Abstracts
Seminar1
Transgender Bodies
Transgender Bodies
Judith Halberstam
"Under the Knife: Representations of the Transgender Body in Contemporary Art"
While the transgender body has been theorized as an in-between body and as the place of the medical and scientific construction of gender, when it comes time to picture the transgender body in the flesh, it nearly always emerges as a transsexual body. In the images I consider here, the transgender body is not reducible to the transsexual body and it retains the marks of its own ambiguity and ambivalence. If the transsexual body has been deliberately reorganized in order to invite certain gazes and shut down others, the transgender body performs self as gesture not as will, as possibility not as probability, as a relation - a wink, a hand shake, a determinate misrecognition. Representations of transgenderism in cinema and video as well as in the art work of Saville, Grace Volcano and Linda Bessemer offer us a particular narrative about embodiment in the twenty-first century and, studied together, they pose some answers to the riddle of why transgenderism becomes such a potent site within postmodernism for remapping relations between body, identity, labor, desire and capital.
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Nikki Sullivan
"Transmogrification/ Perverse Embodiment"
A number of critical theorists have, of late, posited connections between transgender body modification(s) and other modificatory practices such as tattooing, branding, piercing, and so on. Drawing similar analogies, others have discussed the ambiguous and often fraught relationship with surgery that (some) transsexuals, transgenderists, and those who undergo 'cosmetic' and/or modificatory procedures more generally, may experience. Perhaps, at bottom, what procedures as diverse as mastectomies, penilectomies, hormone treatments, tattooing, breast enhancement, implants, corsetry, rhinoplasty, scarification, and so on, have in common is that they all function, in varying ways, and to varying degrees, to explicitly transform bodily being - they are all, in one sense at least, 'trans' practices.
However, whilst it may be possible and even useful to identify similarities between 'trans' practices and 'trans' bodies (in the broadest sense of the term), it is nevertheless crucial that we pay close critical attention to the differences between such practices, the bodies they transform or inform, and the ways in which these are interpreted, evaluated, situated, and lived. The question then, is how to begin such a task. Obviously there are many possible ways to approach the differences between modified (or 'trans') bodies, but something that seems common to much of the current work done in this area is the tendency to set up a dichotomy between 'good' and 'bad' forms of embodiment. This is apparent in some accounts of the differences between transsexualism and transgender, and some analyses of the supposed distinction between 'non-mainstream body modification' and cosmetic surgery. In short, the assumption seems to be that forms of body modification that do not explicitly set themselves up in opposition to 'normative' ideals and ways of being are politically suspect.
Rather than simply interpreting and evaluating different kinds of modified bodies in terms of their presumed capacity to radically challenge the norm, my aim in this paper is to explore both the difficulties and the implications of doing so. My analysis will proceed via a focus on transmogrification - that is, strange or grotesque transformation: transformation that is characterised by distortion, exaggeration, extravagance, and, as the OED puts it, 'unnatural combinations'. In and through the juxtaposition of diverse examples of perverse embodiment I will raise the question of what such bodies do (at least in a particular historico-cultural context), how they function, what effects they produce, what connections they make with other bodies and with particular bodies of knowledge, and why.
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Seminar 2
Managing Sex in Public
Managing Sex in Public
Katherine Albury
"Public Sex and Non-Compulsory Heterosexuality"
Does heterosexuality equal heteronormativity? Can heterosexuality be re-made without being completely undone? If so, can small shifts and changes in contemporary heterosexual practices and identities be seen as evidence of this re-making?
With the rise of 'amateur' sex magazines, contact lists, support networks and websites, the private inner sanctum of everyday heterosexual normativity (the suburban bedroom) has increasingly been made public; and the increasing visibility of alternative heterosexual sex and relationship styles demand different, queerer theories of straight sex.
The public representations of heterosex revealed on these sites (and in women's magazines and television programs such as Sex and the City) are not always explicitly politicised... nor are they adequately described in terms of 'transgression', 'liberation' or 'empowerment'. However, traditional theories of a sadistic male gaze (and deluded female complicity) are also clearly well short of the mark. In this paper I engage with the work of Michel Foucault and William Connolly to explore the potentials, challenges and pleasures of 'de-sanctified', non-compulsory heterosexualities.
