Queer

The word “queer” is a slippery one; its etymology is uncertain, and academic and popular usage attributes conflicting meanings to the word. By the mid-nineteenth century, “queer” was used as a pejorative term for a (male) homosexual. This negative connotation continues when it becomes a term for homophobic abuse. In recent years, “queer” has taken on additional uses: as an all encompassing term for culturally marginalised sexualities – gay, lesbian, trans, bi, and intersex (“GLBTI”) – and as a theoretical strategy which deconstructs binary oppositions that govern identity formation. Tracing its history, the Oxford English Dictionary notes that the earliest references to “queer” may have appeared in the sixteenth century. These early examples of queer carried negative connotations such as “vulgar,” “bad,” “worthless,” “strange,” or “odd” and such associations continued until the mid-twentieth century. The early nineteenth century, and perhaps earlier, employed “queer” as a verb, meaning to “to put out of order,” “to spoil”, “to interfere with”. The adjectival form also began to emerge during this time to refer to a person’s condition as being “not normal,” “out of sorts” or to cause a person “to feel queer” meaning “to disconcert, perturb, unsettle.” According to Eve Sedgwick (1993), “the word ‘queer’ itself means across – it comes from the Indo-European root – twerkw, which also yields the German quer (traverse), Latin torquere (to twist), English athwart . . . it is relational and strange.” Despite the gaps in the lineage and changes in usage, meaning and grammatical form, “queer” as a political and theoretical strategy has benefited from its diverse origins. It refuses to settle comfortably into a single classification, preferring instead to traverse several categories that would otherwise attempt to stabilise notions of chromosomal sex, gender and sexuality.

Shouting from the rooftops : Queer digital storytelling for social impact

This chapter explores some of the practical and theoretical obstacles and opportunities for self-expression experienced by a group of Queer Dig- ital Storytellers who primarily make and distribute their stories online. “Queer” in this chapter encompasses a diverse range of gender and sexual identities and perspectives on same, including the heterosexual children of queer parents and heterosexual parents of queer children. As such it is also used as a unifying moniker by participants in the Rainbow Family Tree case study that is examined in this chapter. The Digital Storytellers in this case study are largely motivated by a desire to have an impact on social attitudes towards gender and sexuality, both in their personal province of friends and family, and in public domains constituted of unknown or invisible audiences. The privacy and publicity dilemmas that will be considered arise out of positioning personal stories in the public domain and the quandaries that emerge from an activist desire to speak truth to power that is located across a wide cross section of audiences.

Introduction : queering paradigms, interrogating agendas

The introduction to the first volume of Queering Paradigms suggested that to queer a paradigm is to of fer a challenge to “the hetero/homonormative and gender binarist assumptions of any given academic discourse.” As queer subjects defy the “seduction of identity by exclusion,” and celebrate “the whole potential of sexuality and gender fluidity and diversity,” any attempt to understand them through the lenses offered by standard discourse is destined to fail (Scherer 2010: 2). “Queer” is not simply a synonym for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex and Questioning/Queer (LGBTIQ) subjects, as common use might suggest. Rather, it ought to be read as a reference to all who defy being pigeon-holed, pushed to the margins, or being pressured to adopt common social narratives regarding gender and sexuality.

What's Queer About Queer Criminology?

The term ‘‘queer criminology’’ is increasingly being used in criminological discussions, though there remains little consistency with regard to how it is used and to what it refers. It has been used broadly to describe criminological research on LGBTQ people and their interactions with the justice system, more specifically to describe those analyses that identify and critique the heteronormative knowledges or binarized understandings of gender and sexuality within criminal justice research, and also to label theoretical and conceptual pieces that argue for a greater connection between queer theory and criminology. However, there are some important distinctions between ‘‘queer criminology’’ and ‘‘queer theory’’ more widely, particularly the deconstructive approaches of the latter. This chapter explores the engagements between queer theory and ‘‘queer criminology,’’ specifically focusing on whether ‘‘queer criminology’’ adopts an understanding of ‘‘queer’’ as an attitude, and as signifying a deconstructive project—a position that features in many strands of queer theoretical work. It will argue that while there are different ways of engaging with ‘‘queer’’ as a concept, and that each of these engagements produces different kinds of ‘‘queer’’ projects, ‘‘queer criminology’’ does not always engage with the deconstructive approaches drawn from queer theory. Ultimately, this can limit the ways that ‘queer criminologists’’ are able to address injustice.

