, but rather to re-install the practice of therapy, not as a technology of self-renovation but as a practice of resignation. Here hierarchies of position are radically undermined by the interposition of a more radical pedagogy, in which the ‘we’ encompasses all, the therapist and the therapized. The therapy does not end; it is up-ended, with analyst taking the position of labouring, insightseeking analysand and the analysands, singular and plural, gifted and challenged, offering a different space. Insight is generated anew in the failed grid, a grid where failure is neither the prelude nor the result of therapy, but its premise or enabling condition. Shortbus’ collegial crew, gifted and challenged, might be thought to allegorize the dilemma that confronts Freud in Civilization And Its Discontents (1930): the gift of the life instinct is beset by the challenge posed by the death drive. Shortbus thus poses a dilemma whose contours are more or less fixed in a grid, but so more or less suggestive of grid failure, by virtue of the fact that we ‘all get it in the end.’ This motto, then, might be read to embody an ethics of forestalled ‘insight,’ where the knowledge that the fixity of mortality generates failure (rather than merely being prone to it) is best encountered in a space where such an insight is both the condition of entry and profoundly excluded from contemplation; there’s no need to conjecture a future in which we will all ‘get in the end,’ nor a better, ‘enhanced’ future when we will all get ‘it’ in the end. You get there when you get it. You get it there. That’s what we ‘all get’ in the end: this sodomitical pun puts the full stop to the film’s queer space not by positing closure, improvement, containment, but rather solipsism: what we ‘get’ in the end is that there’s an end, and the

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end is all we get. This formulation can be prised open in two directions that will orient the remainder of my discussion: the direction of the gifted, and the direction of the challenged, categories that may come to be of particular interest when promiscuously inhabited. The pedagogy of this circle is radically non-hierarchical; in place of a system where teacher (analyst) is understood to relay in more or less persuasive style the insights the student desires, a mutual ignorance (simultaneously gift and challenge) redescribes the space as pedagogical and therapeutic. This redescription of pedagogical space, which I am adapting from Rancière’s amazing polemic The Ignorant Schoolmaster, frames it as limited in scope, oriented toward the recuperation of ‘lost’ space, and generated by spatial and temporal disarrangement that discards the reproduction of forms of explication and installs instead a shared will to learn. It brings into being the knotted moments of ‘queer time’ I will explore in the rest of the paper through two metaphoric instatements of space and time that refuse to lie flat: a metaphorics of shallow, and the figuration of audacious revenance. 2.

shallow

The short bus can be supplemented by another vehicle of transport, the SUV. During the North American winter of 2004 I was ensconced in Somerville, Massachusetts, passing my time as the on-leave partner of the Fannie Hearst Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University. We were subletting from a young couple who alibied their subscription to cable television by mentioning an interest in sports, specifically running. We were told that the cable had, of course, been cancelled in light of our arrival, and it would only be a short time before it would cease to be accessible in the apartment. This sad news prompted us to make hay while the sun shone and so, buried in the snowdrifts, in the shallow middle slice of a three storey house, we watched a lot of television and, when my girlfriend was at work, I watched a lot of television by myself. Our haymaking turned out to last the duration of our tenancy; each day I turned on the television expecting the cable to be off, but it never did go off. This was a curiously addicting phenomenon. Meanwhile the weather outside was bleak and so, with occasional forays to replenish supplies, I was ensconced in this cosy nook for a delicious couple of months. It was during this period of time suspended by anticipated loss that I ‘discovered’ the Law and Order franchise. I was, of course, familiar with its logo and its look, but I had not been a watcher of the show. That winter Law and Order was all over cable, as well as NBC, and you could watch a halfdozen episodes a day without too much fuss. In particular, I became

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attached to the repeats of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (SVU) on the cable channel USA; they were shown out of series order and often repeated over and over again. At first it took close observation of clothes, office furniture, title cards and small casting changes to distinguish between the first five seasons of the show, but after several weeks I was an adept. I could tell, for instance, which season I was watching by glancing at Mariska Hargitay’s hair or trousers (slack suit = season one; fluoro t-shirt = season 2); I became an aficionado of SVU; I became what is known as a ‘shallow viewer.’ ‘Shallow viewing’ is briefly defined at a webpage devoted to its practice as the art of watching an entire one-hour episode without following the plot because you are too busy (1) waiting for Elliot to put on jeans (2) panting as you wait for Fin’s all-too-brief scenes (3) hovering by the TV in case Alex and Olivia have a drool-worthy scene together. Shallow Viewing also allows us to watch upsetting, grisly episodes but spend several hours afterward dissecting outfits and hairstyles. (Television Without Pity, 2005)

To watch such a series as a ‘shallow viewer’ implies a tactic of transversality that promotes, in several crucial ways, another instance of ‘grid failure.’ At the level of plot, each episode produces a causal chain of events that requires close attention to follow, particularly as storylines, meant to jolt us with the introduction of the unexpected, become baroque concoctions of causality, contingency, fate, and paranoia serving to blanket the work of policing with ethical status. Shallow viewing interrupts these concocted relations. Watching repeats on cable in non-chronological order and against the progressive logic of the seasons similarly interrupts those careful impositions of grid logic that are integral to network scheduling. My experience of this temporality was haltingly spatialized in the inhabitation of this temporary home configured as ‘queer capsule’ by the vagaries of cable delivery. If my shallow viewing inaugurated an attempt to regain a sense of chronological order over a seemingly random spray of episodes, it became the locus of my viewing interest, and the series’ strategy of veiling disclosures about the status of its characters’ personal lives through a strategic evacuation of ‘the personal’ itself was its relevant feature. One of the characteristic features of the Law and Order franchise is a kind of blanket disinterest in the personal, as opposed to professional, lives of its characters. Few players in the original series or its spin-offs have more than a spotty backstory; they do not touch, as if their bodily constriction served as analogy to their devotion to duty. Special Victims Unit teases viewers with ambiguity in this area, making a feature of personal history that sporadically allows that ‘face’ of its detectives to encounter the ‘face’ of the

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special victim. Detectives of its fictional 16th Precinct have backstories that ‘motivate’ their desire to work these most ‘heinous’ of crimes; the female detective who becomes the affective focus of the series, Olivia Benson, was born as the result of her mother’s rape and so she is both in some senses a detective and a special victim. The very definition of ‘special victim’ is somewhat elastic; it seems to mean either a victim of sexual assault or a child victim, but as the seasons pass the detectives find themselves involved in everything under the sun, including ‘narco-terrorism,’ although somewhere there usually is a ‘special victim’ as springboard or MacGuffin. For ‘special victim,’ read ‘gifted and challenged.’ The ‘backstory’ of the detectives of the Special Victims Unit is typically offered as a form of trauma narrative: either an account of the trauma experience that is being repeated and revised by membership of the squad, or else of the trauma occasioned by working in the area of sexual assault and violence against children. It is evacuated of what might be called trivial content, ironically leaving available the space for shallow viewing. Shallow viewing can become, very easily, an epistemology of the closet; the circumspection which surrounds the disclosure of private lives conduces to a hermeneutical suspicion about just what it is those detectives are hiding, and in particular one preoccupation of shallow viewers of Law and Order is the purported lesbian relationship between Benson and her Assistant District Attorney (ADA), Alex Cabot, minutely disclosed in the aforementioned “drool-worthy scenes.” These scenes were typically “drool-worthy” precisely because they were circumscribed; they were not centred on explicitly erotic acts; they were, as a kind of antithesis to the sexually explicit scenarios of a film like Shortbus, scenes where the two actors stood close to one another, looked at one another, seemed to tilt in almost imperceptible movements towards each other’s bodies. By season five, it seemed that props were being exchanged so that both characters, for instance, were seen wearing identical necklaces, a scarf worn by Benson in one episode was worn by Cabot in a different episode; a scene where Cabot is discovered on a date with a defence attorney incited attention because Benson’s facial fury in response to this spectacle (diegetically generated by a contempt for defence attorneys) equally reads as a blast of wild envy, resentment or jealousy. The internet television website Television Without Pity (TwoP) was the epicentre of my shallow viewing in 2004, and when I stumbled across it I was astounded to discover that other people were watching SVU in the same way as me. At that time TwoP hosted a lively discussion of the show called ‘Law and Order: Sports Utility Vehicle.’ Before its buyout by Bravo in 2007, TwoP was a pretty interesting site: strictly moderated, highly engaged, its contributors lavishing attention on minutiae and walking a

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queer line between digression and perseveration. One critique of the site described it as a place for people who give way too large a crap about certain television shows to spend yet more hours of their bleary-eyed lives discussing those TV shows. Televisionwithoutpity.com is like a gathering of medieval theology students (the less-bright ones) cantilevered in the 21st-century and discussing, not how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but what the shooting of Santos at the end of last season portends for the upcoming season of “Ugly Betty.” (Moher, 2007, n.p.)

A haven for the gifted and challenged, the “less-bright ones,” the digressive space of shallow viewing is metaphorized through temporal and spatial dislocation: giving “too large a crap,” these medieval subjects are “cantilevered” into the present with archaic obsessive habits intact. Moher’s comment presupposes that what draws the viewer to the site is plot anticipation, but this is the only aspect of his critique that reads wrong to me; my experience of the SUV/SVU thread was not of narrative anticipation but of perseveration over detail, incident, affect; discussion was dominated by ornate elaborations of moments where shallow appeared, including, for instance, a persistent and amused ‘misreading’ of the bonding between detective and special victim as a form of shallow, transgressively perverse, and a compilation of archival tags for repeated actions and gestures that inspired shallow viewing. Shallow viewers might muse upon sightings of ‘the business card of death,’ where the act of a detective giving an individual his or her business card more or less guaranteed that individual’s slaughter, or the ‘bunny hop,’ a jump back in surprise that is particularly humorous when watched repeatedly, but meant to convey the affect of startle-surprise. Whereas shallow viewing is constitutively nostalgic, SVU’s diegetic orientation is toward the future, not merely in its plot-driven structure, where crime is framed as an ur-telos, but more importantly through a rhetoric which allies the idiopathy of criminal trespass with prophetic utterance, as both state-of-the-nation and future forecast. The detectives’ meta-commentary on crime is typically future-oriented, a deliberative rhetoric neatly juxtaposed to the forensic rhetoric of detective enquiry, and triangulated by the epideictic rhetoric of ‘shallow viewing’ suspended in the queer present moment of repeated reviewing. The New York of SVU resembles a noir vision of the forties rather than the post-Giuliani reality of Manhattan; while crime in New York plunged to new lows, SVU described a satanic cauldron of paedophiles, pornographers and pimps, sometimes with an accompanying forecast of catastrophe. “Welcome to the Gaza Strip!” is the ominous closing utterance of one episode that obscurely links drug-related violence among children to the complex realities of the Middle

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East. In look and feel, SVU’s noir aesthetic is distinct even from that of its sister shows; whereas Law and Order : Criminal Intent puts its detectives in a brightly lit office, the 16th Precinct dwells in a shadowy space more reminiscent of the offices of Pacific All-Risk in Double Indemnity (1944) than a contemporary police procedural. Shallow viewing’s epiphanic moment came in the fifth season episode ‘Loss’ where the ADA Alex Cabot, for her audacity in pursuing a sex crime that implicated a drug lord, and with a bunny hop, comes to be the victim of an assassination attempt that sees her buried and pronounced dead. We learn in a coda that she is actually in witness protection, anonymized, lost. This episode sees significant bodily contact between Cabot and Benson as Benson assists Cabot after she has been shot, and the scene in which Benson crawls to Cabot and puts her hand on her wound becomes an iconic pièta around which shallow viewing still revolves. Some time later, in the seventh season, Cabot returns in an episode called ‘Ghost,’ stumbling into the squad room deus ex machina to assist in the closing of a case. Stripped of her role in the series she appears as a spectre whose professional life has been evacuated; no longer the crusading prosecutor, she works at an insurance company. The program in which people exist only for work no longer has a place for her; her haunting ceases with the episode. Moher writes: If Al Qaeda wanted to devise a silent method to obliterate the American economy by making sure its workers were as completely unproductive as possible, it could not do better than to buy google ads to drive yet more traffic to televisonwithoutpity.

Just as shallow viewing detours forensics into perversion, the shallow viewer becomes another bad subject in the service of capitalism, for whom the productivity of the site, and of Google, paradoxically fixes a state of unproductive obliteration. Moher’s formulation is patently hyperbolic and comic, and I don’t mean to take it seriously except insofar as its figuration of paranoia resonates with my general sense that there is something damaging to the heart of normalized social relations that can be found in the archive of the eccentric and unrepresentative, and that his parochial account (written as a Canadian gesturing to America as a near-elsewhere) can be “cantilevered” into a consideration of the ‘lost’ and revenant figure of the former ADA, whose political ambitions, excessively forecast in the character’s introduction, are diminished and extinguished as she dwells in the ‘gifted and challenged’ space of the special victim.

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loss

Episodic television encountered in this mode observes the logic of the récit. Ross writes that the récit recounts the exceptional event, while the propelling force of the novel is everyday, mundane time…for Blanchot [the récit] functions as a kind of transhistorical antigenre that flowers in opposition to the dominant generic compromise formation of any given historical moment. (2008, p. 48)

Ross allies the antigeneric quality of récit with the adolescent body, “at once too slow and too fast”, a body that “acts out the forces that perturb bourgeois society’s reasoned march of progress” (2008, p. 55). Shallow viewing, as an “embrace of…immaturity in place of responsibility” (Halberstam cited in Dinshaw et al., 2007, p. 182, quoted by Payne), skews attention toward the exemplary expository presentness of the récit and is bonded to it through repetitive, nostalgic reviewing as a “right to laziness” asserted contra “the organization of people’s productive capacities and nature’s resources into markets, their rationalization according to cost accounting, their unity broken into smaller and smaller quantifiable subcomponents—the gearing of a society to accumulation for its own sake” (Ross, 2008, p. 71). In this last formulation I am returning to Payne’s final invocation of grid failure, the ways in which personal experience might also be redolent of failure per se, and in particular how his own “failure so far to be successfully plotted on the academic job grid feels far more like crisis than opportunity.” As Payne observes, such failure can only be addressed through an assertion of queer subjectivity that does not require it to be intelligible only through “the same grid structure queer theory aims to dismantle.” Precisely as institutional affiliation may be experienced as disabling and damaging, there is an obvious way in which it enables such sequestrations of time as I experienced in the Atlantic winter of 2004, a time in which I was able to be an ‘unaffiliated scholar’ precisely because I have one. Payne, on the other hand, wrote at a time in which he, like Cabot, was out of the job that should have been his. Such a dislocation results I think not from the failure of the grid, but from the failure of the grid to fail. Normative systems of exclusion have become the endemic index of a pedagogy that sees its raison d’être as the accumulation of assets at the expense of the pedagogical relation, a relation it unaccountably understands to be coterminous with candidature. Unconscionable employment practices permit the ongoing exploitation of casual and contract labour, certainly not to the benefit of most regularly employed academics, whose experience of personal infringement is compounded by their complicity in a system that increasingly fails its most passionate participants.

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As we see more of our students and colleagues thrown into this precarious space, it is imperative to acknowledge that the potential productivity it allows is critically compromised by the failure of institutional grids to be receptive to the gifted and challenged, and as a consequence institutions remain protected against their own productive failure, their up-ending. That’s a one-way street, and I believe without qualification that this regime will fail: after all, ‘we all get it in the end.’ It’s especially important, then, that those gifted and challenged among us remain among us, remain, to borrow from Payne borrowing from Berlant and Warner (2005, p. 203), “accessible, available to memory, and sustained through collective activity,” audaciously haunting the academy, perhaps in time inciting a grid failure that can feel less corrosive. Even more, this revenance requires of us all an act of remembering, “a recollection of the spatial practices that the creation of maps attempted to forget” (Reynolds and Fitzgerald, 1999, p. 74, quoted by Payne). Those institutional maps are documents of systematic distortion, but some of us have long memories, different investments, other spaces, better times in mind.

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REFERENCES Berlant, L., & Warner, M. (2005). Sex in public. In M. Warner, Public and Counterpublics, New York: Zone Books. Berman, M. (2006). On the town: One hundred years of spectacle in Times Square. New York: Random House. Dinshaw, C. et al. (2007). Theorizing queer temporalities: a roundtable discussion. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 13(2-3), 177-195. Halberstam, J. (2005). In a queer time and space: Transgender bodies, subcultural lives. New York: New York University Press. Mitchell, J. C. (Director). (2006). Shortbus [Motion picture]. Australia: Hopscotch Entertainment. Moher, F. (2007, September 8). TelevisionWithoutAnOffButton. Back of the Book: Canada’s Online Magazine. Retrieved January 1, 2009, from http://backofthebook.ca/?s=television+without+an+off+button Monkkonen, E. (1991). Murder in New York City. Berkeley: University of California Press. Povinelli, E. A. (2002). Notes on gridlock: genealogy, intimacy, sexuality. Public Culture, 14(1), 215-238. Rancière, J. (1991 [1987]). (K. Ross, Trans.). The ignorant schoolmaster: Five lessons in intellectual emancipation. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Ross, K. (2008). The emergence of social space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune. London: Verso Books. Reynolds, B., & Fitzpatrick, J. (1999). The transversality of Michel De Certeau: Foucault’s panoptic discourse and the cartographic impulse. Diacritics, 29(3), 63-80. Ruddick, L. (2000). Professional harassment. Critical Inquiry, 26(3). Retrieved January 1, 2009, from http://www.uchicago.edu/research/jnl-crit-inq/issues/v26/ v26n3.ruddick.html Santé, L. (2003). Low life: Lures and snares of Old New York. New York: Farrar Strauss & Giroux. Smith, M. N. (Ed.). (2011). Dickinson Electronic Archives. Retrieved June 3, 2011 from http://www.emilydickinson.org/classroom/spring98/TheyShut.htm Television Without Pity. (2005). Frequently used expressions, part 2: M–Z, Sports Utility Vehicle thread. Retrieved January 1, 2009, from http://web.archive.org/web/ 20050206023219/www.columbia.edu/~ail2001/part2.htm

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CHAPTER 5 CHILDHOOD AS A ‘QUEER TIME AND SPACE’: ALTERNATIVE IMAGININGS OF NORMATIVE MARKERS OF GENDERED LIVES Kerry H. Robinson University of Western Sydney

Abstract: Taking up Judith Halberstam’s call for alternative imaginings to current ways of being, this chapter explores childhood as a potentially queer ‘counterpublic’ (Fraser, 1992). Childhood is perceived as a time and space in which performances of gender and “the conventional logics of development, maturity, adulthood and responsibility” (Halberstam, 2005, p. 13) can be disrupted, allowing a space in which more flexible and fluid ways of being the child, as well as being gendered and sexual subjects more generally, are potentially possible. However, children’s normative behaviours are highly regulated and policed in their everyday lives by adults and other children. Moral panic often prevails when normative values, especially heteronormative values, are transgressed. Childhood is thus a critical period in which the characteristics of the ‘appropriate’ and ‘good’ adult citizen are instilled and nurtured—discursively constituted in white, middle-class, heteronormative, Christian morals and values. It is argued that childhood innocence is an essential commodity in this process, as well as in the construction of child and adult subjects, in maintaining the boundaries between the adult and the child, and in constituting socio-cultural relations of power. Consequently, alternative imaginings of childhood and alternative performances of gender in children are rendered highly problematic. Based on focus groups with children and interviews with early childhood educators, childhood is highlighted as a time and space in which children are interpellated as heteronormative subjects and heteronormative gendered discourses associated with love, marriage and relationships are consolidated and perpetuated. Sue Saltmarsh provides a response to this chapter. Keywords: Childhood, innocence, queer, time, space, moral panic, Bill Viola, gender, sexuality, heteronormative, adulthood, citizenship.

During

a visit to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney in 2008 I became intrigued and moved by a video installation by the artist Bill Viola, titled ‘Heaven and Earth.’ The installation was made up of the exposed tubes of two black and white video monitors positioned facing each other with a few inches between them. Both monitors were attached to wooden columns, one suspended from the ceiling and the other coming up from the floor. On the top monitor is an image of Viola’s aged and dying mother and on the bottom monitor is an image of his newborn child. Although separate images, the glass face of each monitor reflects the image of the other, with the child’s and elderly woman’s faces becoming superimposed on each other, becoming one at different angles. Looking at this installation, I found myself imagining a space existing between the adult–child binary—‘the inbetween’—a space in which the boundaries between the two were blurred, Kerry H. Robinson and Cristyn Davies (Eds) All rights reserved - © 2012 Bentham Science Publishers

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more flexible, or even non-existent on occasions—a queer space—an alternative imagining of the relationship between adulthood and childhood. Although the video installation is a representation of the separated spheres within the binary relationships adult–child, life–death and heaven–earth, it simultaneously queers these relationships, demonstrating the precariousness and fragility of these constructed spheres, and providing a space in which these relationships are reflected upon and potentially read differently. ‘Heaven and Earth’ represents, but simultaneously disrupts, the binary representation of the child as heavenly creature and essence of purity and innocence, and the adult as earthly, soiled, worn and grounded in life. This installation also reminded me of Judith Jack Halberstam’s concept of the technotopian space, one which “tests technological potentialities against the limits of a human body anchored in time and space, and that powerfully reimagines the relations between the organic and the machinic, the toxic and the domestic, the surgical and the cosmetic” (Halberstam, 2005, p. 103). Within the space created by ‘Heaven and Earth,’ and in the in-between space of the two spheres, the representation of the embodiment of the child and adult are transposed into ambiguity, while the viewer walks, sits, observes, bends, creating different meanings of adulthood and childhood. Taking up Halberstam’s call for alternative imaginings to current ways of being, this chapter explores childhood as a potentially queer ‘counterpublic’ (Fraser, 1992). In this context, childhood is perceived as a time and space in which performances of gender and “the conventional logics of development, maturity, adulthood and responsibility” (Halberstam, 2005, p. 13) can be disrupted allowing a space in which more flexible and fluid ways of being a child, as well as being gendered and sexual subjects more generally are potentially possible. However, as pointed out by Nicholas Rose, “childhood is the most intensively governed sector of personal existence” (1999, p. 123). Children’s normative behaviours are highly regulated and policed, officially and informally, in their everyday lives by adults and other children. Moral panic often prevails when normative values, especially heteronormative values, are transgressed (Berlant, 2004; Kincaid, 2004; Robinson, 2008; Taylor, 2007). Childhood is a critical period in which the characteristics of the ‘appropriate’ and ‘good’ adult citizen are instilled and nurtured—discursively constituted in white, middle-class, heteronormative, Christian morals and values (Bell and Binnie, 2000; Berlant, 1997; Richardson, 1998; Robinson, forthcoming 2012). Childhood innocence is an essential commodity in this process, as well as in the construction of child and adult subjects, in maintaining the boundaries between the adult and the child, and in constituting socio-cultural relations of power. Innocence is generally vehemently defended in western society as an inherent and definitive component of normative childhood. Childhood is

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utilized to reproduce and regulate heteronormative cultures and is reflected in government laws and policies, as well as in media and popular cultural images of children (Berlant, 1997; Bruhm and Hurley, 2004; Kincaid, 2004; Stockton, 2009). As a result, alternative imaginings of childhood (and adulthood) as well as alternative performances of gender in children are rendered highly problematic, and this rendering is reflected in the resistance and moral panic often encountered when discourses of normative childhood are challenged. However, children’s agency is mobilized to negotiate and challenge these discourses, with some children resisting the regulations and normative representations of childhood, including their constitution as heteronormative gendered subjects (Robinson and Davies, 2010). This chapter highlights childhood as a time and space in which children are interpellated as heteronormative subjects, and actively regulate the reproduction of cultural values and practices perpetuated within heteronormative gendered discourses associated with love, marriage and relationships. In addition, this chapter explores how some children resist and queer these heteronormative discourses, producing different performances of gender in their everyday lives. In this context of resistance or queering, readings of childhood shift from a period of adult dependency, of voicelessness, of ‘becoming,’ to new and different subjectivities and life narratives, incorporating agency and competency. Childhood as a queer time and space is one in which normative performances of gender are disrupted by children who wish for, and demand, more flexible performances of gender in their lives. These children resist the rigidity of gender performances in their public lives and private spaces, often negotiating harassment from peers and adults (Kilodavis, 2010; Robinson and Davies, 2010). Additionally, in the alternative imaginings of a ‘queer childhood,’ a lifetime and how one progresses through it may no longer be based on fixed normalizing perspectives of generational categories of ages and stages, but on flexible and meaningful life markers of one’s own subjectivity, experience and choice. Negotiating normative life markers, whether in the context of ‘straight’ or ‘queer’ lives, or in childhood, adolescence, or adulthood, is about negotiating powerful hegemonic social, political, economic and educational representations of measures of one’s personal and societal competency, worthiness and ‘normality’ (Jenkins, 1998; Epstein and Johnson, 1998; Sedgwick, 1990). These discourses regulate western adult–child binary relations of power, keeping adults and children in their ‘rightful’ places—‘don’t act like a child,’ ‘act your age’ and ‘too big for your boots’ are just a few of the sayings acculturated in everyday practices that operate to instil shame in those adults, adolescents or children who

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disrupt what are considered ‘normal,’ developmentally appropriate categorical behaviours and practices in the child, adolescent, and adult. The heteronormative constitution of childhood discussed in this chapter is based on qualitative research undertaken by the authori: firstly, through a discourse analysis of the representation of children in several media and popular cultural images that depict children in rituals associated with heteronormative conventional practices, such as marriage, intimacy, and relationships. These media and popular cultural texts constitute children as ‘cute’ through the fetishization of ‘childhood innocence,’ demonstrating children’s contradictory and precarious relationship to this notion. The portrayal of children in these images simultaneously troubles the concept of innocence and disrupts the adult–child binary through links to sexuality. Secondly, the heteronormative construction of childhood is examined through interviews and focus groups with children, parents and other adults, examining their perceptions of the images of children described above, and of children’s resistance to heteronormative constructions of gender more broadly. This research points out that for many children, heteronormative life markers such as first ‘special’ relationships, marriage, and having babies, are integral to the narratives of their early lives and of their perceptions of their ‘destinies’ (Blaise, 2005; Davies and Robinson, 2010; Renold, 2005). Constructions of childhood and childhood innocence in western normative narratives of time and space Normative narratives of time and space are constituted within universalized western enlightenment discourses of what it means to be human. The Enlightenment fostered the notion of an universal human history united by the common ideals of human reason and rationality, progress and perfection, all reinforced by and founded on scientific ‘truths’ and western philosophical ideals (Erickson and Murphy, 2003). Western psychological discourses of human development emerged from these humanist modernist perspectives, constructing childhood, adolescence and adulthood as the biological linear categorical markers of human maturation. Each of these life stages is rigidly separated from the others according to ages and stages in cognitive and physical development, which inflexibly define what it means to be a child, adolescent or adult (Piaget, 1929, 1950; Durkheim, 1956). Overlapping this process of cognitive and physical maturity are other biological and cultural life markers that operate as further signifiers of maturation along this perceived linear pathway, such as schooling, getting a driving licence, sexual maturity, starting work, voting, marriage, buying a house, reproduction, and retirement. Simultaneously these markers not only operate to constitute and reinforce the culturally defined boundaries between

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childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, but also are the socio-cultural, political and economic organizing principles of relations of power in society. They ultimately become markers of the heteronormative status quo (Berlant, 1995; Berlant and Warner, 1998; Bruhm and Hurley, 2004; Halberstam, 2005; Jackson, 2006; Robinson, 2005a). Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley argue that adult utopianism and nostalgia plague the constitution of the child and are the preferred form of the future: Caught between these two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born, the child becomes the bearer of heteronormativity, appearing to render ideology invisible by cloaking it in simple stories, euphemisms, and platitudes. The child is the product of physical reproduction, but functions just as surely as a figure of cultural reproduction. (2004, p. xiii)

It is important to point out that when the boundaries between childhood, adolescence, and adulthood are transgressed in any manner, it often results in a degree of moral panic. Moral panic, particularly that associated with children, gender and sexuality, operates as a political strategy on the part of right-wing conservative governments for maintaining the hegemony of the nuclear family, the sanctity of heterosexual relationships and the heteronormative social order (Berlant, 2004; Robinson, 2008; Taylor, 2007; Tobin, 1997). Within western discourses of human development, the adult–child binarism emerged constituting childhood in opposition to adulthood; children are viewed as inherently different from adults. In this context, the child is perceived as the immature and powerless other to the adult, who is represented as the pinnacle of human development, marked by physical and emotional maturity, and the ability to engage in abstract and hypothetical thinking. Consequently, the child has been perceived as not being fully human due to its infantile development, but rather as being in the process of ‘becoming’ human—as professed by the French sociologist Emile Durkheim (1982, p. 147) in the late nineteenth century: In everything the child is characterized by the very instability of [its] nature, which is the law of growth. The educationalist is presented not with a person wholly formed—not a complete work or finished product—but with a becoming, an incipient being, a person in the process of formation.

The child is considered to be on a linear pathway depicted by various life stage markers of increasing maturation—adolescence and ultimately adulthood. The child (like the adolescent) does not become a ‘citizen,’ a fully-fledged ‘human,’ until it becomes an adult—and the child is encouraged to become a particular kind of adult citizen (Berlant, 2004; Davies, 2008a, forthcoming 2012). Adulthood is the representation of life experience, maturity, critical thinking, sophistication, and independence.

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The child (and adolescent) is perceived as being everything that the adult is not—naïve, dependent, unsophisticated, immature, lacking critical thinking, inexperienced and unknowing—it takes up an oppositional location to the adult subject and is relegated to the margins of public life. The child is thus perceived as ‘lacking’ as a subject. This modernist paradigm has been instrumental in artificially creating the separate, distinct, and often mutually exclusive spaces, which have become known as the ‘world of adults’ and the ‘world of children.’ In fact, children are viewed as being in ‘need of protection’ from this world of adults, which is often represented as a space that is potentially dangerous, corrupt and evil, especially for the ‘innocent’ unknowing child (Bruhm and Hurley, 2004; Davies, forthcoming 2012; Jackson, 2006; Robinson, 2008). The call for protection of childhood and childhood innocence is nowhere more obvious and contradictory than in the context of sexualityii, which is perceived to be a critical marker between childhood and adulthood (for indepth discussions of the relationship between childhood and sexuality see Bruhm and Hurley, 2004; Epstein, 1995; Kincaid, 2004; Renold, 2005, 2006; Robinson, 2005a, 2005b, 2005c; Tobin, 1997). Sexuality is considered the exclusive realm of adults in which children are constructed as the innocent ‘other.’ Kathryn Stockton Bond (2009, p. 62) talks about how childhood is a period of ‘delaying’: “Delay is seen to be a feature of its growth: children grow by delaying their approach to the realms of sexuality, labor and harm.” Stockton (2009, p. 62) makes the observation that “the act of sheltering is a kind of dance on the knife-edge of delay,” and asks, “[h]ow can children be gradually led by degrees toward domains they must not enter at all as children?” Children’s sexuality within this discourse is perceived as nonexistent or, at the most, as immature. Ironically, the discursive understanding of children as asexual beings prevails in some quarters despite the intensive efforts taken to ‘control’ or curb children’s sexual behaviour at various points in time (for an historical example of the repression of children’s sexuality see Wolfenstein, 1998). In this context, children have also been denied access to sexual knowledge about their bodies and their sexual subjectivities, with detrimental impacts on their health and wellbeing on some occasions (Cahill and Theilheimer, 1998; Corteen and Scraton, 1997; Haydon, 2002; Levine, 2002; Plummer, 1990; Robinson, 2002, 2005c, forthcoming 2012). The ‘knowing child’—no longer pure and innocent—is often stigmatized and considered sullied (Gittins, 1998). It is undeniable that children do sometimes require adult protection in many different contexts: not just in the public sphere but, even more critically, in the private sphere of the family. However, this need to protect children is also about preserving their perceived innocence and maintaining rigid boundaries and power relations

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within the adult–child dualism, which practices unduly prolong children’s dependence and lack of voice, of civil rights and of citizenship (Bruhm and Hurley, 2004; Robinson, 2005b, forthcoming 2012). Childhood innocence, a socio-cultural construct, has become the perceived essence of childhood, and is also linked to nostalgic longings on the part of many adults. Childhood takes on the mythology of a time of freedom, frivolity and irresponsibility, providing a stark contrast to adulthood. Historically, understandings of the individual in humanist discourse considered the child to be the core of the essence of self, representing a time lost to the adult through the process of maturation (Jackson, 2006; Stockton, 2009). Consequently, childhood has been nostalgically depicted as the ‘golden age’ (Jenks, 2005; Kociumbas, 1997)—a time of purity and innocence, filled with carefree play. This middle-class and racialized romantic image of childhood was solidified in Christian discourse and in the nineteenth century works of Rousseau and Wordsworth, whose representations of childhood innocence have lasted to the present day. (The photographs of Anne Getty are contemporary examples of this representation of childhood innocence.) However, in more recent years, these humanist discourses of childhood, largely underpinned by, and fixed in, theories of child development, have been critiqued for their inherent biological determinism and universalizing generalizations of childhood, and the fact that they are based on research with small numbers and culturally biased samples of children. These discourses do not take into consideration the socio-cultural and experiential differences among children, or individual subjectivities that impact on childhood in different spaces and times (James and Prout, 1990; James, Jenks and Prout, 1998; Jenkins, 1998; Gittins, 1998). A child is born into society as an embodied being who grows and physically matures over time, but the collective notion of ‘childhood’ and understandings of what it constitutes are primarily socially, culturally and historically variable across ethnicity, class, gender and so on (Southon and Dhakal, 2003; Woodhead, 1999). The categorization of children’s behaviours within chronological ‘ages’ and ‘stages’ reinscribes normative understandings of children’s development that have been framed within white, middle-class and Eurocentric perspectives (Robinson and Jones Diaz, 2006). Childhood ‘innocence’ has been critical in the justification of keeping children separate from the public domains of active citizenry (Bruhm and Hurley, 2004; Epstein and Johnson, 1998; Robinson, forthcoming 2012). Karen Corteen and Phil Scraton (1997, p. 99) point out that “the infantilizing of children, sustaining childhood as a prolonged denial of personhood or citizenship, is particularly marked with regards to their developing sexualities.”

