In Brian Massumi’s A Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari he notes that most of the important and innovative work written on the French pair has come from either Australia or Canada[1]. When it comes to queer theory we might hypothesize a slightly different ‘transcontinental line of flight’[2], one between the United States-Australia. Such a mapping seems unavoidable. Since the early 70s the Australian political scientist Dennis Altman has had an enormous impact on gender and sexuality and lesbian and gay studies. His 1971 book, Homosexual Oppression and Liberation which took a hard social constructionist line prefigured many of the concepts which queer theory would develop some twenty years later (largely without acknowledging his influence)[3]. Australia has also produced the following leading figures in queer and lesbigay studies: Anna Marie Jagose, Nikki Sullivan, Alan McKee, Michael Hurley, Ken Gelder, Tara Brabazon, Elizabeth Grosz, Barbara Creed, Elspeth Probyn, Bob Connell, Chris Berry, Audrey Yue, Rob Cover, Gary Dowsett, Robert Aldrich and Garry Wotherspoon. David Halperin was one of its notable imports for a time in the 1990s when it also had its own queer studies journal, Critical InQueeries (1995-1998). There have been special issues of Media International Australia (1995), Meanjin (1996) and Social Semiotics (1999) all of which point to the mainstreaming of queer down under[4]. This is not to mention the proliferation of queerness on TV, in magazines, in queer zines, and queer Oz literature. Not to mention either that two introductions to queer theory have been written by Australian theorists, Jagose and Sullivan respectively. As Alan McKee puts it, ‘resistance is hopeless’[5] in the face of the queer takeover of Oz.
David Coad’s Gender Trouble Down Under: Australian Masculinities, however, is “the first queer reading of the ‘real bloke’ Oz fantasy in order to see how partial, odd, exclusionary, in a word queer, the whole concept is” (14). Coad is a lecturer at the University of Valenciennes in France and this book is published by the Presses Universitaires de Valenciennes. We might situate France as playing a part in the global-local mapping outlined earlier. This year has witnessed a queer special issue of the journal Rue Descartes with contributions from Eve Sedgwick, Lawrence Schehr and Lee Edelman[6], a sign perhaps that the queer multinational has been exported to France. Coad, however, doesn’t see the queer phenomenon as symptomatic of an Altmanian “global queering”(11), but goes right back to Australia’s convict past to find the seeds of the gender trouble of his title. The book is divided into seven chapters, which collectively explode the myth of Australian hypermasculinity, passing indexically through the convict, bushranger, bushman, digger, ocker, larrikin (there is a helpful GlOZary of Aussie lingo on pages 8 and 9) to the rugby player and the surfer. Underneath the uniform and posturing of fair dinkum or dinky-die Australian masculinity, Coad finds “more than just a soupçon of gender trouble”(11) and as far as he is concerned that gender trouble began with the convicts. Homo Australis indeed.
Coad’s archival research is meticulous and he mines a wide variety of sources as he traverses Australia’s 200 year queer history: letters, legal documents, newspapers, memoirs, photographs, paintings, films, performance art. His scholarship is thorough and the tale he has to tell is compelling and makes for deeply entertaining reading (I read the book in just two days whilst lying in bed with a koala teddy decked out in waistcoat and Crocodile Dundee hat at my feet!). The kind of history he writes is the affective type Foucault argued for in his essay “ The Life of Famous Men” in which he describes feeling a “vibration” when reading the internment register at the Bibliothèque Nationale. In 1982 a volume appeared in which he collected this “anthology of existences”, these “brief lives” chanced upon in books and documents. Several centuries later these lives touch Foucault and they exemplify a queer historical touch. Coad’s consistent impulse is to touch, make contact with and even finally desire the bodies of his subjects. Past and present touch in this haptic history and we are invited to note the similarities and dissimilarities between Australia’s queer past and its queer present. As Coad exposes the legend of heterosexual hypermasculinity and the sex/gender/nation matrix to be nothing but a myth he effectively turns the whole macho outback on its Akubra-clad head.
