Journal articles on the topic 'Homosexual references'

For years Ronald Dworkin has been a leading academic defender of individual rights. The political and jurisprudential theory underlying his defense has had enormous influence. Defense of the rights of homosexuals has been a prominent theme in his writings. In 1966 he published his well-known critique of Lord Devlin’s critical essay on the Wolfenden’s Committee’s recommendations that sexual relations in private between consenting homosexual adults be de-criminalized (reprinted in 1978b, ch. 10). In recent writings, he has condemned key rulings by American courts that denied certain basic rights to homosexuals. References to the rights of homosexuals are made in many of his works. But nowhere does Dworkin present a developed argument for homosexual rights. He appears to think that support for the rights of homosexuals follows naturally from his political-legal theory. But does it? If so, how? And how adequate is such a defense?

Sexual activity is a constant feature of human society, but sexuality has to be studied as a distinct cultural construct. It is articulated in texts and other cultural artefacts. Extant references to sexual acts between men in Middle Kingdom texts are few. In religious and commemorative texts such acts were presented as aggressive, but literary works accommodated a recognition of ‘homosexual’ desire. Two conclusions are suggested from this: that sexual relationships between men were considered irregular by the literate elite, and that the decorum of official texts differed from that of literary (fictional) texts. Three works in particular are discussed: the Teaching of Ptahhotep, the Tale of Horus and Seth, and the Tale of Neferkare and Sasenet.

ObjectiveTo know about knowledge, act and behavior of homosexual seminar audience about homosexual behavior.MethodThis was a cross sectional survey. Participants were chosen by purposive sampling method. Survey was conducted using list of questionnaires which was made according to references used in the seminar presentation.ResultOne hundred and sixty five participants conducted the survey. There were 77 males (46.7%) and 88 females (53.3%). The mean of age of the participants was 21.22 (SD 3.7). Most of the participants were college students (147 students, 89.1%) and never married before (96.4%). Sixty six participants (40%) said that homosexual behavior was induced by environmental situation, fifty eight participants (35.2%) said that it was a biological factor and rest of them did not answer the question. One hundred and four (63%) participants said that homosexual behavior could be cured, twenty four of participants (16.4%) said it could not be cured and the rest of them said did not have any idea. More than half of participants (87 participants, 52.7%) said that homosexual behavior was a mental disorder and most of the participants (87 participants, 79.4%) said that homosexual behavior need to be cured. Most of the participants said that they felt fine if they meet and talked with homosexual man or woman, nineteen participants felt afraid, ten participants felt disgust and twenty five participants felt pity on them.ConclusionMost of the participants considered homosexual behavior as mental disorder and need to be cured.

The classical lesion of primary syphilis is a solitary, indurated, painless chancre. Atypical presentations, such as herpetiform ulceration, are well recognized. However, there are few references in the medical literature to primary syphilis presenting as balanitis or balanoposthitis. We report two cases of primary syphilitic balanitis in homosexual men.

This is the second of two contributions that are asking how the New Testament could be used in a responsible manner in the debate about homosexuality. After an introductory discussion about the possibility that the NT writings provide us with guidelines, the five passages used in the debate are briefly surveyed. It is suggested that 1 Cor 6:9-11 might be understood against the backdrop of the existing cults and religious practices that were found in 1st century Corinth. Some guidelines are then formulated in order to proceed to a more responsible handling of the NT in the debate. Apart from an acknowledgment of the diversity of terms that are used, it is clear that immorality is closely connected with the idolatry and in association with homosexual behaviour. Homosexuality was thus closely linked with idolatry, immorality and perversity in the ancient NT socio-religious world. It is clear that there are no references to homosexual orientation as a sexual identity, on the one hand, and that the NT unequivocally rejects homosexual behaviour in a range of different forms, on the other hand. It is not possible to talk unqualifiedly about homosexuality any more.

AbstractThis article, concentrating on two articles by Richard Hays, critiques recent interpretations of Rom. 1:18-32. Modern interpreters, influenced more by particularly modern forms of heterosexism and its construction of homosexuality, desire, and "nature" than by a straightforward historical-critical reading of Paul's letter, portray Paul as referring to the "Fall" of Genesis 1-3 in Romans 1. Paul, it is assumed, takes homosexuality to be a sign of "humanity's fallen state." These interpreters, therefore, inscribe homosexual desire into universal fallen humanity in a way that Paul does not do. For one thing, Paul is referring not to the Fall in Romans 1 but to the invention of idolatry and polytheism by the Gentiles; homosexual intercourse is therefore not a symptom of "the Fall" but of Gentile polytheism. For another, Paul is not giving an etiology of homosexual desire, which for him as for most ancients was not different from heterosexual desire, but an etiology of homosexual intercourse. Furthermore, modern scholars misconstrue Paul's references to "nature" and acts "contrary to nature" because they import into Paul's discourse particularly modern notions of "natural" and "unnatural" not available in the ancient world. Heterosexist scholars interpret Paul the way they do not because they are simply and objectively "reading the text," as they claim, but because of their implication in homophobia, a particularly modern ideological system that constructs desire, "nature," and sexuality in particular ways.