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Children’s and parents’ readings of heteronormative images of childhood in media: contradictions in normative life narratives Media, advertising, and children’s literature play a critical role in perpetuating discourses that constitute normative life narratives, as well as normative gendered and sexual subjects. In this section of the discussion, I identify, describe and analyze the discourses operating in three images across these three contexts that are mobilized not only to sell products but also to perpetuate powerful discourses that work to constitute normative childhood within heteronormative frameworks. However, shadowing this process, the hetero/sexualization of the children in these images disrupts the hegemonic construction of the normative child as ‘innocent’ and ‘pure.’ The ambiguity and contradictions associated with gender and sexuality that constantly prevail within the adult–child binary are reflected in these everyday visual representations of childhood. The three media images described and critiqued below were also used as discussion prompts with young children and their parents in research conducted by the author. This research focused on children’s education around sexuality in schooling, children’s knowledge of gendered relationships and of sexuality, and parental practices in educating their children around these matters. Children’s and adults’ responses are incorporated into the discussion. The first image is an advertisement that appeared in a glossy table magazine about dining out in an Australian city. It is an advertisement for a café, showing a young boy and girl (approximately seven or eight years of age) drinking coffee together and sharing a large plate of fruit and ice cream. The boy, dressed in black, is the larger character of the two and has an air of confidence and of being in control, which may be read in association with his hegemonic masculinity portrayed through his taller and larger stature, and his dark southern European good looks. He is in an active pose holding a black coffee cup with a gold ancient Greek print, smiling and looking down at she who can only be interpreted as his ‘date,’ sitting closely and demurely beside him. The girl is wearing a light sleeveless floral dress in pinks and mauves and a straw hat ringed with pink and crimson roses; she has her hands folded under her chin and is smiling. In a scene more reminiscent of the stereotypical practices of adolescents or adults, the bowl of ice cream on the table is an image of childhood and childhood innocence that is ignored, forgotten and lost in what is presented as more interesting and tantalizing—new love. The children’s ‘staged’ performance and embodiment of gender encompasses a heteronormative interaction between the two based largely on the positioning of their bodies and their facial expressions—the girl has a look of coyness, seduction and desire, as she leans forward smiling and demurely avoiding the boy’s sexually alluring gaze by staring at his coffee cup. Positioned behind them and above their heads on the wall is visible the lower (feet) section of a cupid statue. The

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children are totally engrossed in each other’s presence; the food is only a backdrop to a scene that is full of lust and anticipation. The caption below the picture reads, ‘Ahhh…This is coffee.’ The image simultaneously constructs the children as innocent and cute, and as sexually engaged, knowing and provocative. How do young children read this image? Jimmy and Rosie are four-yearolds who gave the following account of the image, which provoked links to narratives and events in their own lives. They identified the ways that the girl and boy looked at each other, especially their facial expressions, as the primary impetus behind their thinking that the two were close in a special boyfriend-and-girlfriend way: Jimmy: Researcher: Jimmy: Researcher: Jimmy: Researcher: Jimmy: Researcher: Jimmy: Rosie: Researcher: Rosie: Researcher: Rosie: Researcher: Rosie: Researcher: Rosie: Researcher: Rosie: Researcher: Rosie:

I think they are friends. Why do you think they are friends? Because the girl loves the boy. And why do you think the girl loves the boy? ’Cause sometimes you got a boy and one likes the girl. Is there something about the picture that shows that she might like the boy? Yes…um… Can you tell me what it is? …um, I don’t know…they are smiling at each other… I like a boy. You were saying Rosie that there is a special boy and you like him. Does that mean he is your boyfriend? Yes…boyfriend. What is his name? Robert. Robert. And what do you like about Robert? ’Cause he has lots of cool stuff and I like his cool stuff. You like his cool stuff. Yeah. And does he like you? Yes. He does. So how do you show him that you like him? Because he likes me a bit. How do you know that? Because I met him before.

Similar responses about the looks on the boy’s and girl’s faces as the indicator of the two ‘liking’ each other were given by two five-year-old girls in the following discussion. The discussion also prompted some interesting comments around age, relationships and marriage: Researcher: What do you think is happening in this picture?

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Belinda: Belinda: Researcher: Belinda: Christy: Researcher: Christy: Belinda: Researcher: Christy: Researcher: Christy: Christy: Researcher: Belinda: Researcher: Belinda: Researcher: Christy: Researcher: Belinda: Christy: Researcher: Belinda: Researcher:

Eating lunch. It’s a birthday. Why do you think it is a birthday? Because of the lollies. I don’t think it is, because there is only two people. What do you think the girl thinks about the little boy? They are best friends I think. I think they are best friends. They like each other. Do you think they could be girlfriend and boyfriend? They can’t because they are kids. What does it mean to have a girlfriend or a boyfriend? They have to be old enough, like in Year 5. I have one…boyfriend. You have one do you? What’s his name? [answering for Christy] William. William. He is at my school. What makes him special? He is my cousin. He’s your cousin? You can’t marry a cousin, that’s what my dad and mum said. He’s too old. He’s twelve. Why do you like him? I think he is very kind and silly. Do you think that the girl in this picture likes this boy? Why do you think she likes the boy? Christy: Um, the faces, they are looking at each other. Researcher: What do you think Belinda? Do you think the girl likes the boy? Or the boy likes the girl? Belinda: The boy likes the girl. The girl likes the boy... Researcher: Why do you think that they like each other? Belinda: Because of their faces.

This discussion highlighted how these young girls negotiate the power relations associated with the regulating hegemonic discourses of age, marriage and relationships. Both Christy and Belinda agreed that the picture portrays a sense that the girl and boy represented are in a close relationship—‘best friends’ or ‘like each other’—due to the way that they are looking at each other (an intimacy is portrayed in their smiles). Christy was quick to make the point that they are too young to be girlfriend and boyfriend, which she located as something that grown-ups engage in, offering the example of children in Year 5! Still, Christy, who was about the age of the girl represented in the image, took up the power and position of

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an older person, indicating that she had a boyfriend. Belinda, taking up a normalizing and regulating position, reminded Christy that she cannot marry William because he is her cousin. Christy responded by shifting her suddenly precarious position in the discussion back to one of control, discarding William as being too old for her. The second image is a postcard of a young girl and boy (approximately seven or eight years of age) dressed in wedding attire and posing for an outdoor photograph after the ceremony as newlyweds often do. The girl is in a traditional white wedding dress with a long veil crowned with white flowers spreading out behind her; she is holding a bouquet of Australian native flowers, looking up at her groom. The boy is wearing a black tuxedo coat, which is slightly too big, over a cream shirt and long shorts, shoes and socks, and holding a black top hat. Both are looking into each other’s eyes and smiling. The picture is in black and white, adding to the old fashioned style of the photograph, which is further enhanced by the old stone stairs leading up to a sandstone church in the background. There is a sense for the viewer that this old fashioned style goes beyond the aesthetics of the picture to the values it is trying to represent: traditional heterosexual family values of virtue, commitment and monogamy. The scene perpetuates a sense of rebelliousness associated with masculinity, through the boy’s unconventional clothing under the tuxedo coat juxtaposed against the conventional representation of the female bride. There is a frivolity in the boy’s dress that might give the impression that he does not take the process as seriously as does the girl. Both this image and the one discussed previously are examples of the heterogendered construction of young children being viewed in terms of ‘cuteness’ and the discourse of childhood innocence operating to silence and render invisible the heteronormativity incorporated within the texts. The content, as well as the everydayness of these images—that is, as an advertisement in a coffee table booklet or a postcard in a gift shop or newsagency—troubles the adult–child binary and its precarious and contradictory relationship to sexuality and marriage as markers of adult status and maturation. Halberstam (2005, p. 153) points out that normative life narrative “charts an obvious transition out of childish dependency through marriage and into adult responsibility through reproduction.” The marriage scene between the young children inadvertently destabilizes the boundaries between adulthood and childhood and troubles the normative life narratives that are associated with becoming or being an adult. The first image of the young children on a date does a similar thing, but more obviously troubles the rigid boundary that sexuality represents as the critical distinguishing marker between adulthood and childhood within western

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discourse (though there is always a sense of pending sexual activity associated with a wedding day). The ambiguity in these images is critical to the perpetuation of heteronormative narratives. Ambiguity becomes a strategy in constituting children’s desires to become heteronormative adult subjects and for forming the basis of a road map of critical life narratives about how best to appropriately reach that destination. The following discussion arose when the same children were shown the postcard image of the boy and girl in wedding outfits. Marriage for these young children was clearly considered to be a grown up activity, and they critiqued the image of children getting married. Mock weddings are often part of young children’s play and Jimmy had previously commented that he had married his best friend in preschool. However, the image seemed to them to be a ‘real’ depiction of children getting married: Belinda: Researcher: Jimmy: Researcher: Jimmy:

Kids getting married. Kids getting married? What do you think Jimmy? That’s real strange. Why is it strange? Why? Because kids don’t get married, it is meant to be grownups getting married. Researcher: What do you think Rosie? Rosie: Strange. Researcher: Can kids get married? Rosie: No way.

Heteronormative understandings of marriage prevailed amongst these fourand five-year-olds who had strong ideas on who could and could not get married: Researcher: Rosie: Researcher: Rosie: Researcher:

Do you think that two boys can get married? No. Can you tell me why? Because I only see girls and boys get married. You only see boys and girls get married. Jimmy do you think that two boys can marry? Jimmy: [less certain, as he has married his best friend in dress-ups] I don’t know… Researcher: You’re not sure. Can two girls get married? Jimmy: No. Researcher: No. Why can’t two girls get married? Jimmy: Because I have never seen one. Researcher: You have never seen one. So when do you usually see people get married? Rosie: When they are bigger. And one boy and girl get married...

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Researcher: When they are bigger. Are you going to get married? Rosie: When I am bigger. Researcher: When you are bigger. What about you Jimmy? Do you think you will get married when you are bigger? Jimmy I am already bigger. Researcher: You are already bigger? And you have already gotten married, you told us, didn’t you? Jimmy: Yeah. Researcher: Will you get married again when you are bigger? Jimmy: Yeah...I will be grown soon.

Marriage was a special event that represented growing up in these children’s understandings of life narratives, and they actively constituted it as part of their future lives. The third image analyzed is a photograph which captures the uncensored performance of a young boy and girl (approximately seven years old) embracing in a Hollywood style French kiss who, apparently, after watching the failed attempts of adult actors to make their kiss sexy enough for the producer shooting a commercial for jeans, unabashedly considered that they had what it took to do the job properly. This photograph appeared in a weekend magazine supplement to a major Australian newspaper in a regular segment titled ‘The Moment,’ which invites readers to send in photographs with a brief background story. In the photograph, the boy is bending over holding the girl around the neck and waist and kissing her on the mouth. The girl’s back is arched and she is in a lunging position in order to keep her balance. Her hand is grasping the boy’s arm, which is clutching the waist of her skirt and causing it to slightly hitch up on her body, and her midriff area is exposed due to the riding up of her shirt. Both children are barefoot, standing on an old jetty. The photograph challenges the hegemonic reading of childhood—children as innocent, naïve and unknowing in terms of sexuality—and destabilizes sexuality as representing the rigid boundary between adulthood and childhood. In the background brief to the picture, the photographer comments: There was so much energy in them—it really showed what the models were lacking. We continued with the shoot, and we did get something in the end, but it didn’t have anything on those kids. No spark, no magic. (Browell cited in Hooton, 2001, p. 17)

The children’s confident and public display of sexual behaviour in this photograph and narrative affects the reader/viewer. Many of the adults, including students, teachers, and parents with whom I have worked in my capacity as an educator and a researcher, are often left feeling troubled when

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viewing this photograph. This was also the case for those participants in the adult/parent focus groups. This troubling tends to be associated with negotiating the multiple discursive readings of the children’s behaviour that they encounter in this photograph—that is, children being sexual, behaving in an adult manner, as well as their lack of inhibition and exhibitionism. The photograph captures a rawness and brashness in terms of the children’s relationship to sexuality. The image is troubling for many in that it leaves a questioning and uneasiness around the potential unethical coercion that may have resulted in the children’s performance. Despite their fascination, gazing at it is equally problematic for some adults who experience a sense of guilt for looking at the photograph so inquisitively. This uneasiness arises from a destabilizing of “the normative practices that make everyone else feel safe and secure” (Halberstam, 2005, p. 10). The dominant discourse of children and sexuality is one of vulnerability and exploitation, not of knowing and agency. Margot, a mother in one the adult/parent focus groups indicated that for her it was the children’s engagement in ‘passion’ that was disturbing: I think there is something about the pose, because it is so grown up, it is a passionate pose, it is a passionate kiss and the passion therefore leads to a sort of sexualization and that’s what—if they were standing straight, kind of giving one another a kiss even with arms wrapped around one another would be, to me, just far, far less offensive. It is the pose, because it is depicting passion, and passion equals sex, and they are just too young for that pose and I think that is what it is about…it is all very disturbing.

The photograph led to a questioning of how children know about sexuality and how to behave in such a manner, leaving some of the adults considering their own childhoods: William: Jenny:

William: Jenny:

Shocking! Well I think—I don’t know how it actually makes me feel, but I think it is really interesting that children that young are able to play up that narrative so successfully, in fact almost more successfully than adults in a particular kind of way because it is so familiar to them that they know precisely what to do. How do they know? Well, exactly, I don’t know—it’s all around them all the time, so it’s not, it is kind of—it’s not shocking. I mean it is sexualizing in that sense that there is something shocking about it, but then it’s also so familiar that it’s not shocking at all. I think that if I saw that as a young person I would have wanted to be that girl in a narrative that I felt that I could never get. But I would have to be quite honest about it, it is absolutely true, that is probably what I would have wanted—not necessarily the level of sexualization but what seems to be inside a narrative that I didn’t have access to for whatever reasons.

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The children’s responses to the photograph reflected a similar uneasiness in that it troubled their understandings of adult–child behaviours and resulted in their questioning of the ages of those represented in the pose: Belinda: Researcher: Christy: Belinda:

The last one...what is that? What is happening in that one? They are kissing each other. It looks like married but it can’t be. It looks like—because they are kids. Christy: [referring to the first picture they viewed] The first one was married. Researcher: Do kids kiss like that? Belinda: I’m not really sure. No that looks—they must be grown-ups. Grown-ups dressed like kids. Researcher: They are grown-ups dressed like kids? Belinda: Yeah.

It is interesting how the children repositioned the girl and boy in the image as adults dressed like children in order to make sense of this scenario. These children’s responses also highlight how marriage is often read as the context in which intimate practices, such as kissing, are made legitimate and possible. Childhood can be viewed as a temporal space, constituted within the adult– child binary, in which understandings of what it means to be a child or youth are defined by adults’ perspectives and values (Gittins, 1998; Mayal, 1996). There are many life markers of childhood that operate to define and regulate the normative development of the child, including learning to crawl, walk and talk, toileting, and manners, as well as learning the etiquette of respecting adults’ space and time—being quiet until spoken to or until adults have finished talking. However, there are other critical markers of childhood that are intimately linked with heteronormativity and normalized through the process of heterosexualization, as the above images testify. As I have commented elsewhere: The construction of children’s gendered identities cannot be fully understood without acknowledging how the dominant discourses of femininity and masculinity are heteronormalised in children’s everyday lives. That is, through the processes of gendering children are constructed as heterosexual beings. (Robinson, 2005a, p. 19)

There are numerous markers of the heterosexualization of childhood that are constituted initially in the binarization of genders, such as girls being given dolls, tea sets, or prams in which to push their dolls around, and boys receiving footballs, trucks or guns. This process of gifting reinforces the perception that gendered differences are natural and normal. Play is a significant site of the construction of heterosexuality, with mock weddings,

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playing at mothers, fathers, families, doctors and nurses, and chasing and kissing all being representations of the institutionalization of heterosexuality in childhood and the inculcation of normative life markers—that is, critical stages of children growing up (Epstein, 1995; Robinson, 2005a; Robinson and Davies, 2007; Wallis and Van Every, 2000). These representations and markers are rarely viewed as part of the ‘normalization’ of the construction of heterosexual desire and the inscription of hetero-gendered subjectivities in young children, which continue throughout their lives (Robinson, 2005a). Childhood as queer time and space: creating spaces for different ways of being Childhood can be viewed and experienced as a potential counter-public, or a queer time and space, in which alternative imaginings about gender, sexuality and life markers are possible. Childhood becomes a counter-public or a queer space when children subvert dominant discourses of childhood and gender, doing childhood and gender differently wherein “queer space refers to the place-making practices in which queer identities engage, as well as new spaces constructed by queer counter-publics” (Robinson and Davies, 2007, p. 21). Counter-publics are “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counter discourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs” (Fraser, 1992, p. 123). Children, like adults, are shifting and contradictory subjects, negotiating the different discourses of gender that they encounter in their lives. Most children take up normative performances of gender and strictly regulate, not just their own performances, but those of other children (and of adults). However, some children engage in counter-hegemonic performances of gender, sometimes in public, but often in private spaces away from the regulating gazes of others (Robinson and Davies, 2008). The recently published children’s storybook My Princess Boy was written by Cheryl Kiodavis (2010), mother of a young boy who loves to dress up as a princess. Kiodavis devised the story to open up new conversations about doing gender differently, as well as to counteract the largely negative responses that her son was experiencing from other children (and some adults) as a result of his gender nonconforming behaviours. Supportive of their son’s wishes to transgress normative discourses of gender, the Kiodavis family contribute to the development of a counter-public in childhood in which gender identities can be negotiated and reconceptualized. Educators can also contribute to the formation of a space in which children can do gender differently, but most often early childhood education settings and schools are institutions that regulate and police normalizing performances of gender and sexuality (Blaise, 2005; MacNaughton, 2000;

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Robinson and Jones Diaz, 2006; Surtees and Gunn, 2010). One of the major concerns encountered by many early childhood educators is that of parents not wishing to have their young boys dressing up in female clothing whilst in their care. This concern stems from parental fears, particularly from fathers, that this practice will result in their boys growing up to be gay in later life (Robinson and Jones Diaz, 2006). Interestingly, there are seldom fears expressed about girls dressing up in male clothing (Robinson and Davies, 2007). Some children resist non-normative performances of gender in others, who might open up opportunities for children to read and engage with gender differently. Peta is a queer early childhood educator, who is frequently misread as male by the children with whom she works. Peta’s performance of gender is one of female masculinity, which some children find extremely challenging to their understandings of male and female bodies. Peta talked about one particular boy who refused to accept her as a woman: We were reading Paperback Princess and this young boy Christopher said, ‘are you married?’ I said ‘no,’ that I wasn’t married and he looked at me and said, ‘and you are a boy.’ I said, ‘no, I’m actually a girl,’ and he said ‘no!’ I said that I really and truly am and he said, ‘no!’ I said that I really, really was a girl and some of the girls in the group said, ‘yes she is a girl.’ I said, ‘yeah, yeah, I am a girl,’ and that sometimes I joke but this wasn’t a joke and that I really was a girl.

Christopher continued to resist Peta’s confirmation that she was indeed a woman, despite the added confirmation of other children and educators. Christopher questioned Peta’s proclamations, challenging her around her short hairstyle, clothes (jeans, T-shirt, sneakers) and low deep voice, which are typical markers that children (and adults) often use to determine the sexed body. After this initial discussion between Christopher and Peta, Christopher came back the next day with an additional question that highlighted his continued concern around Peta’s performance of gender: The next day he came back and he said to me, ‘you know how you are a girl?’ and I said ‘yes.’ ‘And I thought you were a boy’; I said ‘yes.’ He said, ‘do other big people ever think you are a boy?’

Hoping that his reading of Peta’s gender might be reconfirmed by an adult, Christopher’s refusal to be corrected demonstrates the rigidity of binary understandings of gender and of the category ‘woman’ that often prevail, especially for young children (Butler, 1990; Davies, 2008b). Young children utilize binary understandings of male and female, based on a range of oppositional readings of the physical body and physical appearance, such as those acknowledged by Christopher. Children, from the time they are born, are taught through daily social practices and everyday visual cues in various forms of media to recognize their own gender and that of others through this

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binary system of classification. Children are also aware of the regulatory norms that operate around performances of gender, negotiating these regulations in their own performances and policing the behaviour of others (Robinson and Davies, 2007, 2010). Halberstam (1998) critiques the perpetuation of the binary gender system, ‘man’ and ‘woman,’ pointing out that it fails to address the multiple performances of male and female that currently exist. Within this system, masculinity is rigidly associated with the male body; it is not a performance of gender that is also produced and sustained across female bodies. Peta’s performance of female masculinity challenges some of the characteristics associated with hegemonic forms of masculinity practiced by male bodies, destabilizing the gender binary. Peta’s queerness also challenges the normative narratives of time through her taking up of playful, often child-like or adolescent behaviour in her everyday life, particularly in context of her work with children—reflected in her comment above that she often jokes with the children. Halberstam (2005, p. 152), in a quest to “recraft relationality,” asserts that “queer temporality disrupts the normative narratives of time that form the base of nearly every definition of the human.” Halberstam argues that the stretchedout adolescence of queer culture markers disrupt conventional binary accounts of a life narrative, based on clear markers between youth and adulthood. Peta’s taking up of behaviours that are considered adolescent and less associated with adults, particularly with adult males—her resistance to conventional clothing regulations, her practical joking, her playing, her disinterest in marriage or having children—blurs the distinct markers between childhood, youth and adulthood. It is interesting that Christopher, who refused to accept that Peta is not male, transgresses some of the binary gender characteristics that he uses to constitute and recognize gender in others. In their discussion around her performance of gender, Peta reminded Christopher of his own queer performances of gender: “I said to him sometimes boys can wear girls’ clothes and girls can wear boys’ clothes and that it was just like how he wore dresses and swishy medallions in dress-ups and he said, ‘OK!’” In the early childhood centre that Christopher attends, he is able to wear female clothing during the day if he so wishes, without being made to feel it is inappropriate by other children or adults. He chooses to wear a particular long silky dress, with a dangly necklace and a special hat, especially when he is feeling upset. According to Peta, the clothing soon soothes his moods and fears. Reminding Christopher of his own transgressive behaviour during their conversation seemed to be the only point at which he was willing to begin to see that it was possible for one to transgress the rigid gender binary. However, ‘dress-ups’ or play acting may have been seen by this young boy as different from Peta’s everyday public performance of gender.

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Conclusion In this chapter I have demonstrated how representations of childhood reinscribe normative narratives of life that are essential to the construction of the normative adult citizen subject. Vital to this process are the ways in which these narratives and life markers of human development are constituted within heteronormative paradigms, and rendered invisible through processes such as the heterosexualization of gender in young children’s lives. From very early ages children learn to read and take up these normative everyday signifiers of what it means to grow older, and are both gatekeepers and resistors of these discourses. There seems to be minimal disruption of this process in their early lives—in fact, moral panic erupts when there is any transgression of these normative processes. The discourse of childhood innocence operates as a powerful regulator and protector of this process, especially in terms of regulating what knowledge is available to children, and when, around areas often considered adults’ issues. Children negotiate these hegemonic discourses of what it means to be a child, adolescent and adult, as well as what it means to be a normative gendered and sexual subject. However, despite childhood being a period of extreme regulation, it is also potentially a time in which doing childhood and identity differently is made possible through some children’s search for more flexible ways of being and of expressing themselves. Childhood can be a queer time and space allowing for transformation and critique of the “practices and structures that both oppose and sustain conventional forms of association, belonging, and identification” (Halberstam, 2005, p. 4). In order to envisage alternative ways of being it is critical that children have access to, or ‘inherit,’ a broad range of knowledge that includes alternative subjective possibilities in their lives that are often found within the contexts of subjugated knowledges.

i

This research was undertaken with Cristyn Davies and was supported by a University of Western Sydney research grant. ii Sexuality is used throughout this chapter as a general term referring to one’s sexual subjectivity, the expression of one’s sexual orientation, and the physical act of having sex. Sexuality is often read purely in terms of ‘the sexual act,’ which results in its perceived irrelevance to children and/or in moral panic when children and sexuality are considered in some relationship to each other. When I argue that sexuality is the boundary between adult and child, it is not just in terms of expressly sexual acts; sexuality more generally is also considered the exclusive realm of adulthood.

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REFERENCES Berlant, L. (1995). Live sex acts. Feminist Studies, 21(2), 379. Berlant, L. (2004). Live sex acts (Parental advisory: explicit material). In S. Bruhm, & N. Hurley (Eds.), Curiouser: On the queerness of children (pp. 57-80). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Berlant, L., & Warner, M. (1998). Sex in public. Critical Inquiry, 24(2), 547-566. Blaise, M. (2005). Playing it straight!: uncovering gender discourses in the early childhood classroom. New York: Routledge. Breckenridge, J., & Carmody, M. (Eds.). (1992). Crimes of violence: Australian responses to rape and child sexual assault. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Bruhm, S., & Hurley, N. (2004). Curiouser: on the queerness of children. In S. Bruhm, & N. Hurley (Eds.) Curiouser: On the queerness of children (pp. ix-xxxviii). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge. Cahill, B. J., & Theilheimer, R. (1998). Stonewall in the housekeeping area: gay and lesbian issues in the early childhood classroom. In W. J. Letts IV, & J. T. Sears (Eds.), Queering elementary education: Advancing the dialogue about sexualities and schooling (pp. 39-48). Lanham: Rowan & LittleField. Calvert, G., Ford, A., & Parkinson, P. (Eds.). (1992). The practice of child protection: Australian approaches. Sydney: Hale & Iremonger. Corteen, K., & Scraton, P. (1997). Prolonging ‘childhood’, manufacturing ‘innocence’ and regulating sexuality. In P. Scraton (Ed.), ‘Childhood’ in ‘crisis.’ London: University College London Press. Davies, C. (2008a). Becoming sissy. In B. Davies (Ed.), Judith Butler in conversation: Analysing the texts and talk of everyday life (pp.117-133). New York: Routledge. Davies, C. (2008b). Proliferating panic: regulating representations of sex and gender during the culture wars. Cultural Studies Review, 14(2), 83-102. Davies, C. (forthcoming 2012). ‘It’s not at all chic to be denied your civil rights’: performing sexual and gendered citizenship in Holly Hughes’ Preaching to the Perverted, Sexualities, 15. Durkheim, E. (1956). Moral education. New York: Free Press. Durkheim, E. (1982). Childhood. In C. Jenks (Ed.), The sociology of childhood: Essential readings (p. 147). London: Batsford Academic & Educational Ltd. Epstein, D. (1995). ‘Girls don’t do bricks’: gender and sexuality in the primary classroom. In J. Siraj-Blatchford, & I. Siraj-Blatchford (Eds.), Educating the whole child: Cross-curricular skills, themes and dimensions. Buckingham: Open University Press. Epstein, D., & Johnson, R. (1998). Schooling sexualities. Buckingham: Open University Press. Erickson, P. A., & Murphy, L. D. (2003). A history of anthropological theory (2nd ed.). Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press. Fraser, N. (1992). Rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. In C. Calhoun (Ed.), Habermas and the public sphere. Cambridge: MIT Press.

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Gittins, D. (1998). The child in question. London: Macmillan. Halberstam, J. (1998). Female masculinity. London: Duke University Press. Halberstam, J. (2005). In a queer time and place: Transgender bodies, subcultural lives. New York: New York University Press. Haydon, D. (2002). Children’s rights to sex and sexuality education. In B. Franklin (Ed.), The new handbook of children’s rights: Comparative policy and practice. London: Routledge. Hooton, A. (2001, July 14). Interview with Anthony Browell, Good Weekend, Sydney Morning Herald, p. 17. Jackson, L. (2006). Childhood and youth. In H. G. Cock, & M. Houlbrook (Eds.), The modern history of sexuality (pp. 231-55). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. James, A., & Prout, A. (Eds.). (1990). Constructing and reconstructing childhood: Contemporary issues in the sociological study of childhood. London: The Falmer Press. James, A., Jenks, C., & Prout, A. (1998). Theorizing childhood. London: Polity Press. Jenkins, H. (1998). Introduction: childhood innocence and other modern myths. In H. Jenkins (Ed.), The children’s culture reader (pp. 1-37). New York: New York University Press. Jenks, C. (2005). Childhood (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. Kincaid, J. R. (2004). Producing erotic children. In S. Bruhm, & N. Hurley (Eds.), Curiouser: On the queerness of children (pp. 3-16). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Kiodavis, C. (2010). My princess boy. Seattle: KD Talent LLC. Kociumbas, J. (1997). Australian childhood: A history. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Mayal, B. (1996). Children, health and the social order. Buckingham: Open University Press. MacNaughton, G. (2000). Rethinking gender in early childhood education. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Piaget J. (1929). The child’s conception of the world. London: Routledge. Piaget, J. (1950). The psychology of intelligence. London: Routledge. Plummer, K. (1990). Understanding childhood sexualities. Journal of Homosexuality, 20(12), 231-249. Renold, E. (2005). Girls, boys and junior sexualities. London: Routledge: Falmer. Renold, E. (2006). ‘They won’t let us play…unless you’re going out with one of them’: girls, boys and Butler’s ‘heterosexual matrix’ in the primary years. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 27(4), 489-509. Robinson, K. H. (2002). Making the invisible visible: gay and lesbian issues in early childhood education. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 3(3), 415-434. Robinson, K. H. (2005a). Childhood and sexuality: adult constructions and silenced children. In J. Mason, & T. Fattore (Eds.), Children taken seriously in theory, policy and practice. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

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Robinson, K. H. (2005b). Doing anti-homophobia and anti-heterosexism in early childhood education: moving beyond the immobilising impacts of ‘risks,’ ‘fears’ and ‘silences.’ Can we afford not to? Contemporary Issues In Early Childhood Education, 6(2), 175-188. Robinson, K. H. (2005c). ‘Queerying’ gender: Heteronormativity in early childhood education. Australian Journal of Early Childhood, 30(2), 19-28. Robinson, K. H. (2008). In the name of ‘childhood innocence’: a discursive exploration of the moral panic associated with childhood and sexuality. Cultural Studies Review, 14(2), 113-129. Robinson, K. H. (forthcoming 2012). ‘Difficult knowledge’: the precarious relationships between childhood, sexuality and citizenship. Sexualities. Robinson, K. H., & Davies, C. (2007). Tomboys and sissy girls: young girls’ negotiations of femininity and masculinity. International Journal of Equity and Innovation in Early Childhood, 5(2), 17-31. Robinson, K. H., & Davies, C. (2010). Tomboys and sissy girls: exploring girls’ power, agency and female relationships in childhood through the memories of women. Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, 35(1), 24-31. Robinson, K. H., & Jones Diaz, C. (2006). Diversity and difference in early childhood: Issues for theory and practice. London: Open University Press. Rose, N. (1999). Governing the soul: The reshaping of the private self (2nd ed.). London: Free Association Books. Sedgwick, E. (1990). Epistemology of the closet. Berkeley: University of California Press. Southon, J,. & Dhakal, P. (2003). A life without basic services: ‘street children say’. SathSath, Save the children UK (Nepal). Retrieved June 23, 2004 from http://www.savethechildren.net/nepal/key_work/street_children.html Stockton, K. B. (2009). The queer child, or growing sideways in the twentieth century. Durham: Duke University Press. Surtees, N., & Gunn, A. C. (2010). (Re)marking heteronormativity: resisting practices in early childhood education contexts. Australasian Journal Of Early Childhood, 35(1), 42-47. Taylor, A. (2007). Innocent children, dangerous families and homophobic panic. In G. Morgan, & S. Poynting (Eds.), Outrageous: Moral panics in Australia. Hobart: Australian Clearinghouse for Youth Studies. Tobin, J. (1997). Introduction: the missing discourse of pleasure and desire. In J. Tobin (Ed.), Making a place for pleasure in early childhood education (pp. 1-37). New Haven: Yale University Press. Wallis, A., & Van Every, J. (2000). Sexuality in the primary school. Sexualities, 3(4), 409423. Wolfenstein, M. (1998). Fun morality: an analysis of recent American child-training literature. In H. Jenkins (Ed.), The children’s culture reader. New York: New York University Press. Woodhead, M. (1999). Combating child labour: listen to what the children say. Childhood, 6, 27-49.