Chapter One focuses on the convict in the eighty-year period between 1788 and 1868 and how the penal colony facilitated same/sex practices rather than discouraging them. This is the reason, Coad avers, why Australia has been at pains to disavow its convict heritage (19). He spends quite a bit of time in this opening chapter turning his queer gaze on the spectacle of a man being beaten. Flagellation and public whipping, he argues, is an importation from Britain and an extension of the English colonization or penetration of male bodies of Australians (18). This is a rather familiar active/passive colonizer/colonized binary framework in which Australia takes the effeminized position, the bottom to England’s pushy, sadistic top. This period, he argues, witnessed a Foucauldian proliferation of discourses about sex. It also witnessed a Foucauldian efflorescence of punishment of the docile male body. Coad is most interested (like Foucault in San Francisco) in the deorsum disciplina (lower discipline) where the exposed male buttocks are whipped and the attendant erotics or homoerotics which the spec(tac)ularized male body excites in the (male) onlookers. He is right, I think, to suggest that flogging is a peculiarly English vice and the homoerotics of male punishment he discerns confirms the findings of medievalists, early modernists, and Victorianists who have thought about the punished, macerated male body[7] and the perverse optic trained on it. Coad spends a long time looking at a still from In the Wake of the Bounty, Errol Flynn’s 1933 film debut, in which he regards a male convict being beaten and appears to have a prominent bulge in his trousers. He points out that Flynn was quick to distance himself from homoeroticism in his published autobiography (25). Another site for this Foucauldian incitement to speak about sex was the all-male barracks. It is rather pleasing that he cites the title of volume one of Foucault’s History of Sexuality as the Will to Knowledge. Robert Hurley’s translation of the title in 1978 mis-states the force of Foucault’s La Volonté de savoir, by underestimating the degree to which desire and knowledge form a mobile dyad in the deployment of sexuality as an epistemological frame with extensive links to what Foucault elsewhere describes as the epistemic transition to discipline. These are the links that Coad explicitly and brilliantly makes in this chapter. He draws on a number of sources here and also considers sodomy at sea (28), his findings resonating with those of A.R. Gilbert for England in a similar period. One particularly touching piece of evidence is a letter from an Irish convict to his male lover (35) which focuses on male affect and love rather than on legal evidence for sodomitical crimes. Sadly Denis Prendergast was executed, the first in a litany of dead queers in this book. Coad also considers female-female sexual practices in this chapter among the convicts at the female factories. He finds in the practice of “head shaving and hair cutting” with which these women were punished (38) a kind of gender trouble and he widens out the array of queer masculinities to include what Judith Halberstam calls ‘female masculinities’[8]. He ends chapter one with a depressing coda about killing the queer (40) and argues that Australia’s homophobic present is a result of its unease with its homoerotic past. The institutionalization of compulsory heterosexuality is not surprisingly to be found in the school where young boys are pressured to be ‘real men’, to play footy and not to be a ‘poofter’ (40). The ‘war on effeminate boys’ and the exhortation to underachieve at school are at the root of the current literacy crisis and boys’ underachievement in school. It is hardly surprising that much of the work on non-oppressive and queer pedagogies has come out of Australia where hate crimes, teen suicide, depression, and homophobic violence are on an alarming rise[9]. Coad asserts that while convictism “made possible and proliferated” (45) sexual dissidence it also “ left a heritage of homosexuality and institutionalised homophobia that continued to haunt the nation well after the end of transportation” (45). Indeed, if the recent pronouncements of the Howard government are anything to go by, despite advances in anti-discrimination policy and decriminalization, homosexuality in Australia is still considered to be a monstrous abomination, and heterosexual citizenship is held up as the exemplary norm[10].