Abstract During the period when General Francisco Franco ruled Spain (1936-1975), official censorship kept a watch on all books that were published in the country. The main objective of this censorship was to conceal from the Spanish people political manifestations that might be ultimately threatening for the dictatorial government politically. However, under heavy influence of the Catholic Church, the censors also veiled for the moral health of the Spanish people by intervening in all matters of sexual morality, decency, obscenity and vulgarity. Research has shown that during this period censors were as vigilant for sexual content as they were vigilant for political content. In this study I will examine censorship and sex by studying Raymond Chandler’s first novel, The Big Sleep (1939) and the three Spanish-language translations published during this period (1949, 1958, 1972). Chandler’s novel contains no potential political offenses to Franco’s Regime and its allies, but it does contain references to male homosexuals, scenes of female nudity, and sexually suggestive dialogues involving the detective and a female character. All of the Spanish versions were censored, whether by government censors or the translators/editors prior to presenting the manuscript to the censors. I will discuss the government-censored and self-censored passages in the Spanish versions of the novel, and show that all of the references to the homosexual characters, much of the nudity, and many of the sexually-suggestive dialogues have been manipulated and/or suppressed, producing undesirable and often unexpected effects.

Referenced as both supporting and weakening the case for parenting by homosexuals, 57 life-story narratives of children with homosexual parents published by Rafkin in 1990 and Saffron in 1996 were subjected to content analysis. Children mentioned one or more problems or concerns in 48 (92%) of 52 families. Of the 213 scored problems, 201 (94%) were attributed to the homosexual parent(s). Older daughters in at least 8 (27%) of 30 families and older sons in at least 2 (20%) of 10 families described themselves as homosexual or bisexual. These findings are inconsistent with propositions that children of homosexuals do not differ appreciably from those who live with married parents or that children of homosexuals are not more apt to engage in homosexuality.

Mainstream theorizing of paedophilia from the mid-1920s through to mid-1960, and even into the 1980s, was importantly psychodynamically oriented. The early history of the concept of paedophilia in early psychodynamic thought is problematic, however. Extant historical references are not without problems of their own, and have suffered from a lack of insight in the wider history of sexuality at this point of ‘erotic age preferences’. Review of primary sources highlights several contemporaneous interfaces of early psychodynamic theory: with the established forensic psychology of perpetrators of child sexual abuse; Krafft-Ebing's specific aetiological concept of age fetishism; early study and typologies of homosexual age preferences; emergent and divergent ideas about psychosexual infantilism; and strikingly late empirical attention to the psychiatry of the perpetrator of intergenerational incest.

Abstract This article seeks to examine homosexuality from the lens of two particular ancient Christian writers, namely Paul the Apostle and Maximus the Confessor. Both were fervent missionaries and did not perceive their writings as doctrinal or philosophical, but merely practical and a defence against other heretical teachings. Even so, contemporary scholars recognise a great profoundness and innovation in their theology. Paul’s references to homosexuality consist of only three or four sentences, whereas Maximus does not discuss the issue directly, given his preoccupation with matters pertaining to the nature of Christ, which at the time were fiercely contested among various Christian groups. The purpose of the article is to examine scriptural references to homosexuality from the perspective of the spiritual context in which they are made, rather than the canonical, ethical or social perspectives to which most scholars and civil society—whether in favour or against—refer to. Homosexuality in the sense of sexual orientation is unknown at the time and even so it is not specifically singled out. Paul seems to be specifically chastising exploitative sexual actions and relationships, whether homosexual or heterosexual.

Abstract In 1981, the Spanish playwright Luis Riaza published the play Medea es un buen chico (Medea is a Good Boy). In it, two male actors perform the main roles of Medea and the Nurse, who comment, with references to other fictional love stories, on the relationship between Medea and Jason. When Jason fails to arrive, the fiction is dismantled, revealing Medea’s identity as Jason’s rejected homosexual lover. Medea es un buen chico mixes elements of performativity, meta-theatricality, and myth in order to explore the limits of gender, sexuality, and the perceived social roles and norms they entail. This article explores how Riaza theatrically reflects on the social performativity of gender through the tragic character and story of Medea, her performance and subversion of her own gendered self, and her eventual rejection and social displacement.