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RESPONSE HETERONORMATIVITY, CHILDHOOD AND INVISIBILIZED CONSUMPTION Sue Saltmarsh Australian Catholic University

Halberstam’s work engages extensively

with texts of popular culture, and my response to Kerry H. Robinson’s chapter focuses on questions of heteronormative time, relationships and consumption that coalesce around the popular texts used by Robinson and Davies in their research with young children and parents. In particular, I am interested here in the ways that the economic order is an absent presence from the children’s and parents’ gendered readings of these texts, two of which were produced as advertisements for commercial products, while the other, it could be said, functions as an advertisement for the heterosexual social order upon which capitalism in no small part relies. I understand this in light of Halberstam’s observation that “[s]o seamlessly has capitalism been rationalized over the last two hundred years, in fact, that we no longer see the fault lines that divide black from white, work from play, subject from object” (2005, p. 9). In this case, fault lines dividing child from adult are constructed by the parents and children in temporal terms, as governing norms through which the regulation of sexuality and, by extension, intimate relationships is instantiated. Yet I want to argue that heteronormative rationalities governing child–adult binaries are among the very practices that constitute, and render discursively invisible, capitalism, its logics and exclusions. Like the Viola installation described in Robinson’s introduction, past and future are superimposed in the narrative accounts of children and parents who were asked to comment on three popular images. As Robinson points out, these heteronormative images—of children posed as if on a romantic ‘date,’ of children dressed in oversized wedding attire, and of children engaged in a passionate kiss—simultaneously and somewhat paradoxically fetishize and potentially disrupt normative discourses of childhood innocence, particularly with respect to sexuality and sexual conduct. Indeed, each of these images plays with temporality, queering the discursive boundaries and cultural imaginaries of childhood as a separate phase of life that is innocent of sexual knowledge and intimate relationships. Yet the meaning-making of children and parents in relation to these visual texts is viewed through the lens of what Halberstam refers to as the “compulsory heterosexuality of the romance genre” (2001b, p. 294). Parents’ and children’s responses to the images and the questions they potentially pose

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largely disavow the possibility of queer readings and any alternative pasts or futures they might imply. As in the Viola installation, in which past and future—the dying grandmother and the newborn grandchild—gaze at and merge into and apart from one another in the mediated space of the visual image, the dialogue between past and future in the commercial images is mediated by the gender norms of Robinson’s respondents. Corresponding to Butler’s contention that “gender requires and institutes its own distinctive regulatory and disciplinary regime” (2004, p. 41), a queer reading of these images is resisted, even when respondents’ own gender performativities and articulated desires would seem to open up a potentially productive space in which such readings might be undertaken. Instead, looking forward (by children) and looking back (by parents) takes place within a regulatory gender framework that makes explicit the discourses of heterosexual subjectivity governing the conduct of children and adults, girls and boys, men and women in close friendships, marriage and intimacy. These three texts utilize readily recognizable markers of heterosexual intelligibility in their interpellation of readers. Staging flirtatious or passionate encounters between boys and girls, photographing them in stereotypical romantic settings, and using wedding garments and accessories all function to inscribe, legitimate and normalize heterosexuality within “a powerful hierarchy in which heterosexuality defines and speaks with perceived authority about the ‘other’” (Robinson, 2005, p. 20). Protected childhoods and imagined futures are thus circumscribed within the perceived desirability of heterosexuality. As Halberstam puts it, “[r]eproductive time and family time are, above all, heteronormative time/space constructs” (2005, p. 10). Importantly, however, such “normalization of heterosexuality is rendered invisible and diverts attention and critique away from the macro and micro social, economic and political discursive practices, including those operating in educational institutions that construct and maintain this hierarchy of difference across sexual identities” (Robinson, 2005, p. 20). While heterosexuality appears as a taken-for-granted assumption in these commercial texts, consumer participation and, indeed, the heteronormativity of consumer participation are less readily visible in respondents’ comments in relation to them. Perhaps not surprisingly, in light of the capacity of images that blur boundaries between childhood and adulthood to incite moral panics (Robinson, this volume), adult respondents comment on what they perceive as the sexualization of childhood in these images. Yet the commercial nature of these texts and the heteronormative economic practices they gesture toward appear to go unnoticed. As Butler points out:

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Norms may or may not be explicit, and when they operate as the normalizing principle in social practice, they usually remain implicit, difficult to read, discernible most clearly and dramatically in the effects that they produce. (2004, p. 41)

Of particular interest, these images are produced primarily for the purposes of addressing adult consumers. Claudia Mitchell and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh observe that “it is not always easy to distinguish between who counts as the adult and who counts as the child in terms of being a consumer of popular culture ” (Mitchell and Reid-Walsh, 2002, pp. 5–6). Yet it is also generally the case that overtly sexualized images are most commonly used in mainstream media as a technique for enhancing the appeal of products and services purchased by adults, such as coffee and clothing, and of ‘experiential commodities’ (Kenway and Bullen, 2001) such as visiting cafés and coffee shops, planning weddings, or shopping as a leisure activity. Yet the adult respondents in Robinson and Davies’ study voice concern about the pervasiveness of sexualized images as a familiar feature of children’s lives, while simultaneously failing to recognize the function of such texts as an everyday mode of address to them as adult consumers. Their voiced concerns reiterate and reinscribe what is seen as the necessity and appropriateness of adult–child boundaries. Yet simultaneously, they overlook their own constitution within this contested, contradictory and ambiguous space between childhood and adulthood, as well as their interpellation as the idealized heteronormative consumer of products, brands and commodified experiences. Further, their concern about the sexualization of childhood is cast in terms of a potential threat to childhood innocence and purity, even though one respondent elaborates childhood desires of her own that would seem to disrupt dominant narratives that posit children as naïve and asexual. One respondent, Jenny, comments in response to the image of the boy and girl kissing: “I think that if I saw that as a young person I would have wanted to be that girl in a narrative that I felt that I could never get” (Robinson, this volume). Jenny’s observation, framed as a kind of confession, “I would have to be quite honest about it, it is absolutely true…” (Robinson, this volume), makes visible the unspeakability of childhood desires, and the ways in which the image of children engaged in a passionate kiss invokes a recollection of her own longings for access to imagined yet prohibited narratives as a young person. Once again, Jenny’s comments gesture toward the queer space of blurred boundaries, in which a young girl can imagine herself within storylines of potential, if inaccessible, sexual intimacy. Yet this queer space and the desires it invokes have been artfully deployed by advertisers to interpellate readers as consumers, in a maneuver not unlike that discussed by

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Halberstam in her work on the shifts between the first and second popular Austin Powers films from the late 1990s (Halberstam, 2001a, 2005). The first film, Halberstam argues, acknowledges “a sea change in sexual mores and gender norms” and in so doing, stages “a feminist critique of sexism that changes completely the constitutive forms of male masculinity” (2005, p. 148). The second film, by comparison, moves from its original queering of mainstream masculinities to parodies of masculinity with mass audience appeal, as well as the attendant shift from Austin’s “fight to save the world for free love” in the first film, to “[saving] it for multinational capitalism” (Halberstam, 2005, p. 148) in the second. I see the images discussed by Robinson’s respondents functioning similarly, insofar as the queer space they potentially create for blurring the distinctions between childhood and adulthood is simultaneously rendered incontrovertibly heterosexual and appropriated by commercial interest. Thus this queer space and the desires it invokes have been artfully deployed by advertisers to interpellate readers as consumers, as well as to render them desirable only as heterosexual consumers. Ultimately for readers, as Jenny’s comments attest, the queer space is returned to a space of governability through discourses of shock and consternation over the potential sullying of childhood innocence through exposure to such images. Additionally, it is a space that renders invisible its function as a site of consumption in the heteronormative economic order. For the children in Robinson’s study, however, heteronormative consumption appears more obvious. For example, when the researcher asks Rosie, who has said she has a boyfriend named Robert, what she likes about Robert, Rosie replies, “he has lots of cool stuff and I like his cool stuff.” Access to and ownership of consumer goods is an important dimension of cultural status within childhood and school cultures (Dyson, 1997; Mitchell and Reid-Walsh, 2002; Saltmarsh, 2009). As Anne Haas Dyson observes, “[t]he symbolic material of books, cartoons, video games—of all aspects of our consumer culture—is useful only if it is used in everyday practices as a means for affiliating, differentiating, and negotiating a social place in the world of others” (Dyson, 1997, p. 143). In this case, the ownership of desirable commodities—‘cool stuff’—signifies participation in the economic order, thereby rendering one desirable within the heterosexual matrices of social life. According to J.K. Gibson-Graham, “[c]apitalism is not just an economic signifier that can be displaced through deconstruction and the proliferation of signs. Rather, it is where the libidinal investment is” (2006a, p. xxxv). Thus, we see in Rosie’s comments an acknowledgement of the personal, relational and libidinal desirability that accrues to those whose consumer participation is readily recognizable by others. The ownership of consumer goods, in other words, is seen as desirable within

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the formation of romantic attachments. Further, Rosie’s interest in Robert as a boyfriend, as distinct from a friend, illustrates the powerful associations that even young children recognize between consumption and heteronormativity. “Heteronormative life narratives” (Robinson, this volume) of growing up, establishing heterosexual relationships, and getting married are thus built on conceptual foundations through which are woven the desirability of capitalist economic participation and the material goods it can supply. It could be argued that Rosie’s interest in Robert and his ownership of consumer goods opens up another kind of queer space, in which the temporal narratives of heterosexual romantic futures are displaced by a preference for the ‘here and now,’ and an interest in the non-human as in part constituting desire and desirability. Indeed, Halberstam argues that “part of what has made queerness compelling as a form of selfdescription…has to do with the way it has the potential to open up new life narratives and alternative relations to time and space” (2005, pp. 1–2). Within the temporal space of childhood, the immediacy of ownership offers a counterpoint to future trajectories predicated on familiar storylines of marriage, children-rearing and so on. Yet, in the researcher’s later discussions with Rosie regarding the photo of children wearing wedding attire, Rosie reiterates the heteronormative order of child–adult binaries, commenting on the strangeness of children dressed as though they are getting married, and affirming her intention to marry when she is older. Here, Halberstam’s insights are instructive, particularly her use of the notion of queer time “to make clear how respectability, and notions of the normal on which it depends, may be upheld by a middle-class logic of reproductive temporality” (2005, p. 3). The three texts discussed by Robinson’s respondents both contest and reiterate heterosexual norms in ways that are readily recognizable to those who commented on them. Yet, with the exception of Rosie’s interest in Robert’s “cool stuff,” the respondents do not appear to recognize or acknowledge the heteronormativity of consumption that these three distinct images represent. An additional observation I would make refers to the ways that the image of the two children kissing, and the newspaper narrative that accompanied it, posit children and childhood as central to spaces of capitalist production. Elsewhere I have argued (Saltmarsh, 2007) that contemporary popular texts have replaced notions of the child as dependent upon and subject to the vagaries of family and local economic circumstances with visions of the child as an active agent in economic innovation, entrepreneurialism and prosperity.

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Despite Western cultural imaginaries of childhood as innocent of not only sexual, but also economic knowledge (Saltmarsh, 2007, 2009), children’s consumer activities, and their participation in workplace employment in industries such as film, television and advertising (to name but a few) pose a significant disruption to such views. The advertising image of the two kissing children, and the accompanying narrative published with it, powerfully demonstrates this reconfiguration of the child as agentive economic subject. In a photo shoot during which the adult models fail to convey the sense of spontaneity and passion desired by the photographer, it is children who intervene to demonstrate what is needed in order for the image to fulfill its function as a commercial text. In so doing, they momentarily disrupt discourses of childhood naïveté with regard to both sexual and economic knowledge—they demonstrate their knowledge of the commonly held dictum that ‘sex sells,’ by performatively producing themselves in overtly (hetero)sexual terms. In this instance, it is the children who queer the time and space between the socially constructed categories of child–adult. Yet the capturing of this moment by the camera poses a potential risk associated with adult complicity in such a disruption to dominant discourses of childhood innocence. The photographer’s explanation for what might otherwise be interpreted publicly as a sexualizing, thus highly transgressive, photograph of young children functions to restore the dominant discourse of childhood innocence within heteronormative regimes of capitalist practice. Readers are thus reassured that the children were not being intentionally sexualized by adults, but rather, were captured in a moment of frustration with adults’ inability to execute a demonstration of romantic affection which, according to Robinson’s respondents, is something with which children are now widely familiar. The children are, in other words, constituted as agentive economic subjects, rescuing the photo shoot, hence the product promotion, through their own inventiveness in playing with the boundaries between (ineffective) adulthood and (competent) childhood. The invitation to readers to submit their own photographs and stories in turn establishes them as complicit in both the consumption and production of images that simultaneously queer and restore (hetero)normative discourse within the logics of capitalism. Returning, then, to the questions initially raised by Robinson with regard to the Viola installation, I maintain that notions of temporality, relationality and sexuality are implicated in obscuring the associations between capitalist consumption and the gendered heteronormative order. If popular texts such as those responded to by participants in Robinson and Davies’ study are to realize their potential for rethinking boundaries between child and adult,

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young and old, past and future, I would argue that explicit attention needs to be given to the place of consumption in maintaining those boundaries.

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REFERENCES Butler, J. (2004). Undoing gender. London: Routledge. Dyson, A. H. (1997). Writing superheroes: Contemporary childhood, popular culture, and classroom literacy. New York: Teachers College Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006a). A post-capitalist politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006b). The end of capitalism (as we knew it): A feminist critique of political economy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Halberstam, J. (2001a). OH BEHAVE!: Austin Powers and the drag queens. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 7(3), 425-452. Halberstam, J. (2001b). The transgender gaze in Boys Don’t Cry. Screen, 42(3), 294-298. Halberstam, J. (2005). In a queer time and place: Transgender bodies, subcultural lives. New York and London: New York University Press. Kenway, J., & Bullen, E. (2001). Consuming children: Education-entertainmentadvertising. Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press. Mitchell, C., & Reid-Walsh, J. (2002). Researching children’s popular culture: The cultural spaces of childhood. London & New York: Routledge. Robinson, K. (2005). ‘Queerying’ gender: heteronormativity in early childhood education. Australian Journal of Early Childhood, 33(4), 19-28. Saltmarsh, S. (2007). Spirits, miracles and clauses: patriarchy, economy and childhood in popular Christmas texts. Papers: Explorations Into Children’s Literature, 17(1), 5-18. Saltmarsh, S. (2009). Becoming economic subjects: agency, consumption and popular culture in early childhood. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 30(1), 47-59.

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CHAPTER 6 REANIMATING ADULTHOOD Kate Crawford University of New South Wales

Abstract: In her essay ‘Pixarvolt—Animation and Revolt’ (2007), Judith Jack Halberstam argues that certain films in the canon of contemporary animated features offer us visions of powerfully transformed worlds. In such films as Over the Hedge and Finding Nemo, traditional normative structures are displaced in acts of revolution and transformation. These narrative themes, in Halberstam’s view, are rarely given such centrality in films explicitly made for adults. The recent box office success of Pixar’s Wall-E attests to the continued popularity of animated children’s films amongst adults, a phenomenon which is cited in the popular media as a disturbing threat to ‘real’ adulthood. This chapter analyses how adulthood as a cultural category has been ordered according to the spatial and temporal scheduling of labour and reproduction, and assesses whether ‘Pixarvolt’ films represent a challenge to these schema. By building on Halberstam’s idea of ‘queer time’ as an alternative to the heteronormative frameworks of adulthood (Halberstam, 2005) and Rosi Braidotti’s work on nomadic becoming (2006), this chapter maps out the evolving imaginaries of adulthood in late modernity. Peter Bansel provides a response to this chapter. Keywords: Animation, Pixarvolt, adulthood, Braidotti, heteronormative, alternative, temporality, media, labour, reproduction, transformation.

This summer in New York, hundreds of adults lined up in the heat, queuing to see the latest animated offering from Pixar : Wall-E. The tale of a solitary robot left behind on an environmentally devastated Earth became the number one film at the US box office, buoyed by an audience that spanned young children to older adults. Wall-E is just the latest in a long string of films that challenge their primary categorization as ‘children’s entertainment’ by offering a strong appeal to diverse age groups. Other animated films in this list include Shrek, Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Chicken Run and Ratatouille. But in addition to proving popular at the cinema, these films have provoked debates about encroaching infantilization: adults refusing to grow up, avoiding mature roles and responsibilities, and retreating to children’s culture (Castles, 2007; Furedi, 2003; Thompson, 2004). Why are these films so popular with adults? Is it an escapist desire for relief from the weight of a mature worldview? Or can further questions be asked about the very sustainability of a sharp distinction between the worldviews of children and adults? The divisions between children, adolescents and adults that became entrenched in the developmental narratives of modernity have been subject to detailed critique (Lee, 2001; Lesko, 2001; White and Kerry H. Robinson and Cristyn Davies (Eds) All rights reserved - © 2012 Bentham Science Publishers

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Wyn, 2008) yet have remained as powerful categories of social organization. The recent development of terms such as ‘adultescents’ and ‘kidults’ to describe people who are seen as insufficiently adult reveals an ongoing anxiety about the boundaries of the adult subject. Of course, the idea that there is a ‘problem’ with adulthood is not new. While Frank Furedi (2003) believes that adults watching Shrek indicates a social decline, in Evelyn Waugh’s era it was the parties of the ‘bright young things’ that were eroding standards of adult behaviour. Tests for adulthood in the media first emerged in the late 1940s in publications such as McCall’s and Vital Speeches of the Day. In 1952, Reader’s Digest ran a quiz titled ‘So you think you’re grown up!’ which offered such questions as ‘would you ever, by choice, spend an evening alone? To see how ‘mature’ you are, turn to page 91.’ In 2004, Quantum Market Research released its own three ‘tests of adulthood’ in its AustraliaScan survey. These tests were defined as having a mortgage, children and a long-term partner. Quantum found the majority of interviewees did not meet those criteria and thus labelled them as ‘uncommitted’ adultescents (2004). Behind all these discourses of concern lies a set of historically contingent normative standards of how adults are supposed to behave, and the problems identified in each era reveal where those norms are threatened. Popular expectations that adults have steady jobs, mortgages and live in nuclear families are currently under strain. The labour market grows more precarious as work is increasingly casualized, and people choose to delay or reject participation in the traditions of marriage, child-raising and property ownership. This makes for pronounced differences between representations of adulthood and how it is lived (Crawford, 2006). As the temporal and spatial markers of adulthood shift, new ways of conceptualizing the adult subject are required. The work of Judith Jack Halberstam encourages an understanding of adulthood as a cultural category and is productive for drawing on temporalities, capacities and enthusiasms outside of a developmental model. Halberstam critiques the heteronormative schedule of adulthood by using the concept of ‘queer time’ to encapsulate “those specific models of temporality that emerge…once one leaves the temporal frame of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance” (Halberstam, 2005, p.7). Halberstam’s work can help to ‘queer’ adulthood by enabling affirmative narratives of adult life unreliant on dynasty and compulsory heterosexuality. By bringing Halberstam’s work into an engagement with the ideas of Rosi Braidotti, the idea of the adult can be challenged further still: away from an anthropocentric liberal subject and towards radically nomadic becomings. Braidotti provokes us to think of a nomadic subject as one who has

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“relinquished all idea, desire or nostalgia for fixity” (1994, p. 22). The posthumanist nomad offers “a conceptual form of self-reflexivity which is specifically addressed to the subjects who occupy the centre,” defined as (among other things) male, white, heterosexual, living in urban centres and owning property (1999, p. 89). The concept is thus a particularly useful critical tool for decentring the authority of the adult: the central, sovereign figure of the human life cycle. In Braidotti’s view, “nomadic subjectivity refers to the need to unfold possibilities of alternative becomings which would undo the monolithic power of the phallogocentric subject” (1999, p. 89). Braidotti’s ideas open up new possibilities, beyond the crisis of representation of the adult subject, where the human is just one figure among many in a much richer landscape. Not for grown-ups? Cartoon characters, pirates and superheroes In her essay ‘Pixarvolt—Animation and Revolt,’ Halberstam introduces a menagerie of unusual animals. There is a group of politically organized chickens, a transsexual fish, a pig who self-identifies as a sheepdog, and the unusual friendship between a sea-sponge and his pink starfish best friend. All these unconventional characters have become famous courtesy of mainstream films, from Chicken Run and Finding Nemo to Babe and Spongebob Squarepants. Halberstam argues that these films are marking out a particular canon with the genre of contemporary film, offering visions of powerfully transformed worlds. But they also reveal some of the contemporary tensions between the way adults and children are figured, how they are addressed in popular culture, and the shifting boundaries between these two categories. In such animated films as Over the Hedge and Finding Nemo, Halberstam suggests that traditional normative structures of the nuclear family and neoliberal individualism are displaced by collective action and alternative models of responsibility and caring for others. By collecting these films under the neologism ‘Pixarvolt,’ Halberstam seeks to find a common thread that unites these purportedly children’s films outside the usual fare of normative Hollywood. In the Pixarvolt flicks, animated animals or odd animated human-like subjects, like Spongebob, or animated animals like Gromit who live with animated humans like Wallace, all transform our understanding of relationality, morality and social change by inhabiting worlds where common sense leads not to home-owning, or family values, or individualistic aspiration but rather the Pixarvolt world is comprised of a strangely radical combination of socialist and anarchist notions mixed with odd translations of “animal values.” (2007, n.p.)

These films reflect particular contemporary tensions between the conceptual

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categories of adults and children. Precisely those attributes that Halberstam notes are being circumvented in Pixarvolt films—home-owning, nuclear families and individual-oriented success—are those that have become most closely associated with normative adulthood in the last fifty years. The conventional narrative of adulthood is structured to stay in synch with the strict temporalities of labour (working life) and reproduction (family life). Animated films ‘for children’ do not have to match these rhythms, as they purport to be made for non-adult audiences. But even the world of the contemporary adult is moving out of phase with earlier time structures. The films produced by animation houses such as Pixar, Dreamworks and Animal Logic, which are provisionally marketed for children, sit within the broad genre called ‘family films.’ That implies that the films are made for a young audience, but that parents and grandparents may also be charmed and amused by the uplifting stories, while acting primarily in the role of a supervisory presence. They are not the main audience to whom the films’ messages are directed, but a surplus public; production houses know that with children will come their families, and it is perhaps unsurprising that many films reflect their own attendance back by representing traditional families enacted by animals. But more unusual are the times when animated films step outside these well-trodden paths to represent other modes of being, particularly collective modes that do not resemble a traditional nuclear family. However, if adults are seen to be enjoying this kind of entertainment without being accompanied by children, this pleasure can be viewed as suspect, revealing a lack of maturity and a failure to put away childish things. This is a popular view echoed by journalists in many major media outlets. For example, Australian journalist Simon Castles writes in The Age newspaper: The signs are everywhere that childishness is more popular than ever, that infantilism is in. Look around…Movie screens are dominated by cartoon characters, pirates, superheroes and sequels (“Tell me the story again, Mummy!”)…Growing up is now a lifestyle choice. (2007, p. 15)

Castles concludes that this is a sign of a culture in crisis. We need adults, in his view, as these are the people who must “raise children, run governments, deliver services, uphold laws, treat ailments, find cures, teach, highlight injustice, protect the vulnerable, make art, set examples, maintain standards.” This list of adult attributes offers a paternalistic vision of adulthood as premised on raising children, enforcing behavioural standards, and upholding the regulatory disciplines of medicine, law, pedagogy, the market and the state. Cartoons, superheroes and pirates are used as the emblems of childishness, yet these are also spaces of resistance, characters

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who live outside human norms, and in the case of pirates as they are discussed in Halberstam’s work rebel against systems of transnational capital. They are the archetypes that are exogenous to normative adulthood: outside the law. A similar view is put forth by sociologist James Côté, who argues that “there is little normative pressure for some people to grow up in terms of what most people in Western societies would consider a traditional adulthood in terms of commitments to life-long roles and obligations” (Côté, 2005, p. 91). Instead, according to Côté, adults foster an extended “youthhood”—rejecting “sustained economic participation” in preference for “squandering of prospects…devoted mainly to hedonistic activities and immediate gratifications not associated with occupational identity development” (2005, pp. 93–94). Like Castles, Côté prioritizes certain institutional commitments (particularly career development, marriage and child-raising) as being key to adulthood, whereas seeking pleasure is seen as a misuse of economic potential. Adulthood as a social category is thus embedded within a neoliberal framework of productivity, discipline and individual responsibility. In Pixarvolt films, Halberstam locates a different kind of narrative, one where children are offered “an animated world of triumph for the little guys, a revolution against the business world of the father and the domestic sphere of the mother ” (2007). It is a rebellion against the most conventional structures of power and sociality that are traditionally inhabited by adults: a sphere of allegiances outside of the realms of labour and reproduction, where battles are fought against common enemies and new spaces are found for a shared life outside of strict profit imperatives. The hens in Chicken Run work together to resist their fate as Kentucky drumsticks; the employee monster s in Monsters, Inc. discover that their company is artificially creating fear in order to maintain productivity, and promptly overthrow their CEO in favour of a different business model. Most of these themes are just as likely to appeal to a particular kind of liberal, ecologically sensitive adult audience as they are to children. Further, there are many ways in which the revolutionary potential of Pixarvolt films is contained. For example, Sully, the monster in Monsters Inc., seeks to improve the company by becoming its CEO—an argument for changing the corporate world simply by changing its leadership. Halberstam cites Shrek 1 and Shrek 2 as working within the Pixarvolt canon, noting the collection of rejected fairytale characters who form a refugee camp outside of Shrek’s swamp. But this runs alongside the strong pro-marriage theme which drives the story in Shrek. Nonetheless, there is a distinct strain of resistance in these films, as the central characters discover ways to celebrate the

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experience of not being like others. This strain is discernible in a large body of films ostensibly made for children, some of which offer a CG-rendered glimpse through the curtain to see that another world is possible, even if it is not fully embraced by film’s end. Halberstam squarely locates the audience for such films with children. She writes that the “main audience is children and [Pixar] seem to also know that children do not invest in the same things that adults invest in”: children are not coupled, they are not romantic, they do not have a religious morality, they are not afraid of death, they are collective creatures, they are in a constant state of rebellion…and they are not the masters of their domain. (2007, n.p.)

But perhaps we should not accept too readily this child/adult distinction. Some children are deeply romantic, some are afraid of dying, some are conformists, others are loners. Likewise, many adults are not in couples, are not romantic or religious, and may see themselves as part of a broader collective of friends and partners. Neither should we overplay the mastery and individualism of adulthood. To the degree that neoliberal economic realities are premised on labour precariousness and insecurity, many adults are not masters of their domain. This may begin to address why the Pixarvolt films have also drawn large and enthusiastic adult audiences. Certainly Pixar producers, directors and executives are very attuned to the wide age ranges of their audiences, and do not direct their films solely towards children or locate their narratives within standard moral frameworks. As Brad Lewis, a senior producer at Pixar, explained in an interview: “We don’t sit back and say we have to be moral leaders…we are trying to be entertainers in the way that if you’re eight years old you’ll get it and if you’re 78 years old you’ll get it” (cited in Berens, 2007, p. 5). There are many reasons why adults living in the current moment would “get it” when the themes touch on the breakdown of corporate trust, on broader models of social responsibility, of unusual pairings and the unreliability of adults. Indeed, the legacy models of orthodox adulthood as they were strongly inscribed during the post-WWII years of the twentieth century are themselves increasingly unreliable. Those are the years Eric Hobsbawm describes as the ‘Golden Age’: the Allies were victorious and prosperous, as economies rocketed upwards, unemployment was falling, and Western standards of living were on the rise. Many of the dominant norms now associated with adulthood are grounded in the one-sided narratives of this post-war period, focusing only on abundant full-time work, affordable housing in the expanding suburbia and clearly-defined gender roles (Hobsbawm, 1995). Getting married young and raising children in nuclear families were so common that they came to be seen, not just as the symptoms of the time, but as the “conditions of

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intelligibility” for adult life, powerfully delimiting what was understood as normal (Butler, 2001, p. 621). Terms such as ‘kidult’ and ‘adultescent’ indicate areas where the boundaries of normalized adulthood are being tested: those that are currently undergoing significant cultural and economic change. Just as the figure of the teenager was used in the twentieth century to embody concerns about social change (Lesko, 2001), the adultescent is the latest problem that reveals concerns about societal progress more generally. For example, the sociologist Frank Furedi is particularly critical of adults who watch precisely the kinds of films in Halberstam’s Pixarvolt genre. Two of the biggest commercial Hollywood hits in 2001 were Shrek and Monsters Inc. Like Chicken Run and Toy Story before them, these animated productions resonated with an embarrassingly old audience…The present-day obsession with childish things may seem like a trivial detail—but the all-pervasive nostalgia for childhood among young adults is symptomatic of a profound insecurity towards the future. Hesitations about embracing adulthood reflect a diminished aspiration for independence, commitment and experimentation. (Furedi, 2003)

Furedi sees these diminished aspirations everywhere, but he particularly mentions three: the tendency of young people to live at home longer, the erosion of the institution of marriage, and the increasing numbers of men and women who remain single in their twenties and thirties. In his view, these are all signs of a “sense of despair that surrounds adult identity” (2003). To reject marriage, to live with one’s parents, to choose to be single, these options are directly opposed to the traditional temporalities of adulthood, as well as its spatial organization. Furedi does not consider that these choices may indicate different aspirations rather than diminished ones, nor does he concede that there could be reasons other than nostalgia for childhood driving adults to see films like Monsters Inc. The heteronormative transition to adulthood has long been marked with the movement in space from the family home to the marital home. Even as recently as the 1950s and 1960s, women were under enormous pressure to marry before they left home, or they ran the risk of being condemned as ‘loose women.’ Jane Lewis studied couples who married during this era, and many admitted that they got married as it was the only way to establish an adult identity and escape parental control. The older generation had married when it was impossible for women to get mortgages on their own account and at a time of housing shortage…Many older respondents made the point that they had no option other than marriage if they were to achieve independent adult status. (Lewis, 2001, p. 143)

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Thus, leaving home and marrying have not historically been symbolic of the kinds of freedom and independence that Furedi claims have been ‘lost’ to contemporary adults. In fact, it may be precisely a growing capacity for selfdetermination that allows people to live longer in the family home, and a desire for increased experimentation and freedom that would lead them away from marriage or couple dyads. However, Furedi sees these choices as a symptom of the “gradual emptying out of adult identity that discourages young men and women from embracing the next stage of their lives” (2003). While he considers this a social calamity, it is nevertheless a productive observation. Adult identity is constantly being emptied of its content; however it is simultaneously being refilled with new characteristics and meanings. Furedi sees only that a previously dominant model of adulthood is disappearing, but fails to recognize the rise of alternative modes of adult life that operate beyond the “grim inevitability of reproductive futurity and suburban domesticity” (Halberstam, 2007). This ‘queer adulthood’ does not invest maturity in those particular institutional markers, and has its own expressions of independence, commitment and experimentation. Married with children: normative adulthood The family, constituted as a social technology for reproduction, is where many powerful norms of adulthood are situated. As concepts of the family change, they also shift the complex associations around how adulthood is performed, particularly female adulthood. Halberstam argues that the normative understandings of family are predicated on time, which framework places a particular onus on women. The time of reproduction is ruled by a biological clock for women and by strict bourgeois rules of respectability and scheduling for married couples. Obviously, not all people who have children keep or even are able to keep reproductive time, but many and possibly most people believe that the scheduling of repro-time is natural and desirable. (2007, p. 5)

Reproductive time, in its normative form, is highly scheduled and dependent on a range of factors. Couples are expected to be married first and have a plan for when and how many children they will have. There are clocks ticking within what is socially acceptable (not too young, not too old) as well as biologically possible. Hockey and James observe that the metaphor of the biological clock has exceeded its origins as a purely mechanical object and taken on agency, intervening to “remind women in particular to hurry up and procreate” (2003, p. 58). Procreation is framed as a critical part of the female transition to fully recognized adult status. For “while employment represents an important

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transition to adulthood for young men, it is motherhood which contributes significantly to a mature feminine identity” (Hockey and James, 2003, p. 149). Since the early eighteenth century, a range of medical, psychological, religious and media discourses offer prescriptions for how women can reach their ‘full adult potential’ by nurturing healthy, socially approved and ‘timely’ families. Reproduction and the bourgeois family structure have commanded the attention of experts who seek to delineate how adults should engage in private lives and form families. As Nikolas Rose argues in his critical assessment of the production of normality, it is experts—first doctors but later a host of others—who can specify ways of conducting one’s private affairs that are desirable…it is experts who can tell us how we should conduct ourselves, not in airy and vaporous moral nostrums, but as precise technologies for the care of the body, the care of others—the children, the old—and the conduct of our daily routines of life. The notion of normality…is the lynchpin of this mechanism. (1999, pp. 74–75)

Indeed, women are counselled on every element of procreating: from how to have sex, when to have children, in which context (married, or with a stable partner), how to give birth and in what location (home or hospital), and in what manner their children should be raised. All these issues are then seen to reflect on their successful (or not) attainment of female adulthood. If, in their private lives, adults have not matched the normative transitions in time and space that delineate adulthood, their reliability and responsibility is questioned. As Halberstam suggests, “reproductive temporality” is the underlying normative logic applied to adults, but women in particular are always expected to run on time (2005, p. 5). But alternative structures of emotional commitment can be found in strong friendship groups, which have attracted popular attention in popular discourses with questions such as ‘Are friends the new family?’ Recognition of friend groups as important structures of intimacy and commitment has also come from new terms such as ‘urban tribes’ (Watters, 2003). Friend groups do not have to operate within the strict regime of ‘repro-time,’ for while couples may exist within these groups, they do not determine their shape and activities. Halberstam addresses these non-kinship-based groups under the term ‘queer’—regardless of the sexual orientation of the participants. By articulating and elaborating a concept of queer time, I suggest new ways of understanding the non-normative behaviours that have clear but not exclusive relations to gay and lesbian subjects. (2005, p. 7)

In other words, these groups operate beyond the frame of dynasty and beyond (even if only temporarily) the normative model of adulthood that centres on marriage and family. Queer time breaks the linear path of