Chapter Two looks at the period of the bushranger, the ‘wild colonial boy’ (50), exemplified by Ned Kelly, in the period after 1880. These outlaws, descendants of the convict, are precursors of the modern ocker or larrikin, the beer-swilling, anti-establishment philistine. They are Sally O’Driscoll’s outlaw theory in action. Coad looks at Kellymania and the disturbing similarities between Ned and his modern day avatar, Mark ‘Chopper’ Read, novelist and subject of a wonderfully brutal film in 2000. All the ingredients are there: homophobia, ‘hypermasculinity, hypercriminality, and heterosexuality’ (60) yet Chopper relies on his male friends who would cut off an ear for him, and has only ever had one girlfriend, whom he prized for her ‘ manly qualities’ (60). Coad finds an underlying homoeroticism in the ‘gang and mateship phenomenon’ (59) and the cross-dressing of Steve Hart, one of the Kelly gang, in particular. He analyses two images, a photograph and a painting of Hart in which he is arms akimbo. Following Tom King, he reads this as a proto-camp gesture associated with the effeminate sodomite (67). He rejects however, the press reports of Hart and Dan (Ned’s younger brother) Kelly dying in each other’s arms, in a kind of homosexual liebestod. The evidence he does present, however, is suggestive and the need for modern novelizations and theatricalizations of the Kelly myth to re-heteronormatize the story is especially telling. Like the earlier letter from one convict to another Coad uncovers (following Garry Wotherspoon) a series of letters from one Captain Moonlight to one James Nesbit. Historians have paid too little attention to love and romance and same/sex friendship but this discussion of bushranger erotics begins to open out our understanding of these matters. There is of course a scarcity of first-person, epistolary documents but the ‘David and Jonathan friendships’ (70) between Hart and Kelly, Moonlight and Nesbit, and Joe Byrne and Aaron Sheritt seem to have been both intense and effusive[11]. Not surprisingly there has been much resistance among homoerotophobic scholars who are uncomfortable with the queering of their male heroes. To suggest they were homosocial is bad enough; to go further and suggest the underlying queerness of the Kelly gang is to invite opprobrium. Coad is brave enough to do both. Apparently, there was much consternation when Mick Jagger took on the role of Kelly in 1970. Australians perceived this to be a demasculinizing and deheterosexualizing of their forebear. Coad doesn’t have much to say about bisexuality in this book. The uneasiness and ‘anti-Jagger sentiment’ he talks about here might have been the place[12].
Judith Halberstam has recently cautioned against the ‘metronormativity’ in recent queer geographies[13] but Coad’s work on Australian masculinities and outing of the outback is a welcome corrective. By focusing on rural masculinities and finding a “homo on the range” (72) he queers the traditionally macho, hyperheteronormative approaches to rural geography[14]. Chapter three continues the discussion of bushmen, the outback, rusticity, and mateship (how can one resist the sexual valence of terms like out back and down under?). He begins with a detailed interpretation of The Man from Snowy River (debunked as an historical fiction) and the line of flight between the Australian bushman and American cowboy (76). Elspeth Probyn’s becoming-horse is literalized in the (con)fusion of ‘man, horse, and nation’ in the myth of hypermasculinity and ‘hyper-Australianness’ (79)[15]. He goes on to discuss Henry Lawson who iconized bushman mateship and homosociality and the fusion of heterosexuality and virile Aussie masculinity. Again, there is an Australian-American line of flight as the Bush poet is compared to the Californian pioneer Bret Harte (who’s homosocial relationship with Mark Twain also took on a decidedly homoerotic cast[16]). It is in the homosociality, the bruderschaft of outback mates that Coad finds the potential for a queered bush erotics. The ‘butch rurality’[17]of the bushmen as opposed to the effeminate urbanity of the city dweller is called into question (most spectacularly by Priscilla’s drag queens in the queer nineties). He also outs the sexism (women are excluded) and racism (non-indigenous peoples are excluded) of this “sex/gender fantasy” (14) and turns the Sedgwickian triangle into a Greimasian square to assert that the outback was “as bent” as a “dog’s hind leg” (92).
