Category: Blog posts

It’s official. Australians have voted in favour of marriage equality!

The yes campaign won a huge victory today, with Australians voting 61.6 – 38.4% in favour of passing legislation to legalise same-sex marriage. A total of 7,817,247 people voted yes.

There has been a lot of negative feelings about this process. Large marriage equality organisations and most prominent marriage advocates opposed to use of any form of public vote to help decide this issue. It has certainly been a tough process for many, and one that many do not want replicated ever again. It is one many would simply like to forget.

But as we come to the end of this process, it’s worth reflecting on this moment for exactly what it is: a huge victory.

Let us think about the significance of what just happened. Over seven million people voted in favour of equality for lesbian and gay Australians. That’s millions of people who ignored the fear mongering of conservatives, and took an active step to vote in favour of equality. People voted in favour across the country — from small towns to large cities, from poor areas to rich. Every state and territory voted yes, while 133 of Australia’s 150 electorates returned yes votes.

While in some ways this vote means very little in legal consequences, this is actually very important. This is a sign of huge changes that have occurred in our community. It’s easy to forget that it was only just over two decades ago that Tasmania became the last state in the country to decriminalise homosexual activity. Now, Tasmania voted in favour of marriage equality legislation 63.6 – 36.4%. I cannot think of any other social issue that has seen such a significant shift in such a short time.

For those of us who are concerned about the impacts this vote have had on vulnerable queer people this is especially important. Growing up queer can be an isolating thing, particularly for those in rural and remote communities. It can often feel like you have supporters nowhere. Now however we have the first ever real indication of the real level of support that queer people have in our community. Of course a vote for same-sex marriage does not mean someone is not a homophobe, but it is a strong start. Now through this campaign, and through this successful vote, we’ve seen millions of people publicly voice a growing acceptance of LGBTIQ people. In Ireland this resulted in a sharp spike in numbers of young people coming out, and we can expect such an outcome in Australia as well.

It is a real possibility, in fact almost a certain potential, that looking back on this campaign many will see it as a difficult moment we should all want to forget. This could easily be seen as something that above all else highlighted the intense bigotry queer people face. Of course that bigotry is still there, and we saw it sharply through this process. But what we also saw were acts of kindness, solidarity and justice — ones that clearly outweighed their counterpart.

It is these acts, and this vote, that we should remember. They are acts of a changing society — one that is clearly becoming more embracing of LGBTIQ people, and more willing to publicly voice that.

Yes this process was hard. But, change is hard. It requires struggle. When you get to the end of the struggle, and you win, you have to celebrate, not lament how hard it was to get here. Let’s do that today!

Earlier this week the vote yes campaign received some amazing news. New polling from Essential Research highlighted a significant enthusiasm gap between yes and no voters. As The Guardian wrote:

 

 

Continue reading Do some queers subconsciously want to lose the marriage equality vote?

“Stop the fags”

This week, many of the direst predictions of those opposing the marriage equality plebiscite came true, as an awful anti-equality poster appeared in parts of Melbourne. The poster, which spread across social media, was pointed to by many as an example of the sort of hate-speech so many have feared with a plebiscite campaign.

This is not the first time a flyer or statement of this sort has received this sort of attention. In fact, especially since the decision by the Coalition to have a plebiscite, it feels like every instance of homophobia such as this ends up making big news, with queers spreading material across social media, lamenting how terrible this sort of stuff is for the mental health of our community.

While there are certainly discussions to be had about whether sharing this material is good or not, we also have to ask ourselves, are our collective responses to this sort of homophobia, and even the plebiscite itself, making us more vulnerable as a community?

Continue reading Is our response to the plebiscite making us more vulnerable than the existence of the plebiscite itself?

Last week the TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale was released on SBS. In doing so the show has revilatised Margaret Atwood’s classic 1985 novel, being considered in many ways a prescient story to tell in our current political climate.

I’ve watched the first four episode of The Handmaid’s Tale so far, and am thoroughly enjoying it. I’ve found the storytelling really engaging, and in particular am loving the juxtaposition between Offred’s internal monologue versus the society in which she has found herself. It is often rare to see an example of a dystopian future where a character has moved so cleanly from society to the next, and I think the Handmaid’s Tale has portrayed that transition exquisitely.

However, there is another reason I’ve found the show so fascinating — that is how clearly it describes, even if in an exaggerated manner, the deep roots of sexual relations, and in turn sexism and women’s oppression, within liberal societies. It does so however in a way opposite to what many think.

Continue reading The Handmaid’s Tale is a relatively accurate depiction of modern sexual relationships – just not in the way you think

Over recent times, particularly since the plebiscite and Safe Schools debates within Australia, I have noticed a strong narrative of ‘suffering’ and ‘vulnerability’ within large parts of the queer community. Mainstream queer discourse has increasingly turned towards defining queer people as ‘vulnerable’, ones who have ‘suffered’ a great ‘injury’, and whose main quest is for those injuries to be fixed in some way. I have spoken about this issue in my podcast Queers with Benjamin Riley, and in Archer Magazine Fury wrote spectacularly about the same issue, stating that:

we queer folk have only been given the option to understand ourselves through the lens of pain. Because of this, it’s hardly a surprise how much we judge and police queerness by its proximity to suffering.

