Vicki Crowley

After dark in the antipodes: pedagogy, place and queer phenomenology

This paper pursues issues of pedagogy, place and queer phenomenology in the context of what might be meant by the term ‘after‐queer’ or ‘what falls outside queer’ as we currently theorise, practice and locate queer. Inspired by Sara Ahmed’s account of how bodies become oriented by the ways in which they take up time and space, this paper investigates how bodies become oriented within and around the field of a television series that centres Indigenous terms and orientations and thereby, still further, problematises the directions and orientations of desire. The paper explores the narrative and queer and other couplings of an Australian tele‐series, The Circuit. It raises issues of audience, public pedagogy and we refer to guestbook discussion as we strive to foreground a methodology for working with sexuality and race that recognises and disturbs in order to read sexual and racial orientations as mixed and unfixed orientations.

Museum, memorial and mall: postcolonialism, pedagogies, racism and reconciliation

Through museum and shopping mall and the possibilities, subtleties, banalities and disparities of reconciliation in South Africa and Australia, this paper immerses itself in the question of pedagogies and in particular the pedagogies of reconciliation, public spaces and postcolonialism. In both Australia and South Africa postcolonialism as theory and pedagogy is ambiguously positioned especially in relation to issues of reconciliation which in turn is arguably also ambiguously located. Reconciliation is or has variously been state‐sanctioned policy, project and agenda which, in part, is a process and practice of recognising and addressing histories of racism and its effects. Projects in both nations have included public, educational and schooling spheres and range, for instance, from the building of large‐scale museums to self‐initiated school and community projects. All of these involve ways of knowing and knowledge of the colonial past and a postcolonial present. Not insignificantly, they all involve the ways in which race, racism and postcolonialism are understood and represented. Central to this, the authors contend, is a necessity to bring into question the discursive practices of both racism and anti‐racism particularly as they influence and shape new emerging modalities of anti‐racism within postcolonial contexts and practices. The authors argue that an ability to analyse and deconstruct everyday spaces such as shopping malls is as integral to pedagogy as is a class excursion to a museum such as the Hector Pieterson or the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg. Still further, they argue that postcolonial pedagogy is itself an artefact of fraught histories deeply informed by colonial origins, local specificities and contemporary strategies of remembrance. This ought not to have happened … Something happened there to which we cannot reconcile ourselves. None of us ever can. (Arendt, 1993, pp. 13–14, 3 emphasis in original) Whatever your age, wherever you are in life’s journey—parent or child, single or coupled, gay or straight, young or old, regular worshipper or visitor … You are included in our worship and invited to join in our fellowship and witness. (Order of Service Sheet, Cathedral Church of St George, Cape Town, Die Sint George‐Katedraal, Kaapstad, Icaehtedral ka George Ongcwele, Yasekapa, November 2005) Reconciliation is a matter that takes place on different levels, if it takes place at all. (Dodson, 2000, p. 265)

Drag kings "down under": an archive and introspective of a few Aussie blokes

SUMMARY The mid 1990s saw an explosion of Drag Kings in many major and smaller cities throughout the world. While documentation of this has largely occurred through publications in the USA and UK, the Internet and smaller publications have demonstrated a phenomenon that has arguably re-ignited feminist debate. In Adelaide, Australia, Ben Dover and His Beautiful Boys set the annual lesbian and gay festival alight. This chapter describes this performance to set the stage for exploration of some of the workings of ‘race’ and ethnicity in the creation of persona, choice of name and naming that is brought to Drag King performance. Drawing on interview material the chapter suggests that just as Drag Kings and kinging has been a useful and provocative site for closer and deeper understandings of genders, bodies and sexualities, Drag Kings and Kinging may also provide a useful site for unraveling some of the minefield that is race and racism.

A rhizomatics of hearing: becoming deaf in the workplace and other affective spaces of hearing

This paper stages a corporeal and affective trail through plateaus of ‘Becoming deaf’ in the workplace of academia. The paper aims to display the unfamiliarity of deafness in a profession whose ability to speak and hear the written word is all too commonsense. In this piece, Deleuze and Guattaris ‘rhizome’ acts as sensibility and motif as a body deafens. I make use of photography, poetry and poesis as multi-textual pedagogy for engaging with the disjuncture between advocacy and experience, and to draw attention to the dysphoria of theorising affect and the multidimensionality of experiential relations of affect. The paper argues that deafness/becoming deaf is always a form of hearing and the ‘strange label’ of disability is brought into question just as it increasingly opens presence, tension, texture, and interdependence.