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maturation from childhood through adolescence, followed by marriage and then children. It is less focused on the normative scheduling of daily life, the ‘early to bed, early to rise’ timeframes of child-rearing (Halberstam, 2005). The emphasis on friend groups as legitimate forms of social cohesion and intimacy in themselves (rather than as ways to just fill the time before marriage) mirrors the emphasis on broader networks of connection that occur in many queer communities. Watters acknowledges this debt in his discussion of the urban tribe model: “Gay populations have been living outside of families in large urban centers a full generation before heterosexual yet-to-be-marrieds joined them in such large numbers” (2003, p. 117). It is the queer conception of community and connection that prefigures much of what he documents about heterosexual adult friendship groups at the start of the twenty first century. Homosexuals had already addressed the problems my group was facing (living outside of families, travelling uncharted social paths), and they had come up with the same solution: create loose, flexible friendship networks that were connected through weak ties to other networks. (Watters, 2003, p. 117)

Where friendship and non-normative sociality is an end in itself, outside of marriage and family, then the model of adulthood that is premised on marriage and reproduction is productively destabilized. Halberstam sees non-normative expressions of intimacy as a “politics of refusal—the refusal to…enter the heteronormative adulthoods implied by these concepts of progress and maturity” (2005, p. 179). The forms of commitment and responsibility within friend groups can in themselves constitute a more expansive, pluralized conception of intimacy in adulthood. This pluralization does not deny the fact that many will continue to shape their lives within the nuclear family pattern. But it does make alternative narratives available for adult lives, with distinct forms of responsibility and commitment existing in the ‘queer time’ of friendship networks. Rather than constituting a refusal of maturity itself, ‘urban tribes’ can be understood as a reimagining of what responsible adulthood might mean. Michael Warner observes that gay communities have established successful non-normative forms of sociality that exist as a complex web of relationships, outside the institutions of marriage and family that have shaped the temporalities of adulthood. A relationship can form, develop and redevelop over time, without the expectation that it should eclipse all other relationships and friendships. This runs counter to the strict developmental logic that assumes all people will follow the same “phases of maturation, like acne,” as Warner writes, “until we say ‘now we are adult and ready to marry’” (1999, p. 136). Warner argues that by observing gay communities, [y]ou will realise that only a fine and rapidly shifting line separates sexual culture from many other relations of durability and care. The

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impoverished vocabulary of straight culture tells us that people should be either husbands and wives or (nonsexual) friends. Marriage marks that line. It is not the way many queers live. If there is such a thing as a gay way of life, it consists in these relations, a welter of intimacies outside the framework of professions and institutions and ordinary social obligations. (1999, p. 136)

This network of intimacies represents a queer conception of adults participating in loose family structures located outside of the narrow heterosexual nuclear archetype. Rather than constituting a direct rejection or reclamation of normative family, Warner proposes that queer communities have developed values and forms of relating that are not simple replications (or resistances) of the dominant modes. As Warner suggests, “straight culture has much to learn from [queer culture], and in many ways has already begun to learn” (1999, p. 116). The pluralization of care-relations outside of institutional and professional modes is an important way in which ‘straight’ adulthood is queered. Adulthood as affirmative becomings Alternative frameworks of intimacy offer us glimpses of adulthood beyond the good adult/bad adult discourses evident in some strands of developmental sociology. But how should these alternatives inform different understandings of the adult subject itself? Halberstam’s work on queer time creates counter-logics to the histories of adulthood which have been structured around labour and reproduction. But do we need to go beyond just queering the adult? Elizabeth Povinelli argues that human identities are held in tension between the discourses of individual freedom and social constraint. These discourses limit what subjects can become and organize the distribution of “life, goods and values across social space” (Povinelli, 2006, p. 570). Povinelli calls these ‘autological’ and ‘genealogical’ discourses. The former are practices of “self-making, self-sovereignty, and the value of individual freedom,” while the latter are inherited practices that constrain “the self-actualising subject” (2006, p. 570). This division articulates with Halberstam’s work insofar as Povinelli sees the distinction between autological and genealogical discourses as being not simply that of freedom and its other, but of “time and the Other”. Of course, the use of time as a method of disciplining others within the liberal diaspora has interested postcolonial critics, including myself, for some time now…Indeed, difference itself is saturated with an injunction about time and the voice—whose voice is marked by past, present, and future time—as a condition of material and authorial distribution. (2007, p. 570)

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Adults inhabit the authoritative time of the present. The distribution of respect and authority moves to those adults who possess the markers of maturity, with each institution (such as marriage, family or property ownership) being entered into at the right time. Povinelli’s idea of a subject held in tension between autological and genealogical discourses is a useful way to think about how different modes of adulthood coexist, and how lives can contain elements of both normative and alternative subjectivities. These twin discourses connect the lived experience of adulthood in its most intimate forms to broader economic and institutional forces. In Povinelli’s view, the autological and genealogical intersect, shift, and fit together differently depending on context. They are compelling because they function as a diagram: at one and the same time these positions fit together, interpret, orient, and provide a means of moving among an array of disparate phenomena and organize these disparate phenomena into a definite field of values. They make sense of how our intimate relations relate to our political and economic actions, and how they differ from the ways other people do these things. (2007, p. 571)

This is a generative model for thinking through the multiple modes and markers of being adult. For example, a twenty-something living with parents while studying and working part-time is operating in an autological set of processes that function within current economic realities (such as education debts and high property prices) but are not completely concurrent with the genealogical discourses of adulthood. There are common experiences of adulthood which are nonetheless situated in a field of values that do not perfectly emulate convention: according to Furedi and Côté (among many others), they represent adulthood done ‘wrong.’ Povinelli’s diagram of social constraints and individual freedoms moves beyond these arguments to represent the complex relations between the adult subject and the social, cross-hatching expectations and desire lines. But while drawing together Halberstam’s queer time with Povinelli’s autologies and geneaologies may help us to observe the conceptual field of contemporary adulthood, it does not yet help us in answering the question of what this means in developing alternative expressions of maturity and adulthood. In fact, it points to the innate instability of adulthood itself, raising the possibility that adulthood was always queer. It cannot answer Weber’s questions “What should we do? How should we live?” (2004, p. 277). This requires a more extreme rendering of how the adult subject can be constituted in a period marked by neoliberal capital and ecological threat. This is where the work of Braidotti can be useful to articulate an affirmative politics, one based as much in pleasure, difference and potential as in

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responsibility, commitment and maturity. Her work articulates the concept of a nomadic subject beyond neoliberal individualism, one that can resist the double-pull of “hype on one hand, and nostalgia on the other” (Braidotti, 2006b), yet can adequately encompass powerful alternatives. In her view, “nomadic becomings are…the affirmation of the unalterably positive structure of difference, meant as a multiple and complex process of transformation, a flux of multiple becomings, the play of complexity, or the principle of not-One” (2006b, p. 145). Drawing on the vitalism of Deleuze, this nomadic becoming is one that allows for ongoing change over time, as well as an openness to the outside beyond the atomized isolation of the self, and including non-human others. In such a relational universe, growth does not end after childhood, and responsibility does not end with the self or at the door of the family home. The concept of the “not-One” is useful for dispersing the neoliberal focus on the singular individual. In her essay ‘Affirming the Affirmative: On Nomadic Affectivity,’ Braidotti suggests a potentially radical reconceptualization of the subject, shifting away from the anthropocentric ‘I’ of liberal individualism to a non-unitary, sustainable ‘we’. An important reason for needing a new grounded, embodied and embedded subject [is that] “we” are in this together. What this refers to is the cartography as a cluster of interconnected problems that touches the structure of subjectivity and the very possibility of the future as a sustainable option. “We” are in this together, in fact, enlarges the sense of collectively bound subjectivity to nonhuman agents, from our genetic neighbours the animals, to the earth as a biosphere as a whole…What “sustainability” stands for, therefore, is a regrounding of the subject in a materially embedded sense of responsibility and ethical accountability for the environments s/he inhabits. (2006a, n.p.)

Braidotti locates responsibility in a wider schema, in a more-than-human expanse that encompasses the bio-sphere itself. This is a more thoroughgoing transformation of the subject than a process of simply queering relations to the normative scheduling of adult life. It is a profound shift away from the solitary subject and toward a model of sustainability within a complex ecological network. Indeed, Braidotti sees this shift as the next step, one which moves beyond queer models that establish new margins and identities that can be easily drawn into a market logic of product niches. This is an alternative to a global process of queering that would be merely a proliferation of quantified differences and not a qualitative de-centering of hyper-individualism. Becomings are the sustainable shifts or changes undergone by nomadic subjects in their active

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resistance against being subsumed in the commodification of their own diversity. (2006a, n.p.)

Braidotti offers an affirmative ontology that has the capacity to disrupt traditional accounts of maturity, where the subject becomes adult through its acquisition of the institutional markers of responsibility (marriage, house, children, etc.). In its place is an lifelong series of becomings, where responsibility is grounded in the interconnectedness with other human and non-human actors, in what Étienne Balibar calls “trans-individuality” (2007). Braidotti draws on Hannah Arendt’s notion that our responsibility is acquired simply by virtue of being born into a community, but that it radiates outward to include the non-human community and environment around us. In this way of thinking, we are many, not one; and we are more than human. Conclusion What kind of alternative imaginaries are opened up by the bringing together of the work of Halberstam and Braidotti? Certainly, a broader ethics of sustainability allows us to move away from the central position usually held by the adult subject. In an exchange in Theory, Culture and Society, Braidotti describes how, in her view, the very idea of the ‘imaginary’ marks out “a space of transitions and transactions”: ‘The imaginary’ inscribes the process of individuation into a broad web of socio-political relations…it flows like symbolic glue between the social and the self, the outside…and the subject. (1999, p. 90)

If we were to envisage a shared imaginary flowing between the work of Halberstam and Braidotti, it might incorporate new models of kinship, ones which can expand beyond the self-oriented neoliberal self to make new connections in the world, in acts of ongoing conceptual creativity. If alternative imaginaries are a transformative force that “propels multiple, heterogenous becomings, or repositionings of the subject” (Braidotti, 1999, p. 91), then both these theorists enable us to rethink how the category of adulthood is positioned, how it could change, and ultimately whether it has lasting usefulness. However, the figure of the adult is still vested with responsibility, a responsibility that desperately needs to be broadened beyond the self and the family if more sustainable futures are to be possible. Rather than dismissing the need to think about adulthood at all, it may be more productive to conceptualize an affirmative ethics of becoming-adult, within an expanded community of environmental interconnections. Our adult responsibility to the human and the non-human will only grow, rather than contract, as we move beyond the liberal tradition of individualism to more nomadic subjectivities.

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Of course, all alternative imaginaries need stories: in this case, ways to communicate what a nomadic becoming might look like, sound like, feel like. Halberstam’s work on the Pixarvolt genre gives us an intriguing glimpse of the possibilities. The Pixarvolt genre makes animation itself into a feature of kinetic political action…The human and non-human then are featured as animated and unanimated rather than real and constructed or subjects and objects. [It] offers more in the way of a vision of collective action than most independent films and critical theory put together. (2007)

And so we return to Pixar’s creation of Wall-E, the robot deserted on a lonely playground of waste known as Earth. This dark vision of a posthuman future is sharply political, and if there is a vision of collective action here, then it seems to depend non-human entities. What is left of humanity has fled to a space station, but is chillingly infantilized. Machines do all the work, and the residents begin to look more like babies as they move around in recliners with affixed screens. They have abrogated both responsibility and creativity; they are neither children nor adults, but pure, helpless consumers. Paolo Virno writes in ‘Childhood and Critical Thought’ (2005) that it is time to ‘reactivate childhood’ as a critical method of engagement designed to escape the stultifying and ‘hallucinatory’ character of adult autonomy. Virno argues for the subversive, playful, transformative aspects of childhood, as opposed to the infantile, passive creatures that confront us in Wall-E. The society of mature capitalism is simply puerile. What is necessary is to mobilize against it the forces of childhood from which it draws, but which it shamelessly degrades to the status of a nightmarish kindergarten. (Virno, 2005, p. 10)

If we are to avoid the “nightmarish kindergarten,” as well as the degradation of the ecologies around us, we need to activate more radical ways of being. Together, Halberstam and Braidotti offer us alternatives beyond the masterful adult figure who draws upon the resources of the Earth to sustain only the needs of the self. We can develop new imaginaries around a nonunitary subject, one who is connected as much to outside forces, communities and environments as to its own childlike desire for change, growth and revolution.

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REFERENCES Balibar, E. (1997). Spinoza: from individuality to transindividuality. Mededelingen vanwege het Spinozahuis, 71. Delft: Eburon. Berens, J. (2007, September 29). Ratatouille: year of the rat. Telegraph Magazine (London), p. 5. Braidotti, R. (1994). Nomadic subjects: Embodiment and sexual difference in contemporary feminist theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Braidotti, R. (1996). Nomadism with a difference: Deleuze’s legacy in a feminist perspective. Man and World, 29, 305-314. Braidotti, R. (1999). Response to Dick Pels. Theory, Culture & Society, 16(1), 87-93. Braidotti, R. (2006a). Affirming the affirmative: on nomadic affectivity. Rhizomes, 11-12, Fall/Spring. Retrieved from http://www.rhizomes.net/issue11/braidotti.html Braidotti, R. (2006b). Transpositions: On nomadic ethics. Cambridge: Polity. Butler, J. (2001). Doing justice to someone: sex reassignment and allegories of transsexuality. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 7(4). Castles, S. (2007, August 5). We of the Neverland. Age. Retrieved June 8, 2011 from http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/we-of-the-neverland/2007/08/04/ 1185648203409.html Côte, J. (2000). Arrested adulthood: The changing nature of maturity and identity. New York: New York University Press. Côté, J. (2005). Emerging adulthood as an institutionalized moratorium: risks and benefits to identity formation. In J. Arnett, & J. Tanner (Eds.), Emerging adults in America: Coming of age in the 21st century. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Crawford, K. (2006). Adult themes: Rewriting the rules of adulthood. Sydney: Macmillan. Dale, D. (2004, May 25). The new youth—check the mirror. Sydney Morning Herald, p. 12. Furedi, F. (2003, July 29). The children who won’t grow up. Spiked essays. Retrieved April 9, 2008, from http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/00000006DE8D.htm Halberstam, J. (2005). In a queer time and place: Transgender bodies, subcultural lives. New York & London: New York University Press. Halberstam, J. (2007). Pixarvolt—animation and revolt. Flow: A Critical Forum on Television and Media Culture, 6(6). Retrieved from http://www.flowtv.org/?p=739 Hobsbawm, E. (1995). The age of extremes: The short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991. London: Abacus. Hockey, J., & James, A. (2003). Social identities across the life course. Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hren Hoare, C. (2002). Erikson on development in adulthood: New insights from the unpublished papers. New York: Oxford University Press. Lee, N. (2001). Childhood and society: Growing up in an age of uncertainty. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Lesko, N. (2001). Act your age: A cultural construction of adolescence. New York: Routledge Farmer.

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Lewis, J. (2001). The end of marriage: Individualism and intimate relations. Cheltenham & Northampton: Edward Elgar. Povinelli, E. A. (2006). The empire of love: Toward a theory of intimacy, genealogy, and carnality. Durham & London: Duke University Press. Povinelli, E. A. (2007). Disturbing sexuality. South Atlantic Quarterly, 106(3), 565-576. Quantum Market Research. (2004). AustraliaScan Survey. Retrieved June 2, 2004, from http://www.qmr.com.au/austscan.htm Richardson, D. (2000). Rethinking sexuality. London: Sage. Rose, N. (1999). Powers of freedom: Reframing political thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thompson, L. (2004, August 1). To infantility and beyond! Independent on Sunday, pp. 14-15. Virno, P. (2005). Childhood and critical thought. Grey Room, 2, 6-12. Watters, E. (2003). Urban tribes: Are friends the new family? London: Bloomsbury. Whimster, S. (Ed.). (2004). The essential Weber: A reader. London: Routledge. White, R. & Wyn, J. (2008). Youth and society: Exploring the social dynamics of youth experience (2nd ed.). Melbourne: Oxford University Press.

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RESPONSE ANIMATED BECOMING Peter Bansel University of Western Sydney

In

‘Reanimating Adulthood’ there is play between Crawford and Halberstam’s address to animation: as a cinematic genre with revolutionary potential (Halberstam); and as the inspiration to direct this revolutionary potential towards the articulation of evolving imaginaries of adulthood in late modernity (Crawford). I am animated by Crawford’s invitation to think about how we might re-imagine the human and the subject in a time and space marked by neoliberal capital and ecological threat. Crawford takes up, from Halberstam’s work on ‘Pixarvolt’ animated features, the theme of revolution as powerfully transformed worlds. I, in turn, work with an iteration of revolution as turning, as a circular movement rather than a linear trajectory. This is a circular movement that animates possibilities for becoming, for queering becoming, and becoming queer, in a queer(ed) time and space. I work with the term ‘animated’ in the spirit of Deleuze and Guattari’s (2004) vitalism: with their account of bodies and becomings as relations between the human and the non-human. These are relations through which the human subject becomes more than human, and the inanimate becomes animate(d). I hope, in part, to tell disorderly narratives (Halberstam, 2005), narratives that decentre the human at the same time as they articulate possibilities for becoming. This is also a move towards disrupting normative constructions of time, space and the subject, and articulating both “strange temporalities” (Halberstam, 2005, p. 1) and even stranger spatializations of human subjects. Crawford takes up Halberstam’s (2007) work with the narratives of Pixarvolt animated features as visions of powerfully transformed worlds, and conjoins this with Braidotti’s work on nomadic becoming. It is to these themes of narrative, transformation and becoming that I turn in this response. Halberstam’s account of the Pixarvolt genre foregrounds narratives of anthropomorphized animals, toys or robots that variously signify dilemmas of the human condition, failures of late capitalism and possibilities of ecological disaster. These narratives, despite their apparently non-normative characters, are still anthropocentric, for despite their anthropomorphism the human is left at the centre of the allegorical narrative. How, I ask, might we tell disorderly narratives that decentre the human subject? This is a narrative project, a project of narrating alternative

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accounts of the human subject and of the human subject as becoming: as becoming more than human. Whilst Crawford addresses evolving imaginaries of adulthood in late modernity, I am more preoccupied with evolving imaginaries of the human, or more precisely of the relationship between the human and the nonhuman. Crawford’s contemplations are underpinned by an address to historically contingent normative standards of ‘appropriate adulthood’ inscribed by heteronormative trajectories of labour market participation, marriage, home-investment, family, retirement planning and so on. She recognizes that late capitalism, neoliberalism and globalization have eroded the stability, certainty and accessibility of these trajectories. As Crawford recognizes, “to the degree that neoliberal economic realities are premised on labour precariousness and insecurity, many adults are not masters of their domain.” So, whatever historical or generational differences might be observed in performances of childhood, adolescence and adulthood, these must be understood as part of the programmatic ambitions of government rather than the moral failing of children to grow up or adults to know their proper place. As Crawford suggests, adulthood is itself unstable, and perhaps always already ‘queered.’ I take up, then, the theme of instability, of instability as ‘queer,’ and of becoming as instability, uncertainty and possibility. I’m interested in Crawford’s reminder that there is a pronounced difference between representations of adulthood and how it is lived. Clearly, if there are pronounced differences between lived experience and representations of it, then this is as true of heteronormative lives as of any others. Just as Crawford hopes to move conceptions of the adult “away from an anthropocentric liberal subject towards radically nomadic becomings” I want to move conceptions of the human away from them too, and in so doing relinquish “all idea, desire or nostalgia for fixity” (Braidotti, 1994, p. 22). Braidotti’s nomadic becoming posits a human subject as one figure among many in a more complex landscape of human and non-human others. Halberstam’s account of the Pixarvolt genre foregrounds the extent to which the genre anthropomorphizes animals and machines in allegorical tales of human failings and new worlds. What I’m interested in here is a reverse movement, a turn, or revolution, a move that decentres the human. Where Crawford argues that “the pluralization of care relations outside of institutional and professional modes is an important way in which ‘straight’ adulthood is queered,” I emphasize the pluralization of care relations through an extended concept of the subject as more than human. I proceed in a spirit of agreement with Crawford’s intimations that: normative categories and subjectivities are already unstable and queer; subjects can be understood as lifelong becomings; and responsibility can be located in and

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as the inter-connectedness between the human and non-human, rather than in and as a fetishization of individuality. So, what I want to do is queer the concept of the human subject by constituting it as more than singular, as more than stable, and indeed, as more than human. Though I’m interested in queering temporalities, spatialities and bodies, my ambitions are modest. For whilst I’m happy to concede that anything might be possible, I simultaneously recognize that not everything is possible. I think of this as an animating tension between limits and possibilities: between the known and not, the anticipated and not, the imaginable and not. I’m particularly interested in the disordering effects of the unknown and unknowable, the yet-to-be-imagined and the indefinable, of the chaos that unravels the stability, singularity and coherence of the norm. I think of this chaos not as the absence of order but as the simultaneous co-existence of multiple orders, of an impossible and overwhelming excess of multiplicities and possibilities. Attempts to live with and contain this chaos result in practices that filter, exclude and elide the too-muchness by reducing it to norms that are never as stable as they appear. I’m proposing a countermovement, a revolution, a turn, that embraces this too-muchness as simultaneously unbearable and as the possibility of becoming. This is a movement that recognizes that normativities are unstable regulatory fictions and that becomings have no fixed shape. Becomings are, in this sense, unknowable and unpredictable and animate us to embrace ambiguity, ambivalence, incompleteness and uncertainty as the very conditions of possibility. In responding to Crawford’s invitation to think about how we might reimagine the human and the subject in a time and space marked by neoliberal capital and ecological threat, I address three sets of conceptual relations: temporality, futurity and possibility; subjectivity, instability and becoming; spatiality, bodies and the extra-human. Temporality, futurity and possibility Both Crawford and Halberstam suggest that new imaginaries are emergent from the telling of disorderly narratives. The disorderly narrative I am attempting to tell resists the ordering of time and space and the ordering of relations between the human and the non-human. This disordering is an attempt to give another account of futurity and possibility, one that is not figured as a resistance to, or causal consequence of, the conditions of a problematized (neoliberal) present. Halberstam (2005, p. 7) suggests that “queer time” is a term for “those specific models of temporality that emerge…once one leaves the temporal frame of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance.” Neoliberalism has, I suggest, in one sense emphasized the reproduction of heteronormative

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family time and undone it through the instantiation of deregulated working conditions that impact on work/life balance with implications for family and community life and relations of care (Edgar, 2005; Hamilton and Denniss, 2005; Pocock, 2003; Pusey, 2003; Watson et al., 2003). So, what of the present and the accounts we might make of both it and the future? Ricoeur’s (1988) work on temporality and narrative foregrounds the ontological experience of the subject as present. Both living in the present, and giving accounts of experience in the present moment, are located in temporal trajectories that instantiate a movement from the past to the future through the present, incorporating times past, present and future. Since everything is mediated by the experience of presence in the present, Ricoeur refers to past, present and future as ‘past-present,’ ‘present-present’ and ‘future-present.’ This situates all subjects and their narratives of experience in the present: what is past has an instantiation that is now and not then, and the future-that is-yet-to-come is paradoxically here. The future, then, is not a spatialized temporality waiting to happening: it is already happening in the present. The question of the disorderly narrative becomes, then, not about what will or might happen, nor about what we will or might do in some other moment. It is, rather, a question of what is happening now, where what is happening now is understood as an unstable becoming that calls us to act in the present, not on the basis of a narrative of future ecological disaster, but on a rethinking of the relation between the human and the nonhuman, of the inanimate as animate, and of the human subject as becoming not being. Subjectivity, instability and becoming I am attempting to disengage becoming from futurity and attach it to instability in the present. I have suggested that normative practices of regulation are unstable and irreducible and that they are always becoming something else. This something else escapes the teleological modernist romance of progress and improvement and the latent romance of a Marxist revolution. It is simply an account of an unknowable and unpredictable “horizon of expectation” (Ricoeur, 1988, p. 219)—that which we anticipate and desire. I recognize the extent to which neoliberalism has colonized discourses of becoming and desire as acts of self-improvement accomplished through new alignments of social and fiscal capital, and practices of lifestyle and consumption (Featherstone, 1995; Gay, 1996), or as shape-shifting portfolio workers who can inhabit new identities and skills as desired by the market (Gee, 1999). I am thus cautious about any claims I might make for and about becoming. The account of becoming I am figuring here is about something different: it is about different alignments, with different possibilities. There is, in this figuration, something of

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Halberstam’s address to the Pixarvolt narratives as metaphors for new alignments, configurations and powerfully transformed worlds, rather than any literal narrative of what is problematic in the present and possible in the future. What might it mean to resist romancing the future? I’m gesturing towards a not-necessarily-utopian vision of the future, one that recognizes that it is both uncertain and precarious. So, what might it mean to face this precariousness not with certainty about what is to come—cataclysm or redemption—but with uncertainty and a certain openness? How might we give, in this space of uncertainty, an account of ethics that foregrounds and responds to relations of difference and instability—which is indeed what I read Crawford and Halberstam to be inviting? What lies beyond causal relations between past–present–future trajectories or narratives? What, indeed, is becoming, and what is our relation to that becoming? Ethical becoming, as Crawford acknowledges, involves a necessary shift away from the anthropocentric ‘I’ of liberal individualism to a sustainable ‘we,’ where that ‘we’ is more than human. As Braidotti suggests, ‘we’ are in this together, and this ‘we’ is simultaneously human and not. This relational ‘we’ (that is more than human) is materialized in different bodies and in relations among them, and it is these co-constitutive relations that shape our responsibility for that which is simultaneously part of us and more than us. This responsibility is, as Crawford suggests, to be broadened beyond selfinterest and located in imaginaries of an unstable, decentred, non-unitary subject who is more than human. For Deleuze and Guattari (2004) becoming refers, in part, to the ways in which material bodies human and not, become other. This becoming-other is a process by which someone/something simultaneously continues to become other while continuing to be what it is (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004), persisting as simultaneously a repetition and a difference (Deleuze, 2004). Bodies, both human and not, undergo modifications or changes when they act upon, or are acted upon by, other bodies. These modifications or changes arise from relations between bodies, and these relations between bodies, and the changes or becomings they instantiate, are ‘affects’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004). Affects are becomings: they are “the relations composing, decomposing, or modifying an individual,” and these relations have corresponding intensities that affect it, change it, augment it, or diminish its power to act (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004, p. 256). Affects are the changes, variations, modifications, or becomings that occur when bodies come into contact. The embodied human subject, as relation, affect and becoming, is assembled from co-constitutive relations with other bodies, human and not. The subject, as assemblage, is both relation and

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becoming, transformed or refigured by the affects that emerge when bodies come into relations with each other, changing each other in the process. These changing relationships and becomings are possibly dangerous and precarious, as well as heterotopian. Recognition of becoming as indeterminate and precarious invites an ethical orientation to change (or revolution) that does not assume a romance of world peace and averted ecological disaster, but rather recognizes a nexus of possibilities including the possibility of violence. Narratives of possibility, and possible narratives, are unlikely follow linear trajectories of inexorable forward movement towards closure, disaster or improvement, but rather involve a not always predictable series of movements in the present through which we might articulate alternative narratives with alternative trajectories. And yet, as Grosz (1994, p. 210) recognizes, becomings and their trajectories are fields of differences that “do not lend themselves readily to representation” or to “handy models.” Spatiality, bodies and the extra-human Halberstam suggests that within the postmodern we have become adept at talking about normativity, but less adept at articulating the variety of multiplicities, ruptures, excesses and nuances that escape regulatory accounts of one to one cases of transmission between causes and effects. I’m interested in articulating something of the embodied subject as an excess of practices of regulation, and locating this excess in accounts of human subjects as multiple and co-constitutive relational assemblages of bodies, both human and not. I engage with Deleuze and Guattari’s vitalism as a way of reanimating the non-human, not as an anthropomorphic cipher for the human, the human condition, or human futures, but as a way of simultaneously reanimating the human and animating the inanimate. I frame this through Halberstam’s suggestion that masculinity “becomes legible as masculinity where and when it leaves the white middle class body” (1998, p. 2). Halberstam argues that if what we call “dominant masculinity” appears as a naturalized and invisible relation between maleness and power, “then it makes little sense to examine men for the contours of that masculinity’s social construction” (p. 2). Further, Halberstam suggests that masculinity becomes most legible when located at the site of bodies other than those of “naturalized men,” and so looks instead to female bodies. What I take from this is the thrilling idea that that which is in question is better understood through its location in, and as, another. So I look to other bodies, bodies other than human, in order to understand something of the human subject. I suggest that we might understand the embodied human subject differently by articulating the co-constitutive

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relations through which that subject is assembled within multiple networks of multiple bodies (both human and not). Deleuze and Guattari (2004) give an account of the embodied human subject as an assemblage of bodies, and of relations between them. These bodies are more than human: they may also be bodies of thought, bodies of animals, bodies of water, trees, rocks, wind and so on. There is, says Deleuze (2006, p. 8), no boundary between the organic and the inorganic, as each is continuously folded into the other such that all matter, “whether organic or inorganic,” is one. All bodies undergo modifications or changes when they act, or are acted upon, by other bodies. This is a continuous process of modification, a movement that ‘cannot be stopped.’ In this sense any body is simultaneously movement, modification and becoming. Bodies, as becomings, are not fixed and stable, but always being made and unmade, moving together and coming apart. This emphasis on becomings and possibilities resists constitutive accounts of the operations of authority, regularity and inevitability, and opens up possibilities for becoming that avoid certainty or closure. Attention to co-constitutive bodies shifts attention away from the body as singular to the body as multiple and relational. This emphasis on the subject as an assemblage of heterogeneous elements shifts attention from an account of the ‘I’ as autonomous and singular, to an ‘I’ that is multiple and relational: to a ‘we.’ It also shifts attention away from a preoccupation with the human subject towards those other non-human bodies through which the assemblage of the subject is anyway accomplished. So, what I am emphasizing is a co-constitutive relation between human subjects and other bodies, and also their becoming as multiple and mobile assemblages. These relational assemblages, of which the subject is an artefact, are, suggests Rose (1999), produced through the accumulation of relations with other bodies and ritual repetitions of normative stories. These ritualized repetitions of the norm constitute grids of visibility and intelligibility that obscure other accounts. It does not however erase those accounts or practices that resist repetitions of the norm. I have thus far gestured towards the ethical implications of understanding subjects as becomings, as more than singular and more than human. Just as I am cautious about the inherent romance of becoming, I am cautious about dominant narratives of ethics in late modernity. Rose (1999) proposes that the late twentieth century was characterized by an acute “ethicalisation of existence” which intensified the demand that citizens, in the name of our own self realization, took responsibility for our own conduct and its consequences through shaping a relation to ourselves as experts who take care of ourselves. This imperative for self care is part of a larger

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programmatic ambition of neoliberal government in its restructuring of relations between states, citizens and markets. Individuals are constituted in direct relation to the market as entrepreneurial actors who mobilize possibilities for existence through the exercise of choice, especially choices related to consumption. Strategic to this project is the mobilization of psychological discourses that propose a theory of self-actualizing subjectivity and emphasize “the psychological strivings” (Rose, 1999, p. 113) of individuals over the needs of the collective. Rose (1999) gives an account of the practices of self care as assembled through the articulation of ethical scenarios, discursive repertoires and performative possibilities (not unlike the Pixarvolt narratives). These repertoires and possibilities are shaped through narratives of dilemmas and their solutions which serve as exemplars of particular ethical scenarios. The articulation of dilemmas and solutions is accomplished through the mobilization of ethical technologies and repertoires for conduct in particular contexts and for particular purposes. These representations of dilemmas, and means for coping with them, cast a grid of visibility over existence. They single out certain types of event as significant and problematic at the very same time as they make certain ways of conducting oneself in relation to those events thinkable and possible. What I’m suggesting is that this grid of visibility be articulated as opaque rather than transparent—as black-out rather than illumination. It is a grid that obscures our necessary relationality and the ruptures, excesses, contradictions and multiplicities through which illusions of stability and normativity are produced. Beck, Giddens and Lasch (1994) emphasize the extent to which neoliberalism accomplishes an intensified individualization that is characterized by the segmentation of each life course by the market and the state. Proliferations of new identity categories, especially those linked to age and life-stage, and to gender and sexuality, are co-ordinated by commercial imperatives to generate new markets and practices of consumption. Traditional identity categories are rearticulated and reanimated within these new markets and practices of consumption as matters of freedom and choice. Attributions of age, gender, sexuality, class and ethnicity are rearticulated and reanimated according to ever-expanding commercial categories and sub-categories aimed squarely at the expansion of capital in the name of individual freedom. Expansion of capital is accomplished through the reification of individuals, individualism and individuality. So, practices of consumption become as much about gaining purchase on the commodification of identities as they are about the purchase of commodities. These consumer based identities are constitutive regulatory norms that are embodied and performed by subjects

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in the articulation of themselves as individuals who can choose who they might be or become. But, like Crawford, I’m emphasizing an account of becoming not as the exercise of practices of freedom, consumption and choice, but as relations between multiple, changeable, co-constitutive and interdependent bodies (both human and not). This account of relationality de-emphasizes the neoliberal imperative for care of the self, and emphasizes a necessary care for the other—for the other who is simultaneously and paradoxically oneself. Disorderly narratives and evolving imaginaries In attempting to resist capitulation to, or reification of, the normalizing power of regulation, I contest the expectation that we can arrive at more or less stable conclusions about the way things are; I contest that we can name, analyze and deconstruct stable objects of study such as the subject, the child, the adult, neoliberalism and so on. I’m emphasizing escape from the postulates of normativity and singularity, and a migration towards multiplicity and relationality that responds creatively to a world that is taken to be composed, as Law (2004, p. 9) suggests, of “an excess of generative forces and relations.” I’m emphasizing, among other things, heterogeneity and variation, complexity, diffusion and messiness: a generative flux that recognizes and articulates bodies and realities as assemblages of multiplicities, relationalities and becomings. These relational assemblages have no fixed shape, nor do they entirely belong to a grid of intelligibility through which their meanings might be constituted, stabilized and secured. It is from within these temporalized and spatialized heterogeneous assemblages that embodied human subjects emerge as relations rather than singularities, as becomings rather than beings. In this way, our location in time and space queers us at the very same time as it constitutes and regulates us. As assemblages of possibilities and becomings, bodies are less stable than the normative categories through which they are articulated might otherwise suggest. To see homogeneity as a fiction that masks complexity and heterogeneity allows us to engage with acts of imagination that transcend the idea that there is indeed a child who is ontologically different from an adult, a straight that is ontologically different from queer, or a human who is ontologically different from the non-human. This is, as Crawford suggests, a move “beyond queer models that establish new margins and identities that are easily drawn into a market logic of product niches.” It is, instead, a move towards the generation of accounts of decentred subjects and bodies, human and not, that emphasize a co-constitutive multiplicity, relationality and becoming among them. This recognition of co-constitutive relations informs the articulation of narratives of responsibility, ethical scenarios, discursive repertoires and performative

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possibilities that see only proliferations of differences in the spaces formerly occupied by stable taxonomies, and only relationalities in the spaces formerly occupied by individuals. It is in and from these spaces that we might articulate alternative imaginings, narratives and becomings. This is a project of articulating narratives of becomings that are tenuous, provisional, deferred and yet-to-be-elaborated—with who knows what consequences?