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Alan McKee
"How to Show Men Not-Kissing on Television"
This illustrated lecture will provide an annotated genealogy of the ways in which men are shown not-kissing other men in popular television series. The desirable end point is an 'ordinary' representation of homosexuality that is not necessarily 'normal', but so familiar as to seem unremarkable. Notable points in the journey include Dynasty, Melrose Place, Star Trek: TNG, the gay porn videos Rush and Romeo and Julian, and, finally, Will and Grace.
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Seminar 3: Speculating on Sex
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Cathy Hawkins
"'I'm a Stranger Here Myself': Ripley and the `Alien' Movies"
Film critic Rebecca Bell-Metereau has argued that the character of Lt. Ellen Ripley in "Alien" is one "so foreign as to be unrecognizable to most popular critics" (1985: 10). Ripley is, according to Bell- Metereau, the most alien being depicted in the film. How strange is Ripley? What kind of conceptual dilemmas does she pose? This paper looks at the critical response to all four "Alien" films, and speculates on how we might investigate Ripley's strange[r]ness.
Wendy Pearson
"(Fear of a) Queer Galaxy: Is Sexuality SF's Final Frontier?"
One of the cliches that circulates most firmly around science fiction is that it is a genre intended for young men and boys, with the consequence that its supposedly few depictions of sexuality are seen as juvenile and voyeuristic. These two expectations, of generic convention and audience demographics, are generally taken by critics as historical reasons why it was not until the sixties and seventies that sf started to include mature, complex investigations of human sexuality - whether as human sexuality, or allegorized as alien sex. Despite the ability of sf to allow us to explore every aspect of human sociality, including gender and sex, it has remained by and large a conservative genre in which, to take one example, gay and lesbian characters have generally been found only in works by gay and lesbian sf writers - in distinct contrast to the treatment of race and even of gender.
I want to begin this paper by looking at some of the televised sf from the 1960s, particularly Star Trek, and examining its treatment of issues of human sexuality. Why, for example, was the episode "Plato's Stepchildren" lauded for showing the first inter-racial kiss (between a black woman and a white man) on American television when the kiss itself was both reluctant and nearly asexual? Why have the producers of later versions of Star Trek consistently refused to include gay and lesbian characters in their multicultural starship crews? And why have their so-called "gay" episodes all been firmly constructed to normalize the viewer's expectations of heterosexuality, even in the eighties and nineties? I intend to finish this section of the paper by showing that Star Trek is not alone in its attitude to human sexuality, by looking at some recent sf films, especially The Matrix. And I want to finish by investigating what sf is capable of doing with issues of sexuality, by examining a number of novels whose speculations about the alternative ways in which we might live as sexual beings depict an entire realm of possibility that Star Trek et al. are afraid to contemplate. What, after all, is the point of a highly technologized and imaginative vision of the future if the people who live in it are cloned from a nostalgic fantasy of the 1950s?
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Seminar 4: Thinking Sex
Gary Dowsett
"The changes that have occurred to the social positioning of gay men in Australia since Stonewall (June 1969) have been quite dramatic. This is nowhere clearer than in current legislative activity in many states and territories to register gay relationships in some formal ways, and to provide mechanisms that put gay male couples on the same footing as heterosexual de facto couples before the law, such as joint property rights, wills, superannuation etc. Gay marriage remains elusive, yet it is still demanded by a minority of gay men (if opposed by others). All this in just over 30 years. But just what has been achieved? Have gay men found the nirvana of full Australian citizenship to be just what we wanted, or have we bought a very second rate product, one that limits our possibilties, social and sexual, and robs other Australians of innovation and leadership?"
Melissa Hardie
'Eve Sedgwick, Redacted'
This paper examines the Starr Report on the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal through the lens of Eve Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet, one of the most important foundational texts in the field of queer theory, both for what that tells us about one of the most striking discussions of '"sex" in the media in the twentieth century and for the way in which both the scandal and its reportage suggest ways to re-read Sedgwick.