Men with a homosexual orientation are more likely to experience depression than women who have a homosexual orientation. The purpose of this study was to conclude and examine the literatures related to the process of self-acceptance of Gays who were HIV positive. The method used was literature review by searching indexed articles from several database sources such as from PubMed, Proquest Disbursement of databases, scanning, and screening. In the search for the articles, 832 articles were identified. In addition, after filtering the titles, abstracts, and research methods, 103 articles were obtained to be taken and reviewed independently based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria. Then, a further article screening was carried out to find accurate and complete references regarding the self-acceptance process for ga MSM who were HIV positive and obtained 10 articles for a critical appraisal. The author filtered the articles based on the critical appraisal results and obtained 4 articles for a final review based on the period of 2013 to 2018, and identified using an electronic database.The findings showed the process of self-acceptance of gay people who are HIV positive. The responses when they first found out that they were HIV positive mostly showed the same response, namely experiencing anxiety, shock, distrust and rejection of the HIV test results in the form stress and depression. Over time, the informants accepted themselves as HIV positive sufferers in a resigned and strong form. Most of them had not disclosed their HIV status, especially to their partners and families because they were afraid of rejection and stigma.

This paper shows how a rapid taped survey is used to collect language samples from four New Zealand speech communities. It details the methodology in the study, and presents an analysis of one variable, (s) fronting. This variable is of special interest because, although phoneticians have noted that English speakers sometimes produce this sound in different ways (MacKay 1987: 98; Ladefoged and Maddieson 1996), the sociolinguistic literature does not mention (s) as a variable, apart from references to the homosexual community (Taylor 1998). The findings show that males and females in the majority New Zealand European community use different proportions of the fronted variant of (s), and that minority ethnic groups align themselves around these gender differences in various ways. The paper differs from most research on language and ethnicity in its focus on the similarities between the majority and minority groups, rather than on the differences.

The objective of this study is to identify the dimension of the personality that has the greatest influence on the risk of exposure to HIV infection. The models used to fulfill the scientific objective are the empirical method of information gathering and the theoretical deductive method. The 16-FP test and the HIV infection exposure assessment test applied to homosexual adolescents between 18 and 24 years old allowed us to measure the association of the study variables. The non-association between personality and the risk of HIV infection is concluded. The predominant personality dimension is the category called toughness. The prevailing risk level of exposure to HIV is the medium risk. The average age with minimal risk of infection is 20 years, the average risk is 20.9 years, and the high risk of infection is 21.9 years. Keywords: Personality, homosexuality, HIV, risk of infection. References [1]T. Santa Cruz y M. Antezana, «Impact on corporate image in the face of inclusion of LGBT communities in retail stores in Peru,» Correspondencias & Análisis, vol. 13, nº 1, pp. 101 - 126, 2021. [2]R. Muñoz, «Estigma estructural, adherencia al tratamiento antirretroviral y cultura organizacional de cuidados en la atención hospitalaria en VIH y Sida enGuayaquil, Ecuador,» Andamios, vol. 15, nº 36, pp. 311- 341, 2018. [3]L. Brito, D. Jiménez, E. Sinche y A. Angulo, «KNOWLEDGE AND PERCEPTIONS LINKED TO HIV/AIDS IN SHUAR COMMUNITIES OF ECUADOR, » Ciencia y enfermería, vol. 25, nº 1, 2019. [4]J. Rausch, A. Gäbel, K. Nagy y N. Kleindienst, «El aumento de los niveles de testosterona y cortisol al despertar respuestas en pacientes con trastorno límite de la personalidad: Género y el rasgo de agresividad cuestión, » Psiconeuroendocrinologí, vol. 55, nº 1, pp. 116-127, 2015. [5]D. Mosquera, A. Gonzalez, y Van der Hart, O., «Trastorno límite de personalidad, trauma en la infancia y disociación estructural de la personalidad,» INTRA-TP, pp. 1 - 18, 2013. [6]V. Caballo, Manual de trastornos de la personalidad: Descripción, evaluación y tratamiento, Madrid: Síntesis, 2004. [7]O. González, N. Pérez y M. Redondo, «Procesos básicos en una aproximación cognitivo-conductual a los trastornos de personalidad,» Clínica y salud, pp. 401-423, 2007. [8]P. Fernández y A. Morales, «“No quiero que me rechacen”: Experiencias sobre la revelación del estado serológico a las parejas sexuales en hombres,» Escritos de Psicología, vol. 7, pp. 44 - 55, 2014. [9]B. Buenrostro, H. González, I. Delgado, A. Mora, J. Cadenas y S. Montero, «Frecuencia de infección por VIH/sida en usuarios de preservativo,» Revista Cubanade Investigaciones Biomédica, vol. 31, pp. 480 - 489, 2012.

The paper aims to explain the development of the perception of national identity of the Christian Democratic Party (CDU), the strongest German political party in the past few decades. The paper focuses on election manifestos for the 1990, 1994, 1998, 2002, 2005, and 2009 elections. For this purpose, each manifesto is examined according to up to five analytical categories – such as values, nation, Europe, threats, and society. These categories explore the party’s perception in a wider context instead of focusing only on direct references to national identity. The analysed period was divided into three phases with an emphasis on the internal crisis between the years 1998 and 2002. The crisis influenced policy priorities; therefore the perceptions of elements belonging to national identity were changed in order i) to gain victory in the general elections in 2002 and 2005, and ii) to reflect properly the state of German society. Therefore, significant policy shifts were made. These policy changes show how the party successfully integrated societal demands and preferences over the past decade. Thank to this, the CDU incorporated both conservative and liberal elements. This is evident in the case of incorporating liberal elements such as homosexual partnerships while, at the same time, actively stressing the importance of defending national interests.

