Hannah McCann

Beyond the visible: Rethinking femininity through the femme assemblage

While there has been much focus on the disempowering and incapacitating effects of ‘normative’ femininity, less attention has been paid to the queer possibilities of femininity. Queer femme has been proposed by some as a key site for rethinking femininity. Extending upon these discussions, and drawing on interviews conducted with queer femmes in Australia in 2013, this article proposes focusing on affective dimensions to deepen our understanding of queer femme as more than an identity, but rather, as assemblage Working from the basis of assemblage, this article examines exactly how and why femme bodies queer femininity. However the article also argues that where queer femme discourse distances itself from non-femme, or ‘normative’, femininity, it misses an opportunity for advocating for a different approach to gender presentation within a broader collective. The central argument of this article is that from an affective theory of queer femme as assemblage, we can better understand both queer femme identity and the attachments to femininity that people maintain more generally, without relying on a binary logic that proclaims femininity as only disempowering or empowering, queer or not queer enough.

‘A Voice of a Generation’: Girls and the Problem of Representation

Girls has been understood by many as ‘a generational document’ (Woods, 2015, p. 38) that fails to adequately represent the diversity of young women in today’s multicultural world. Why Girls is seen as the ‘voice of a generation’ despite the creator Lena Dunham’s suggestion that she is merely ‘a’ voice is key to understanding the weight placed on representational politics in contemporary society. This chapter examines why we make demands about diverse representation, and what we hope these will achieve. It also considers the context within which representations of diversity are inserted, and the cruel promises for equality these engender. This chapter suggests a rethinking of representational demands, to consider the underlying material inequalities that give rise to concern for diversity in the first instance.

Solidarity Is Possible: Rethinking Gay and Lesbian Activism in 1970s Australia

ABSTRACT This article critically engages with the debate around whether gay and lesbian activism in the 1970s was marked by solidarity or inevitable fragmentation investigates the dominant fragmentation thesis, which presupposes that the union between men and women was fragile at best and thus necessarily came to an end. Drawing on three examples from the archives of Australian gay and lesbian history, this article offers an alternative glimpse of moments of solidarity from the time. What these moments reveal is that the question of fragmentation was a contested arena, where many sought unity over separation in order to fight common struggles around homophobia and sexism.