At a conference in 1995 entitled “Constructing Masculinity” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (no doubt startling her audience) made the comment that “sometimes masculinity’s got nothing to do with it”. What she meant, of course, is that sometimes masculinity has nothing whatsoever to do with men. So often unfairly criticized for her neglect of women in her theorizing of homosocial desire (most famously by Terry Castle in The Apparitional Lesbian) Sedgwick recognized as far back as then the need to drive a wedge between the two topics: men and masculinity, and the radicality of disrupting the conversation on the topic of masculinity[18]. Just as he had in his discussion of Tasmanian female convicts armed with dildos (39) Coad recognizes in his fourth chapter on bushwomen and female masculinity that not everything that can be said about masculinity pertains to men and that women too are producers and performers of masculinity as Halberstam has argued. I applaud this extension of the broader array of Australian masculinities to female masculinities but Coad is too hasty to dislocate some performances of F2M from lesbianism and too quick to desexualize others (all of which has the effect of reheterosexualizing these subversive queerings of the heteromasculine script). In this chapter he discusses several cases; a female husband from Ireland, Ellen Tremayne/ Edward De Lacy Evans, who married three wives, the disfigured Johanna Jorgensen (who would be of interest to disability historians), the moustachioed women of Joseph Furphy’s novel Such is Life (1903), the murderer/ess Eugenia Falleni, and Eva Langley, the unpublished novelist who legally changed her name to ‘Oscar Wilde’ (104). The Australian bushwoman is updated in depictions of ‘female larrikinism’ in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert but Coad is quick to evacuate the beer-swilling Shirl of her tough, dykey female masculinity (137).
Chapter Five moves on to filmic re-evaluations of the bushman story which out the previously latent bush homoerotics. First up is Gallipoli which reworks the myth of the Australian ‘digger’ or soldier dying for his country. He does acknowledge the queer potential of Peter Weir’s film but in the end sees it as repressing the homoerotic relationship between Archy and Frank (Mel Gibson). He seems caught between two queer historical impulses: those of David Halperin and those of George Haggerty. Halperin would read Gallipoli as an exemplar of non-erotic friendship as Coad does[19]. This at least is how he interprets the buddy film Lethal Weapon also starring Gibson, alongside Danny Glover. Haggerty, on the other hand, and I’m inclined to agree with him, sees an ‘emotional intensity and erotic attachment’ in relationships between men which are homoemotional and he thinks that these bonds can be as erotic as ‘what qualifies as “sodomy”’[20]. So Archy and Frank don’t need to kiss or fuck for us to read their relationship as homoerotic. The film already ratchets the degree of emotional intensity up from homosocial mateship[21]. Given Gibson’s acerbic homophobic pronouncements in recent years and his massive gay following a more nuanced reading of both this film and of the Mad Max films than is provided here is needed[22]. This chapter concludes with a reading of Crocodile Dundee (who never existed [13]) and Patrick White’s Twyborn Affair. Coad has written extensively on White before and he will crop up again in the epilogue.