The paper aims to explain the development of the perception of national identity of the Christian Democratic Party (CDU), the strongest German political party in the past few decades. The paper focuses on election manifestos for the 1990, 1994, 1998, 2002, 2005, and 2009 elections. For this purpose, each manifesto is examined according to up to five analytical categories – such as values, nation, Europe, threats, and society. These categories explore the party’s perception in a wider context instead of focusing only on direct references to national identity. The analysed period was divided into three phases with an emphasis on the internal crisis between the years 1998 and 2002. The crisis influenced policy priorities; therefore the perceptions of elements belonging to national identity were changed in order i) to gain victory in the general elections in 2002 and 2005, and ii) to reflect properly the state of German society. Therefore, significant policy shifts were made. These policy changes show how the party successfully integrated societal demands and preferences over the past decade. Thank to this, the CDU incorporated both conservative and liberal elements. This is evident in the case of incorporating liberal elements such as homosexual partnerships while, at the same time, actively stressing the importance of defending national interests.

This article analyzes how mainstream artists respond to the dynamics of online fan communities, developing complex metanarratives that interrelate their songs and music videos with their “personal” activity on social media. Audiences analyze in depth and discuss each release, contributing to its viralization on the internet. However, these strategies need strong narratives that allow convincing developments and transmedia storytelling, and this is where literature becomes a significant source of inspiration. I argue that the assumption (or subversion) of popular literary characters and narratives contributes to a positioning of artists in the music scene and facilitates their “reading” by the audience. To illustrate this process, I analyze the references to Romeo and Juliet by mainstream pop artists in the last decade, paying special attention to Troye Sivan’s debut album Blue Neighborhood (2015), considered a homosexual version of Shakespeare’s drama, and to Halsey’s concept album Hopeless Fountain Kingdom (2017), understood as a queer version of the play. Both artists explained their personal reading of Shakespeare’s drama as a way of expressing their own feelings and experiences. These examples of metanarrative storytelling achieved their aim, and millions of fans engaged with both artists, discussing lyrics, photos and music videos related to Romeo and Juliet on social media.

Thus far, published references to Henry Cowell's imprisonment consistently obscure the facts of his case and overlook virtually all of the essential primary sources, including court documents, correspondence, psychological evaluations, and even Cowell's own writings on the subject. Although Cowell acceded to a charge that he had engaged in homosexual activities with a minor, the charge was distorted by newspapers and both exaggerated and minimized by his friends. The extraordinary prison sentence Cowell received resulted largely from a misleading letter by a juvenile probation officer, written amid a political climate of severe antipathy toward sex offenders. During Cowell's incarceration, several leading psychologists evaluated the composer according to then-prevalent theories of homosexuality. These psychologists, along with several officers of the court, expressed faith in the composer's "rehabilitation" and their recommendations helped secure the composer a parole. Political changes in California and the entry of the United States into World War II paved the way for a pardon, which was granted primarily so that Cowell could work on a government project known as "cultural defense." Despite his impressive accomplishments in prison and the positive resolution of his case, Cowell never fully recovered from the experience. Scholarly repression of the facts ensued and led to fragmented, inaccurate accounts of the prison years. Hence, this part of Cowell's life provides a useful test case on some persistent issues in musical biography.

Numerous recent media accounts indicate that teachers are being fired, put on probation, or otherwise censured because of information found on their social networking sites (SNS). While the literature in business, psychology, and pharmacy shows initial investigations of the impact of SNS information on hiring decisions, this area has not been investigated in the field of education. Data from pre-service teachers’ SNS were compiled into a 51-item questionnaire and K-12 school principals rated each statement on its likelihood to influence a hiring decision if it were found on the SNS of a teacher applying for a position at his or her school. The statements included on the questionnaire included sexual talk, swearing, violent language, references to drugs and/or alcohol use, and language that could be considered pejorative to individuals with disabilities, persons of color and/or homosexual individuals. The findings of this preliminary study indicate that of the 51 statements, 28 had average ratings in the moderate-to-significant impact on hiring decision range and 22 had average ratings in the minor-to-moderate impact on hiring decision range. Only one item of the 51 fell in the no impact-to-minor impact on hiring decision range. Findings are discussed in relation to professional dispositions, categories of information that may influence hiring decisions, and internet use policies. Implications based on the data from this study include the need to develop state and university policies for SNS use. Finally, the results of this study indicate that further research into hiring administrators’ use of data from SNS in hiring decisions is warranted.