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REFERENCES Beck, U., Giddens, A., & Lasch, S. (1994). Reflexive modernisation. Cambridge: Polity. Braidotti, R. (1994). Nomadic subjects: Embodiment and sexual difference in contemporary feminist theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (2004). Difference and repetition. London & New York: Continuum. Deleuze, G. (2006). The fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. London & New York: Continuum. Deleuze, G., & Guattari. F. (2004). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Continuum. Edgar, D. (2005). The war over work: The future of work and family. Carlton: Melbourne University Press. Featherstone, M. (1995). Undoing culture: Globalisation, postmodernism and identity. London: Sage. Gay, P. du (1996). Consumption and identity at work. London: Sage. Gee, J. (1999). New people in new worlds: networks, the new capitalism and schools. In B. Cope, & M. Kalantzis (Eds.), Multi literacies: Literacy learning and the design of social futures (pp. 43-68). London: Routledge. Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile bodies: Towards a corporeal feminism. St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin. Halberstam, J. (1998). Female masculinity. Durham & London: Duke University Press. Halberstam, J. (2005). In a queer time and place: Transgender bodies, subcultural lives. New York & London: New York University Press. Halberstam, J. (2007). Pixarvolt—animation and revolt. Flow: A Critical Forum on Television and Media Culture, 6(6). Retrieved August 4, 2008 from http://www.flowtv.org/?p=739 Hamilton, C., & Denniss, R. (2005). Affluenza: When too much is never enough. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin. Law, J. (2004). After method: Mess in social science research. Abingdon & New York: Routledge. Ricoeur, P. (1988). Time and narrative (Vol. 3). Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press. Pocock, B. (2003). The work/life collision. Sydney: The Federation Press. Pusey, M. (2003). The experience of Middle Australia: The dark side of economic reform. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rose, N. (1999). Governing the soul. London: Free Association Books. Watson, I., Buchanan, J., Campbell, I., & Briggs, C. (2003). Fragmented futures: New challenges in working life. Annandale: The Federation Press.

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CHAPTER 7 QUEERING HIGH SCHOOL AT SUMMER HEIGHTS Susanne Gannon University of Western Sydney

Abstract: This chapter looks at queer places and times on Summer Heights High, the hit Australian television mockumentary. The success of the program pivots on the credibility of the performances of actor Chris Lilley as 16-year-old schoolgirl (Ja’mie King), 13-yearold Tongan schoolboy (Jonah Takalua) and drama teacher Mr G. Although Lilley’s performances can be read as ‘drag’ in their subversion and exaggeration of sex and gender norms, the chapter argues that beyond the bodies of Jonah and Ja’mie, subversive imaginaries are enacted in the narrative through two minor characters, Ofa and Tamsin. The student characters are traced through a series of scenes that take place in the very queer places of the boys’ toilets, the Year 11 formal and ‘Polyday’ celebrations. Gannon suggests that the excessive performances of the characters draw attention to sexuality, gender, class and race in secondary schools, and not only to the operations of these striations of identity but also to their instability and contingency. This chapter details normative structures and processes as manifested and subverted in Summer Heights High. It considers the ambiguities of parody, where Lilley articulates homophobia and racism at the same time as they are critiqued. It examines the operations of drag to show how Lilley’s performances of race and gender demonstrate that these are not sutured to particular bodies. Bronwyn Davies provides a response to this chapter. Keywords: Summer Heights High, queer, parody, drag, gender, homophobia, Chris Lilley, performance, race, class.

Summer

Heights High was a highly successful mockumentary series on Australian ABC television in late 2007 and has since sold well internationallyi. Its humour was generated by the script and performances of comedian Chris Lilley in drag as a schoolgirl (16-year-old Ja’mie King) and as a Tongan schoolboy (13-year-old Jonah Takalua), complemented by the third in his trio of characters, the drama teacher Mr G. Through the excessive performances of these and other characters, the series draws attention to sexuality, gender, class and race in secondary schools. It draws attention not only to the operations of these striations of identity but also to their instability and contingency. This chapter offers a tentative reading of Summer Heights High as a site that might begin to nudge viewers towards the sort of ‘queer time and place’ from which Halberstam (2005) advocates that new and perhaps subversive imaginaries might be generated. It considers the ambiguities of parody, where Lilley articulates homophobia and racism at the same time as they are critiqued. It examines the operations of drag to show how Lilley’s performances of race and gender demonstrate that these are not sutured to particular bodies. It attempts to detail normative Kerry H. Robinson and Cristyn Davies (Eds) All rights reserved - © 2012 Bentham Science Publishers

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structures and processes as they manifest and are subverted in Summer Heights High. And it takes into account how notions of the ‘real’—real schools, real students, real teachers, real research, real bodies—complicate readings of this text. Summer Heights High parodies the ‘slice of life’ genre of documentary. It purports to witness events that are already going on in a particular social and cultural context. In the style of slice of life documentaries, the camera follows the characters in turn through their individual trajectories in that time and place. In its marketing, the series trades on the supposed realness of its portrayal of an Australian secondary school ii . It is advertised to potential audiences as “set in an average Australian high school” with its verisimilitude underpinned by Lilley’s “uncanny insight into human behaviour [and] characters who will hit a chord with students, teachers and parents alike” (ABC, 2008; BBC, 2008). It was filmed in the buildings and grounds of a Melbourne secondary school and some of the extras were students and teachers. Summer Heights High School is rife with heterosexism, homophobia, racism and class prejudice. Viewer responses indicate that these elements are also readily recognizable in their own narratives of schooling. It is tempting to consider the series as a site for investigating sexualities in schooling, an area that is of great interest to educational researchers but notoriously difficult to research (cf. Epstein et al., 2003; Ferfolja, 2007; Forrest, 2006; Rasmussen et al., 2004; Rasmussen, 2006; Robinson, 2005). However Summer Heights High is not an ethnographic text about high schools. Despite its aspirations to be credible and recognizable, it is fiction. As parody, it simulates the real and exceeds it on trajectories that must remain recognizable for the parody to succeed. The close readings of particular excessive characters and scenes in this chapter are tracings of the discursive and corporeal textures of the fictional space and the operations of parody in Summer Heights High. This analysis asks how the discursive and narrative moves coded into the series have the potential to enable viewers to see some of the taken-for-granted norms of race, gender, sexuality and class. By working into some of these fault lines, the series might perhaps enable viewers to imagine otherwise. This chapter concentrates on the student characters in Summer Heights High. The characters of Jonah and Ja’mie, both played by Lilley, enable close readings of the “many lines of identification [that] traverse the terrain of masculinity [and femininity] dividing its power into complicated differentials of class, race, sexuality and gender” (Halberstam, 1998, p. 2). The narrative arc of the series is shaped around events that take place within one school term, marked by the arrival and departure of these two students. Ja’mie is a rich white girl who arrives at Summer Heights High School on a student exchange program from her wealthy private school, Hillford Girls’

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Grammar, and leaves to return to her old school and her old life at the end of the series. Jonah is a Tongan boy who has already been expelled from a string of other schools and is finally, at the end of the series, expelled from this one too. The chapter suggests that although Jonah and Ja’mie, through parody, provide overt critiques of gendered and sexed subjectivities in the series, the two minor characters Ofa and Tamsin also operate as important sites of more subtle subversion. The first half of the chapter focuses on Jonah Takalua. His attempts to make a place for himself as a Tongan youth in the grounds and classrooms of Summer Heights High are mapped and his trajectory is considered in relation to the only female member of his Polynesian clique, Ofa, a Year 8 student like him. Ofa’s representation as an adolescent “masculine woman” (Halberstam, 1998) provides another subtle critique of normativity that can be traced through Summer Heights High. The second section of the chapter follows Ja’mie King through the school as she attempts to create a satisfactory social niche for herself. It also considers Ja’mie in relation to her lesbian classmate, Tamsin. At different times and to varying degrees the trajectories of Jonah and Ja’mie are entangled with these minor characters, who provide further scope for subversive imaginaries. In Summer Heights High, the intelligibility of the main characters is contingent on performances that are queered by the excesses of parody and by the operations of drag. Lilley’s performances as Jonah and Ja’mie can both be considered within the paradigm of ‘drag’ in that “discontinuities between gender and sex or appearance and reality” are played out on the bodies of subjects (Halberstam, 1998, p. 236). The discontinuities of drag draw attention to the artifice and effort involved in all performances of gender. In Summer Heights High, the audience are in on the ‘joke’ that a white male-bodied actor in his thirties is a 16-year-old girl and a 13-year-old Tongan boy. Like the drag performances that Halberstam documents (1998, 2005), these incongruities are used for creative and critical performances that call into question the categories upon which they depend and the effects of those categories in the world. In particular, Summer Heights High draws attention to how heterosexuality is performatively contingent on homosexuality, as queer is reified to become the ‘other’ against which heterosexuality is imagined and enacted. Queer provides the conditions within which straight is made possible, thus the terrain of sexuality remains always and inevitably unstable. The effort required to maintain this binary is evident throughout the series. From the opening scenes we see the character of Jonah enacting an overtly homophobic masculinity. Later we see Ja’mie attempt to improve her social cachet by a performance of faux lesbian desire. Both of these characters are deeply invested in their heterosexual identities and they work hard to maintain them. At different points in their narratives, and in different ways,

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they each raise the spectre of pedophilia to further inscribe their heterosexuality and to reinforce their disavowal of homosexuality. After flirting briefly with lesbian possibilities, Ja’mie opts for a relationship with a much younger male student, claiming that she would “rather be a pedophile than a lesbian.” Jonah manipulates teachers and other adults by evoking the possibility of their recognition—or misrecognition—as a pedophile. The audience of Summer Heights High is far from the queer counter-public that Halberstam examines. The series is an evocation of the familiar dystopia of secondary schooling. It is often disturbing to watch but in that disturbance there is a provocation to attend more closely to what is going on. The comedy, the characters, and the narratives pivot on gender, sexuality, race and class—on their heightening through parody and the drag performances of Chris Lilley. Summer Heights High draws attention to their operations of sexuality, race and class and to their fault lines. This makes the series, the school and the semester that it purports to document a queer sort of space and time. The remainder of this chapter explores the characters of Jonah, Ja’mie, Ofa and Tamsin in relation to each other and those around them, and their investments in particular and unstable identifications. Jonah Takalua: Don’t look at my dick sir, you’ll look like a poofta Jonah Takalua is the most complex and ambivalent character in Summer Heights High. His relentlessly masculine performance highlights how homophobic discourses and practices are deeply implicated in the production of heterosexuality. Jonah’s performance demonstrates how masculinity, rather than inhering in the body, or in male genitalia in particular, is “the product of repeated and scripted motions” (Halberstam, 2005, p. 135). Jonah operates at the intersection of gender and ethnicity where his performance of masculinity is inflected by his ethnicity, and his performance of ethnicity is inflected by his masculinity. Halberstam notes that “femininity and masculinity signify as normative through white, middle-class, heterosexual bodies” (1998, p. 29) but Jonah’s is not a normative straight male body. He is a non-Anglo non-white boy, and therefore might be looked to for performances of masculinities other than the crisis-ridden “adolescent white hetero-masculinity” that Halberstam identifies in the US (2005, p. 126). At school, where he is marginalized in multiple ways, Jonah’s performance of hypermasculinity can be read as central to his sense of himself and his location within the relational networks within which he moves. His constant disavowal of homosexuality, his homophobic bullying and overt misogyny are coupled with a vulnerability that the viewers of the series have greater access to than with Lilley’s other characters. Jonah is marked as ‘other’—and as inferior—in

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terms of his race, citizenship, class and ability. Consequently, his masculinity is undesirable, at least to some of his teachers. He is the son of a single parent, a working class father who is portrayed by the filmmakers as awkward and abusive when he is called up to the school in relation to his wayward son. In classrooms, Jonah is incompetent in terms of the performances required of him by the school—he cannot read, he cannot behave with appropriate classroom decorum, he backchats his teachers. In the playground he swaggers around with a small group of other Pacific Islander kids, graffitis walls and practices breakdancing but even in this— his only apparent talent and source of pride as the best breakdancer in the ‘whole suburb’—he is gazumped by a new student who, although younger and smaller than him, is a better breakdancer and becomes his nemesis. His repeated failure and ineptitude in the formal contexts of schooling operate as a partial counterfoil to the verbal and non-verbal homophobic abuse that he delivers to others. Halberstam suggests that “masculinity becomes legible where and when it leaves the white middle class body” (1998, p. 2). Jonah’s identity as masculine is performed from a platform of ethnicity; his masculinity is particularly linked to his Tongan identity. He and his Samoan and Tongan friends call themselves ‘Polyforce’ and we see them together almost always. If we understand dominant masculinity to be associated with “power and legitimacy and privilege” (Halberstam, 1998, p. 2), then Jonah and his male friends are excluded from this masculinity and instead they rest on the tenuous ground of reputation, and the necessity of ceaseless repetition of behaviours that might secure this ‘reputation.’ In episode one Jonah tells the camera that “we’ve got a reputation for being really tough and stuff and teachers are, like, fully scared of us. They have this rule that we’re not allowed to go more than ten metres from the fence, the boundary of the school in case we beat the shit out of pedestrians and stuff.” Though his friend Leon interrupts with “we don’t attack people,” Jonah explains their precarious positioning within the affective relations of the school as “yeah but we’ve got a reputation for being violent and stuff, so we might attack someone.” He adds, “you never know what we might do.” In representing Jonah as a young Tongan male, Lilley draws on readily available cultural tropes that associate minority masculinities—where discourses of race, ethnicity and class intersect with gender—with an uncontrollable and uncivilized masculinity. In the social imaginary of Summer Heights High non-white ethnicity is aligned with “excessive and violent masculinity” (Halberstam, 1998, p. 29). This “never know what we might do” is attached to the non-white body, whereas teachers and other authorities do assume they know what the white middle class male body will do. This excessive masculinity—this masculinity that might explode into drama at any time—

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is firmly located in the ‘other’ body, the body other than the white middle class male body. The ‘other’ body in Summer Heights High is also the body of Ofa, a Polynesian girl who is one of the five members of Polyforce, the friendship group of which Jonah is the centre. Rather than being in drag, as Lilley’s characters are, this character is played by a female actor, also named Ofa. Her body is a site of gender ambiguity. Rounded and solid rather than recognizably breasted and branded as female, Ofa wears a version of the boys’ school uniform, with three-quarter length pants, a white shirt and a tie, and is seen with the four boys most of the time. She is not ‘outed’ as female until episode three, when a teacher instructs her friend Leon at the Year 8 dance: ‘You dance with Ofa, she’s a girl.’ Again she is visibly gendered ‘girl’ in episode six, on ‘Polyday,’ when the audience glimpse her for a moment wearing a lei, a frangipani flower and a girl’s dance costume, standing awkwardly at the back of the stage with the other Polynesian girls as the boys dance at the front for the assembled school. Ofa’s location in the school is mediated by her looks, her gender and her ethnicity. For Ofa and the other members of Polyforce, being Polynesian transcends gender differences as an identity category and within this ethnic difference, Ofa is recognizably performing a female masculinity. Elsewhere in the series she is interpellated as masculine by the teachers. Episode two begins with the English teacher, Miss Wheatley, including Ofa in her comment “you boys will all be seeing Mrs Murray today” after the group has played a trick on her. In episode eight, when Mrs Palmer introduces Jonah as one of “her Gumnut boys” the camera pans along the row of Pacific Islander students including Ofa, and it implies by its gaze that she too is one of the boys. In episode seven, when Jonah’s locker is graffitied by other students, the racist slurs include: “Polynesian chicks have dicks.” In this graffiti, Ofa is not named nor does the slur address gender discontinuity as a feature of any individual student. Rather the condition of female masculinity is attached to the entire collective of “Polynesian chicks.” Nevertheless viewers are led to read “Polynesian chicks” as Ofa because she is the only one portrayed in the series. Whilst viewers are encouraged to see Ofa as masculine in some scenes, Ofa’s femininity is also exploited and underlined in the Polyday celebrations. A Polyforce music video clip is played to the gathered school community. The backup vocal to the rap is a melodious female voice singing “Polynesian baby, Polynesian baby.” A closeup shows us Ofa’s face under a baseball cap singing these lines. Ofa’s body, despite her minimal dialogue and fleeting role in the series, is reinforced in all these scenes as an ambiguous site that contests the normative binary of male and female gendered identity.

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In Summer Heights High disruption, disobedience and nonconformity are racialized in the character of Jonah. Part of the masculine excess is the homophobic display that is part of Jonah’s masculine repertoire. The first exchange we see in episode one demonstrates how his masculine performance pivots on homophobia. Bullying is a problem, we are told by the voiceover of the school welfare teacher, Mr Peterson, as the camera pans across Jonah and his friends sitting outside Peterson’s office. Jonah is in trouble after he and his friends have ‘tormented’ a small red-haired boy (a ‘ranga’). Mr Peterson tells us how he works one-on-one with victims and perpetrators to try and get to the ‘root causes’ of bullying. His goal is to get Jonah through a whole term without him being expelled. Jonah has thrown the boy’s school bag over the train line. His justification is that he didn’t do it, it was a joke, and that the boy is a ‘homo’ anyway. Jonah:

Mr P: Jonah: Mr P: Jonah: Mr P: Jonah: Mr P:

There’s a difference between bullying and joking around, Sir. We were joking around with him, Sir. He doesn’t get it. It’s not my fault. He takes it serious…He just starts fucking crying. He’s a homo. Well I’ve got to tell you it’s not appropriate. It’s not appropriate because he’s a homo. We were trying to have a fun time on the way to school. Was it fun for Ben? Yes. He just didn’t get that it was fun. We weren’t even bullying him, Sir… Are you going to come back this afternoon and do it again or are you going to look at Ben and say sorry Ben. Sorry, you homo. No Jonah, that’s not acceptable. Try again…

Throughout the series, Jonah associates being ‘a homo’ with almost every behaviour that others want him to take up, in particular with all practices of school compliance, including reading and doing his work in classes. In the first episode, the camera follows Jonah and his friends around the schoolyard recording him taking things from other students and throwing them on the roof, calling out abuse—“Fuck you, you motherfucker”—and pushing around other students. The camera cuts back and forth from this scene to Mr Peterson explaining that Jonah is a “very special student” who is “a lot more than he seems on the surface,” an “at risk” student who is multiply disadvantaged. We also see Jonah in classrooms. Gumnut Cottage, the alternative education space where he and other Pacifica students have some of their classes with Mrs Palmer, a sympathetic remedial literacy teacher, is contrasted with Jonah’s regular English class where he acts up and harasses his teacher Miss Wheatley. We understand that Mr Peterson and Mrs Palmer are on Jonah’s side, as they work one-on-one and try to understand him and to meet his needs. They undertake strategic ignoring of his ‘language’ and behaviour, remind him of his personal goals, adapt and

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modify contracts and school rules to create incentives for him to succeed. Yet the familiar school management practices they deploy are ultimately ineffective with Jonah. We also understand that Miss Wheatley is not on Jonah’s side, as she rigorously enforces class and school rules that have him gradually removed from his desk, from his English class and finally from the school altogether. These moves are all positioned by school authorities as direct consequences of Jonah’s actions, of the choices that he does and doesn’t make to behave compliantly in the same ways expected of all students and of all rational self-managing subjects. Jonah’s performative style is already constructed for us by teachers and school processes as individualized, psychologized and pathologized. In the first episode we also see Jonah and his friends in the boys’ toilets, as Ofa remains outside as lookout. This is where Jonah and his friends hang around “just doing tagging and shit.” He invites the camera in and points out his tags amongst the other graffiti on the walls: ‘dicktation’—a drawing of a penis and testicles then ‘tation’ and ‘liek my ballz’ scrawled on the stainless steel of the communal urinal. Then they are interrupted by a teacher. Jonah makes use of the ‘bathroom problem’ (Halberstam, 1998), to get out of trouble. The problems of bathrooms for gender performance are that they are always liminal spaces, disrupting public/private binaries and with the potential to both draw attention to and disrupt gendered performances. In particular the male bathroom “constitutes both an architecture of surveillance and an incitement to desire, a space of homosocial interaction and homoerotic interaction” (1998, p. 24). Compared to female toilets which tend to be “dominated by gender codes,” male toilets are dominated by “sexual codes” (1998, p. 24) and Jonah mobilizes these to extricate himself from detention. School toilets are often fraught places for all who might enter them. Ofa is excluded from the boys’ toilet but we might assume that she is hardly welcome in the feminine space of the girls’ toilet either. When she thrusts her head in the door to announce that a teacher is coming, Jonah ceases his guided tour of the graffiti and turns to the urinal as if to urinate. The teacher has come to collect him for detention but stops at the door, averting his eyes. It is already clear to teacher and students that the male toilet is a “highly charged sexual space” (Halberstam, 1998, p. 24). In this scene the camera cuts back and forth between Jonah at the urinal, calling back over his shoulder, and the teacher hovering half in and half out of the door. Mr J: Jonah, come on mate. Jonah: Sir, don’t come in. I’m pissing. Don’t look at my dick, Sir. [The camera comes closer to the teacher who we can see now has his eyes closed.] Mr J: No-one’s looking at…just hurry up. Jonah: Sir, you’ll look like a poofta. Don’t look at me. Mr J: Hurry up.

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Get out, Sir.

The teacher backs out and the door closes as Jonah turns from the urinal to the camera, his fly still done up, his hands out in a triumphant gesture, his mates hi-fiving and hugging him. He explains to us: Jonah:

That’s how you get out of detention. They look like perverts. They have to go straight away. It’s the best method.

Male teachers and students appear to be equally subject to Jonah’s homophobic performance. The accusation that he might be a ‘poofta’ is enough to chase the teacher from the door. Jonah’s collapse of homosexuality and perversion evokes the spectre that often haunts men who work with children, the spectre of pedophilia. The teacher is stopped by the possibility of this interpretation. Pedophilia is a thread through Summer Heights High but the character through which it is worked most directly is the Year 11 girl Ja’mie, also played by Lilley, who is slumming for the term at Summer Heights. For Ja’mie, whose celebrity begins to wane after the heady early days at the school, pedophilia and lesbianism emerge as the two available perversions through which she might express her uniqueness and enhance her social status. Ja’mie King: I’d rather be a pedophile than a lesbian Lilley’s embodiment of the Year 11 girl Ja’mie King is remarkable in its corporeal distinctiveness from his portrayal of Jonah. As with Jonah, Ja’mie’s intelligibility as a girl is established through an excessively gendered performance. In contrast with the loose-limbed swaggering Jonah, Ja’mie is the epitome of femininity. Her body is tightly constrained. Her long hair requires her to bring her hand up frequently to primp and flip it back from her eyes and she maintains a slyly indirect gaze. In the early episodes as we see Jonah saunter through the school yard, we see Ja’mie ‘throwing like a girl’ in a parody of incompetent femininity. With Ja’mie, as with Jonah, Lilley’s hyperfeminine performance can be read as an act of drag. As a gender performance it is exaggerated and made visible, untethered from any remnant sense of a ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ sexed body. Ja’mie’s excessive femininity manifests in her obsessions as well as her appearance. She is most concerned with establishing and maintaining her social image and popularity and early episodes track her attempts to position herself with the girls who seem to be the most desirable social group in her year, the ones who are pointed out to her in the first episode as the ‘bitches.’ Ja’mie is immensely confident about her superiority over the students at Summer Heights. Power inheres not in her putative gender but in the social cachet that wealth and privilege guarantee. Her motivation for later considering whether she would ‘rather’ be a pedophile or a lesbian is foreshadowed in the first episode in one of her few straight to camera

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commentaries. The scene cuts back and forth between a highly staged public performance where she holds a microphone and gives a speech to the entire assembled school, with an accompanying slide show depicting ‘the world where I come from,’ and a private session with the camera outdoors. Like Jonah she takes this tête-à-tête with the camera as an opportunity to explain herself and her motivations. She confides to us how her friends at Hillford Girls’ Grammar were shocked at her decision to come slumming to a public school. The PowerPoint presentation she makes on the public stage in the school hall segues straight into her private commentary outside. Ja’mie: My friends think I’m an idiot, They’re like, why would you go to Summer Heights High? It’s like the boganestiii school in the world. It’s such a random thing for me to do. But I’m always doing things that, like, push outside the boundaries. Do you know what I mean?

Like Jonah, Ja’mie assumes that we will appreciate what she says to us, that we are all on the same page. She’s always doing things like this, she says, she’s just that sort of girl. She goes on to elaborate the snobbery that is already obvious in her public presentation and which is almost her undoing later in the series. She tells the camera outside the school hall: Ja’mie: I usually try to avoid public school people, do you know what I mean? Like, one time I went to this Year 10 formal with this guy from a public school, as a joke. Me and my friends thought it would be so cool just to check out all the bogans and stuff. Do you know what I mean? It was such a crap formal.

Her visit to Summer Heights High provides her with another opportunity to “check out all the bogans.” However Ja’mie struggles to find a place where she can belong within the social landscape of Summer Heights High, and where she can still maintain a sense of herself as different, and her reputation for pushing “outside the boundaries.” One of the ways that Ja’mie settles on to be different is her ambition, in the early episodes, to be the first Year 11 girl to go out with a Year 7 boy. In later episodes, the Year 11 formal becomes the focus of Ja’mie’s anxieties. The lesbian student Tamsin becomes the object of her desire as a partner for the formal, as the vehicle through which she might mark herself as different. As Rasmussen notes, the school formal is both “preserve of heterosexuality” and “the space of sexual subversion” (2004, p. 134). Ja’mie’s interest in lesbians is piqued initially in episode two when the ‘emos’ are pointed out to her, including the ‘dyke emos.’ “Do you have lesbians at this school?” asks Ja’mie of her friends. “Yes,” they respond in of-course tones of voice. “Oh my God,” she says, “I don’t think you’re allowed to be a lesbian at my school.” Prohibition, as Foucault elaborates, may be more likely to incite desire than to extinguish it.

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For Ja’mie and her friends looking hot and being noticed by others, being the object of the gaze, is of critical importance. In episode six, the ‘lesbian issue’ in relation to the school formal becomes the key plotline for Ja’mie. She raises it first at the committee planning the formal: “I don’t think we should be letting them come. Like, I don’t want to be a bitch but…We’ve got the most awesome night planned and don’t want to be upstaged by a bunch of dykes.” The other members of the committee respond by pointing out that “lesbians are really, like, in at the moment” and that there are some “really hot lesbians” at the school, and that “they’ve been really accepting of us.” They invoke the figure of another Year 11 girl, Tamsin Walker, as the hottest lesbian at the school. Lesbianism is not social death here, but rather we hear from the other girls that “all the boys know” and “they really like her.” In the heterosexual milieu of coeducational secondary schooling, the boys’ approval of the lesbian is important. The talk about the formal revolves around the ‘look’ that is most desirable. The look is not their dresses or their hair or makeup but their social location as part of a couple with social prestige. It’s not enough for a heterosexual girl to be there with a good-looking boy. There also needs to be a twist. One girl is bringing a good-looking boy in a wheelchair. Ja’mie tells her: “That is such a good look, going with a disabled guy. That gets you so much cred…Wheelchairs are such a good visual like when you arrive.” The foil of otherness is used to increase attention on the star attraction, the girl in question. These girls are their own publicists. Later in this episode, Ja’mie asks Tamsin Walker to go to the formal with her. In this scene her approach is initially furtive. She disappears into the bushes, and emerges suddenly to sidle up awkwardly to Tamsin and take her to a part of the school where they won’t be seen talking. Ja’mie is visibly nervous, her eyes skitter about and her voice is hesitant. The story she delivers is that she is a nascent lesbian using the school formal as a chance to come out. When Tamsin says “I didn’t know you were into girls,” Ja’mie answers her, “yes I am. I’ve been really confused for a while and now I’m really sure and I’m really into chicks.” In a later scene in the same episode when Tamsin seeks out Ja’mie, Tamsin also locates herself within this coming out storyline. Tamsin: I had a big think about it and I think it’s a really good idea to go to the formal…I’d love to go…If you need to talk at all about the whole coming out thing, I’ve been there.

But here Ja’mie shifts her own location in the coming out story. Ja’mie: I’m cool. I’m OK about it. I’ve always known. I was just born this way.

The drama for Ja’mie is that this time her friends have witnessed the exchange between herself and Tamsin. She turns to them as Tamsin walks away and begins her defence.

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Ja’mie: Oh my god. Don’t freak out. I’m not a lesbian. I told her I was lesbian so she’d take me to the formal…Don’t you get it? She’s like the second hottest girl in Year 11.

Ja’mie of course is, in her view at least, the hottest girl in Year 11. The other girls, despite their earlier defence of lesbians in the face of Ja’mie’s apparent homophobia, now turn away from her. Kaitlyn: But she’s a lesbian! Holly: It’s disgusting to even joke about it. To go with a lesbian! Ja’mie: Think about it. When we turn up to the nightclub and we get out of the limo everyone’s going to go schizo. It’s going to be so much better than you and the wheelchair guy.

Ja’mie wins them over with her argument about image and the at-any-cost celebrity moment. Lesbianism here, or rather faux-lesbianism, like many other behaviours in the volatile repertoire of cool, is an optional accessory for Ja’mie and her cool friends. In this context, lesbianism—even when it is erratically and conditionally tolerated—provides no challenge to the heterosexual matrix or the limited range of ways of being female that it provides. Rather, lesbian desire has been tamed within the circuits of teenage female popularity. Although ultimately marginal to school culture and events, Tamsin disrupts the norms of sex and gender as they operate at Summer Heights High. Her disruption is not created by excessive performances, such as those of Jonah and Ja’mie which draw attention to the contingency of gender, but by an apparent naturalness. In episode seven on a free-dress day, Ja’mie complements Tamsin on her jeans and black t-shirt: “Oh you came as a lesbian! Cool!” Tamsin responds that these are her normal casual clothes. In contrast to Ja’mie’s expectation that lesbianism can be put on and off, like the other costumes that students wear on the day, Tamsin suggests that—for her— lesbianism inheres in her body, not in her dress. Lesbianism is normal for her and this body; these clothes, this way of being in the world, these desires are her ‘normal.’ Tamsin’s comportment, compassion, manner and mode of speaking reinforce her naturalness, and construct her as ‘genuine’ in contrast to the artifice of many of her peers. Ja’mie’s engagement with Tamsin in the remaining episodes of the series continues to turn on the binary of lesbian/not-lesbian. At the beginning of the final episode, Ja’mie is still simultaneously embracing and abjecting lesbianism. She tells her beautician: Ja’mie: I’m going with a lesbian tonight to the formal. I’m not one. I’m just going with one because she’s really hot.

Tamsin is “really hot” not because Ja’mie desires her, in fact Ja’mie disavows desire at the same time as she notes Tamsin’s desirability. For

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Ja’mie perhaps, as a girl performing heterosexuality, desire is subsumed— or redirected—away from fleshy bodies into image and a quest for celebrity. Not unlike Jonah and his concern with reputation, female popularity also turns on being known for something, on having and appropriately managing the right sort of reputation. During this conversation, as her final makeup is being applied in preparation for the formal, Tamsin sends a text message to her. Ja’mie’s reaction is violent. Ja’mie: Oh my God, oh my God. Stupid bitch, stupid lesbian bitch. Oh my God. Tamsin’s not coming to the formal with me. She found out I’m not really a lesbian…

The Year 7 boy, Sebastian, from the earlier episodes, is Ja’mie’s last minute replacement for Tamsin and the series concludes, three weeks after the formal, with Ja’mie and Sebastian in a committed relationship and Ja’mie about to leave the school at the end of term to go back to Hillford Girls’ Grammar. Heterosexuality is reinscribed as the norm. On the last day she comments on the recent dramatic events. Ja’mie: I’m really so pissed off that Tamsin dumped me hours before the formal. Holly: She’s so jealous of you and Sebastian. Ja’mie: I know. Kaitlyn: It’s so obvious. Ja’mie: She yelled out at me the other day: “Oh Ja’mie, you’re a pedophile for going out with a Year 7.” Get over it. Kaitlyn: But she’s a lesbian! Ja’mie: I’d rather be a pedophile than a lesbian. Seriously.

