Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2019

This article explores how the queering potentialities of the Australian music television programme Countdown (1974–87) were drawn into dialogue with the show’s role in a ‘cultural nationalizing project’. Countdown was culturally significant in the way it presented different versions of masculinity and femininity to a mainstream audience, particularly in a period where depictions of identity beyond the heteronormative mainstream where extremely rare, or indeed totally absent, from prime time television. However, while Countdown provided an avenue through which alternate ways of ‘being’ masculine could be made visible, Countdown’s ‘queering’ of the heteronormative masculine subject worked to largely recentre white, heterosexual, cisgendered men in the Australian and Aotearoa/New Zealand cultural mainstream. The show’s positionality within a nation-building media project in the 1970s and 1980s is a salient reminder of the ways in which media are shaped by a complex generic context which frames their production and reception, as well as the heterogeneous context of their broadcast and dissemination.

Stories of war are constructions. When filmmakers create narratives based on facts, they often need to verify technical details and seek out visual and social contexts for events and the characters who experience them. This article uses a case study of the award-winning short film Sparrow to consider how obscurification and erasure operate both institutionally and socially to render gay soldiers’ experiences of war invisible. Using the true story of an incident that occurred in the Second World War, the article considers the manner in which the impacts and dynamics of shame, the selective nature of ANZAC memorializing, official record keeping, military policy and national legislation can collectively function to distort or render irretrievable the contributions of New Zealand gay men who have served in the nation’s armed forces.

Recent research has shown that the stories and experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ) people are largely absent in museums internationally. At the same time, there is a growing awareness in the Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) sector that public-facing cultural institutions have a duty to reflect diversity in all its forms, to take an active approach to inclusion and to promote understanding between different groups, communities and cultures. What, then, might such an undertaking entail? Moving beyond assimilationist approaches to inclusion this article elaborates a ‘queering’ of contemporary museum practices, the often invisiblized assumptions that inform them and the ethico-political effects that they produce. The article will draw on examples from our own practice as museum curators in South Australia inspired by international and Australian artists and curators including Matt Smith (UK) and Jo Derbyshire (Australia).

Sydney, Australia, 1920. A man named Harry Birkett was arrested for the murder of his wife Annie Birkett. Shortly after the arrest, the police discovered that Crawford was not a man but a woman named Eugenia Falleni. There are no archival documents in which Falleni speaks about their gender and sexuality, and yet recent (re)presentations of this individual have assigned them to rigid identity categories such as lesbian, transgender, transsexual, heterosexual, man and woman, based on interpretations of their gendered and sexual acts. In this article, I argue that such approaches stabilize gendered and sexual acts characterized by movement into congruent and whole identities and, as such, foreclose queer possibilities. By deploying scholarship that sits at the intersections of queer and trans studies, I argue that recent representations of Falleni reveal identity as a fundamental structuring device for understanding being-in-the-world, and propose that we read cases past and present as sets of transing moments that enable a framing of all gendered being as movement.

This article explores the Auckland-based arts collective FAFSWAG. This group of queer Pasifika artists and dancers has taken up the activism and aesthetics of US ball culture, creating their own underground vogue scene. Facing exclusion and marginalization sometimes from both the mainstream queer community and their own Pasifika communities, FAFSWAG craft a creative response that celebrates and asserts safe spaces for queer ‘brown’ bodies and revisits distinctive Pasifika gender concepts. Their discourse, dance, and events offer responses to lived exigencies of colonization, diaspora, homophobia and racism. Voguing offers masculine and feminine movements for these queer bodies, challenging masculinities imposed by ‘tradition’, pop culture and colonial narratives. The transplanting and uptake of New York ball culture has given FAFSWAG in New Zealand a platform and inspiration to create art and movement that reflects their multiple identities, genders, histories and influences.