Agreement between assays for the detection of human herpesvirus 8 (HHV-8) antibodies has been limited. In part, this disagreement has been because assay calibration (i.e., differentiating positive from negative results) has not been done in a standardized fashion with reference to a wide spectrum of HHV-8-infected (true-positive) and HHV-8-uninfected (true-negative) persons. To describe the performance of an assay for HHV-8 antibodies more accurately, we used epidemiologically well-characterized subjects in conjunction with testing on two existing immunofluorescence assays for HHV-8 antibodies to define two groups: a group of 135 HHV-8-infected individuals (true positives), including Kaposi's sarcoma patients and those asymptomatically infected, and a group of 234 individuals with a high likelihood of being HHV-8 uninfected (true negatives). A new enzyme immunoassay (EIA), using lysed HHV-8 virion as the antigen target, was then developed. With the above true positives and true negatives as references, the sensitivity and specificity of the EIA associated with different cutoff values were determined. At the cutoff that maximized both sensitivity and specificity, sensitivity was 94% and specificity was 93%. When the EIA was used to test a separate validation group, a distribution of seropositivity that matched that predicted for the agent of Kaposi's sarcoma was observed: 55% of homosexual men were seropositive, versus 6% seropositivity in a group of children, women, and heterosexual men. It is proposed that the EIA has utility for large-scale use in a number of settings and that the calibration method described can be used for other assays, both to more accurately describe the performance of these assays and to permit more-valid interassay comparison.

El trabajo de investigación versa sobre las realidades sudamericanas, en especial las de países como Argentina y Brasil, cuanto la regulación del matrimonio universal. De ese modo, el artículo buscará elucidar algunas cuestiones importantes sobre el tema, permitiendo una interpretación más amplia sobre la orientación sexual homosexual y la necesidad de reducción de obstáculos que impidan el acceso a los mismos derechos, con las mismas denominaciones que a de las personas heterosexuales. Para la metodología del estudio, se utilizó una investigación multidisciplinar, es decir, un abordaje en distintas ramas como la historia, el derecho, la psicología. La investigación apuntó que las dificultades enfrentadas por las personas homosexuales deben ser amenizadas con la retirada de los impedimentos que inviabilizan el acceso a los mismos derechos que a los que ya cuentan con la debida protección.

<p>La presente reflexión pretende presentar de manera sistemática y descriptiva principalmente el estado actual del matrimonio civil homosexual y de las uniones de hecho de igual carácter en nuestro país con alguna referencia al Derecho de Familia español. La propuesta temática a desarrollar es la siguiente:</p><p> </p><p>1. En cuanto a la unión marital permanente de hecho entre compañeros, mostrar como en Colombia la pretensión de aplicación igualitaria de las normas que regulan la Unión permanente de hecho entre parejas heterosexuales y homosexuales pasa por un tamiz que deja entrever claramente que dicha pretensión es un sofisma de distracción que paradójicamente le hace el juego a una sociedad democráticamente diferenciada entre el que se considera “el orden normal” y “orden anormal” de las apetencias sexuales y afectivas de los ciudadanos.</p><p>2. En cuanto al matrimonio civil entre personas del mismo sexo, recordar al respecto la polémica de variada intensidad generada en la mayoría de los países del mundo por su legalización, incluidos aquellos donde existe actualmente protección legal del matrimonio homosexual.</p><p>Author shows what is the legal situation of civil same sex marriage at the moment in Colombia and, comparetively, in Spain. In order to complete this explanation, the author offers a detailed exposition about history and present of same sex partnership in Colombia and Spain</p>

Objective: To review the published literature in relation to prevalence of HIV infection and risk behaviours for HIV among the mentally ill to assist in the development of appropriate strategies for public health policy, surveillance and clinical management of HIV and HIV risk in these groups. Method: A search of published literature was carried out using ‘Medline’, in association with following up appropriate papers cited in the References of journals identified. Results: The North American literature shows an increased risk of HIV infection in psychiatric patients receiving treatment in both inpatient or community settings. HIV infection is associated with a number of risk behaviours, particularly male homosexual sex and injecting drug use, and being the sexual partner of a person with a history of these. Impulsivity, high levels of sexual activity during acute exacerbations of psychiatric illness, poor skills at negotiating safe sex, homelessness and drug abuse are all risk behaviours common among those affected by some mental illnesses. The mentally ill also have a comparatively poorer knowledge of HIV/AIDS. There is a dearth of published Australian data addressing the question of HIV seroprevalence or risk in the mentally ill. Although there has been development and implementation of HIV risk-reduction programs overseas, the development and evaluation of any programs in Australia has not been published. Conclusions: Arguably, Australia has developed a comprehensive program of national surveillance for HIV infection and has been relatively successful in its response to the HIV epidemic, with the high rates of infection in the early to mid-1980s substantially reduced to around 600 new diagnoses per year. However, while risk behaviours which exposed those infected with the virus are recorded, underlying conditions which predispose them to these behaviours are not. Nevertheless, there is HIV infection amongst mentally ill and intellectually disabled people in Australia. Examination of the North American experience reveals opportunities to prevent a high rate of HIV infection in those with mental illness in Australia. Such a program would require adequate risk behaviour assessment, appropriate diagnostic testing and management, and development of specific educational interventions which are properly evaluated to ensure their effectiveness.