For Ja’mie, as well as for Jonah, homophobia becomes a necessary condition for heteronormativity. Even though hetero‘norm’ativity for Ja’mie is perverse, because the object of her desire is only twelve years old, any queer alternative is made to seem impossible. Ja’mie’s narrative arc through Summer Heights High suggests that desire is a matter of will and image control. However Ja’mie’s control is only ever tenuous and the contradictions inherent in her performances reinforce the fragility of heterosexuality. The character of Tamsin might seem to open other modes of being in the world but despite the visibility of at least one lesbian at Summer Heights High, the series tells us that acceptance is always contingent, tenuous and marginal.

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Conclusion In looking at an Australian fictional television text and attempting through it to trace elements of heteronormativity and queer imaginaries in high schools, I have attempted to seek “insights in eccentric and unrepresentative archives” (Halberstam cited in Dinshaw, 2007, p. 182). Popular culture texts are part of the cultural archives that delineate what is imaginable and what is not, and that may contribute to fissures in normativity. Halberstam suggests that though heteronormativity has become part of our vocabulary of critique, we are “far less adept at describing in rich detail the practices and structures that both oppose and sustain conventional forms of association, belonging and identification” (2005, p. 4). Summer Heights High, in the compressed space and time of one school term, details some of the practices and structures that hold heterosexuality, and homosexuality as its abject other, rigidly locked into place. However, at the same time, it shows their interdependence and the frailty of heterosexuality. As a parody that works for large audiences, the fictional space of Summer Heights High is simultaneously marked as having the semblance of truth. Lilley’s performances as the vehemently but unstably heterosexual characters Jonah Takalua and Ja’mie King invite exploration of the intertwined operations of sexuality, gender, class and ethnicity. As ‘drag’ they are marked by both incongruity and credibility. Ja’mie and Jonah, who might be read as both overtly queer and profoundly straight, are juxtaposed with the minor characters of Ofa and Tamsin who in different ways begin to subvert the straight projects of high school and of adolescence. For mainstream audiences, Summer Heights High operates “to influence and ironize” femininity, masculinity, race and class (Halberstam, 2005, p. 129). Subversion of gender norms can also be located in the minor characters. Tamsin is agentic, articulate, attractive and compassionate, while her nemesis Ja’mie is a wannabe faux lesbian and a lying shallow snob—yet the series leaves the position of lesbian in high school as marginal and, in Tamsin, it seems to be restricted to older students. Ofa’s female masculinity appears to some students, according to the locker room graffiti, to be sutured to her Polynesian body, and she remains on the periphery of the group of boys with whom she associates and of school in general. Lilley portrays Jonah’s delinquency as entangled with his minority masculinity, but he also attends in great detail to the institutional structures of schooling that in the end, and despite several sympathetic teachers, cannot contain or support him. Jonah exercises his masculinity through homophobic display and his resistance to all forms of school compliance as ‘homo’ reinforces the fact that the middle-class masculinity that is desirable in, and compatible with, school will never be available to Jonah. In episode seven, Mrs Palmer says to camera, “I just worry that we as a school are not doing him a lot of good.” We might wonder this also about Tamsin, about Ofa—perhaps even

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about Ja’mie—and about many other young people in Australian high schools.

i

All episodes were accessible in full at the ABC website in 2007 and more than thirty extracts have been posted on YouTube for a potentially global audience. The most popular thus far on YouTube is the ten minute montage of Jonah from episode one, which had 3,150,561 viewings by May 18, 2011. The most popular extract involving Ja’mie had been viewed 674,174 times (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owolyDIQ4NQ). The series was sold in March, 2008 to HBO in the United States, BBC3 in the United Kingdom, and the Comedy Network in Canada. ii Internet message boards reflect viewers’ responses to the ‘realness’ of the series. See, for example, comments on YouTube under Jonah’s Episode 1 Montage (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_O5U9irS3iA), the thread ‘Was your high school like Summer Heights High?’ on the Summer Heights High Appreciation Society on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=4741784213&topic=3149), and comments in the queer press in the online Sydney Star Observer (http//www.ssonet.com.au/display.asp? ArticleID=7233). iii Bogan: an Australian slang term used to describe a stereotypical Anglo-Australian working-class demographic (see http://www.bogan.com.au/definition/index.php).

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REFERENCES Australian Broadcasting Corporation. (2008). About Summer Heights High. Retrieved September 8, 2010, from http://www.abc.net.au/tv/summerheightshigh/#about British Broadcasting Corporation. (2008). Summer Heights High press pack. Retrieved September 8, 2010, from http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/ 2008/05_may/14/summer_intro.shtml Burns, S. (2007, October 25). Hitting the heights of comedy. Sydney Star Observer. Retrieved September 8, 2010, from http://www.ssonet.com.au/display.asp?ArticleID=7233 Dinshaw, C., Edelman, L., Ferguson, R. A., Freccero, C., Freeman, E., Halberstam, J., et al. (2007). Theorizing queer temporalities: a roundtable discussion. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 13(2-3), 178-195. Epstein, D., O’Flynn, S., & Telford, D. (2003). Silenced sexualities in schools and universities. Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books. Ferfolja, T. (2007). Teacher negotiations of sexual subjectivities. Gender and Education, 19(5), 569-586. Forrest, S. (2006). Straight talking: challenges in teaching and learning about sexuality and homophobia in schools. In M. Cole (Ed.) Education, equality and human rights: issues of gender, ‘race’, sexuality, disability and social class (2nd ed.) (pp. 111133). London: Routledge. Halberstam, J. (1998). Female masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press. Halberstam, J. (2005). In a queer time and place: Transgender bodies, subcultural lives. New York: New York University Press. Rasmussen, M. L. (2004). Safety and subversion: the production of sexualities and genders in school spaces. In M. L. Rasmussen, E. Rofes, & S. Talburt (Eds.), Youth and sexualities: Pleasure, subversion, and insubordination in and out of schools (pp. 131-152). New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Rasmussen, M. L. (2006). Becoming subjects: sexualities and secondary schooling. New York: Routledge. Robinson, K. (2005). Reinforcing hegemonic masculinities through sexual harassment: issues of identity, power and popularity in secondary schools. Gender and Education, 17(1), 19-37. Talburt, S. (2004). Intelligibility and narrating queer youth. In M. L. Rasmussen, E. Rofes, & S. Talburt (Eds.), Youth and sexualities: Pleasure, subversion and insubordination in and out of schools (pp. 17-40). New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

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RESPONSE SUMMER HEIGHTS HIGH: QUEER TIME AND QUEER PLACE IN AUSTRALIAN HIGH SCHOOLS Bronwyn Davies University of Melbourne

In responding to Susanne Gannon’s paper I take up the project she initiates of reading Summer Heights High as “a site that might begin to nudge viewers towards the sort of ‘queer time and place’” that Halberstam envisages. I will argue that Summer Heights High may move further toward making a counter-public out of the everyday mainstream viewing public than Gannon has envisaged. It does so, I will suggest, by its revelation of power as a performative masquerade, and by making the binaries male and female, masculine and feminine, black and white, straight and queer, elite and marginal inhabit the same space and the same time, in general at Summer Heights High, and specifically at the site of Chris Lilley’s body. Halberstam’s project is to disrupt the assumption that masculinity only belongs in/on the male body. In Female Masculinity she puts forward a “few proposals about why masculinity must not and cannot and should not reduce down to the male body and its effects” (1998, p. 1). She is frequently asked to address the question “If masculinity is not the social and cultural and indeed political expression of maleness, then what is it?” (1998, p. 1). She points out that although we have difficulty defining masculinity we readily recognize and invest in it: “we spend massive amounts of time and money ratifying and supporting the [heroic] versions of masculinity that we enjoy and trust” (1998, p. 1). Furthermore, “heroic masculinity has been produced by and across male and female bodies” (1998, p. 2). The argument in Female Masculinity is that the “widespread indifference to female masculinity…has clearly ideological motivations and has sustained the complex social structures that wed masculinity to maleness and to power and domination” (1998, p. 2). In Female Masculinity she sets out to make masculinity legible through examining its existence in bodies other than the “white male middle-class body” (1998, p. 2). In such a project there is a necessary but problematic conceptual separation of the sexed body and the performative body. Linguistically, and in everyday imagination and practice, masculinity and maleness are linked together in the same body, and form a binary other to femininity and femaleness. Halberstam asks us in Female Masculinity to suspend this link, and to imagine, and to gaze at, female bodies that are masculine. She asks us to separate out sexed bodies from performative bodies (a move Butler has

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persuaded us is not possible) in order to disrupt in a yet more radical way the male/female and masculine/feminine binaries. In Halberstam’s later work, In a Queer Time and Place, the figure of the transgender subject is placed at the centre of the project: “This book tries to keep transgenderism alive as a meaningful designator of unpredictable gender identities and practices, and it locates the transgender figure as a central player in numerous postmodern debates” (2005, p. 21). Butler argued in Gender Trouble that sexed bodies cannot signify without gender, that there is no body prior to or lying behind the performative body signifying itself as gendered. Halberstam, in contrast, invokes female and male sexed bodies that exist prior to gender, in order to construct her argument that the gendered qualities of one can appear on the other, and that sexed bodies can transform themselves from one to the other. Whereas ‘what is masculinity’ is the most common question Halberstam had been asked in 1998 (1998, p. 1), I am interested here in the evocation of a male body prior to its performance as masculine. What is that male body? And what is the female body that can perform itself as masculine? What do the words male body and female body signify? It seems to me that these questions are usefully provoked by Halberstam even though they are clearly unanswerable. They allow me to play with the texts and characters of Summer Heights High in a way I could not have done if I had allowed sex and gender to remain conceptually inseparable. While as a social scientist I believe they are actually inseparable, their conceptual separation opens up a provocative and interesting new time and space to play around in. When asked to say what masculinity is, Halberstam appeals to its recognizability and desirability, particularly its heroic forms, to suggest that we don’t need to define it because we both recognize and desire it. We can’t say the same for the recognizability of the male body, since it has no preperformative existence. We might appeal to genitals or hormones or genetic characteristics to establish ‘what it is.’ But the presence of transgendered bodies and transsexual bodies in the range of Halberstam’s bodies of interest introduces a gendered performativity that undoes this practice of working back from the performative body to the assumption of an originary sexed body. Instead, the performative body becomes the originary body, and the sexed body becomes secondary, being able to be brought in line with the performative body. In working back from gender to sex, and working in a field where both are transformable, and where the automatic links can no longer be assumed between sex and gender, a radical deconstructive move is accomplished. The sexed body can no longer be assumed as the substrate of the performative body.

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The everyday or straight-public reading of Summer Heights High is that Chris Lilley has a male body, and that while he can perform the roles of Ja’mie and Jonah and Mr G, he does not performatively become them. But if we become the queer audience or counter-public Lilley invites us to be, and work back from the performances (which are, after all, all we see) to the imagined body, it is possible to argue that we actually can’t and shouldn’t presume to know the body lying behind the performances. In bringing Ja’mie to life as an elite 16-year-old girl, who not only appears in Summer Heights High but does newspaper interviews, has her own website, and has previously appeared in other shows, what is it that the audience comes to see? The typical feedback from young women on talkback radio was that Ja’mie was absolutely recognizable as a girl from an elite Australian private school. Halberstam’s deconstructive move makes it necessary to ask, is there any such thing as the real Chris Lilley—an embodied being lying behind the performance of Ja’mie? The name, Jamie King, is a feminization of a boy’s given name, and a family name signifying the sovereign male head of state. This is in curious contrast to Chris Lilley’s name, where his given name can signify either male or female, while his family name evokes a flower, a ‘passive feminine being,’ both weak and pure and irreproachable. The affectation that Ja’mie adopts (her mother and teachers call her Jamie) is perhaps no more than an affectation, but the sound of it, je mé, is French (inviting a poststructuralist reading of Ja’mie’s characterization of herself as “so random” and as someone who pushes outside the boundaries). And it could, in a polyglot and appropriately perverse way, be read as the ultimate narcissistic name: I me. Sinclair (2007) asks whether Ja’mie is feminism’s Frankenstein. I suggest that she is, rather, neoliberalism’s Frankenstein. The neoliberal subject is cut loose from social and relational responsibility and competes to win at all costs (Davies and Bansel, 2007). Ethics and morality are no longer a responsibility of the neoliberal individual but of the auditor and of the technologies of surveillance. When the teachers call Ja’mie to account for happy-slapping, she uses her greater social power to insist that the girls she has offended must simply see it as a joke and get over it. She apologizes because she is required to, and points out that she does not mean the apology, it is only a formality—a game she will play to regain her status of top dog among the girls she has happy-slapped. Ja’mie is the perfect neoliberal subject insofar as she is flexible and believes herself to be free— able to become whatever she wants to be, or whatever the context requires her to be.

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While Ja’mie accomplishes herself as dominant, she also engages in a masquerade of femininity, preening herself much more than the other girls, and returning the conversation constantly to how hot she is. That this is masquerade, rather than a naturalized performance, is made acutely visible by Ja’mie’s relative unattractiveness (Riviere, 1985). Far from reducing the power of Ja’mie, the visibility of the masquerade, as masquerade, cements her performative accomplishment of gender and class membership. She is unattractive (and as a pre-queer, straight-public we presume she has a ‘male body’), but she can nevertheless engage in the masquerade of a femme performance that makes her undisputedly the hottest girl in the class. Riviere (1985) characterizes the accomplished womanly subject as a good wife, mother and housewife who maintains social life and assists culture, who appears feminine and plays mother to a wide circle of friends. She does not ask for anything but waits until it is given. She engages in self-sacrifice, devotion, and self-abnegation. Riviere describes women she has worked with who possess all these womanly characteristics, but also rival their male colleagues in the excellence of their masculine performances. She observes such women heightening their femininity as a form of masquerade: “Womanliness therefore could be assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it” (1985, p. 39). Riviere does not confine this observation to those women who are also competently masculine. Womanliness, she concludes, is indistinguishable from the masquerade. “The reader may now ask how I define womanliness or where I draw the line between genuine womanliness and the “masquerade”. My suggestion is not, however, that there is any such difference; whether radical or superficial they are the same thing” (1985, p. 39). Womanliness is the masquerade. In Ja’mie’s performance the masquerade is made visible as masquerade at the same time as her womanliness is accomplished. She performs her womanliness in a femme or camp style, so revealing the masquerade, and, in the same act, she accomplishes herself as unquestionably powerful and dominant, and thus as gendered masculine. The masculine gender that I am reading here would usually be read as classbased power—as upper-class femininity. But in relation to the male/female binary, and the project of its disruption, I want to ask, is there any reason to read the successful performance of power as class when, if attached to a male body, it would be read as gender? Ja’mie’s performance can also be read, then, as engaging in the border crossings that Halberstam calls “kinging” (Halberstam, 2005, p. 129). Whether we call it a camp or a king performance doesn’t matter. While her name suggests we read it as a king performance, whichever way we read it (male body masquerading as female, or female body masquerading as male), Ja’mie disrupts the

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male/female binary, drawing the audience into the queer time and space characterized by a radical uncertainty about the sexed body lying behind the performance. This radical uncertainty is not accomplished just by Ja’mie. The roles of Jonah and Mr G are an important part of Ja’mie’s performativity. Although Gannon does not include Mr G in her analysis I want to include him, if only briefly, as a crucial element in the queering of the straight-public. Mr G, it is rumoured, is named after one of Chris Lilley’s teachers. The Mr G at Summer Heights High is a narcissistic drama teacher, gendered male, dominant and abusive, and inhabiting a highly feminized body. In marked contrast to Ja’mie’s awkward body, Mr G’s body is fluid, flexible and beautiful to watch. Mr G’s narcissistic excesses are deadly. He mercilessly uses and abuses his friend and supporter, the science teacher, who, for his part, “hangs on his lips.” Mr G is concertedly ‘random,’ like Ja’mie and Jonah, and invokes in the audience an anticipatory horror about just how far his excesses can go. Mr G insults the students and refuses to work with disadvantaged students, trying to get them removed from the school rather than include them in his musical by depositing human faeces that they can be blamed for. He insults the school principal, telling her to shove her job up her fat arse. His school musical is an excruciatingly insensitive story about a girl in the school who has just died. The only person Mr G feels love for, apart from himself, is his chihuahua, Celine. His passion for Celine, like everything else about him, is in excess. His performance can be read as a king performance insofar as his body can be read as feminine (not only because it is the same body shared by Ja’mie, but because it is so fluid and beautiful to watch), and his performance of teacher/gay/masculine is made visible as masquerade. Like Ja’mie, Mr G’s masquerade makes him intensely believable as Mr G, the drama teacher at Summer Heights High. He is at the same time the ultimate bitchy drag queen. He is also drag king insofar as he uses exaggeration, parody, and earnest mimicry to explode his own masculine and teacherly dominance in the school. As with Ja’mie, whether we call it a camp or a king performance doesn’t matter. It is the complex, impossible yet successful mixing of dominant masculinity with femininity on the same male/female body that works to deconstruct both the male/female binary and the straight/queer binary. The character of Jonah, finally, is performed on a body that is also being read as female and as gay. Jonah, in both Christian and Islamic history, was a minor prophet who did not like God’s plans for him. Disobeying God, he sailed off on a ship that was shipwrecked in a wild storm. Jonah was thrown overboard and then saved by being swallowed by a large fish. But God commanded the fish to vomit Jonah up and, once again, commanded Jonah

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to go to Ninevah to preach, telling the people of Ninevah they would be destroyed if they did not follow God’s law. They didn’t obey, but as it turned out, God decided not to destroy them. Jonah was outraged. He was thus a reluctant and somewhat rebellious prophet figure whose purchase on power and agency continually slipped away from him. And, further, JONAH is an acronym for a Jewish organization, ‘Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality,’ an organization dedicated to ‘assisting’ individuals with unwanted same sex attractions. Like Mr G and Ja’mie, Jonah is narcissistic, and interested in his own power at the expense of others. Like Ja’mie and Mr G he is given to ‘random’ acts, such as accusing his father of sexually molesting him to get out of doing an English assignment. Jonah’s rejection of almost all aspects of schooling is on the basis of what he reads as its feminization of students. The silence and passivity that his English teacher, in particular, demands of him, clearly coincides with Riviere’s characterization of the feminine. Whereas Jonah is physically intimate with his Polyforce friends, he fears that the passivity of good studenthood will render him homosexual. He rebels against the orders from the teachers, seeing them as unreasonable and seriously lacking in humour. Jonah is in one sense the archetypal dominant male. His tag, he tells the camera, ‘dick’tation, signifies that he is a dictator. His troubled performance of dominant masculinity is made visible by the school’s inability to allow his masculinity free reign. He gets swallowed up in safe places like Gumnut Cottage, only to be spewed out again. Dominant masculinity is made visible and amusing and outrageous through Jonah’s performance of it. Some of the sympathy for Jonah also comes from his outlaw status. His safe space, Gumnut Cottage, can also be read as the outlaw’s hideaway, as can the boys’ toilets. Like the outlaw of epic male stories, Jonah yearns for a utopic existence where masculinity has free reign and where he can be a sovereign, non-subservient subject. When Jonah is being evicted from Gumnut Cottage it is difficult not to feel deep sympathy for him in the same way one feels sympathy at the death or capture of the heroic outlaw. But when the camera shifts from his eviction, panning over the teachers’ cars, it reveals that Jonah has badged every single car, and the audience is reminded that this hyper-masculine character is an irredeemably rebellious character who can only be cast out. The masculine ideal has failed and “the male hero must learn to live with the consequences of a shift of power, which has subtly but completely removed him from the center of the universe” (Halberstam, 2005, p. 136). As Gannon points out, the mainstream Australian public took to Summer Heights High with enormous enthusiasm. While they might not have been transformed into a recognizable counter-public they have been amused,

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horrified and deeply fascinated by the grotesque face of class and gender. And they have thereby accepted, without necessarily thinking about it, the possibility that the binaries male and female, masculine and feminine, black and white, straight and queer, elite and marginal, can and do inhabit the same body at the same time—in the same queer time and queer place—a queer time and queer place that is simultaneously recognizable as the current everyday world of Australian high schools.

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REFERENCES Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge. Davies, B., & Bansel, P. (2007). Neoliberalism and education. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 20(3), 247-260. Halberstam, J. (1998). Female masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press. Halberstam, J. (2005). In a queer time and place: Transgender bodies, subcultural lives. New York: New York University Press. Riviere, J. (1985). Womanliness as masquerade. Retrieved April 7, 2008, from http://www.ncf.edu/hassold/WomenArtists/riviere_womanliness_as_masquerade Sinclair, J. (2007, October 24). It’s all about me: Summer Heights High’s Ja’mie is feminism’s worst nightmare. Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved April 19, 2008, from http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/girl-power/2007/10/24/ 1192941209467.html

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CHAPTER 8 GAY INTIMACY, YAOI AND THE ETHICS OF CARE Aleardo Zanghellini University of Reading

Abstract: This chapter takes up Halberstam’s invitation to creatively engage with subjugated knowledges, and does so for the specific purpose of rethinking gay intimacy. Models of gay male intimacy appear to be largely polarized between a heteronormative quasi-marital paradigm and a counter-normative hedonistic one. Engaging with texts belonging to the yaoi subculture—a genre of Japanese comics and animation characterized by a thematic focus on male same sex desire, but produced by heterosexual women for a heterosexual female audience—may help us promote an intrinsically valuable diversity of practices of intimacy. The epistemological horizon provided by yaoi involves intriguing and significant differences from the marital and hedonistic models of mainstream gay culture across two main understandings of ‘intimacy’: intimacy as sex and intimacy as familiarity. Furthermore yaoi, being produced by women for women, is perhaps more likely to reflect an understanding of male same sex intimacy premised on an ethics of care when compared to the models of intimacy emerging from within gay male culture. If the marital and hedonistic models reflect, in different ways, a quintessentially male way of conceptualizing intimacy, then decentring their dominance and making space for alternative scripts such as those offered by yaoi may enrich our conceptualizations of intimacy and afford a more balanced (less gendered) range of options in the realm of relationality. Subjugated knowledges such as yaoi may offer normative and aesthetic horizons alternative to mainstream Gay, enabling the project of re-envisioning male same sex intimacy. Kane Race provides a response to this chapter. Keywords: Gay, intimacy, heteronormative, yaoi, Japanese comics, hedonism, counternormative, gay sex, desire, gay culture.

With an increasing number of jurisdictions recognizing same sex marriage or marriage-like same sex civil partnerships or unions, the debate about whether or not lesbians and gay men should seek the right to marryi seems to have abated. In this paper I won’t discuss whether or not there is merit in the apparently counter-intuitive argument that the availability of same sex marriage or civil unions will actually contract, rather than expand, lesbians and gay men’s options by pushing many of them into conventional marriages or marriage-like relationships. My concern is that, even without the option of same sex marriage, the choice, at least for gay men, seems already largely restricted and polarized between heteronormative quasimarital relationships and counter(hetero)normative (but homonormative) hedonistic models of intimacy. As Edwards (2006, p. 84) puts it: [Many gay men express the] complaint that gay culture is often a shallow, youth-dominated, image-, sex-, and body-obsessed world… Kerry H. Robinson and Cristyn Davies (Eds) All rights reserved - © 2012 Bentham Science Publishers

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leaving profoundly little room for any alternative but to conform… Moreover, those who question or confront their dissatisfactions with this situation often opt out of commercial gay culture completely, retreating to coupledom…

Adam (2006) similarly captures the binary organization of models of gay intimacy and their normative status when he remarks that “[r]omance scripts that prescribe a relationship trajectory of dating, falling in love, sexual exclusivity, and life-long commitment, often run up against male-gendered scripts of sex as adventure, pleasure, and exploration without commitment” (p. 9). He also reports from research describing young gay interviewees as feeling torn between a desire for casual sex and an aspiration towards monogamous relationships (p. 9). To be sure, Adam makes these observations in the context of a larger argument purporting to document the creative ways in which gay couples negotiate the terms of their relationships by drawing on these two dominant social scripts. Yet, while I acknowledge that there is much to be said for the honesty with which many gay couples address, for example, the question of sexual nonmonogamy, I would be hesitant to endorse the implication, quite pervasive in queer studies literature, that current models of gay intimacy are a paragon of pluralistic relationality. Bersani resisted this conclusion more than twenty years ago (Bersani, 1987, pp. 218–221), although the thrust of his argument was not so much that gay intimacy should be rethought, but rather that gay sex was being extolled by gay theorists for all the wrong reasons. For Bersani, the truly radical and progressive potential of gay sex is its uncompromising and unapologetic devaluation of subjectivity, a “radical humiliation and disintegration of the self” (1987, p. 217): gay sex can be seen as an ethical practice inasmuch as it dissolves the sense of self, which is a prerequisite for practices of violence and domination (pp. 218, 222). I am not interested in pursuing Bersani’s line of argument here. Indeed, I am not interested in judging gay sex or gay intimacy more broadly as either good or bad, or in asking questions about its ethical valence. Rather, my point is that the range of thinkable modes of gay relationality (including sexual relationality) remains too limited and essentially organized along binary lines or what I shall call the marital and hedonistic models of intimacy.ii Indeed, the fact that so many gay men tend to settle for open relationships— and not, for instance, for such alternative paradigms as polyamory (Adam, 2006, p. 24)—seems to me to confirm, rather than undermine, the prescriptive power of these two models. Adam’s arguments, largely focused precisely on various permutations of open relationships, are couched in

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terms of ‘relationship innovation,’ but the contours of the picture he paints change significantly if you read his text ‘against the grain.’ Does combining the primary emotional commitment to one partner typical of the marital model with the sexual nonmonogamy characteristic of the hedonistic model genuinely involve a shift away from the binary ‘hedonistic/marital’ organization of gay relationality? Here a disclaimer is in order: when I claim that dominant gay epistemology organizes intimacy largely on the basis of these two paradigms, my claim is not that mainstream gay identity—by which I mean gay identity, say, á la Queer as Folk—and the models of intimacy it generates exhaust the range of gay male identities and lifestyles taken up, created, or experienced in contemporary Western societies (let alone outside the West). Indeed, the fact that I speak of ‘mainstream’ gay identity and ‘dominant’ gay epistemology itself implies that there exists a degree of gay male ontological and epistemological pluralism. However, I do want to argue that the emergence and flourishing of alternative models of intimacy is significantly constrained, if not absolutely precluded or inhibited, by the dominance of mainstream gay (cf. Halberstam, 2005, p. 40). One strategy to decentre the dominance of mainstream gay would be to create an ‘archive’ of gay subcultures: to document them and attend to the alternative ontological and epistemological paradigms they offer. However, apparently alternative ontologies and epistemologies on closer inspection may prove not all that alternative. Thus, in his analysis of Bear masculinity, Hennen has persuasively argued that while Bear practices of intimacy challenge hegemonic masculinity by their re-evaluation of an ethics of care, that challenge may remain largely negligible because of Bear culture’s emphasis on a “radical similarity…to both heterosexual men and conventional masculinity” (Hennen, 2005, p. 41). In taking up, for the purpose of rethinking gay intimacy in this paper, Halberstam’s suggestion of creatively engaging with subjugated knowledges, I have become intrigued by the possibilities offered by non gay-initiated and non gay-produced alternative ways of being gay and knowing the world. In particular, I will discuss a Japanese subcultural genre of comics and animation known as yaoi or BL, whose distinguishing feature is a thematic focus on male same sex desire, but which is produced by heterosexual women for a heterosexual female audience. Not all of us may feel the need for alternative models of intimacy. Some queers who oppose same sex marriage may not necessarily be concerned with the chilling effect same sex marriage may have on the reinvention of intimacy. Rather, they may simply be bothered by the fact that same sex

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marriage will steer some or many gays and lesbians away from what I called the counter (hetero) normative hedonistic model and towards the conventionality of marital familial models. However, some same sex attracted men simply can’t find a comfortable place within dominant gay epistemology, mainstream gay identity and the limited models of intimacy that these generate. Furthermore, although as announced before I am not interested here in evaluating current practices of gay intimacy as either good or bad, there is something problematic about a queer theory which, while taking it as axiomatic that there is something wrong or limited/limiting about the marital model, displays a tendency to wink at, or even celebrate, its correlative, and to assume it to represent a more valuable form of life for queers. Perhaps this form of life is more valuable, but its celebration doesn’t sit well with queer’s own stated goals: after all, the hedonistic model is, even more than the marital model, the dominant form of gay intimacy, but one of queer’s raisons d’être is precisely the need to decentre the dominance of gay within the world of sex and gender outsiders. More crucially, the hedonistic model of intimacy has all the trappings of a reverse discourse in Foucault’s sense (Halberstam, 2005, pp. 52–53), which subjectifies gay men by attaching them to their own identity (Foucault, 1982). And this is particularly problematic when the degree of commercial investment in the hedonistic model is taken into account. The so called ‘gay lifestyle’ has proved remarkably amenable to colonization by corporate interests (though no more so than the marital model), which raises serious questions about who is inciting whom to identify as what. We also need to ask whether the tendency to celebrate the hedonistic model may not be unwittingly ethnocentric. To the extent that the model may now resonate in many non-Western countries, might this not be largely (if not necessarily exclusively) an effect of the exportation of metropolitan gay identity to these cultures? Halberstam has rightly taken issue with scholarly analyses that fail to problematize the dominance and exportation of Western metropolitan gayness (Halberstam, 2005, pp. 36–38). This paper attempts to think of ways of re-envisioning gay intimacy which avoid both heteronormativity and the reverse discourse of counter(hetero)normativity. I use the word ‘intimacy’ because of its diverse connotations. According to the online Oxford Dictionary (2011) ‘intimacy,’ among its other usages, refers to the idea of ‘sexual intercourse’: the sort of intimacy brought to the fore by the hedonistic model. But the dictionary states that ‘intimacy’ also means “close familiarity or friendship” (the significance of the use of the word ‘familiarity’ should not be missed, as its

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root reveals that the family is culturally understood as the sphere where, par excellence, intimacy in its broader sense occurs). This is the sort of intimacy brought to the fore by the marital model.iii My claim that yaoi /BL can help us engage in the process of re-envisioning gay intimacy is based on the belief that the epistemology provided by this genre involves intriguing and significant differences from the marital and hedonistic models across these two main understandings of ‘intimacy.’ In developing my arguments, I will draw, among others’, on the scholarship of Judith Jack Halberstam. The yaoi/BL genre Japanese female artists started producing manga about love between beautiful boys (bishounen) in the early seventies. Even early instances of the genre depicted sex scenes, whose incidence progressively increased as artists witnessed the authorities’ relative lack of concern for their work (McLelland, 2006).iv ‘BL’ (standing for Boys’ Love, the English translation of shounen-ai, which was the original name for the genre) has now become the marketing identifier for both manga and anime about male same sex relationships produced by women for women. ‘Yaoi’ is more accurately used to refer to fan produced work. This may be wholly original or ‘slash.’ In slash work, popular male characters from non-BL comics (say, ‘x’ and ‘y’) are slashed together (x/y) by fans who like to think of them as same sex attracted. Unlike professionally produced BL manga or anime, in fan produced yaoi work, “the symbolic appearance of characters, and emotions attached to characters’ situations, has become far more important than the traditional plot” (Kinsella, 1998, p. 201).v This feature of yaoi may be significant, if Halberstam (2005) is right in arguing that narrative forms of art are less suited to sustaining the sort of aesthetics that challenges conventional understandings of social reality (pp. 105–108). On the other hand, the distinction between yaoi and BL manga on grounds that plot matters less in the former may be overstated if, as Delany (1994) argues, any successful comics will decentre the plot to a greater or lesser extent: “What the comics [sic] narrative has to do before it achieves [plot] coherence is push the action from one visually exciting situation to another” (p. 88). For this reason, it is not necessarily misguided to treat, as I do here, yaoi and BL as a single genre. This move also seems justifiable in light of such circumstances as a) the fan base being virtually the same for both yaoi and BL, and b) the reciprocal feedback process between the two being both constant and, arguably, definitional of the genre. Indeed, there are several instances of professionally produced BL work where the sex is as explicit and as prominent as in yaoi fan produced work. Furthermore, fan artists do

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not content themselves with slashing non-BL characters or creating original yaoi work, but happily borrow characters from professional BL work; it is not uncommon for the most talented fan artists to be recruited by commercial publishers and hence become pros. Although my arguments below (focused on content and stylistic conventions) don’t distinguish between anime and manga, it is worth pointing out that reading manga might be more conducive than watching anime to generating the sort of agentic reflexivity required to re-envision the social and/or the personal. This is because, as Delany (1994) puts it, “[w]hat makes the comic gaze…privileged [in comparison to the TV or movie gaze] is that the gazer has the greatest control over the comic book gaze. The comics [sic] gaze is at once the most distanced and the least manipulated…The gazer is a “coproducer” of the comic at a [higher] level of involvement and intensity, through the nature of the medium itself” (p. 93). Yaoi/BL as a subjugated knowledge That yaoi/BL is not the dominant way of looking at gay male relationships is beyond doubt. This is true both of the broader society (where I take it as uncontested that same sex relationships still tend to be viewed ultimately as less valuable than heterosexual ones, both in Japan and in the West) and of gay epistemology itself which, in its dominant form, as we will see, differs significantly from yaoi/BL in its conceptualization and construction of same sex intimacy.vi But is the irreducibility of yaoi/BL epistemology to mainstream gay epistemology enough to make yaoi/BL count as a subjugated knowledge of the kind that can contribute something useful to the task of re-envisioning gay intimacy, of diversifying it beyond current paradigms? I think the answer to this question turns not only on whether or not it is a subjugated (as in marginalized) knowledge, but also on its moral and political credentials—a question complicated by the commercial aspects of yaoi/BL.vii Halberstam’s discussion of subcultural activity within postmodernity offers a useful starting point for deciding on the status of yaoi/BL as a subjugated knowledge, and one of the kind that has something useful to contribute to re-envisioning gay intimacy. As Halberstam (2005) argues, “[w]ithin postmodernism, subcultural activities are as likely to generate new forms of protest as they are to produce new commodities to be absorbed back into a logic of accumulation” (p. 98). Halberstam also argues that postmodern cultural production cannot be understood merely as a product of the economic relations of late capitalist societies that does nothing but

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legitimize those relations. In particular, Halberstam suggests that postmodern visual culture can challenge, for example, our sense of “history and futurity” in ways that defy the dominant understandings thereof (p. 104), and quotes Crow to the effect that commercial exploitation of subcultural production can act as an incentive for subcultures to engage in more (and more radical) subcultural production (p. 109): “some subcultures do not simply fade away as soon as they have been mined and plundered for material” (p. 127). All these observations imply that possibilities for resistance and transformation do not necessarily require wholesale externality to the capitalist matrix (assuming there is such an outside place for subcultural production to emerge and operate). In this sense, the fact that BL is a moneymaking phenomenon does not necessarily mean that it—or yaoi, with which it exists in a symbiotic relationship—is automatically wholly subsumed under or assimilated into dominant epistemology (ceasing to be a subculture) and hence deprived of its transformative potential. This seems especially so if one considers that, despite the popularity of the genre in Japan among young straight women, BL’s Western audience remains a niche, non-mainstream, market. In other words, even if BL is a moneymaking enterprise, there is little evidence that it makes money out of the mainstream, which seems to have yet to develop the “voyeuristic and predatory” interest in the genre that it has shown for other forms of queer subcultural production (Halberstam, 2005, p. 157). The moral and political credentials of yaoi/BL would be suspect if the heterosexuality of its creators and consumers made it similar to representations of transgender lives by non-transgender people, which Halberstam (2005) argues tend to result in projects of stabilization, rationalization and trivialization (pp. 54–55).viii But the motives animating the emergence of yaoi/BL are quite unlike those underlying such projects. Rather, shounen-ai was born “largely as a reaction against the contrived and formulaic heterosexual love stories marketed at a female audience at the time” (McLelland, 2005, p. 67). Generally, the focus on male same sex relationships has been explained on the ground that “[i]n the context…of restrictions on behaviour and development that women experience…, young female fans feel more able to imagine and depict idealized strong free characters if they are male” (Kinsella, 1998, p. 302). In other words, a rejection of heteronormativity (taking the form of opting out of the genre of heterosexual love stories and its conventions) and a creative engagement with the empowering possibilities afforded by same sex intimacy were foundational to the genre.

