Daniel Marshall

Popular culture, the ‘victim’ trope and queer youth analytics

This article offers a joint reading of two cultural texts that reflect the contest over victim‐oriented characterizations of queer youth in contemporary culture. The first text is a representation of queer youth taken from the popular UK television series Shameless (2004). The second text is an online discussion about representations of gay and lesbian characters on television that was recently posted on the Queer Youth Network website. Through my reading of these two texts, I explore the rise of explicit mainstream representations of gay and lesbian characters and the emergence of an identifiable queer youth audience as key characteristics of the contemporary ‘after‐queer’ moment. Through a reflection on the queer youth analytical techniques observable on the Queer Youth Network site, I conclude by outlining some key implications for future educational research in the field of youth, sexuality and popular culture.

Historicizing Sexualities Education.

During the 1979 Victorian state election, fundamentalist Christian groups such as the Citizens Against Social Evil launched a public campaign against the inclusion of homosexual content in secondary school education. And, on March 19, 1979, the Minister of Education’s office sent out an order to all secondary school principals directing them ‘‘to ensure that copies of books seeking to foster homosexual behaviour are not available to children’’ (Thompson and Shears 1979). Thirty years later, and at another Victorian state election, we see a different Minister of Education campaigning on an agenda that includes an increased focus on, and support for, sexual and gender diversity in education. This minister, Bronwyn Pike, lost her ministry as a result of the defeat of the state ALP government in the 2010 poll. The contrast between these two historical moments provides the starting point for this article. This historical contrast raises a number of key questions too large for full discussion here, including how can we describe the history of developments in ideas about sexuality and education in Victoria? What dominant ways of knowing sexuality and education have emerged through this history? And, what have been the implications of these emergent knowledges and their attendant practices on the contemporary conjunction of sexuality and education? In order to begin exploring these large and complex questions from the perspective of a more confined set of interests, my article reflects on the disciplinary basis of the contemporary teaching of sex and sexualities in Victorian schools. In particular, I argue for an interdisciplinary approach to the teaching of sex and sexualities education which foregrounds historical curriculum content and I use this argument as a way to speak to broader questions that are raised by the shifts in sex and sexualities education since 1979. An implicit assumption—or what Eve Sedgwick (1994, 22) would call an ‘‘axiomatic grounding’’—of my argument is that, over the last thirty years, sex and sexuality education has emerged as a subject properly addressed by a disciplinary focus on health, and that this focus has often occluded an interdisciplinary approach to the subject, resulting in the de-historicization of sex and The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 34:23–34, 2012 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1071-4413 print=1556-3022 online DOI: 10.1080/10714413.2012.643730

Progress in question: the temporalities of politics, support and belonging in gender- and sexually-diverse pedagogies

Abstract In this paper, we examine some of the ways in which different approaches to the idea of progress emerge alongside competing temporalities of sexual and gender diversity and belonging in the context of public debates and discussions on the Safe Schools Coalition review (February 2016). The public debates provided an important point-of-focus for understanding the contemporary setting of support for minorities in relation to cultural belonging and inclusivity in educational settings. The paper discusses the relationship between progress and temporality in its historical setting within Australian LGBTQ political history. We investigate three angles in which progress has been articulated in the Safe Schools debates: (1) disruptions to support as political setback to progress; (2) the view that safe support is necessary for the progress of LGBTQ ‘vulnerable’ youth within ‘developmental stages’; (c) the framing by conservative commentators that LGBTQ support curricula is a form of ‘progressive politics’ that undoes normative histories of neoliberal and conservative progress. Making use of the public debates around the Safe Schools curriculum to critique some of the ways in which progress on minority belonging for younger persons helps open the fields of meaning for alternative kinds of belonging that are produced through alternative cultural histories of marginalized subjects.

Editors' Introduction Queering Archives: Intimate Tracings

In the longer introduction of Radical History Review’s two thematic issues “Queering Archives,” we frame the archive as an evasive and dynamic space animated by the tensions of knowledge production, absence, and presence. As Jeffrey Weeks argued in RHR in 1979, “The evolution of sexual meanings and identities that we have traced over the past hundred years or so are by no means complete.”1 Fragments of information float unfixed — historically unraveled — and we form archives when we pull the fragments into the orbit of efforts to know. Yet the business of knowing is unsteady, as scholars of sexuality and gender have amply demonstrated. Between the fraught and necessary practices of historicization, anachronism, interpretation, bias, and partial readings that propel historical scholarship, archival fragments fall in and out of the frame of an easily perceptible knowledge. Queer historical knowledge thus is evasive — like a coin dropped in the ocean and for which one grasps, reaching it only for it to slip away again, rolling deeper into the beyond. To say that the knowledge work of animating queer historical fragments is marked by such slipperiness is to underline how the archive negotiates the decomposition and recomposition of knowledge’s materials. We pull and push at the fading paper, the fraying fabric, the photographs bleaching into their backgrounds, and manipulate technologies on their way to obsolescence, all as part of some suturing effort of one kind or another.