Sabe-se que a homossexualidade existe desde os primórdios, sendo vivenciada de forma livre. Entretanto, a sociedade atual é composta subjetivamente de muito preconceito, considerando a homossexualidade, uma afronta às normas sociais. Quando a homossexualidade atrela-se ao idoso, o tabu e discriminação intensificam-se, principalmente devido ao julgamento social de que pessoas idosas não sentem atratividade ou não são mais aptas a praticar o sexo. Assim, torna-se importante analisar as dificuldades enfrentadas pelos idosos que são homossexuais, problemática essa que gera muita polêmica, preconceito e estereótipos. A homossexualidade no idoso é um assunto pouco estudado, partindo do pressuposto da escassez de referenciais bibliográficos. Portanto, faz-se necessário a realização de mais pesquisas e estratégias, no intuito de ampliar o grau de conhecimento em relação ao tema. Nesse sentido, este estudo trata-se de uma pesquisa bibliográfica, a partir de artigos científicos, na expectativa de tentar entender o surgimento dessa problemática, como também, tentar encontrar as explicações relacionadas ao estigma da sexualidade no idoso, tendo em vista, que esta era vista de forma natural na antiguidade. Os resultados confirmaram a existência de um tabu em relação à homossexualidade na terceira idade agregado a dois fatores: a homossexualidade e o envelhecimento. Dois temas carregados de preconceitos advindos de uma sociedade heterossexista. Brand expression and repression: Reflections on homosexuality in old age Abstract: It is known that homosexuality has existed since the early days, and lived freely. However, today's society is made up of a lot of prejudice subjectively considering homosexuality an affront to social norms. When homosexuality harnesses to the elderly, the taboo and discrimination intensify if, mainly due to social judgment that older people do not feel attractive or are no longer able to have sex. Thus, it becomes important to analyze the difficulties faced by older people who are homosexual, this issue that generates much controversy, prejudice and stereotypes. Homosexuality in the elderly is a subject little studied, assuming the lack of bibliographical references. Therefore, it is necessary to further research and strategies in order to increase the level of knowledge on the subject. In this sense, this study it is a bibliographic research, from scientific papers, hoping to try to understand the emergence of this problem, but also try to find the explanations regarding the sexuality of stigma in the elderly, given that this it was seen naturally in antiquity. The results confirmed the existence of a taboo about homosexuality in old age added to two factors: homosexuality and aging. Two themes loaded with prejudices arising from a heterosexist society.

Culture deliberates the arts and philosophy, which are considered to be important for the development of civilization and mentality of the people. In a multicultural and multilingual country like India marginalisation of certain communities, including homosexual, is a significant problem that threads the fabric of our society. In modern society, gender and sexuality-based discrimination are witnessed all over the world. The term homosexuality has never gained social acceptance and has been treated down the ages as taboo subjects. Although sexual desires are a matter of instinctive behaviour, yet are controlled by social norms and morals. Therefore, heterosexuality is the only acceptable mode of relationship and is considered as a centre to our culture. The homosexual relationships are still stigmatized as unnatural and unacceptable in Indian social context and therefore often hidden under the shroud of privacy. Mahesh Dattani, an Indian writer, has chosen such taboo subjects and treated them with great confidence and sublimity to bring them from the boundary to the main stream. This paper focuses on the pathetic conditions of those who struggle between instinct and social culture concerning queer theory in the play DO THE NEEDFUL: A RADIO PLAY by Mahesh Dattani.

We investigated the hypothesis that certain signs in the Draw-A-Person projective technique reflect male homosexuality. Human figure drawings from 88 gay and 88 heterosexual men, with no clinical psychological symptoms, were submitted to trained raters who were blind to the purpose of this research. The raters independently judged whether 21 signs, previously referenced in the literature as suggestive of male homosexuality, were present in the figure drawings. Only two signs, hair and hips, differentiated between groups. Results were interpreted in the light of changing social attitudes towards homosexuals and methodological problems of prior studies.