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Gilligan’s (1993) ethics of care theory can help me elaborate on why yaoi/BL qualifies as a subjugated knowledge of the kind that may usefully challenge dominant models of gay intimacy. The ethics of care theory and queer may seem strange bedfellows. Yet there is nothing intrinsically essentialist in Gilligan’s basic insight that “some dimensions of moral experience, such as contextual decision making, special obligations, the moral motives of compassion and sympathy, and the relevance of considering one’s own integrity in making moral decisions” (Calhoun, 1988, p. 451) tend to figure more prominently in women’s rather than men’s modes of moral thought. Gilligan never argued either that all women reason morally in terms of the ethics of care, nor that such a mode of moral reasoning is hardwired in female anatomy, physiology, psychology, or anything of the sort. ix Her theory is perfectly compatible with social constructionism, with a nurture- rather than nature-based view of gender and even of sex. x Furthermore, Gilligan never said that the ethics of care was a superior mode of moral reasoning and never implied that all women should subscribe to it. Her point was simply that this mode of moral reasoning had been systematically undervalued and marginalized. In other words, Gilligan made a case for the proposition that the normative system embodied in the ethics of care was a form of subjugated knowledge that called for attention and re-evaluation. Thus restated, Gilligan’s point is eminently compatible with queer. Yaoi/BL, being produced by women for women, is more likely to reflect an understanding of gay intimacy premised on an ethics of care when compared to the models of gay intimacy emerging from within mainstream gay male culture. xi This suggests that yaoi/BL is the sort of subjugated knowledge that may have something valuable to contribute to the reenvisioning of gay intimacy, especially if coupled with the point, made above, that yaoi/BL was born as a reaction to the formulaic constraints of marital heteronormativity. To paraphrase Halberstam (2005), yaoi/BL “culture constitutes…a counterpublic space where white [heteronormative and metronormative gay] masculinities can be contested, and where minority [gay] masculinities can be produced, validated, fleshed out, and celebrated” (p. 128). In reading yaoi/BL through an ‘ethics of care’ lens, my aim is neither to imply that such an ethics provides a superior paradigm to the masculine ‘ethics of justice,’ nor to recommend that gay men should uncritically embrace it. Rather, my goal is to bring into relief the discontinuities between dominant gay epistemology and yaoi/BL in order to facilitate a project aimed less at reifying the ethics of care than at fostering the conditions for the flourishing of a Foucauldian ethics of the self. For Foucault (1997), individuals constitute themselves as ethical subjects in

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relation to moral codes, not by either automatically conforming with or rejecting their prescriptions, but through the adoption of a critical and reflective attitude towards them. To the extent that subjugated knowledges such as yaoi/BL offer normative (as well as aesthetic) horizons alternative to mainstream gay (for example in the extent to which they appear to be informed by an ethics of care), they enable the re-envisioning of gay intimacy intended as an ethical project in this specifically Foucauldian sense. Yaoi/BL intimacy: the genre Introduction So what is the picture of male same sex intimacy emerging from yaoi/BL? The typical yaoi/BL relationship involves a seme and an uke. The terminology is derived from martial arts and has been used in Japan for centuries in the context of intimate relationships: a seme is an attacker and an uke is a receiver (McLelland, 2006). Martial arts terminology, when applied to relationships depicted in yaoi/BL material, is likely to have a particular resonance for Japanese audiences, as the historical archetype of same sex male love in Japan was, beginning in the thirteenth century, the relationship between a samurai and his younger companion (MacDuff, 1996, p. 252). This historical archetype of homoeroticism may well be part of the explanation for the ‘hierarchical’ structure and age difference that predominantly informs yaoi/BL relationships, at least if one shares Altman’s (1996) belief in “the continuing importance of premodern forms of sexual organization” to an appropriate understanding of contemporary sexualities (p. 89). Yet, in the yaoi/BL context, ‘hierarchical’ should not necessarily be understood in the same way as one has come to think of it in the context of much Western sexually explicit material. In particular, associating seme with ‘top’ and uke with ‘bottom,’ as those terms are used in the context of Western gay male sex/ pornography, would not do justice to the distinctiveness of these roles in Japanese yaoi/BL culture. Drawing on antipornography feminist work (Dworkin, 1981; Dworkin and MacKinnon, 1988; MacKinnon, 1993; Leidholdt and Raymond, 1990), a number of commentators have criticized gay pornography as heteropatriarchal for its reliance on the top/bottom formula (Kendall, 1997; Stoltenberg, 1990a, 1990b). Others, including queer theorists, have argued that far from entrenching patriarchy, gay pornography or sex assists in destabilizing gender identity categories (Stychin, 1992, pp. 883–885) or the subject/object dialectic (Bersani, 1987). Even these arguments, however, if I read them correctly, do not deny that representations centred on dominance and submission are endemic in gay male pornography: indeed, if gay pornography/sex is the progressive force its apologists claim it is, it seems

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to be so not only despite, but even through, the hierarchical organization of the relationships it enacts. Penetration tends to be key to this hierarchy, with the insertee assuming the subordinate role, following a pattern that dates at least as far back as Roman times (Cantarella, 1992). In the context of oral sex, to which I shall limit my observations in this paper for reasons of space, the bottom typically does the servicing. Contrast these conventions of gay male pornography with a typical seme– uke sexual encounter in yaoi/BL anime. For the uke to fellate the seme would be quite out of the question. Since the uke is at the receiving end of the ‘attack,’ it is the seme’s job to fellate the uke no less than it is his job to anally penetrate him, or, for that matter, to make the uke fall in love with him. A seme who knows what he is doing will also proceed to proclaim his enduring devotion by vowing to always protect the uke. For this, as for the age difference between participants, there are historical antecedents in Japanese culture—in particular, the seme’s proclaiming lifelong devotion echoes a literary tradition idealizing, and quite possibly codifying the etiquette of, homoerotic love between samurais and their companions (Eskridge, 1993, p. 1467; Schalow, 1993), and priests and their acolytes (MacDuff,1996, pp. 249–251; Schalow, 1993). These conventions of the yaoi/BL genre are as removed from those of standard Western gay male pornography/sex as they could be. Indeed, I would argue that ‘activity/passivity,’ rather than ‘dominance/submission,’ provides the most accurate conceptual framework for understanding much (if not all) yaoi/BL work. This does not necessarily contradict the observation that producers and consumers of the genre ultimately assert “the right to imagine sex which is not politically correct: that is sex which derives its interest from imagining power differentials, not equality” (McLelland, 2005, p. 74). The reason is clear: power asymmetries do not necessarily have to lead to relationships of dominance and submission. If the seme is the one who does (the pursuing, the romancing, the fellating, the penetrating), the uke predominantly is. He must, first of all, be a suitable object for the seme’s attentions. The first requirement, then, is for him to be a bishounen: a beautiful or pretty boy. He also needs to be the polar opposite of the seme, or he could not fall for him as hopelessly as he is supposed to. For example, since the uke needs the seme’s protection, he will have to be more vulnerable, innocent, and less experienced than the seme. This will generally mean that the uke will be smaller, shorter, younger and more feminine looking than the seme. Ultimately, it is also the reason why the uke’s eyes tend to be preposterously large.

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Intimacy as sex Two elements stand out for me in this model of intimacy when contrasted to the mainstream picture of sex emerging from much gay pornography and the hedonistic model (the marital model is by definition very much sanitized and desexualized, so the term of comparison, when examining sexual practices/interaction, must come from the hedonistic model). The first is that the sex going on in yaoi/BL lends itself to reinforcing heteropatriarchy less than the mainstream picture of gay sex promoted by pornography and the hedonistic model. With this, I am not implying that antipornography feminism is clearly correct in its understanding of gay sex (indeed I deliberately refrain from taking a position in that debate). I do mean to imply, however, that the antipornography reading of gay pornography/sex is not implausible. In contrast to pragmatist or poststructuralist views to the contrary, Eco (1990) argues that not every reading of a text is as good as any other reading. While he concedes that it may be impossible to say which is the best reading, he argues that it is often possible to identify the bad or implausible readings of a text, because they run counter to the text’s intention. By this, Eco means that they are not sustained by the text taken as a whole, and that they ignore the stylistic and other conventions that allow for the uniform (as opposed to fragmentary or arbitrary) reading of a text. If we treat the picture of sex emerging from gay porn and the hedonistic model as a text, the antipornography reading appears to be everything but an implausible interpretation of it, unless we are prepared to argue, as I am not, that the all male context in which it is enacted is somehow free of heteropatriarchal semantic conventions. Whereas much gay pornography, therefore, is eminently—albeit not exclusively—readable in heteropatriarchal terms, the picture of same sex desire emerging from yaoi/BL, even once it leaves the all female context of its production and fandom, remains less amenable to heteropatriarchal readings, and hence less likely to reinforce heteropatriarchy. In particular, when it is a seme—by all standards the masculine element in the pairxii— that does the servicing on an uke (who doesn’t merely suffer, but enjoys, the experience), there just isn’t the same scope that there is in gay porn/sex for reading/experiencing the act of oral intercourse as fetishization of male power and powerful masculinity. In the mainstream picture of gay male sex, even role reversal (where the top switches to bottom and vice versa) does not guarantee escaping heteropatriarchal signification. True, on a queer reading, role reversal (and indeed the very fact that in gay sex it is always a male that necessarily inhabits the bottom role) is at least partially disrupting of gender binarisms and

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hierarchies. But there is always the response that role reversal is no more than just that, and does not actually undermine the integrity of signification of the masculine top role and feminized bottom role, no matter who inhabits them. In contrast, in yaoi/BL sex the seme does not fellate the uke as an effect of temporarily inhabiting a bottom role. His seme role is, rather, partly constituted and defined by his providing the servicing in oral intercourse. His (masculine) role is constructed at the outset in a way that does not consistently glorify and narcissistically re-enact male power and powerful masculinity. Performing oral sex is partly intelligible in terms of an ethics of care focused on concern for the other and positive obligations—at least to the extent that much of the thrill in performing oral sex is the pleasure of giving, of physically pleasing one’s partner more than oneself or even at the expense of one’s own sensorial pleasure.xiii For who will deny that, from the point of view of purely physical comfort, gagging—pardon the pun—sucks? Of course giving head may be pleasurable in a number of ways, some of which are no less sensorial in nature than the pleasure one gets from being fellated. But my point is that much of what makes fellatio distinctly pleasurable for the fellator—in a way in which, say, eating a banana just isn’t—is precisely that idea of giving and self-sacrifice. In a context, however, where that act of giving is represented or accepted as a tribute to the masculinity of a top—as his due—the significance of that idea is always liable to be elided by, or subsumed under, the fetishization of male power that the fellatio symbolizes. The unavailability of that context in yaoi/BL representations of oral sex (where, as already noted, it is the seme who fellates the uke) precludes the elision of fellatio’s valence as a sexual act informed by an ethics of care. Intimacy as familiarity The second element I wish to draw attention to is the seme professing his lifelong devotion for, and intention to protect, the uke. Comparable elements are absent from the hedonistic model of gay intimacy, which is largely centred on casual one-off encounters. Nor is the hedonistic model in this sense just an ideal type; rather, it operates like a normative reality: “in a…study of single men, many expressed a view that the commercial scene encouraged superficial sexual contact and had difficulty finding more enduring partnerships” (Adam, 2006, p. 7). It is striking how neatly the opposition ‘ethics of care’ versus ‘ethics of justice’ maps onto the opposition between the yaoi/BL (female produced) model of intimacy and the hedonistic (male defined) model. On the one hand, the seme’s vows make sense in terms of an ethics of care emphasizing

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relationships, interdependence, responsibility and positive obligations. On the other hand, the practice of consensual one night stands sits well with an ethics of justice and its focus on freedom from interference, individuals and their entitlements, including their (admittedly, sacrosanct) right to sexual autonomy and pleasure. But in standing opposed to hedonistic intimacy, yaoi/BL intimacy does not merely replicate marital intimacy—the other side of mainstream gay. On the one hand, yaoi/BL intimacy is not explicitly or implicitly desexualized in the same way as marital intimacy. On the other hand, yaoi and shounen-ai’s (BL’s precursor) very raison d’être was dissatisfaction with the stultifying constraints of marital heteronormativity and the storylines it generated. In this sense, the (implicit) permanence and caring dimensions of the seme–uke relationship cannot point in the direction of some idealized ‘happily ever after’ model of domestic bliss. It may not be clear where they do point, but it’s clear to me that at least they don’t point there. Take the temporal dimension. The logic of interdependent longevity and aging typical of heteronormative temporality (‘growing old together’) is very much unlike BL/yaoi’s temporality. This is significant, because it is against the frame of reference of BL/yaoi’s own temporality that the seme’s vows of endless devotion need to be read. To understand that frame of reference, consider that often we don’t know the age of yaoi/BL characters; when we do, they invariably look younger than they are, while at the same time not looking of any age at all. Most of them don’t age: by the end of the adventure, if they have not died young, they are still young. Thus, when they display signs of dementia, it is not of the senile type, but rather a mark of permanent youthful idiocy and even, occasionally, of their being kawaii (cute)—a quality typically, if by no means exclusively, associated with childhood and childishness in Japan. Crucially, the lives of yaoi/BL characters are generally extraordinary,xiv so it is quite inconceivable to think of them as ‘settling down’ or doing any of the things that ‘responsible’ adult citizenship is known for involving. Yaoi/BL temporality is then queer in Halberstam’s sense. Like the temporality of the hedonistic model that Halberstam (2005) discusses (and yet in a different way), it is not connoted by “temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance” (p. 6) which “form the base of nearly every definition of the human in nearly all of our modes of understanding…[including] our understandings of the affective and the aesthetic” (p. 152)—that is, among others, our understandings of intimacy.

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Admittedly we don’t have the option of not growing physiologically old that manga characters do. But ‘physiology’ is itself a discursive domain that, while undoubtedly useful in, say, medical contexts, does not have to rigidly construct the trajectory and organization of intimate relationships, or at least not to the extent that I suspect it does in the marital model of intimacy. If Halberstam (2005) is right in saying that “[f]or queers the separation between youth and adulthood quite simply does not hold” (p. 174), yaoi/BL seems to usher in a queer conceptual economy in which the separation between adulthood and seniority matters less. Yaoi/BL intimacy: Loveless I will conclude with a reading of the 2005 BL anime Loveless, adapted from an original manga by artist Youn Kouga, to briefly illustrate my point about the influence of the ethics of care on yaoi/BL models of intimacy. While above I have argued that the conventions of the genre generate models of male same sex intimacy informed by an ethics of care, what is intriguing about Loveless is that its intelligibility as a text promoting an ‘ethics of care’ mode of relationality is dependent on the characters’ defying those conventions. Loveless is about twelve year old Ritsuka, who has trouble remembering what he used to be like before his elder brother Seimei’s death two years before, and is concerned that his current self may not reflect who he really is. Ritsuka is befriended by nineteen year old Soubi, who tells him that Seimei and he used to be a fighting couple, trained in the art of fighting by casting magical spells at the Seven Moons School. A fighting couple comprises a ‘Fighter,’ who inflicts damage on the couple’s opponents, and a ‘Sacrifice,’ who receives the damage during fights. Soubi also informs Ritsuka that Seimei wanted the two of them to fight together, declares his love for the boy and French-kisses him on their first encounter. Ritsuka is confused and irritated (including at Soubi’s protestations of love), but the two soon find themselves fighting side by side—Ritsuka as Sacrifice and Soubi as Fighter—against other couples determined to kill them and sent by the School. Defeating their opponents apparently will bring them closer to solving the riddle of Seimei’s death. The fights are erotically charged, as the more intense the bond between Fighter and Sacrifice, the more effective the couple will be in inflicting damage on the opponents and repelling their attacks, which gives Ritsuka and Soubi an excuse to kiss and embrace during fights. As more and more opponents appear, Soubi starts confronting them alone, taking on the damage that his Sacrifice should receive, which causes Ritsuka much frustration. Soubi has explained to him that a Sacrifice/ Fighter relationship is comparable to a master/slave one, encouraging Ritsuka to take charge, but when Ritsuka reluctantly does so to order Soubi

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not to fight alone, Soubi repeatedly disobeys, enduring severe physical pain. As Ritsuka becomes less and less shy in giving orders to Soubi, the conduct of the latter becomes increasingly less compulsive. His actions are no longer explainable in terms of Seimei’s instructions, Ritsuka’s orders, or being destined to act in a certain way. Soubi’s moving principle seems to be the love he has genuinely come to feel for Ritsuka. Sexual activity in the anime is never enacted, not even off screen: in Ritsuka’s world, virgins have cat ears that they shed only upon their ‘first time,’ yet Ritsuka sports his pair until the end of the anime. The erotic tension and romantic involvement between the main characters is not acted out, but sublimated into their Sacrifice/Fighter and master/slave relationship. Starting with the Fighter/Sacrifice relationship, Ritsuka as Sacrifice and Soubi as Fighter quite literally embody, respectively, feminine values and virile martial virtues—just as one may expect given the status of the former as uke and of the latter as seme. Indeed, not even Soubi’s refusal to allow Ritsuka to play his role as Sacrifice, albeit disturbing the Sacrifice/uke and Fighter/seme associations, seems to compromise this conventional gendered organization of meaning. This is because Soubi’s conduct here could be construed as the ultimate in heroic masculinity. However, on an even more compelling reading, I would argue that Soubi’s refusal makes him a defender of a feminine ethics of care. In particular, Soubi’s rejection of the abstract rules that define his and Ritsuka’s respective roles and prerogatives is reminiscent of Antigone’s defiant rejection of the ethics of (formal) justice embodied in the King’s law in order to give effect to the imperatives of care, compassion and contextual decision-making. The same privileging of an ethics of care over an ethics of justice is at work in Soubi’s refusal to obey Ritsuka’s orders. As master—a role thrust upon Ritsuka by the rules of the game, which appear to codify some sort of mysterious higher law—it is Ritsuka’s right to have Soubi obey him. However, as Soubi’s express acknowledgement of that right gives way to his unwillingness to honour it in practice out of concern for Ritsuka himself, a reorientation of his priorities occurs, readily intelligible in terms of an ethics of care. The reorientation here is particularly powerful because of its paradoxical trajectory: the initial enthusiasm with which Soubi encourages Ritsuka to take on his role as master may be motivated by a willingness to make up for the power imbalance that Ritsuka’s young age and emotional vulnerability inevitably impart to the relationship. Thus, in a sense, making an uke the master and a seme his willing slave already seems to carry to the extreme the distinctively ‘feminine’ and caring masculinity of the seme. Yet, as explained, it is Soubi’s eventual rejection of his slave status that

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ends up accomplishing even more perfectly his alignment with feminine values of care. One of the most sexually tense moments in the anime is when Ritsuka, at Soubi’s request, pierces the ears of the latter so as for Soubi to bear a permanent physical reminder of their relationship. The hymenal imagery that the act of piercing conjures up seems to cast Ritsuka in a seme like role—a move patently against the conventions of the genre. Yet the exaggerated smallness of Ritsuka’s body compared to Soubi’s crouching lankiness, as well as the awkward hesitation, serious concentration, and physical effort with which the boy performs the task keep him firmly anchored to his uke identity. The scene is again fruitfully readable in terms of an ethics of care. In particular, the seme renounces the ethics of justice where he gives up his rights (to penetrate) and makes himself available for ‘penetration’ by the uke, subordinating and even sacrificing the integrity of his status to the overriding importance of their relationship—whose value, as explained above, is symbolized by the piercings themselves. (The sacrificial connotation of Soubi’s conduct is arguably reinforced by an imagery of crucifixion invisibly supplementing the much less gruesome images visible onscreen: that imagery is unconsciously activated through the idea of a man who willingly suffers, for the sake of a greater good, his flesh to be pierced by metal.) By the end of the anime, which leaves much unexplained, Ritsuka has established an intimate bond with Soubi and meaningful friendships with secondary characters in the story, and has become less preoccupied with his own individuality and the need to recapture his previous self. In this sense Ritsuka too experiences an ethical reorientation towards values of care. The relationship between Ritsuka (an emotionally vulnerable twelve year old) and Soubi (a seductive young adult) would almost necessarily be exploitative if organized on the basis of either a logic of heteronormative marital domesticity or hedonistic counter(hetero)normativity. As a yaoi/BL relationship oriented along the lines of an ethics of care, on the other hand, the intimate bond between the two main characters manages not only to be nonexploitative, but also to empower Ritsuka. Importantly, this is not accomplished at the cost of a sanitizing desexualization of the relationship. If anything, as a BL fan who disliked the anime put it while reviewing Loveless, “[t]he writers have done all they can to sexualize [the Soubi–Ritsuka relationship] without progressing them beyond a kiss” (Summer Queen, 2007). For example, Soubi’s gay male roommate misses no opportunity to call Soubi a ‘pervert’ and ‘rorikon,’xv and Soubi exudes so much seductive seme charm that it is a wonder how

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anybody could resist him for any length of time at all. Ultimately, the very fact of cat ears peeping out of Ritsuka’s hair is a constant reminder to the viewer of the sexual potential of the relationship—of an erotic tension always on the verge of eruption. Conclusions If the marital and hedonistic models reflect, in different ways, a quintessentially male way of conceptualizing intimacy, then decentring their dominance is not just a matter of promoting an intrinsically valuable diversity of (morally sound) sexual identity forms and practices, but also of trying to rethink intimacy in more symmetrical (less gendered) terms. This is not to say that the ethics of care is superior to the ethics of justice; rather it is to say that making the ethics of care play a greater role than it currently does in defining our conceptualizations and practices of intimacy may afford a more balanced range of options in the realm of relationality. And yaoi/BL may be just the sort of subjugated knowledge that could prove helpful in this enterprise. Manga and anime may look like an unlikely starting point to thinking through alternative models of intimacy, but Halberstam’s own work on “pixarvolt” (Halberstam, 2007) suggests that alternative visions may lie here and now in the most unpredictable places.

i

The classical pro-marriage piece is Stoddard’s ‘Why Gay People Should Seek the Right to Marry’ (1989), while its anti-marriage counterpart is Ettelbrick’s ‘Since When is Marriage a Path to Liberation?’ (1989). ii This terminology is used both because I think it’s as descriptively as accurate as any, and because I want to be deliberately provocative. Whereas ‘marital’ will make many a queer reader cringe by conjuring up the spectre of heteronormativity, ‘hedonistic’ will make them feel uncomfortable to the extent that the word is commonly used to express disapproval. This suits my purpose, which is to encourage critical scrutiny of both these dominant models of gay intimacy. iii These two understandings of intimacy may be gendered in significant ways. In a North American study on what college men and women understand by intimacy “[w]omen tended to focus primarily on love and affection and the expression of warm feelings” whereas “[f]or men, a key feature of intimacy was sex and physical closeness” (Hatfield and Rapson, 1996, p. 161). iv The tolerance of Japanese authorities for this material is largely attributable to the convention (now no longer followed) of interpreting the Japanese criminal code’s obscenity provision as permitting the representations of all manner of erotic representations so long as they did not explicitly show adult genitalia and pubic hair (Schodt, 1996, pp. 135–136). v The decentring of the plot within yaoi is expressed in the very term that designates the genre—the word is an acronym for the Japanese ‘Yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi,’ which means ‘No build-up, no foreclosure, and no meaning’ (Kinsella, 1998, p. 301). vi In this connection, it is significant that some Japanese gay men dislike the genre (McLelland, 2000).

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vii

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While I refrain from openly discussing the goodness or badness of current forms of gay intimacy, an argument advocating the diversification of forms of intimacy beyond the current range cannot avoid the question of the moral soundness of that which is not currently part of that range and which we seek to include in it. This is because expanding that range must ultimately be with a view to promoting personal autonomy, seen as necessary for leading a valuable life; but while the availability of bad options does not detract from the value of personal autonomy, it is only when autonomy is oriented towards the good that it is valuable (Raz, 1986, p. 381). viii Essentially these representations employ different strategies in order to contain the threat that transgender poses to the gender system and heterodomesticity. ix “The different voice I describe is characterized not by gender but theme. Its association with women is an empirical observation, and it is primarily through women that I trace its development. But this association is not absolute…No claims are made about the origins of the differences described” (Gilligan, 1982, p. 2). x It is to Butler that we owe the insight that because sex itself, as ‘matter’, is only accessible through discourse, it too is discursively constructed like gender (Butler, 1993). xi If not as an effect of the specific gender of yaoi/BL’s producers and their Japanese audience, the proposition that yaoi/BL is more likely to reflect an ethics of care than Western gay models of intimacy arguably holds as a matter of cultural differences. As a Japanese cultural product, yaoi/BL is likely to be at least partially influenced by the worldview of Confucianism, whose ethical vision, it has been argued, displays remarkable similarities with Gilligan’s ethics of care (Li, 1994). xii Both seme and uke are normally extremely androgynous looking, but the greater ‘femininity’ of the uke (who has larger eyes, is smaller and shorter, has a rounder face and a small triangular chin, is younger and more vulnerable looking than the seme, and generally sports highly stylized hairstyles) make the seme look clearly masculine through the logic of “masculine supplementarity” (Halberstam, 2005, p. 131). xiii This is not to deny that there may be other illuminating lenses through which acts of oral sex can be construed and the pleasure they provide accounted for. xiv I mean this not in the Randian sense of ‘extraordinary’ that Halberstam criticizes, but in the more mundane sense that yaoi/BL characters inhabit, as often as not, magical worlds or tend to find themselves involved in unlikely situations. xv Rorikon is a Japanese abbreviated rendition of ‘Lolita Complex’; it refers to the sexualization of underage and even prepubescent girls. Rorikon is a particular theme of certain manga. For a discussion of rorikon as well as other erotic topoi in manga, see Shigematsu (1999).

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Kinsella, S. (1998). Japanese subculture in the 1990s: Otaku and the amateur manga movement. Journal of Japanese Studies, 24, 289-316. Leidholdt, D., & Raymond, J. G. (Eds.). (1990). The sexual liberals and the attack on feminism. New York, NY: Pergamon. Li, C. (1994). The Confucian concept of Jen and the feminist ethics of care: a comparative study. Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 9, 70-89. MacDuff, W. (1996). Beautiful boys in No drama: the idealization of homoerotic desire. Asian Theatre Journal, 13, 248-58. MacKinnon, C. (1993). Only words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McLelland, M. (2000). Male homosexuality and popular culture in modern Japan. Intersections, 3. Retrieved June 3, 2011 from http://intersections.anu.edu.au/ issue3/mclelland2.html McLelland, M. (2005). The world of yaoi: the internet, censorship and the global ‘boys’ love fandom. Australian Feminist Law Journal, 23, 61-77. McLelland, M. (2006). Why are Japanese comics full of boys bonking? Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media, 10. Retrieved June 3, 2011 from http://blogs.arts.unimelb.edu.au/refractory/2006/12/04/why-are-japanesegirls%e2%80%99-comics-full-of-boys-bonking1-mark-mclelland/ Raz, J. (1986). The morality of freedom. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Schalow, P. G. (1993). The invention of a literary tradition of male love. Kitamura Kigin’s Iwatsutsuji. Monumenta Nipponica, 48, 1-31. Schodt, F. L. (1996). Dreamland Japan: Writings on modern manga. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press. Shigematsu, S. (1999). Dimensions of desire: sex, fantasy and fetish in Japanese comics. In J. A. Lent (Ed.), Themes and issues in Asian cartooning: Cute, cheap, mad and sexy. Bowling Green, KY: Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Stoddard, T. (1989). Why gay people should seek the right to marry. OUT/LOOK National Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, 9, 8-12. Stoltenberg, J. (1990a). Gays and the propornography movements: having the hots for sex discrimination. In M. S. Kimmel (Ed.), Men confronting pornography. New York, NY: Crown Publishers. Stoltenberg, J. (1990b). Pornography and freedom. In M. S. Kimmel (Ed.), Men confronting pornography. New York, NY: Crown Publishers. Stychin, C. F. (1992). Exploring the limits: feminism and the legal regulation of gay male pornography. Vermont Law Review, 16, 857-900. Summer Queen (2007). Review: Loveless. Retrieved September 10, 2008 from http://www.boysonboysonfilm.com/anime/loveless3.html

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Kane Race

RESPONSE YAMETE, O-SHIRI GA ITAI! Kane Race The University of Sydney

Ever since Foucault’s comments about the creative possibilities of gay life in his well-known interviews ‘Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity’ (1997a) and ‘Friendship as a Way of Life’ (1997b)—and no doubt before these—queer scholars have been turning to queer sexual subcultures to elaborate and archive alternative modes of intimacy, pleasure, knowledge, ethics, performance, affiliation and care. Zanghellini’s paper is unusual in this regard, in that it turns to a Japanese women’s comic genre to look for a more satisfactory model of gay male intimacy than the forms he finds at hand in gay culture. There is much that is interesting about this sexually graphic comic genre in which sex itself “does not seem to be the “point” but is used to underline the centrality of the characters’ feelings,” as Mark McLelland puts it (McLelland, 2003, p. 55). But when I first read Zanghellini’s initial essay into this area, I feared that he was burying gay culture a little too quickly in his enthusiasm to endorse a fantasy of gay life generated by differently embodied subjects. To be sure, I share Zanghellini’s sense of the problem of dividing gay life into marital and hedonistic alternatives. My contribution begins by querying whether such a dichotomy can adequately capture gay relations in their present configuration. The acronym yaoi stands for ‘yama nashi ochi nashi imi nashi,’ which translates as ‘no climax, no point, no meaning.’ The implicit detachment of sex from teleological development and psychological complexity is refreshing. But there is an alternative acronym offered playfully by Japanese fans of the genre: ‘yamete, o-shiri ga itai’ or ‘stop, my ass hurts!’ (McLelland, 2003, p. 277). And, since this phrase seems to capture so well some of the complex pleasures of—and objections to—charged relations like submission, subjugation and appropriation, I’ve adopted the phrase to stand as the title of my rejoinder. Shapes of intimacy Zanghellini introduces a study by Barry Adam to isolate two models of ‘Western’ gay life—the marital model and the hedonistic model (Adam, 2006). Gay men are depicted as caught between these two alternatives. It would be easy enough to believe that when gay men don’t opt for either one model or the other (which many don’t) it is because, effectively, they have opted for both. But ‘opting for both’ is not the same as opting for one or the