Queer Contingencies: Bifurcation and the Sexuality of Schooling

This article critiques the contemporary focus on same-sex attracted youth, “antihomophobia,” and “safe schools,” as well as the ways these foci structure the logics of the prevailing policy approach. The author examines how contemporary antihomophobic reform in education is sustained by a series of false dilemmas: that the political demands and investments of straights and nonstraights can be easily distinguished one from another; that the expression of homophobia is anathema to queer educative work; and that everything that is at stake in the messy confluence of sexuality, gender, and schooling can be made sense of by figuring the problem as a matter of being safe. Gesturing toward a queer social policy for schooling, this article critiques the “zero-tolerance” approach of antihomophobia education, arguing that it falsely bifurcates the social world of the school into homophobic/antihomophobic iterations, unsafe/safe versions, and straight/homosexual interests.

Reading Queer Television: Some Notes on Method.

What can one do with queer television? Today, television across many Anglophone markets (especially those of North America, the United Kingdom, and Australia) seems comparatively full of self-declared gay and lesbian characters and people (with developments underway to expand these representational efforts to include a wider range of avowedly queer subjects). This apparent ubiquity of representation raises the question as to whether or not the political project of queer representation on television has been achieved (for a related discussion, please see Cover 2000). Perhaps, queer television is now passé as an object of interest and investigation? Moreover, the importance of these gay and lesbian representations has often been framed by their contribution to wider cultural struggles for mainstream recognition of gays and lesbians which, some argue (not unproblematically), has been achieved. This association, if it is maintained, anchors the warrant of gay and lesbian representations to a rapidly receding cultural past, thereby strengthening the feeling of datedness that one might attach to mainstream gay and lesbian representations on television. If one entertains these positions in the spirit of what Nancy Fraser describes as “thought experiment[s]” or as an inaugurating “heuristics” (Fraser 2003, 16, 70), one finds oneself in the somewhat ironic situation of having more queer representations on television than ever before accompanied, oddly, by a diminishing critical or political enthusiasm for engaging with them. So, what can one do with queer television? As an article focused on the question of what one might do with queer television, rather than what one might say about the content of queer television, this is a discussion that one might say is focused more on questions of method rather than on queer television itself. It is an article that seeks to contribute to efforts that want to think about how queer television might continue to be positioned as a generative object of critical and political interest amidst the contemporary atmospherics of datedness cultivated by those unsympathetic to contemporary queer television studies (despite the field’s vibrancy). Within certain mainstream markets, the representation of LGBT or avowedly queer characters and people on television is now well established as a

Working recognitions: An introduction

In her now famous response to Jurgen Habermas, Nancy Fraser (1990) argues that the lack of recognition of marginalized social groups excludes them from any possibility of belonging to a universal public sphere. Fraser contests the suggestion that such a public space, to the extent that we can say it currently exists, is actually able to be inclusive. For Fraser, the very notion of independent “citizens” is masculinist, because to function in the public sphere, one must rely on a certain level of domestic (private, usually female) unrecognized labor, stolen or repossessed land, and ignored identity politics. Especially since the 1990s, the question—in theory and in politics—of how subjects might participate in the social has nourished renewed critical engagements with the politics of distributive justice, the recognition of difference and the relationships between these things. Historically, these particular engagements have brought into relief broader theoretical and political tensions. Exchanges between Judith Butler and Nancy Fraser in the late 1990s offer one example of this work. In “Merely Cultural” (1997), Judith Butler responds to what she describes as a “culmination of sentiment” characterized by

Queer reparations: dialogue and the queer past of schooling

This article reflects on historical homophobia within educational practice and administration as an effort to consider how we might promote dialogue around the queer past of schooling. Along the way, it provides some discussion of the significance of archival knowledge in helping us to develop an understanding of the past while also providing resources for making sense of the contemporary moment. To develop my argument, I illustrate some examples of historical homophobia, through a brief discussion of some education administration practices in Australia, I then move on to briefly consider some of the implications of historical homophobia, and its effects in relation to educational research, practice and administration today. In the final section of the paper, I discuss some of the ways in which we might address the queer past of education through a cultural politics of queer reparation.

Queering Archives A Roundtable Discussion

© 2015 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc. “Queering Archives: A Roundtable Discussion” provides a reflection on histories of queer archives studies, while marking out some key directions for the fields future development. As a broad conversation about the career of the queer archival, as both intellectual project and political practice, this discussion focuses on developments and limits within North American queer studies of the archive, which emerges as a central object of analysis and is itself somewhat archived within the terms of the discussion. The roundtable discussion provides a sustained critical engagement with the profile of the queer archive as a site for radical struggles over historical knowledge, offering a renewed sense of the queer archive as a pertinent site for scholarship and politics across an array of orientations and tendencies.

BEATING SPACE AND TIME: historical gay sex and queer cultural geographies of masculinities

Abstract: This article focuses on historical queer cultural geographies of masculinities and to do so it focuses on two cases/places. The first is an archival case/place: a partial assembly of documents of beats and their uses during and in the wake of Gay Liberation in Australia. The second is a literary case/place: Thomas Manns Death in Venice, a canonical twentieth-century imbrication of male homosexuality and geography. This article will seek to rationalize the mobilization of these two asynchronous cases/places through the insights that both afford, when brought together, for elaborating contributions that queer readings of Nietzsche can make to contemporary queer theories of space, time and masculinities.