The present study makes an exhaustive review of the conditions and challenges faced by society to transform the school into a truly inclusive, coeducational, and democratic space. It proposes a theoretical model, of a bottom-up nature, to achieve gender equality in the school environment, giving special importance to teacher training. This study evaluates the training in gender equality and coeducation that students with degrees related to teaching are receiving. An analysis is conducted of the presence of attitudes that support the gender/sex system and the identification of relevant female references in a sample of 452 students in the Degree in Primary Education or the University Master’s Degree in Teacher Training for Compulsory Secondary Education, Upper Secondary Education, Vocational Training, and Language Teaching (MUPES). For the collection of information, an ad hoc questionnaire was used that contemplates formative and cultural aspects, together with the Inventory of Ambivalent Sexism (ASI), the Attitudes of Heterosexuals toward Homosexuals (HATH), and the Women in History (WH) scales. Among the main results, the important lack of training in aspects related to gender equality and coeducation, as well as a general lack of knowledge of historical female references, stands out. It can be concluded that, at present, teacher training is still in the early stages of the proposed model.

The Anatomy of the State, Rothbard (2018), American economist and had his article published by the Mises Institute in 2012. Translated and adapted into Brazilian Portuguese by Leandro Augusto Gomes Roque & Fernando Fiori Chiocca. The book is structured in 7 chapters totaling 50 pages. The book is an abstract and illustrative reading of a typical “anatomical” and “physiological” organizational of the state. In order to carry out this work, a survey of the staked work was carried out. The methodology followed the Raposo (2019) process as a basis. Brito e Cunha (2015) apud Bardin (2009). n each page exposes arguments and substantiates its ideals in an expository way to criticize the roots of pro-state thinking. The book exposes the empirical and well-known argument in which it states that the state "is us", that "we are the government". It is generally an efficient form of wealth production, as it requires little effort, even though it is parasitic. Refuting the concept of collectivity of the State. This excerpt concludes by stating that the State is eminently authoritarian, and in its essence corresponds to the sum of the political forces of wealth production, while the private ones, yes, are characterized by the use of the economic means of wealth production. Bibliographic References BARDIN L. Análise de conteúdo. Portugal: Edições 70; 2009. BRITO e CUNHA R. B, GOMES R. Young male homosexuals and their health:a systematic review. Interface (Botucatu). 2015; 19(52):57-70.5–148, 2015. RAPÔSO, C. F. L .et al. LGPD-LEI GERAL DE PROTEÇÃO DE DADOS PESSOAIS EM TECNOLOGIA DA INFORMAÇÃO: Revisão Sistemática. RACE-Revista da Administração, v. 4, p. 58-67, 2019 ROTHBARD, Murray N. Anatomia do estado. LVM Editora, 2018.

FCS-9237, a 5-page fact sheet by Christine Regan and Kate Fogarty, is one in a series of discussions on understanding teen sexuality. It helps adults who work with youth understand what sexual orientation is, the challenges faced by LGBT adolescents, and the stages of homosexual identity development. Includes resource lists and references. Published by the UF Department of Family Youth and Community Sciences, August 2006.

AbstractFocusing on the disciplinary function of humor as an understudied subject in humor studies, this article addresses Qazvini jokes – the contemporary Persian joke cycle targeting men from the Iranian city of Qazvin – as mainstream gender humor that uses ridicule as a means of supporting heteronormativity and fueling homophobia. Adopting an historical-analytical approach and considering examples of and references to Qazvini jokes, I argue that the joke series likely originated as a disciplinary tool to buttress the emerging heteronormative gender order of early modern Iranian society. Contextualized instances of these jokes not only illustrate that this punitive function has endured to the present but also indicate their ongoing homophobic role. This argument problematizes the claim made in humor studies that jokes have no social consequences. Qazvini jokes may be inconsequential in the limited sense that they might not affect attitudes toward their direct targets – that is, individual men of Qazvin – yet their heteronormalizing and homophobic functions clearly speak to larger social structures within Iranian society and culture. This form of ethnic humor both adheres to and informs Iran’s prevailing gender and sexuality norms; as such, in this broader sense, the jokes may indeed have far-reaching consequences.

The experience of homosexuality among Portuguese troops engaged in the colonial wars in Africa (1961-1974) appears primarily in those rare works that do not defend the colonial conflict nor shy away from crises of masculinity. Conversely, works apologetic of Portuguese colonialism are almost exclusively homophobic. In texts that narrate the colonial experience of openly gay writers, such references arise indirectly and in the background. Generally focused on the conflicts and traumas of young soldiers, allusions to homosexual experience negotiate a tension between surrender and self-defensive resistance. That this tension is normally resolved in favor of the latter shows how resistance was not a subversion of heteronormative masculinity; rather, it contributed to the repression of its crisis. The result is a reinforcement of the open homophobia encoded in the revolutionary ideals that led to the events of April 25, 1974.