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other: the sexual order requires that these options be counterposed, such that one stands as the (im)moral alternative to the other. Recognizing this point allows us to appreciate the practical inventiveness and intimate labour of those who try to negotiate such relations. Adam’s study is entitled ‘Relationship Innovation in Gay Male Couples’ for this reason, and he goes to some length to identify the variety of practical strategies and understandings that people devise to make things work, largely in the absence of approved social scripts (Adam, 2006). Nor should we underestimate the potentially challenging work on the self that such negotiations may entail. It is not ‘nothing’ to decentre sex as the primary gauge of interpersonal trust and commitment in the context of contemporary romantic narratives, not to mention such deeply ingrained masculine traits as sexual possessiveness and territorialism. Moreover, since Adam’s is a study of gay male couples, he doesn’t try to catalog the huge variety of relations, connections, intimacies, and modes of belonging that may feature in more ‘casual’ male–male sexual cultures, or that do not revolve around the couple form. One rather obvious example travels, in the West, under the term ‘fuck-buddies,’ but this term doesn’t really begin to describe the multiple configurations of friendship, sex, affection, and relational play that queer people habitually improvise. Such relations are often demoted as commitment-free and unreliable, and it is true that only infrequently do they involve the forms of capital transfer and established duty and obligation that make the couple form such a deeply invested and fiercely guarded unit. But this difference should not detract from the way such relations can model ‘being sexual together’ in a way that affords each partner some degree of sexual autonomy, for example. And no doubt there are other modes of care, attention, interaction and affective relation that are worth noticing even in more anonymous encounters. These modes are difficult to recognize or sustain as legitimate because they lack the metacultural matrix that naturalizes heterosexuality and enshrines its modes of intimacy, sustenance and intelligibility (Berlant and Warner, 1998). But I think there is much to be accounted for in the shadowlands between normative domesticity and what appears to be ‘reckless hedonism.’ Indeed one might re-envision intimacy fairly radically with reference to what appear to be fairly mundane and widely accessible erotic scenes. For some homosexually-attracted men, for example, a biographical person is not the privileged locus of the term ‘sexual relationship.’ For some folks, the phrase ‘sexual relationship’ might better describe a relationship with a scene or a place—such as a park, a venue, or a beach—with more or less regular attendees and some level of transient participation. Take the old blokes down at Congwong Beach, a nudist spot south of Sydney. On a warm weekend, they’re engaged in various forms of erotic and semi-erotic display

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and appreciation. There’s a more or less regular crowd, and a few unfamiliar faces, young and old. Some of them have sexual contact there; some catch up with friends or recent acquaintances. Some of them just watch, or do both—or neither—depending on the mood that takes them. Some share local stories and conjecture with visitors and passers-by. Some stroll up and down the beach, building gradual networks of intermittent arousal. The significance of the sex that happens in these contexts for their participants may be something so ‘small’ as a sense of assurance in the possibility of encountering affection, good will, or just mutual interest from random strangers. At any rate, the details of romantic personhood simply do not best organize, nor necessarily describe, the nature of some people’s affectionate or erotic attachments. The sort of sustenance and pleasure these scenes provide for their participants—and the forms of friendship, belonging, sociability and diffuse eroticism they embody—are not easily accounted for in conventional taxonomies that dichotomize sex in terms of ‘regular’ or ‘casual’ partners. But to reduce them to one of two models is to miss important dimensions of queer pleasure, belonging, and even affective survival. Nor should we discount too quickly the ethical repertoires that may characterize some casual sex cultures. But if we want to appreciate these, it is probably worth dispensing with pre-established normative frames steeped in the language of heterosexual relations, and attend instead to the modes of conduct, imagination, interaction and commitment that may emerge from embodied participation in these scenes. In other words, rather than measuring sexual cultures against pre-given normative criteria, I wonder what can be learnt by remaining open to the cultural and practical frames and sensibilities that surface. Samuel Delany once found in the porn theatres of Times Square what he saw as one of the few remaining zones of pleasurable “interclass contact and communication conducted in a mode of good will,” which prompted him to devise a highly original vision of urban relationality (Delany, 1999, p. 111). Christopher Castiglia has documented the associations some gay men make between venue participation and certain counter-memories of gay life, which are then claimed by some gay men to be politically motivating, inspiring commitment to a projected collectivity rather than a private unit (Castiglia, 2000). Gayle Rubin has documented the modes of affiliation and improvised kinship that took shape in North American S/M sexual subcultures, which were closely linked to the formation of new pleasures (Rubin, 2000). Michael Warner finds in queer public cultures a “special kind of sociability” and ethicopolitical sensibility based in the shared inhabitation of shame (Warner, 1999). And Halberstam, Rubin, Ann Cvetkovich, Jill Julius Matthews, Lauren Berlant, Ulrika Dahl and others have taken a similar approach to lesbian and transgender erotic cultures, including some that sexualize domination and submission (Berlant,

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1997; Cvetkovich, 2003; Halberstam, 1998, 2005; Matthews, 1997; Rubin 1992, 1984; Volcano & Dahl, 2008). My point is not to prescribe any particular sexual practice or mode of cultural participation. Nor do I want to deny that such cultures can be experienced in terms of loneliness, boredom or desperation (no less at least than marital relations). But I do want to remain attentive to the sensibilities, values, counter-intimacies, and material forms of pleasure that may characterize and/or be elaborated in these ‘normally degraded’ sexual scenes. In her article ‘Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of Sexuality,’ Rubin importantly argued for a less presumptuous way of judging sexual acts than what usually passes (including within some feminisms) for sexual morality, based on “the ways partners treat one another, the level of mutual consideration, the presence or absence of coercion, and the quantity and qualities of the pleasures they provide” (Rubin, 1984, p. 283). Here ‘ethics’ can only be discerned by attending to lived practices of sex and intimacy, and denotes embodied codes of conduct and ways of life. i Attending to such ‘ethics’ is a long way from claiming that queer sexual scenes are some haven of egalitarian and communitarian values. It is merely to promote more open-ended—even ‘ethological’—inquiry into the affects, values, pleasures, and logics that such scenes and practices embody. The work of fantasy I want to turn now to a brief consideration of what yaoi does for its principal producers and consumers—Japanese women and schoolgirls. And considered from this perspective, there is certainly something fantastic about how yaoi responds to the social relations of sex and gender in which it is embedded. It would appear that yaoi enables an imaginative dispensation with gender norms for Japanese women and schoolgirls—one that is specifically sexually expressive. And it is useful to situate this genre in these terms, because it helps us even better to appreciate the potentially subversive social work of the erotic imagination. McLelland argues that the main attraction of boy-love stories for Japanese women is that they graphically represent love between relative equals in a highly statusconscious society (McLelland, 2000). He illustrates this point by comparing the depiction of homosexual sex in women’s comics and men’s comics. According to McLelland, Japanese men’s comics typically represent sex as an act of domination along established lines of power differential (such as gender and age). This is true not only of straight male comics, but gay ones, “where the female victims of mainstream men’s manga are replaced by junior men who are used and abused by their seniors (and shown loving it)” (McLelland, 2000, p. 279). Yaoi, by contrast, would appear to minimize the impact of these status differentials by equalizing the gender, relative age,

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and attractiveness of the parties. This enables an elaboration of feminine sexuality via the representation of beautiful young men having sex. There is some debate about whether yaoi as a genre can be considered pornographic. Some critics and authors say so, while others insist that the narratives are beautiful and pure, while still others qualify this claim by saying that the genre purifies love from “the tarnished male-female framework of heterosexual love” (Fujimoto cited in Welker, 2006, p. 857). Whatever the case, it would appear that the genre has some erotic value for its readers. But its stories are not necessarily as touchy-feely as one might be led to believe. McLelland mentions a yaoi website called ‘Sadistic’ which contains original stories about men in their twenties with an emphasis on SM and hard sex (McLelland, 2003). And yaoi isn’t the only sexually explicit genre of women’s comics : apparently there is a genre of ‘ladies’ comics,’ produced by and for women, whose scenes of women molesting men on subways and enjoying such activities as gang rape and sodomy would, in the words of one commentator, “make European and American feminist s wince” (Schodt cited in McLelland, 2000, p. 58). So it would seem that the gender of a genre’s primary producers and consumers actually gives few guarantees about the niceties of the sexual relations depicted. It’s not clear either that a Western feminist ‘ethics of care’ is the best framework by which to understand the relations depicted in yaoi. Another relevant concept is the concept of amae, which was coined by the scholar Doi Takeo to describe relations of dependence in Japanese society (Takeo, 1971). The verb amaeru does not translate well into English, but it is generally used to describe an individual’s behaviour aimed at inducing a person in a position of authority to take care of him/her. It can be translated as ‘to depend,’ ‘to be spoiled,’ ‘to let oneself be spoiled’ or ‘to take advantage,’ but does not carry the social stigma of weakness or childishness that is associated with it in Western society. According to Doi, amae behaviour is proactive and implies a greater degree of agency than simple dependence. The subject seeking amae is the one who initiates the superior/inferior relationship, by putting themselves in a position of dependency which they then turn to their own advantage to achieve specific goals. Interestingly, amae is not a gendered notion. It applies indifferently to male and female individuals and to sexual and nonsexual relations. In a way, amae appears to be the reverse of the ‘ethics of care’ discussed by Gilligan (1982): the male subject seeking amae finds his agency in acting defenseless and dependent in order to obtain his goals while reinstating the authority of the older party and the value of the relationship. These technicalities aside, one may be able to recognize general differences in the depiction of homosexual love in girls’ comics : more emotional build-

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up, less emphasis on penis size and the mechanics of penetration, less obvious power differentials between the parties. And it is interesting in this regard that, since the Japanese language is very sensitive to differences in status such as age, yaoi cannot entirely dispense with power differentials. But what is also interesting, according to my colleague Rebecca Suter who has done some work in this area (Suter, forthcoming), is that these power differentials become a source of negotiation, intrigue and speculation. So while Zanghellini is right to observe that the uke/seme roles are a concern of most yaoi manga, these roles are not necessarily fixed nor even easy to detect upon first reading. Within fan communities, when a new series appears, there are often heated debates about who has the uke and who has the seme role in the story. This in itself suggests a space in which such roles are more performative, and not straightforwardly associated with a stable identity. It is clear then that yaoi is doing something very interesting for its readers. If traditional girls’ manga led young female readers to interiorize conventional gender roles through identification with the girl protagonists and their heteronormative love stories, in yaoi the choice of an exoticized Western setting and the gay male protagonists suspends that kind of identification and allows the readers to experiment with different models. Yaoi would appear to dislodge sex from its overdetermination by established power differentials for readers for whom such overdetermination may be experienced as stifling. For some, this provides a temporary escape, while for others, it plays a more galvanizing role in sex and gender experimentation. James Welker even cites some Japanese lesbians who describe these tales of beautiful young boys having sex as central to their identity formation (Welker, 2006). There is much to marvel at here, in terms of how the erotic imagination negotiates and responds to specific historical and material constraints. But to prescribe its representations as erotic fodder for differently embodied subjects, on the basis that they are more ‘ethically appropriate’? Well, that’s another story. My point is that the subversive operations of this genre are best grasped by relating them to the embodied conditions with or upon which they work. In Undoing Gender, Judith Butler speaks of the political importance of fantasy. She canvases fantasy as that which exposes the “realities to which we thought we were confined as open to transformation” (Butler, 2004, p. 217). The labour of fantasy is situated labour, even as it has recourse to sometimes wild appropriations. It names that process through which we creatively but unpredictably grapple with given norms, in provisional attempts to “derive our agency from the field of their operation” (2004, p. 32). This is all the more reason, it seems to me, to honour a certain free play or ‘autonomy’ of fantasy,ii rather than require it to conform in advance to

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certain a priori political or moral credentials. The project of generating subversive imaginaries may require us first to work up from lived conditions of embodiment to see how certain fantasies and representational practices negotiate given material circumstances, rather than attempting to prescribe certain values or investments for already sexual bodies. As a way of opening new erotic positions for women, yaoi does something interesting with the idea of homosexuality. If fantasy is reconfigurative work, what are gay fantasies doing with masculinity? However politically or morally inappropriate a given fantasy is deemed to be, it could be read as the body’s provisional attempt to find alternative ways of imagining and relating to the specific conditions and historical constraints in which it is embedded. Zanghellini’s analysis seems to turn on a certain configuration of oral sex, and it is good that he finds some inspiration on this count. The erotic imagination has recourse to all sorts of unexpected and productive appropriations (as the genre of yaoi, with its frequent recourse to exoticized Western settings, amply demonstrates). I’d only like to invite him to be more attentive to the many embodied forms of gay practice which are not always straightforwardly gendered, and whose power differentials are not at any rate generally or necessarily fixed to established social roles. And there are many more nuanced, embodied tales to be told, even by experienced hedonists, about lived practices of oral sex, where a garden variety blow job might encompass an expanding variety of affective modes in which power is more subtly or ambiguously exchanged: tasting, hankering, withholding, devouring, refusing, exposing, connecting, suspending, sharing, offering, taunting, tending, surrendering, munching, spitting, plunging, pleasuring, suckling, savouring, dangling, gobbling—need I go on? Recognizing these relational modes has become possible using the alternative methodologies for approaching queer embodiment and culture and subjugated knowledge developed by queer scholars. Making them work calls for an expansive practical imagination that doesn’t superimpose one ethical frame onto diverse others. Zanghellini draws our attention to some intriguing aspects of yaoi, which I have attempted to develop and expand upon here. But I have also tried to suggest another approach. Like other forms of queer eroticism, yaoi is doing something specific for its principal readers and producers, and while we might take inspiration (erotic or otherwise) from its representation of same sex intimacy, and from the creativity of its achievements, to situate it as a more desirable form of gay intimacy than those already being elaborated among gay men—especially on the basis that it is more ‘ethically appropriate’—may well be to neglect, both at home and abroad, the ethical innovation and subversive operations of queer eroticism and of fantasy itself.

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I would like to thank Rebecca Suter for very generously discussing yaoi with me and contributing substantially to the relevant sections of this response.

i

For a cognate approach to ethics in the context of HIV prevention, see Race (2003, 2007, 2008, 2009). For an excellent feminist critique of certain normative applications of the feminist ‘ethics of care,’ see Sybylla (2001). ii This is as distinct from practice, where coercion is clearly unacceptable.

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REFERENCES Adam, B. (2006). Relationship innovation in gay male couples. Sexualities, 9(1), 5-26. Berlant, L. (1997). The Queen of America goes to Washington City: Essays on sex and citizenship. Durham & London: Duke University Press. Berlant, L., & Warner, M. (1998). Sex in public. Critical Inquiry, 24(2), 547-66. Butler, J. (2004). Undoing gender. New York: Routledge. Castiglia, C. (2000). Sex panics, sex publics, sex memories. Boundary, 27(2), 149-72. Cvetkovich, A. (2003). An archive of feelings: Trauma, sexuality and lesbian public cultures. Durham: Duke University Press. Delany, S. (1999). Times Square red, Times Square blue. New York: New York University Press. Foucault, M. (1997a). Friendship as a way of life. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), Michel Foucault: Ethics. Allen Lane: Penguin. Foucault, M. (1997b). Sex, power and the politics of identity. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), Michel Foucault: Ethics (pp. 163-73). Allen Lane: Penguin. Halberstam, J. (1998). Female masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press. Halberstam, J. (2007). In a queer time and place: Transgender bodies, subcultural lives. New York: New York University Press. Matthews, J. (1997). Sex in public: Australian sexual cultures. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. McLelland, M. (2000). No climax, no point, no meaning? Japanese women’s boy-love sites on the internet. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 24(3), 274-291. McLelland, M. (2003). Japanese queerscapes: global/local intersections on the internet. In C. Berry, F. Martin, & A. Yue (Eds.), Mobile cultures: New media in queer Asia. Durham: Duke University Press. Race, K. (2003). Revaluation of risk among gay men. AIDS Education and Prevention, 15(4), 369-81. Race, K. (2007). Engaging in a culture of barebacking: gay men and the risk of HIV prevention. In K. Hannah-Moffat, & P. O’Malley (Eds.), Gendered risks. London: Routledge-Cavendish. Race, K. (2008). The use of pleasure in harm reduction: perspectives from the history of sexuality. International Journal of Drug Policy, 19(5), 417-423. Race, K. (2009). Pleasure consuming medicine: The queer politics of drugs. Durham: Duke University Press. Rubin, G. (1984). Thinking sex: notes for a radical theory of the politics of sexuality. In C. Vance (Ed.), Pleasure and danger. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Rubin, G. (1992). Of catamites and kings: reflections on butch, gender, and boundaries. In J. Nestle (Ed.), The persistent desire. A femme-butch reader. Boston: Alyson. Rubin, G. (2000). Sites, settlements, and urban sex: archaeology and the study of gay leathermen in San Francisco 1955–1995. In R. Schmidt, & B. Voss (Eds.), Archaeologies of sexuality. London: Routledge. Sybylla, R. (2001). Hearing whose voice? The ethics of care and the practices of liberty. Economy and Society, 30(1), 66-84.

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Suter, R. (forthcoming). Gender bending and religion in Japanese girls’ comics. Asian Studies Review. Takeo, D. (1973 [1971]). The anatomy of dependence: The key analysis of Japanese behavior. (J. Bester, Trans.). Tokyo: Kodansha International. Volcano, D. L., & Dahl, U. (2008). Femmes of power: Exploding queer femininities. London: Serpent’s Tail. Warner, M. (1999). The trouble with normal: Sex, politics and the ethics of queer life. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Welker, J. (2006). Beautiful, borrowed and bent: ‘boy’s love’ as girl’s love in Shôjo Manga. Signs, 31(3), 841-860.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We would like to thank Wayne McKenna, the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic and Research), University of Western Sydney, Australia for funding the symposium in which these chapters were first presented. We also acknowledge the financial support contributed by the School of Education, University of Western Sydney to assist in the production of this book. We are grateful to Bronwyn Davies for her ongoing support and commitment to this project. Special thanks are due to Jack Halberstam for her time, expertise and involvement in the symposium, and contribution to this book. Thanks also to Rhubarb (www.rhubarbrhubarb.org) for nuanced editorial work and technical savvy, and to David Bates and Justin Boschetti for their helpful comments and photographs. Lastly, we’d like to thank the authors of this book for their patience and for their fine contributions. Kerry H. Robinson and Cristyn Davies

Kerry H. Robinson and Cristyn Davies (Eds) All rights reserved - © 2012 Bentham Science Publishers

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Biographical Information Kerry H. Robinson is an Associate Professor in the School of Education and the Centre for Educational Research at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. She lectures in sociology and cultural diversity and difference. Her research interests include constructions of gendered and sexualized identities, including how these are negotiated in educational contexts; gendered and sexualized violence; constructions of childhood and sexuality; and sociology of knowledge. She has published widely in these areas, including her co-authored book, Diversity and Difference in Early Childhood Education: Issues for Theory and Practice (Robinson & Jones Diaz, 2006, Open University Press). Kerry is currently working on two books, a co-edited collection Retheorising School Violence to be published by PalgraveMacmillan in 2011, and a monograph titled Innocence, Knowledge and the Construction of Childhood: The contradictory relationship between sexuality and censorship in children’s contemporary lives, to be published by Routledge in 2012. Cristyn Davies is an experienced researcher, writer, editor, and tertiary educator. Her research interests include: the culture wars; moral panic; contemporary performance; literature and new media; and the intersections between gendered and sexual subjectivities with citizenship, media, and constructions of childhood and youth. Most recently, she co-edited and contributed a chapter about homophobic violence to a forthcoming collection titled Reconceptualising School Violence: Context, Gender and Theory, to be published by PalgraveMacmillan (London) in 2011; and contributed a chapter with Kellie Burns titled ‘Imagining queer community in and beyond The L Word’ in Loving the L Word: Television fans and queer pleasures to be published by I.B Tauris (London) in 2011. Cristyn has co-edited and contributed to special issues of Sexualities, Cultural Studies Review, and Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood. Cristyn has published in literary journals and has collaborated with academics, writers, performance artists, and digital and new media artists on a range of projects. Peter Bansel is a postdoctoral researcher in the Centre for Educational Research at the University of Western Sydney. His work, focussed on neoliberalism and subjectivity, has specifically addressed the relation between historically changing practices of government and historical changes in the constitution and regulation of subjectivities. It has also addressed the ways in which western consumer economies have figured subjects as autonomous economic agents through their relation to the market and practices of consumption. His recently completed PhD, ‘Subjectivity at work,’ was a philosophical contemplation of the narrative and discursive work through which biographical narratives of experience are fabricated and performed. Kerry H. Robinson and Cristyn Davies (Eds) All rights reserved - © 2012 Bentham Science Publishers

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Kellie Burns completed her PhD thesis entitled ‘‘Blood, sweat and queers’: (re)Imagining global queer citizenship at the Sydney 2002 Gay Games.’ She is currently working as a lecturer in the Faculty of Education and Social Work at The University of Sydney, Australia. Her work is published in journals and edited collections, most recently in Discourse: The cultural politics of education; The Journal of Lesbian Studies and Sexualities. Her current work explores the relationships between sexual citizenship and popular culture within the current neoliberal governmental order. Kate Crawford is an Associate Professor in the Journalism and Media Research Centre at the University of New South Wales in Sydney ([email protected]). She is the author of Adult Themes (2006), which argues for a more critical engagement with the category of adulthood. Her current research is on affect and mobile media, and gender and technologies of listening. In 2008, she was awarded the Australian Academy of Humanities biennial medal for excellence in humanities research. Bronwyn Davies is known for her work on gender, for her work with collective biography, and her writing on poststructuralist theory. Her recent work has focussed on the development of a critique of neoliberalism as it impacts on subjectivities at work, with a particular focus on university work. Her work on body–landscape relations, and on enabling pedagogies, is now turning toward the development of a theory of place in pedagogical settings, and on working across the boundaries between the arts and social sciences. Susanne Gannon is an Associate Professor in Education at the University of Western Sydney. In various papers and book chapters she has interrogated discourses of hegemonic heterosexuality and femininity, and contested narrow representation of ethnic identities in film, television, drama, newspapers and advertisements. She is interested in popular culture texts as sites for generating subversive bodies, politics and imaginaries. Judith Jack Halberstam is Professor of English and Gender Studies at USC. She works in the areas of popular, visual and queer culture with an emphasis on subcultures. Halberstam’s first book, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995), was a study of popular gothic cultures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and it stretched from Frankenstein to contemporary horror film. Her 1998 book, Female Masculinity, made a groundbreaking argument about non-male masculinity and tracked the impact of female masculinity upon hegemonic genders. Halberstam’s latest book, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (2005), described and theorized queer reconfigurations of time and space in relation to subcultural scenes and the emergence of

Biographical Information

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transgender visibility. Halberstam was also the co-author with Del LaGrace Volcano of a photo/essay book, The Drag King Book (1999), and with Ira Livingston of an anthology, Posthuman Bodies (1995). Melissa Jane Hardie lectures in English at the University of Sydney. She is finishing a book on the death of the closet with chapters on celebrity outings, The Starr Report, Lindsay Lohan, post-closet cinema and queer plots in soap opera. She has recently published a special issue of Australian Feminist Studies on Women and Crime (2010) and her current research investigates the relationship between queer theory, the aesthetics of experimentalism and true crime. Robert Payne is an Australian media and cultural studies scholar who currently teaches in the Department of Global Communications at the American University of Paris. His research crosses the three broad fields of queer theory, masculinities in popular cultures and media, and cybercultures and subjectivity, and he is working on a monograph entitled In the Grid which draws elements of these together through analysis of grid structures in media culture, subjectivity and critical theory. Robert’s essays have been published in a number of books and international journals including Social Semiotics, Postmodern Culture and Cultural Studies Review, a recent issue of which he co-edited with Cristyn Davies on the theme of panic. Kane Race is a Senior Lecturer in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. He has published widely on the impact of HIV antiretroviral therapy on gay social and sexual cultures, and the subjugated ethics of certain sexual and drug-using practices in this context. His book Pleasure Consuming Medicine: The Queer Politics of Drugs (Duke University Press, 2009) investigates the political significance of drug discourses in neoliberal society, and the possibilities of ‘counterpublic health.’ Sue Saltmarsh is Associate Professor of Educational Studies at the Australian Catholic University. She has undertaken a range of ethnographic, social semiotic and discourse analytic studies concerned with the cultural production of subjectivities and social relations. Her ethnographic research has been undertaken within early childhood, primary, secondary and tertiary educational settings, with a particular emphasis on the ways in which economic discourse is implicated in the production of gendered and racialized economic subjectivities. Her research is informed by cultural theories of consumption and poststructuralist theories of subjectivity and power. Sue has a longstanding interest in social justice and equity in education, and is co-editor of the journal Global Studies of Childhood.

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Katrina Schlunke teaches cultural studies at the University of Technology Sydney in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Her most recent book is Cultural Theory in Everyday Practice (co-edited with Nicole Anderson) published by Oxford University Press (2008). She is an editor of the Cultural Studies Review and is currently working on a project looking at Captain Cook in the Popular Imagination. That project has led her to reconsider some of the scenes in The L Word’s ‘Love Boat’ episode. Elizabeth Stephens is a Research Fellow at the Centre for the History of European Discourses, the University of Queensland. She has published widely in the areas of queer and gender studies, and is the author of Queer Writing: Homoeroticism in Jean Genet’s Fiction (Palgrave, London, 2009) and Anatomy as Spectacle: Public Exhibitions of the Body from 1750 to the Present (Liverpool University Press, 2009). Aleardo Zanghellini has been Reader in Law at the University of Reading since 2010. Prior to that, he taught for five years at Macquarie University and was a visiting scholar at the University of Kent and the AHRC Centre for Law, Gender and Sexuality (2009). Substantively, much of Aleardo’s scholarship is in the field of law, gender and sexuality, with an emphasis on family rights and freedom of expression. His work, which is interdisciplinary in nature and draws on a diverse range of theoretical perspectives, has been published in UK, US, Australian and Canadian journals.

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INDEX A  adulthood ..... 5, 16, 93, 95, 109–15, 119, 121, 126, 132–34, 136, 139–50, 152, 156, 157,  204  advertising ................................................................................................................................. 85, 115, 136  agency .................................................................................................. vii, 111, 122, 146, 188, 215, 216  Amy G ................................................................................................................................................. 37, 41, 42  animation .......................................................................... vi, 1, 5, 6, 10, 139, 141–43, 145, 153, 156  B  burlesque .............................................................................................................................. 2, 23, 30, 43, 51  C  cabaret ........................................................................................................................... 2, 23, 30, 31, 37, 38  cartoons ..................................................................................................................................... 134, 141, 142  childhood ............ 5, 96, 109–16, 119, 121, 123–27, 131–36, 145, 147, 151, 153, 157, 203  cinema/cinematic ................................................................................................................... 20, 139, 156  comics .......................................................................................... 7, 191, 193, 195, 196, 211, 214, 215  consumerism .............................................................. 20, 57, 59, 60, 70, 77, 79, 132–36, 153, 163  consumption ................................................................. 2, 5, 21, 23, 34, 62, 131, 134–37, 159, 163  counter‐public .................................... 5, 7, 32, 90, 93, 109, 110, 124, 170, 183, 185, 188, 198  D  Didion, Joan ............................................................................................................................................. 23–25  documenta ............................................................................................................................................... 12, 13  Doujak, Ines ............................................................................................................................................ 13, 14  drag ......................................................... 6, 13, 20, 39, 74, 90, 167, 169, 170, 172, 175, 180, 187  E  education ........................................................................................................ 17, 71, 116, 124, 150, 173  eroticism ......................... 2, 8, 14, 23, 39, 91, 95, 103, 174, 199, 200, 204, 205, 207, 212–17  ethics .. vi, vii, ix, 7, 34, 74, 78, 86, 87, 99, 100, 102, 122, 151, 152, 160–64, 191–93, 198,  199, 202, 204–7, 211, 213–15, 217  F  failure 4, 9, 10, 12, 13, 25, 29, 34, 82, 83, 88, 90–92, 95, 96, 98–100, 102, 106, 107, 121,  142, 171, 188  fantasy .................................................................................................. 8, 65, 66, 77, 211, 214, 216, 217  female masculinity .................................................................. 1, 9, 11, 40, 125, 126, 172, 180, 183  feminism ................................ 16, 33, 52, 58, 59, 62, 63, 68, 78, 134, 185, 199, 201, 214, 215  fetish ........................................................................................... 3, 36, 56, 66, 112, 131, 158, 201, 202  Foucault, Michel .... iv, vii–ix, 10, 19, 28, 29, 59, 64, 83, 87, 88, 90, 98, 176, 194, 198, 211  freak .................................................................................................................................... 48, 50–53, 66, 67  G  gay ....................................................................................................... 7, 26, 92, 148, 159, 191, 211, 212  government ......................................................................... viii, 26, 41, 77, 110, 113, 142, 157, 163  grid ...................................... 4, 82, 83, 87–90, 93, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 102, 106, 107, 163, 164 

Kerry H. Robinson and Cristyn Davies (Eds) All rights reserved - © 2012 Bentham Science Publishers

228 Queer and Subjugated Knowledges....

Robinson and Davies

H  homophobia ........................................................................................... 6, 61, 167, 168, 173, 178, 179  I  innocence ...................... 50, 109, 110, 112, 114–17, 119, 121, 127, 131, 133, 134, 136, 200  intimacy ..... 7, 26, 28, 31, 37, 38, 43, 49, 57, 93, 94, 112, 118, 123, 131–33, 147–50, 188,  191, 194, 202–4, 211, 212, 214, 217  gay ............................................................................... 7, 8, 191–99, 201, 202, 204, 206, 207, 217  K  Kingpins, The ......................................................................................................................................... 20, 21  Knox, Elena ......................................................................................................................... 2, 23, 30–35, 51  L  L Word, The .................................................................... 3, 56, 58, 61–63, 67, 68, 70, 71, 74–77, 80  La Clique ........................................................................................................................ 2, 23, 30, 35–43, 51  labor/labour ........... viii, 5, 60, 61, 76, 96, 106, 114, 139, 140, 142–44, 149, 157, 212, 216  Lapdog ................................................................................................................. 23, 30, 31, 33–36, 43, 51  Law and Order ........................................................................................................................ 4, 101–3, 105  lesbian ......... 3, 19, 27, 56–64, 66, 67, 70, 74, 76–81, 92, 103, 147, 169, 175, 176–80, 213  Lilley, Chris .............................................................................. 6, 7, 167–72, 175, 180, 183, 185, 187  low theory ........................................................................................................................ xi, 1, 9, 11, 17, 19  Lull ............................................................................................................................................... 30, 31, 33, 35  M  manga .................................................................................................................... 195, 196, 204, 214, 216  Many­Headed Hydra, The .................................................................................................................. 15, 19  marriage ... 66, 92, 93, 95, 109, 111, 112, 117–21, 123, 126, 132, 135, 140, 143–48, 150,  152, 157, 191, 193, 203  masculinity ...... 1, 9, 11, 38–41, 61, 116, 119, 123, 126, 134, 161, 168–72, 180, 183, 184,  186–89, 193, 201, 202, 205, 217  Miller, Jennifer ....................................................................................................................................... 52, 53  Mitchell, John Cameron ................................................................................ 4, 82, 90, 92, 94, 95, 100  monsters ........................................................................ xi, 3, 15, 19–21, 51, 53, 56, 58, 63–71, 143  mother/motherhood ................ 3, 56–67, 70, 71, 77, 79, 103, 109, 122, 124, 143, 185, 186  N  neoliberalism . viii, 4, 26, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 43, 51, 141, 143, 144, 150–52, 156–59, 163,  164, 185  Nevin, Robyn .......................................................................................................................................... 23–25  O  O’Mer, David ............................................................................................................................... 2, 37, 39–41  P  parenting .... 5, 60–62, 66, 70, 78, 112, 115, 116, 121, 125, 131, 132, 142, 145, 150, 168,  171  performance art .................................................................................. 2, 23, 25–30, 32, 35, 38, 43, 49  performativity ......................................... 7, 32, 40, 53, 163, 164, 174, 183, 184, 186, 187, 216  pirates ................................................................................................................................... 14–16, 141, 142  Pixarvolt ......................................................................... 5, 6, 139, 141–45, 153, 156, 157, 160, 163 

Index

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popular culture ................................................................... 3, 56, 58, 110, 112, 131, 133, 141, 179  pornography ..................................................................................................................................... 199–201  poststructuralism ............................................................................................................ vi–viii, 185, 201  pregnancy .................................................................................. 3, 4, 56, 57, 63, 65, 67, 70, 74–81, 94  R  religion .................................................................................................................................. 15, 21, 144, 147  S  sexuality .. 2, 5, 6, 12, 18, 23, 30, 42, 59–61, 68, 70, 91, 112–16, 119, 121, 122, 124, 131,  136, 163, 167–70, 180, 215  shallow viewing ...........................................................................................................102, 103, 105, 106  Shortbus .................................................................................................... 4, 82, 83, 90–95, 99, 100, 103  Shrek .................................................................................................................................139, 140, 143, 145  spatiality ......... vii, 4, 5, 6, 26, 28, 39, 43, 62, 82, 83, 85–89, 93, 98, 99, 101, 104, 107, 139,  140, 145, 158, 159, 161, 164  subculture .............................. xii, 1, 4, 7, 9–11, 28, 82, 83, 85–90, 93, 95, 191, 193, 196, 197  subjectivity ................... vi, ix, 1, 4, 5, 82, 87, 92, 96, 106, 111, 132, 141, 151, 158, 163, 192  subjugated knowledges .............................................................. 1, 7, 9, 10, 48, 127, 191, 193, 199  Summer Heights High ...................................................................... 6, 7, 167–80, 183–85, 187, 188  superheroes ....................................................................................................................................... 141, 142  T  television....... 3, 6, 7, 56–58, 61–63, 67, 70, 74, 77, 80, 101, 103, 104, 106, 136, 167, 179  temporality ....... 2, 4–6, 10, 26, 28, 43, 75, 76, 80, 82–85, 89, 93, 95, 96, 98, 99, 101, 102,  104, 123, 126, 131, 135, 136, 139, 140, 142, 145, 147, 148, 156, 158, 159, 203  Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, The .................................................................................................... 68–70  theatre ....................................................................................................................................................... 23, 49  transsexuality ........................................................................................................................... 13, 141, 184  V  Viola, Bill .................................................................................................................... 5, 109, 131, 132, 136  W  Weiwei, Ai ........................................................................................................................................................ 12  Y  yaoi ............................................................................................. 7, 8, 191, 193, 195–207, 211, 214–17  Year of Magical Thinking, The ........................................................................... 23, 25, 26, 43, 49, 50