Fury continues, stating:

Oppression and its relevant experiences have become an important tool to define what makes us different to the mainstream and to each other. This, in its turn, has been important to ferry resources to the most in need. However, it is not without its downsides. It is easy to process the conversation around oppression like it, in itself, is a tangible metric instead of a shared context which yields statistical trends.

Given this recent turn I thought it would be interesting to have a quick look at one of the key texts I have discovered for my PhD over the past months, Wendy Brown’s “States of Injury”. Written in the 1990s, this book is a collection of essays , asking the provocative questions, how has injury become the basis for political identity in contemporary life, and how have law and other state institutions come to be seen as redressing such injuries rather than as perpetrating them? It would be possible to go through each and every essay with a blog post (maybe not a bad idea!). But for today I want to start by looking at the first chapter, which as an introduction presents Brown’s thesis as a whole.

Continue reading Freedom and the injured subject

This lecture was given to the GEND1001 class at the Australian National University in 

May 2017. 

What I am going to do today is take a brief look at the history of homosexuality and the homosexual, or queer, movement in the modern era. In doing so I will be specifically focusing on gay identity as it exists today, in particular examining the movement for marriage equality and what that says about gay identity.

I’m going to do this in the following way:

1. First I am going to briefly examine the history of the same-sex marriage movement, starting from about the 1990s.
2. Second I will look at two of the major critique of same sex marriage, being feminist critiques of marriage and assimilationist critiques.
3. Finally I am going to bring this together into my particular field of interest, examining same-sex marriage as a tool for the incorporation of gay, lesbian, and increasingly trans* people into our capitalist economic system.

Continue reading Marriage equality, capitalism, and gay identity

This speech was presented as part of the Noted Festival Event on Thursday the 5th of May: ‘AIDS Action Council presents Gay Sex is Fun’.

Thank you to Noted for inviting me to speak and for the AIDS Action Council of the ACT for putting on this excellent event.

Speech

Growing up as a man who is attracted to men I very early on became aware that my life was supposedly going to be a lot harder than many others.

When I came out to my mother for example she said her only worry was that my homosexuality would make my life harder. My first relationship with a boy, one that lasted a huge three weeks (that’s a long time for a teenager), ended after he decided that he could not be gay and that he would be straight from now on. Based on his regular appearances on my Grindr feed I assume that has not worked out. But I still remember thinking that that would never occur if I were straight. And even now, when insisting we’re all ‘born this may’ many gays demand that “of course I’m born gay, who would choose this?” It’s like homosexuality is exactly what our protractors say it is; a disease from which we should all wish we were cured.

Now, I do not want to deny that gay lives have been and remain hard. Discrimination, repression and violence towards gay people remains rife.

Yet, at the same time, I feel an intense need to say, fuck that! Fuck this idea that being gay is a thing that’d we’d all want to avoid like the plague. Fuck the idea that it is something no one would choose.

I say this not just because gay sex — that which happens between a monogamous couple with the hope that one day this sex will be legitimised by the state and that next time the wedding rings will have to be taken off before the fingering begins — is fun, although I am sure it is.

I’m saying it because the very nature of being gay has the potential to open up a range of sexual possibilities, ones that I know I likely would never had explored if I were straight.

Continue reading Gay Sex is Fun

Earlier this week I was lucky enough to be able to attend a Masterclass by Professor Nikolas Rose titled ‘Social Sciences and the Self in the Age of the Brain’. Professor Rose has a long history in sociology, with a particular interest in the intersection between conceptions of the self and subjectivity with biomedicine. This is all underpinned by analyses of authority and power, and how our power systems interact and inform our concepts of the self.

The Masterclass included a morning of discussion with Professor Rose tackling these issues, following by some fascinating presentations from participants.  Presentations included discussions on abortion law in Australia, the connection between perceptions of the self and music, the rise of ‘brain game’ devices and how these provide a sense of ‘brain training’, and a really fascinating talk on how women with autism interact with the medical system.

There is so much I could talk about this Masterclass, but I wanted to touch on some questions of medical authority that sparked in my mind.

At one point in the Masterclass we ended up debating and discussing the concept of leadership. We talked about how leadership has been given a psychological basis, with the concept being that leadership is an ‘inherent trait’, a trait that few are provided, and which is denied to others.

This discussion connected me back to an article I read a long time ago, titled “Leadership: An Alienating Social Myth” by Gary Gemmill and Judith Oakley. In this article Gemmill and Oakley argue that the very concept of leadership – the idea that our organisations, institutions, and broader society, require great leaders in order to survive — is a ‘myth’. This myth is one designed specifically in order to create and reinforce particular social structures and systems of power. As they argue:

“The social myth around leaders serves to program life out of people (non-leaders) who, with the social lobotimization, appear as cheerful robots (Mill, 1956). It is our contention that the myth making around the concept of leadership is, as Bennis arrests, and unconscious conspiracy, or social hoax, aimed at maintaining the status quo (Bennis, 1989).”