Chapter Six takes us to the queer streets of 1990s Oz via a discussion of homosexual subcultures in the 1930s (which confirms George Chauncey’s study of Gay New York) and during the Second World War (corroborating Allan Berube’s thesis). Coad sees decriminalization as contributing to this queerification of Oz (host of the Gay Games in 2002) where the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras is now on a par with the Melbourne Cup and Oxford Street is a thoroughly queerized space. The ‘foregrounding’ of Australian camp (131) is credited to Baz Luhrmann who’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo+Juliet has even been called homonormative[23]. Oddly, there is no mention of queer icon Kylie Minogue or her famous rear, nor of the insidious outing campaign surrounding her Neighbours co-star Jason Donovan. A queering of the small screen[24] would have been welcome. Of the many queer boys on The Secret Life of Us, for example. And, a queer kiss on the daytime soap Breakers caused an outrage, rather than an OUT rage! Instead, we get a celebratory[25] reading of Stephan Elliot’s The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (131-144). It is now de rigueur to ‘do’ queer theory by (re)citing a set of compulsory Butlerian norms (the title of this book is part homage to the homecoming queen of queer) and Coad does all this very well. On his reading Priscilla is Butlerian performativity writ large, with its ‘unexpected alignments and realignments of male and female with, or against, the masculine and the feminine’ (132). This is Coad at his campiest and best and at times his style is reminiscent of Andy Medhurst in his more excessively camp moments. In a brilliant deployment of Butlerian logic Coad sets out the book’s main tenet: ‘if heterosexual identity in the outback is not “the real thing”, but is itself an imitation and an approximation of an imagined origin or ground, then the idea that bushmen are more manly, masculine and Australian than Sydney boys is a fantasy. A “fair dinkum Aussie bloke” is a theatrically produced effect, posturing and posing as the real’ (140). This chapter concludes with a coda about queering the (rugby) pitch where men are donning frocks à la David Beckham with increasing (and for some worrying) regularity. What does it say about Australian masculinity when its rugby stars are coming out as Ian Roberts did? (145) Or when sports presenter Peter Wherrett ‘comes out’ as a transvestite à la Eddie Izzard? Queer Theorist, Heather Brook, is sceptical but Coad, looking to role models like Dennis Rodman (147) is far more sanguine: he genuinely thinks that these guys are ‘dressing up for its erotic potential’ (147). If he’s right, and he may be (Beckham has gone on record as being comfortable with his iconic gay status) and as soccer replaces rugby and cricket as Australian boys sport of choice (according to last night’s World Football programme), the thorough debunking of Australian masculinity and the heterosexist gender code might not be too far off in the future[26]. The Australian sportsman (and woman[27]) and sports fan may be about to enter his end-zone.
The seventh and final chapter ‘Double Trouble’ is an important contribution to Black Queer Studies and queer diaspora studies as it focuses on non-Anglo-Celtic queer masculinities[28], on Australia’s ‘queer black present and past’ (151). He charts Aboriginal same/sex practices and Asian-Australian masculinities. Like Richard Fung he notes the near invisibility of ‘the Asian male body in [Australian] gay culture’ (153). The next section introduces us to the ‘flamgirlantly (the delightful coinage is Coad’s) queer performance artist/e Leigh Bowery, a sort of Orlan-meets-RuPaul who worshipped John Water’s Divine[29] and gave birth on stage in a taking on of the mother role (à la Dame Edna) (160). This discussion of body modification leads to a final section (the most problematic in the book) on transsexual narratives (intersex does not feature in this book at all despite a recent Australian decision to issue a passport marked ‘X’). Given that the Australian line on transsexuality has been propounded by Sheila Jeffreys[30] and Germaine Greer the need for a more sensitive analysis is pointed. Unfortunately, I don’t feel we get that here. The epilogue is a sustained critique of the mythopoetic men’s movement and Robert Bly and Steve Biddulph, its American and Australian proponents, respectively. While I agree with Coad that a worrying essentialism underlies the rhetoric of the men’s movement I do think that there are positive things to be taken from it, especially in the service of formulating queer(ed) masculinities for the future. He concludes by saying that ‘Australian males have (unsuccessfully) spent two centuries trying to be “men”’ (177) and the positive note is that if gender trouble has always lain at the heart of Oz masculinity then it always will. By causing the image of the hypermasculine, heterosexual Australian male to (back to Deleuze and Guattari) stutter, Coad has written the very best kind of queer history.
Michael O’Rourke
School of English
[1] Brian Massumi, A Shock to Thought: Expression After Deleuze and Guattari (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), xxxiv.