Theorizing Masculinity in Information Systems Research

INTRODUCTION: I want to argue that understanding masculinity is an important part of understanding gender and sexuality as it relates to information and communications technologies (ICTs), specifically those under the lens of the information-systems community. In order to do this, the landscape of gender and sexuality research in general is referred to along with such research in the field of information systems (IS), with reference as necessary to masculinity studies. I will then suggest some possible areas where a more thorough going theorization may prove useful. In sum, future research might focus on the relation-ship between marginalised masculinities and the construction and consumption of is in work organisations and society…

Subduing power : Indigenous sovereignty matters

The concept of ‘power’ can refer to the institutionalised and embodied capacity and right to dominate through a variety of means including ideology, politics, science, religion, class, race, gender and sexuality. Early feminist theorising within the West, for example, conceptualised the structure and nature of power as being connected to male domination and authority within society. Marxists, alternately, argue it is the ruling class that holds power and exercises it as owners of the means of production. In a general sense, we can say that as feminists have tied power to patriarchy and Marxists’ definitions of power have been connected to capitalism. The essays in this section, though, are less concerned with such totalising conceptualisations of power than they are with processes of interpellation or subject creation within dominant or dominating discursive spaces.1 Not power as such, but its many workings and apparatuses.

All of Us

All of Us is a ground-breaking Australian government approved anti-bullying educational resource comprised of seven online videos that feature gender diverse, sexual diverse and intersex youths. The videos, along with unit guides and student handouts, have been designed to address a gap in high school curriculum as they teach not just about sexual diversity and gender diversity but also the values of empathy and respect, which has been demonstrated to improve students’ wellbeing and educational engagement. The resource captures the real life experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex young people through a collection of short videos and teaching activities that are aligned to the Year 7/8 Health and Physical Education learning area of the Australian Curriculum. All Of Us has been developed to have a real impact on student attitudes towards lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people and to encourage whole school change that affirms and supports the right of all students, staff and families to feel safe at school. This free video resource is widely available and allows all schools, regardless of experience, location or funding, the chance to create an environment where every student can learn, every teacher can teach and every family can belong from the beginning of 2016. The resource was launched on Thursday, 26 November 2015 at Treasury Theatre, 1 Macarthur St, Melbourne. The launch was attended by almost 200 people including former Safe Schools Coalition Ambassador Jason Ball, Victorian Commissioner for Gender and Sexuality Ro Allen, Chris Bush, Executive Producer of All Of Us, Micah Scott, CEO of Minus18, All Of Us Margot Fink; Safe Schools Coalition Victoria's Manager Roz Ward and; Sally Richardson, National Program Director of Safe Schools Coalition Australia.

Towards (dis)Satisfaction

Hosted at Blindside Artist-Run Initiative (Melbourne) the exhibition Towards (dis)Satisfaction (2015) was a re-staging of earlier sculptural works from the exhibitions Means are the Ends: The Command Issue and Crude Tools (2014), Feeble Actions (2013). The forms humorously interrogated representations of gender and sexuality via strategies of sculptural intervention. A stripper’s pole oozes grease from its stainless surface, fluted with holes. A dildo vibrates on a glass tabletop; propped up by simulated testicles, the intensity of the dildo’s vibrations makes the form spin. With its continual circling, the phallus drags Vaseline over the table, performing a drawing and redrawing of a smeared circle. In Towards (dis)Satisfaction fetish is used as an instrumental strategy, employed as a mode to work across different theoretical and material discourses. In the works the play between explicit and implicit depiction creates an ambiguity that has suggestive potency, where fragmentation and dysfunction initiate diverse readings. These material dialogues make apparent the anxiety and desire inherent in the viewer and question how the visual conventions of erotica and art history are mutually informative.

Gender, sexuality, and rurality in the mining industry

Sexuality is a subject that has been, at best, marginal in the significant body of literature that has examined gender and mining in contemporary Western nations. This is despite the fact that academics have circled, if not almost bumped into the topic in closely related discussions of hegemonic masculinity and mining work, and of patriarchal familial relations and mining communities. This scholarship has documented what has been and remains women’s primary relationship to mining—that is, as a “mining wife.” How patriarchal relations are manifest in and emerge from this state of affairs has been critiqued with research on the gendered implications of housing arrangements in mining towns, the division of household labor, changing shift-work mining rosters, and the gendered consequences of strikes and mine closures (Williams 1981; Gibson 1992; Gibson-Graham 1996; Rhodes 2005; McDonald, Mayes, and Pini 2012). Despite the centrality of the heterosexual relationship—and indeed heteronormativity—to these discussions, scholars of gender and mining have had little to say on the subject of sexuality. In response to this lacuna, this chapter takes an exploratory lens to the subject of sexuality and the mining industry. We approach the task from the perspective that the mining industry is gendered as masculine. That is, definitions of mining mobilize around masculinized notions of physicality, technical competence with machinery, and strength, as well as emphasize the harshness and dirtiness of the work (Mayes and Pini 2010).

Equal employment opportunity and diversity management : can either live up to the promise of achieving gender equity?

