Kellie Burns

(re)Imagining the global, rethinking gender in education

This paper develops new lines of analysis for understanding the relationships between globalisation, the imagination and emergent models of the ‘girl-citizen’. It begins by outlining a new critical framework for studying globalisation that takes as its object of study not what globalisation is, but what globalisation does. Making use of Foucaults analytics of governmentality, it argues that globalisation can be usefully understood as a complex and contradictory set of movements that establish new modes of regulation over the conduct of individual citizens. It further argues that within the current global milieu, the imagination operates as part of a broader neo-liberal project of government that situates the global citizen in the role of entrepreneur of the self. For girls and young women the imagination becomes a tool for constructing and governing their gendered selves alongside idealised models of global citizenship and cosmopolitan identity. Finally, it is proposed that examining the role and effects of the imagination in ‘making’ and ‘managing’ global citizenship-subjects is vital to understanding the emergent models of girl-citizenship both within and outside schooling contexts.

Producing Cosmopolitan Sexual Citizens on The L Word

Using Showtimes The L Word as a case study, we argue that lesbian sexuality and lesbian lifestyles are produced alongside broader discourses of cosmopolitan consumer citizenship. The lesbian characters in this program are first and foremost constructed through their investments in certain neo-liberal consumer and lifestyle practices that limit the possibility of what lesbian subjectivities and/or lesbian politics can or cannot become. We offer an alternative strategy of reading lesbians in image-based media and popular culture that attends to the ways in which lesbian subjectivities are produced in a climate of neo-liberal consumer and lifestyle practices that have shifted the ways in which sexual citizens are produced. Our aim is to provide a critical framework that can be applied to other lesbian-themed television texts and to a range of other image-based visual media including film, commercial advertising, and new media.

Mediating Healthy Female Citizenship in the HPV Vaccination Campaigns

Analyzing the HPV awareness and Gardasil® vaccine campaigns for the United States (US), we argue that the campaigns reflect “the new public health” model that positions individuals as neoliberal citizens responsible for managing their health and maximizing public health opportunities. The campaigns, directed primarily at girls and young women and their mothers, also mobilized neoliberal discourses of risk, choice, and self-management alongside postfeminist political rhetoric that values empowerment, freedom, choice, and rights. Postfeminist tropes were co-opted by Mercks marketing imperatives in order to produce girls and young women as an agentic, niche market of health consumers. We then foreground a low-budget counter-narrative alternative media campaign produced by young women and disseminated through YouTube. This campaign demonstrates the role of new media in producing alternative perspectives on agentic female citizenship and disrupts Mercks campaign imperatives.

Constructions of Young Women’s Health and Wellbeing in Neoliberal Times: A Case Study of the HPV Vaccination Program in Australia

This chapter explores how the concept of wellbeing is operationalized in policy and practice, constituted as health’s more flexible and well-rounded counterpart. Drawing on Foucault’s (1991) analytics of governmentality, we argue that “health-as-wellbeing” is mobilized as a modality of neoliberal government. Taking the Australian Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination program as a case study, we explore how discourses of healthy citizenship, HPV and HPV vaccination are produced and consumed through conjoining discourses of health and wellbeing. We analyze the initial televisual and online promotional materials that targeted girls and young women alongside data from a qualitative research study about the school-based HPV vaccination program. We argue that the shift from health to health-as-wellbeing produces and manages contemporary subjectivities through a range of pedagogies and consumptive practices that position individuals as free-choosing agents and managers-of-the-self. We illustrate how the discourse of health-as-wellbeing is employed to mediate knowledge about HPV and HPV related cancer, and to construct the norms of healthy and gendered citizenship.

Cosmopolitan sexual citizenship and the project of queer world-making at the Sydney 2002 Gay Games

Using the Opening Ceremony of the Sydney 2002 Gay Games as a case study, in this article I analyse sexual citizenship through the lens of global cosmopolitanism. I begin by arguing that at these Games an idealised sexual citizen was produced through neoliberal discourses of freedom, rights, choice and cosmopolitanism. At events of this kind, these individualising practices function as new and important forms of ‘political’ action. I then argue that the idealised cosmopolitan sexual citizen is presumed to be a white, western citizen-subject who has access to ‘difference’ through urban living, global travel and through personal investments in the project of global queer world-making. Finally, I illustrate how becoming a cosmopolitan sexual citizen involves a set of consumptive practices that fetishise and Other non-white bodies and lives. At large global gay and lesbian events like the Gay Games, local histories and bodies are mediated as sites of consumption that affirm sexual citizens’ status as global cosmopolitan citizens and define the parameters of an imagined queer world.

Book Review: Jayne Caudwell (ed.), Sport, Sexualities and Queer/Theory. New York: Routledge, 2006. x + 180pp. ISBN 978—0-415—36762—2

their experiences of self-harming behaviour and its relationship with their experiences of S&M. Robinson’s contribution offers an insight into the relationship between extreme sport – in this instance she uses rock climbing – the masculine identity and social attitudes to risk and harm when transgressing the boundaries between life and death. The discussion of male identity links well with the ideas of men in movies and heroism used by Edwards in a later chapter. The second section of the book considers representations of wounding moving the conceptual framework from the real to the virtual in films and text and on the internet. McCosker deconstructs the film Crash to reveal ways in which the damaged and wounded body has become sexualized, challenging dominant discourse by revealing the erotic potential of pain to the viewing audience. In exploring the on-line S&M narratives from fans about film and TV productions Alexander attempts to unpack some of the socio-cultural context and interpretation of extreme pornographic images and text. Burr continues the media theme analysing scenes from Buffy the Vampire Slayer where traditional roles are reversed as the gaze becomes feminine and the object of desire is masculinized. She suggests that the eroticization of the wounding and torture scenes stems from a ‘combination of cinematic, narrative and psychological processes and mechanisms’ (p. 155). To make sense of these images Burr develops an interesting Sartrean theoretical framework to deconstruct the underlying meanings. Edwards also challenges the gendered discourse by suggesting that masculine identity depends on socio-cultural concepts of the hero and cinematic acts of heroism linked to masochistic spectacles – in other words displays of suffering for the greater good. The last two chapters make successful connections between pain, wounding and the sexual combining both the virtual imagery and real-time action. Jorgensen views gender differences within art displays of self-mutilation while Livholts deconstructs the reports of rape in the media observing the harmful and wounding acts caused by the sexualized and embodied speech used the media. Burr and Hearn’s compilation successfully provides interesting and new insights into the sensual nature of bodily wounding by bringing together ‘a range of issues around sexuality, gender, power, violence and representations’ (p. 12) from a variety of academic perspectives.

Giving Voice, Making Change: How PFLAG Resources Can Be Useful Classroom Tools

I want to suggest a new way of a\pproaching the topic of sexuality within the secondary and/or tertiary classroom and offer an example of a teaching resource that might help facilitate this shift. I stumbled upon this resource one sunny February evening in 2005 when I was invited by friends to attend the Sydney Mardi Gras, Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. As the tickets had been purchased ahead of time, I was not entirely certain what was on the programme for the night. To my pleasant surprise a local documentary, Bouncing Castle: Keeping Families Together (2005), was being screened. The one-hour feature not only captured my attention, it provided me with a renewed sense of how I would approach the topic of sexuality in my classroom that semester. Directed by Chris Castro and produced by Giovanni CampoloArcidiaco and Vanessa Gonzalez, Bouncing Castle is an initiative of the Western Sydney chapter of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG). Since its debut screening in Sydney, it has been included in gay and lesbian film festivals in Bendigo (AUS), Melbourne