[2] Alan Nicholson, review of Ian Buchanan, Deleuzism: A Metacommentary, Ian Buchanan and John Marks (eds.), Deleuze and Literature, Gary Genosko, Félix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction and Gregg Lambert, The Non-Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze in Textual Practice 17.2 (Summer 2003): 422-430, at 423.
[3] Dennis Altman, Homosexual Oppression and Liberation (New York: New York University Press, 1971). On the book’s anticipations of queer theory see Jeffrey Week’s introduction to the 1993 edition which is reprinted in his Making Sexual History as “Dennis Altman and the Politics of (Homo)Sexual Liberation”, 75-85.
[4] J Brooks, M Hurley and L Raymond (eds), “Queer Media”, Media International Australia 78 (1995); C Berry and A Jagose (eds), “Australia Queer”, Meanjin 55.1 (1995); Alan McKee (ed) “(Anti)Queer”, Social Semiotics 9.2 (August 1999).
[5] Alan McKee, “’Resistance is Hopeless’: Assimilating Queer Theory”, Social Semiotics 9.2 (August 1999): 235-249. The debate about the emergence of queer can be followed in the pages of the Australian Humanities Review. Begin with Dennis Altman’s essay “On Global Queering” and track the responses by David Halperin, Chris Lane, Donald Morton and others. For a cynical view of the queer theory ‘fairytale’ see Dean Kiley’s “Un-Queer Anti-Theory”, <http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR>.
[6] Robert Harvey and Pascal Le Brun-Cordier (eds), “Queer: Repenser Les Identitiés”, Rue Descartes 40 (2003).
[7] See John Vincent, “Flogging is Fundamental: Applications of Birch in Swinburne’s Lesbia Brandon” in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (ed), Novel Gazing: Queer Readings of Fiction (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 269-295.
[8] Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998).
[9] See Eve Sedgwick, “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay: The War on Effeminate Boys”, in Tendencies (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), 154-166. On Australian boys, schooling and masculinities, see Wayne Martino, “’Cool boys’, ‘Party Animals’, ‘Squids’, and ‘Poofters’: Interrogating the Dynamics and Politics of Adolescent Masculinities in School”, British Journal of the Sociology of Education 20.2 (1999): 239-63 and (with Deborah Berrill), “Boys, Schooling and Masculinities: Interrogating the ‘Right’ Way to Educate Boys”, Educational Review 55.2 (June 2003): 99-117.
[10] On sexual citizenship and recent federal debates in Australia see Carol Johnson, “Heteronormative Citizenship and the Politics of Passing”, Sexualities 5.3 (August 2001): 317-336 and “”Heteronormative Citizenship: The Howard Government’s Views on Gay and Lesbian Issues”, Australian Journal of Political Science 38.1 (March 2003): 45-62.
[11] For a 1780s case in Colonial America see Caleb Crain, “Leander, Lorenzo, and Castalio: An Early American Romance”, Early American Literature 33(1998): 6-38. See also Richard Godbeer, “’Sodomitical Actings’, ‘Inward Dispositions’, and ‘The Bonds of Brotherly Affection’: Sexual and Emotional Intimacy Between Men in Colonial and Revolutionary America” in Katherine O’Donnell and Michael O’Rourke (eds) Siting Queer Masculinities 1550-1800 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, forthcoming).
[12] On Jagger’s bisexuality see Marjorie Garber, Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life (London: penguin, 1995) esp. 135-145.
[13] Judith Halberstam, “The Brandon Teena Archive” in Robert J. Corber and Stephen Valocchi (eds) Queer Studies: An Interdisciplinary Reader (Blackwell: Oxford, 2003), 163.
[14] See for an overview, Jo Little, “Rural Geography: Rural Gender Identity and the Performance of Masculinity and Femininity in the Countryside”, Progress in Human Geography 26.5 (2002): 665-70.
[15] Elspeth Probyn, “Becoming-Horse: Transports in Desire”, in her Outside Belongings (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), 39-62.
