25 :1 (2002) pp.107-108
Hard Men, Soft
Men
Dr David Coad’s previous book (Prophète dans le Désert) was in part an examination of the nature and role of sexuality in Patrick White’s fiction. With Gender Trouble Down Under, he widens his investigation to the whole of Australian culture in order to highlight the exaggerations and ambiguities of Australian conceptions of masculinity, as embodied in particular in the figure of the ocker.
His starting point is the traditional view of Australia as a man’s country, where hypermasculinity is everywhere in evidence, and that view’s counterpart, namely the country’s ‘long history of homophobia’ (p.19). Coad argues that this showing off of masculinity mostly serves to disguise and repress the feminine side of Australian men, who find themselves alienated, forced to deny those traits that might detract from the virile stereotype to which they are made to conform. But the disguise always wears thin, and an inclination to camp runs through much of Australia’s culture, bringing into question the carefully constructed image of the virile Aussie. The book is not just a study of the more or less hidden homosexual or homoerotic element in Australian culture: it ranges across wider territory, encompassing such features as cross-dressing and transsexualism. This leads Coad to a deconstructive interrogation of history, literature and film, as well as the performing arts.
As could be expected, much of Coad’s methodology is based on queer theory, but he also draws on Lacan, film studies, as well as plain archival research. He deploys all the strategies required by such a wide-ranging project, but wears his scholarship lightly. The book is by no means a systematic historical study of queerness down under. Coad focuses on selected samples that are especially illuminating for his purpose: he examines in succession a variety of Australian figures who have become cultural icons – the convict, the bushranger, the bushman, the digger, the athlete, etc. – and in each case he draws attention to the underside of the Australian legend, the repressed homoerotic side that no amount of denial will make go away. The book mostly follows the chronological emergence of those figures, and ranges from the earliest days of colonisation to the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras and the International Gay Games held in Sydney in November 2002. It surveys cultural trends which lead Coad to conclude that ‘In two hundred years Australia changed its reaction faced with the queer from one of suppression, or killing, to make queerness a commodity and a money-spinner, turning it in fact into a tourist attraction’ (p.129).
Coad does not insist very much on the homophobic violence which used to characterise Australia, and hasn’t entirely disappeared in spite of the greater tolerance of recent decades, leading to assaults, self-loathing and occasionally suicide. His focus is on the symbolical violence which has vainly tried to eradicate the queer from the national scene. Like the repressed, it always returns with devastating effect, shooting the culture through with various forms of neurosis, some of which are truly flamboyant, as the movie Priscilla illustrates. Coad doesn’t ask whether public acceptance of this flamboyance is not another way of making the queer other and thereby of exorcising the disturbing thought that gays and lesbians are ordinary members of Australian society, that they do not reside in some freakish, fenced-off ghetto where they might be safely stared at, laughed at or ignored, but live in our streets, our houses and, ultimately, in everyone of us. Because Coad concentrates on sexual ambiguity or lability rather than on homosexuality per se, he does not pay much attention to avowedly gay and lesbian literature.
Coad’s analyses are often compelling and illuminating. They propose a subversive perspective which effectively counteracts the stereotypes to which Australian culture is often reduced. The book is highly readable, witty, occasionally polemical and mostly jargon-free. It is also nicely illustrated, not least by the colourful still from Priscilla on the cover. Its insights, and the thoroughness of the research underpinning them, make it quite a valuable contribution to Australian Studies.
Xavier Pons
Université de Toulouse
France