This paper examines the extent to which women movement into management positions. Like many other countries, this progress in Australia is slow. The paper includes discussion of the theoretical explanations for this and the extent to which these are borne out in Australia. We are aware this group represents only a minority of Australian women workers, and there are many other groups of women workers for whom constraints to women’s access to senior management may not be the most pressing issue. We have, however, chosen to focus on women in management in this paper, as while there was considerable research and public policy attention directed towards this group in the 1980s and early 1990s, over the past decade there seems to have been a reluctance to continue to address this group, despite the numerical evidence that women continue to be disproportionately represented in senior management positions. We believe it’s timely to refocus on women in management.

Of tails and Tempests : Feminine sexuality and Shakespearean children's texts

This paper reads a range of nineteenth-century texts for children that retell either Shakespeare's The Tempest or mermaid narratives, considering the models of feminine subjectivity and sexuality that they construct. It then moves on to two key contemporary texts — Disney's film adaptation of The Little Mermaid (Clements and Musker 1989) and Penni Russon's Undine (2004) — that combine the Shakespearean heroine with the mermaid, and reads them against the nineteenth-century models. Ultimately, the essay determines that, while these texts seem to perform a progressive appropriation of the two traditions, they actually combine the most conservative aspects of both The Tempest and mermaid stories to produce authoritative (and dangerously persuasive) ideals of passive feminine sexuality that confine girls within patriarchally-dictated familial positions. The new figure for adolescent female subjectivity, the mermaid-Miranda, becomes in turn a model of identification and aspiration for the implied juvenile consumer.

Duggaibah, or 'place of whiteness' : Australian feminist and race

Our society operates in such a way as to put whiteness at the center of everything, including individual consciousness--so much so that we seldom question the centrality of white- ness, and most people, on hearing 'race', hear 'black'. That is, whiteness is treated as the norm, against which all differences are measured. 1 Race shapes white women's lives. In the same way that both men's and women's lives are shaped by their gender, and that both heterosexual and lesbian women's experiences in the world are marked by their sexuality, white people and people of color live racially structured lives. In other words, any system of differentiation shapes those on whom it bestows privi- lege as well as those it oppresses. White people are 'raced' just as men are 'gendered'. 2

'Homophobia' in the university classroom : law and justice students' conceptualizations of queer identity

Heteronormative discourses provide the most common lens through which sexuality is understood within university curricula. This means that sexuality is discussed in terms of categories of identity, with heterosexuality accorded primacy and all ‘others’ indeed ‘othered.’ This paper reports on research carried out by the authors in a core first year university justice class, in which students of law and/or justice were required to engage with, discuss, and reflect on discourses on sexuality. It uses a poststructural framework to identify how students understand non-heterosexualities and how they personally relate to queer identities, in the sense that it asks questions about gender and sexual identity, and the discourses surrounding them. It was found that strongly negative attitudes to non-heterosexualities are quite resistant to challenge, and that some students express being confronted with queerness as a deep-seated fear of being drawn into otherness against their will. The result was that, while many students were able to unpack their attitudes towards queerness and engage in critical reflection and re-evaluation of their attitudes, students with strongly negative views towards non-heterosexualities conversely refused to engage at all, typically perceiving even the engagement itself as a threat to their core heterosexual identity. However, the authors caution against relying on the idea that students are simply “homophobic” to explain this reluctance, as this term does not necessarily account for the complexity of the discourses that inform students’ reactions in this context. This “homophobia” may simply be related to a way of performing gender and sexual identity as opposed to overt discrimination and fear.

Fashion retailing and the bottom line : The effects of generational cohorts, gender, fashion fanship, attitudes and impulse buying on fashion expenditure

This study examines the influence of demographic ( eg. gender and generational cohort) and psychographic ( eg. fashion fanship, attitudes and impulse buying) drivers on frequency and levels of expenditure on fanship purchases, Using regression analysis, the results suggest that for weekly and monthly expenditure, gender and fashion fanship were significant influences, while for yearly expenditure, gender and impulse buying were significant. Attitudes towards fanship had no significant influence on expenditure. Females purchase more often and were significantly different from males on yearly expenditure, fashion fanship, attitudes and impulse buying. Generation Y is higher on purchase frequency, fashion fanship, attitudes and impulse buying compared with other cohorts under investigation.

The league of men : masculinity, the media and rugby league football

The rhetoric of masculinity is at melting point in Australian culture. In the nineties, Australian television news and sporting programs have constructed a particularly shrill and insistent form of brash, heterosexual sporting masculinity in football reporting. Against this norm of rippling 'muscularity' and aggressive competition, all so-called aberrant forms of humanity such as women, homosexuals, and men who do not fit into Connell's 'hegemonic masculinity' paradigm have been effectively marginalised and silenced. Class and ethnicity discourses are at best muted, and at worst, ignored in much of the writing about sporting masculinity. While acknowledging the significance of class and ethnicity, this paper explores the nexus between gender, sexuality, the media and League football.