[16] See Peter Stoneley, “Rewriting the Gold Rush: Twain, Harte and Homosociality”, Journal of American Studies 30.2 (August 1996): 189-209.
[17] David Bell, “Farm Boys and Wild Men: Rurality, Masculinity, and Homosexuality”, Rural Sociology 65.4 (December 2000): 547-561, at 558.
[18] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Gosh, Boy George, You Must be Awfully Secure in Your Masculinity”, talk delivered at “Constructing Masculinity” conference organized by Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis and Simon Watson in 1995.
[19] David Halperin, “How to Do the History of Male Homosexuality, GLQ 6 (2000): 87-123.
[20] George E. Haggerty, “Male Love and Friendship in the Eighteenth Century”, in Katherine O’Donnell and Michael O’Rourke (eds) Love, Sex, Intimacy and Friendship Between Men, 1550-1800 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2003), 70-81, at 73.
[21] For a similar reading see David McInnes “Camp Histories and Queer Histories of Oz: A Review of Robert Reynolds’s From Camp to Queer: Remaking the Australian Homosexual and David Coad’s Gender Trouble Down Under: Australian Masculinities”, Australian Humanities Review (May 2003).
[22] For a fine start see Michael DeAngelis, “Identity Transformations: Mel Gibson’s Sexuality”, chapter three of his Gay Fandom and Crossover Stardom: James Dean, Mel Gibson, and Keanu Reeves (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001), 119-177.
[23] By Richard Burt in his Unspeakable ShaXXXspeares: Queer Theory and American Kiddie Culture (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998). I would counter-argue that Luhrmann’s MTV-esque musical Moulin Rouge is resoundingly heteronormative and fails to dismantle the sexual and gender scripts upon which the traditional hetero Hollywood musical relies.
[24] As would a queering of cyberspace. The work of Chris Berry, Fran Martin, and Audrey Yue is beginning to chart this territory.
[25] For a more critical reading see Alan McKee, “How to Tell the Difference Between a Stereotype and a Positive Image: Putting Priscilla, Queen of the Desert into History”, <http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr0300/amfr09b.htm>.
[26] For Brook’s opinions see “How to Do Things with Sex” in Carl F.Stychin and Didi Herman (eds) Sexuality in the Legal Arena (2000), 132-150.esp 147. On Rodman see Ben Carrington, “Fear of a Black Athlete: Masculinity, Politics and the Body” New Formations 45(Winter 2002): 91-110. Mark Simpson is influential throughout Coad’s book but no mention is made at this point of his essay “Active Sports: The Anus and Its Goal-Posts”, chapter four of his Male Impersonators: Men Performing Masculinity (London: Cassell, 1994), 69-93.
[27] Queering the ring may not be far off for women. See Rachel Morley, “Boxed In: Muscling in on ‘Masculine Identities”, Journal of Australian Studies 76 (2003): 109-116.
[28] On the emergent field of Black Queer Studies see Siobhan B. Somerville, “Introduction: Queer Fictions of Race”, Modern Fiction Studies 48.4 (Winter 2002): 787-794. See also Anne-Marie Fortier “Queer Diaspora” in Diane Richardson and Steven Seidman, Handbook of Lesbian and Gay Studies (London: Sage, 2002), 183-197 and Terry Goldie “Introduction: Queerly Postcolonial”, Ariel 30.2 (April 1999): 9-26.
[29] On the centrality of Divine in the formation of queer male (and female) identities see Eve Sedgwick and Michael Moon, “Divinity: A Dossier, A Performance Piece, A Little-Understood Emotion” in Tendencies (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), 215-251.
[30] Jeffreys equates transsexuality with body modification and piercing. See her shocking diatribe in Unpacking Queer Politics: A Lesbian Feminist Perspective (Cambridge: Polity, 2003).
Michael O’Rourke, School of English, University College Dublin.