Within the New Moment--An Interview with Judith Halberstam

In April 2002 Judith Halberstam, academic, cultural critic and author of Female Masculinity, toured Australia giving public and academic lectures about her recent work on sub-cultures, the Brandon Teena archive, representations of the transgender body and her notion of female masculinity. The interview is introduced through a brief sketch of her argument for female masculinity. The interview pursues three elements of her work. First, Halberstams reflections on the implications that female masculinity and transgender have for teaching and pedagogy; second, the issue of humanism and post humanism as a site of concerted challenge and intervention; and finally, the interview turns to Halberstams thoughts on an often overlooked area of sexualities--the relationship between queer theory and postcoloniality. Halberstams responses are located amid what she sees as an era of new experimentalism. This era of experimentalism is perhaps an era where transgenderism acts as some kind of reorganizing of gender norms in which gender differences instantiate themselves as the baseline from which gender-sex-sexualities are understood and experienced. It is an argument positioned beyond binaries where multiple bodily aesthetics and practices collude and collide in the practice of displacing of singularity and authenticity.

Disability and sexuality: Desires and pleasures

There is an ongoing missing discourse of pleasure in studies of sexuality and disability, and considerations of sexual pleasures and sexual desire in the lives of people with disabilities play very little part in public discourse. This opening article analyzes some of the major theoretical influences and debates informing prevailing assumptions about disability and sexuality. An exposition of the theoretical and conceptual terrains that underpin and shape this special issue works to canvas a series of often disparate sites of contestation, and suggests that disabled and sexual embodied subjectivities are much more than ‘asexual’ or ‘hypersexual’ pathological constructions. The articles explore the ways in which the intersection of disability and sexuality involves an understanding of the interlocking discourses of normality, sexuality, able-bodiedness, heteronormativity and desire, which can shape possibilities for sex, sexuality, pleasure and intimacy for people with a disability. What will become evident is that a greater attention to the phenomenology of sexual embodiment, pleasure, desire, and the diverse meanings of intimacy and the erotic, can make significant contributions to social and scholarly analyses of disability and sexuality. The utilization of different methodological approaches that can attend to complexity and diversity in the experience of sex and sexuality further constitutes part of the critique of ableist narratives of the ‘normal’ desiring and desirable subject that cannot account for the intersubjective conditions in which embodied subjectivity is constructed and pleasure experienced.

Hearing (Dis)abled Masculinities in Australian Rules Football: Possibilities for Pleasure

This chapter argues that the multiplicity of identities offered through amateur Australian Rules football agitate against the complacency of utilitarian constructions of the male body as they figure in heteronormative masculine identifications. Drawing on interviews with two young heterosexual men with a hearing disability, it is revealed that the football code of Australian Rules grants a heterogeneity of embodied pleasures and possibilities for constructing desirable modes of ‘able-bodied’ masculinity that the institution of paid work does not permit. Performances of physical prowess on-the-field perform a subversion of disabled containment, mobilising a particular mode of spatiality, a distancing from their experiences of being ‘Othered’ in their respective workplaces. Hearing (dis)abled masculinities in football allows heterosexual desire to be heard as a powerful productive force for inciting and producing diverse pleasurable heterosexual modes of embodiment, subjectivity and intimacy. The young men’s stories point to a lack of fixity—the ‘always’ in the construction of disability and heterosexual modes of masculinity that renders these identities processes of hard labour.

The unforgiving scalpel, clinical precision and the untold of gender: An essay review of unseen genders, beyond the binaries

Recently The Secret Life of Us, an Australian television series about a group of 20somethings living in Melbourne’s inner urban St. Kilda, included as sub-theme, the story of an intersex baby and the dilemmas facing the parents of a baby born with indeterminate genitalia. The father in particular desperately wanted a son and was demanding early surgical intervention. Alex, the doctor in the series (played by Claudia Karvan) believed that the parents should wait and let the child, in its own time, act as the arbiter of its gender identity. Here the audience was presented with the reality that very many babies do not conform to tidy embodiments and that there is deep contestation about the realities of this experience. The differing responses of each parent and the medicos alerted the audience to the ‘something else, something more’ that is happening ‘out there’ in the real world. The sub-theme, brief and almost anecdotal as it was, managed to roundly encapsulate elements of contemporary