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Seminar 5: Making Men
Michael Flood
"Bonding in bonking: How homosociality shapes men's heterosexual relations"
Among young heterosexual men, male/male peer relations structure and give meaning to their heterosexual relations. Qualitative research among young men in Canberra finds that their heterosexual sexual relations are powerfully shaped by their relations with other men. Homosociality organises the male-female sociosexual relations of some young heterosexual men, in at least five ways. First, male-male relations take priority over male-female non-sexual relations, and platonic friendships with women are dangerously feminising and rare if not impossible. Second, sexual activity is a key path to masculine status. Third, other men are the audience, always imagined and sometimes real, for one's sexual activities. Fourth, heterosexual sex itself can be the medium through which male bonding is enacted. Lastly, men's sexual storytelling is shaped by homosocial masculine cultures. Assessing the workings of male homosociality is significant in theorisations of both heterosexuality and masculinity.
Guy Davidson
"Gay Simulation"
This paper forms part of a larger work in progress which investigates the elaboration of notions of gay male identity and community in representations of "the gay ghetto" in a variety of polemical, fictional and cinematic texts from the post?Stonewall period. It focuses on two texts from 1979/80 which exhibit a number of striking narrative and thematic parallels, Felice Picano's novel The Lure and William Friedkin's film Cruising. The plots of both texts involve a nominally straight man going "undercover" in the New York gay ghetto in order to help police trap a killer of gay men, with the protagonist emerging from this traumatic experience with his heterosexual identity either destabilised (Cruising) or discarded in favour of a fully fledged gayness (The Lure). Both texts hover uncertainly between "constructionist" and "essentialist" accounts of their protagonist's gayness or gay potential: both can be read, on the one hand, as offering a telescoped account of the environment shaping the gay individual and, on the other, as identifying gayness as a repressed aspect of the personality. My interest is not so much in delineating this conflict, however, as it is in drawing out the signficance of scenarios in which simulating gayness becomes ? more or less ? indistinguishable from being gay. Deploying the theoretical work of, among others, Mark Seltzer, Henning Bech, Roger Caillois and Jean Baudrillard, I suggest that the fictional texts' representations of subjectivity, the body and urban space provide insight into the interplay of simulation and identification which many assert is characteristic of postmodernity, and which I contend is particularly evident in gay male culture.
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Seminar 6: (E)strange/d Desires
Leigh Dale
"Did Jesus teach that we should pluck out our eyes?" Sexuality, Spirituality and Self-mutilation in Tsiolkas' The Jesus Man"
If Foucault were correct in his argument, made in The History of Sexuality, that sexuality has been the foundational episteme for subjectivity since the third quarter of the nineteenth century, that sexuality is "our most fundamental truth" and "therefore not only a truth, but a danger" (Ladelle McWhorter Bodies and Pleasures 10; 10-11), then it is not difficult to understand why discussion of genital self-mutilation should be firmly encased by a discourse of irrationality, and more recently, of trauma. Throughout the 1990s, 'trauma' reverberated in cultural criticism, in media reports, in conceptualizations of the self, the body and subjectivity. Newly named if not newly discovered, trauma was as likely to be trivialised as it was to be taken seriously through this proliferation of discourse, and it may be located retrospectively as part of a broader shift of interest, towards what one might broadly call the sociology of suffering. This paper will consider the representation of spirituality, suffering and self-mutilation in Christos Tsiolkas' second novel The Jesus Man within the context of broader narratives about self-mutilation and bodily trauma.
Barbara Creed
"Bestiality, Darwinism & Desire"
From King Kong to the recent Planet of the Apes, the cinema (mainstream and pornographic) has been drawn to tales and parables about the human-beast, the struggle to survive, the horrors of devolution and bestiality, the boundaries between human and simian, the universal fear of and attraction to the animal other. Darwinian theories of survival of the fittest, evolution and devolution, eugenics and the body have influenced a large number of films but very little has been written on the influence of Darwinism on the cinema. Why is the bestial body such a potent site within the history of cinematic representation? Why was the 'girl and the gorilla' genre so popular? What is horrifying and poetic about bestiality? How does the beast feel? This paper will explore the concept of bestiality in film and other cultural texts & the extent to which bestiality enables a remapping of relations between human and animal, self and other ?