“Leadership theories espousing “traits” or “great person” explanations reinforce and reflect the widespread tendency of people to deskill themselves and idealise leaders by implying that only a select few are good enough to exercise initiative.”

What was interesting to me was connecting these concepts of leadership with medical authority. Throughout the masterclass we discussed the authority medical practitioners have in our society, with Professor Rose and one point commenting that for many ‘the drug a doctor provides is doctor’. Doctors and other medical practitioners have taken on particular ‘leadership’ roles in our society, given not just significant control over individual people’s health, but also increasingly over public policy and debate.

In many cases this is extremely important. We all value having the expertise of a doctor, who has studied at University for a very long time, when we get sick.  We cannot all be experts in this area, and giving that expertise to those who can focus in on it makes total sense.

However, as discussed in the masterclass, this expertise also takes on particular power roles, ones that have and continue to be used, just like leadership, to reinforce particular social roles. Professor Rose focuses this inquiry specifically on the ‘psy’ medical professions – psychology, psychiatry etc etc.  These practices of the brain have been integral to shaping our concept of subjectivity and the self, and then provide avenues for which to exclude or punish those who do not meet collectively agreed upon acceptable senses of self.

Professor Rose gave as an example one of his first ever jobs, a teacher in a school in the United Kingdom for ‘maladjusted students’. Professor Rose interrogated the very concept of ‘maladjustment’, questioning the biomedical explanations provided for this ‘condition’. The concept of ‘maladjustment’ Professor Rose said was based in biomedical understandings (i.e. that these kids were inherently maladjusted), giving medical authority to the exclusion of these students in to what was likely a poorly funded and supported school. In doing so it ignored the social causes behind these kid’s behaviour, in turn ignoring the possibility that their behaviour may actually be 100% reasonable given their circumstances.

This sort of medical authority is common in our society. One only needs to look at the way homosexuals and other ‘sexual deviants’ have been treated by mainstream capitalist society – whether it is through the classification of homosexuality as a mental illness, or the castration of sexual deviants – as active uses of medical authority to enforce particular social norms. The oppression of sexual minorities has, at least for the past 100 years, been inherently based in medical language and acts – an act of using the trust, authority and expertise of medical practitioners as a way to justify minority oppression.

However, as we are able to challenge dominant ideas of leadership, we also have the capacity to challenge these conceptions of medical authority as well. The best example I can find of this is the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s. In this instance the issue was not medical practitioners using their trade to actively oppress minority groups (although that certainly did occur), but rather those in power often refusing to act either fast enough or with enough intent to halt the crisis (note that this is not an attack on individual medical practitioners, but rather on those who held significant power and did little to act on a major epidemic). Put simply, unlike many other epidemics, many of the powerful medical authorities, particularly in the United States, dragged their heals on HIV/AIDS, holding up life-saving treatments at times when they were desperately needed. This scenario is a perfect example of the use of an illness to attack a minority group, and then the withholding of medical intervention as a way to deny a solution to the problem. It is a clear use of medical authority to attack a minority group.

What we saw in response was the very use of this authority as a counterpoint. Receiving no joy from many in positions of power, HIV/AIDS activists and sufferers, sought out that authority themselves. People learned about the disease and drugs to deal with it, set up ‘buyer’s clubs’, and presented medical arguments to those in power in order to create change. They usurped the authority of the medical profession and took it for themselves when they needed it.

This in many ways was successful, finally pushing those in power to take the epidemic more seriously, to provide more funding, and to eventually get us to the point where HIV/AIDS has become manageable in Western Countries.

However it also has side effects. Professor Rose noted that one of the side effects of this approach was that it created an increasing focus on individual responsibility for health issues. The authority of doctor’s broke down to a point we are increasingly seeing where they are no longer considered the key point-person of an individual’s health, with ‘individual responsibility’ taking a much larger role. This has positives and negatives – while some authority has been usurped from medical practitioners, it also often places this authority and responsibility into the hands of those who may not have the capacity or skills to implement it.

What we are seeing though clearly is a break down in much of the medical authority in our society, coming at a time of a breakdown in other forms of authority structures, in particular the political class. The question is, what does this look like? The side effect of this break down of authority is that we are all taking more ‘control’ over our health and medical decisions. We all have to work on our own to fix our health, or we face punishment. But this does not seem to be that much of a solution either, as it once again ignores the inherent power structures that allow for authority structures to help shape our concept of the self. In fact one could argue that the provision of ‘individual responsibility’ in health matters is once again the implementation of medical authority structures – with this time medical approaches being used to enforce strict concepts of individualism. It is not a community approach to health, but rather a competitive individualist one, one where if you fail doing it by yourself you are then left behind.

This role of authority in creating concepts of individuality and concepts of the self is something I will be exploring more as I undertake my research. It is clear Professor Rose is someone I will have to continue reading. This masterclass was great, and I look forward to exploring these issues further.