Background: Same-sex marriage is currently not legalized in China, despite the considerably large number of homosexual and bisexual Chinese populations. At the same time, their holistic health status remains unclear. This is the first scoping review conducted to comprehensively examine all the available literature and map existing evidence on the holistic health of homosexual and bisexual Chinese.Methods: This scoping review used the framework of Arksey and O'Malley and followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis extension for scoping reviews (PRISMA-ScR). A comprehensive search strategy was carried out across 20 English (EN) and Chinese (both traditional and simplified) electronic databases from January 1, 2001, to May 31, 2020. Two reviewers conducted the reference screening and study selection independently and consulted a third senior reviewer whenever a consensus must be achieved. Data extraction was conducted using a structured data form based on the Cochrane template, after which a narrative synthesis of the findings was performed.Results: A total of 2,879 references were included in the final analysis, with 2,478 research articles, 167 reviews, and 234 theses. Regarding the study populations, the vast majority of studies centered on men only (96.46%), especially men who have sex with men (MSM). Only 1.32% of the studies targeted female sexual minorities. The geographical distribution of all research sites was uneven, with most of them being conducted in mainland China (95.96%), followed by Hong Kong (2.05%), Taiwan (2.02%), and Macau (0.06%). Regarding the specific study focus in terms of the health domain, around half of the studies (45.93%) focused on sexual health only, and an additional quarter of the studies (24.15%) investigated both sexual health and social well-being. Meanwhile, the studies focusing on mental health only accounted for approximately 15% of the total.Conclusions: This scoping review revealed that previous research focused more on male than female sexual minorities, on disease-centered surveys than person-centered interventions, and investigations on negative health conditions than positive health promotion. Therefore, investigations centered on the female sexual minorities and corresponding person-centered interventions are highly needed.Review Registration: The protocol of this review has been registered within Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/82r7z) on April 27, 2020.

Mujeres que quieren ejercer su experiencia maternal sin la necesidad de contar con un fecundador conocido o, aunque conocido, no están interesadas en asignarle dicha responsabilidad. Parejas homosexuales, de hombres o mujeres, con o sin hijos, propios o adoptivos. Parejas heterosexuales que libremente han decidido no ser padres. Hombres solos que deciden adoptar, y un sinnúmero de etcéteras que nos hacen pensar en la complejidad de esta nueva realidad.

1997 was a bad year for celebrities. Deng Xiao Ping and Mother Teresa died of old age, Gianni Versace was shot, Princess Diana killed in a car accident, John Denver's plane crashed, Michael Hutchence hung himself and Sonny Bono died in a skiing accident. In each case, the essence of the news story is the extinguishment of life and the consequent extinction of the body. So-called journalism ethics usually prevent photographs of dead bodies (especially when mutilated). However, recently we saw, on the front page of The Courier-Mail, an unnamed Albanian lying in a pool of blood with a clear bullet wound in his head; the lack of photographs of dead celebrities' bodies is therefore political as much as it is influenced by the editors' sense of propriety. Live celebrities fulfil a particular function; what, then, are their bodies made to do in death? I. Versace / Cunanan Gianni Versace was shot on the front steps of his Miami mansion in July 1997, after a morning walk to the local cafe for magazines and coffee. He received two bullets in the head and was pronounced dead on arrival at the local hospital. Ten stories in four magazines carried only two small photographs of paramedics attending Versace on a gurney, despite its obvious newsworthiness. Live Versace is surprisingly absent from the accompanying photographs, where he appears alone, with celebrities or with family (including his lover) just 15 times in 68 photographs. Intriguingly, Versace's body is similarly expunged from the texts. The word 'body' itself also only appears twice in relation to Versace; only one report mentions his cremation and his ashes' return to Italy. Versace's blood, spilling down the steps, appeared much more frequently (textual references plus photos: n=15). Most magazines reported a fan who tore Versace ads from a magazine and sopped them in the designer's blood, but there are no photos of this bizarre act. At no point does any article actually describe Versace as homosexual, although most note that when he was ill in 1996, the press assumed he had HIV/AIDS (in fact, it was cancer). His lover, D'Amico, only appears twice and is only once referred to as such; elsewhere he is a 'companion', 'life partner' and even 'significant other'. What Versace did have, frequently discussed in safe monetary terms, was his business -- a respectable living entity accessible through, importantly, the discourse of family. Anxiety about the continued survival of the eponymous body corporate partially covers the extinction of Versace's fleshly body. So where is Versace's body? The photograph tally gives us an important clue: his alleged murderer, Andrew Cunanan, appears in more photographs (n=16) than the celebrity victim. Importantly, although they supposedly met at an opera, any link between Versace and Cunanan is implied only by the proximity of descriptions of their respective lives. Some texts explicitly suggest the opposite (Time 32): "yet Versace in mid-life, it turns out, was a tempered bon-vivant, a high-glitz homebody. He remarked, 'You can go to a restaurant if you want, but things are always better at home.'" Cunanan's perverse body permeates the texts, too. All stories decribed his career as a "worthy companion" to older, wealthy gay men; all mention his mother's incorrect claim that he was a prostitute. There were 29 references to his preference for "kinky sex" and bondage gear found in his apartment and 41 to a mythical "gay lifestyle" (including references to the "gay scene", "gay bars", "gay hangouts", his alleged work as a gigolo and so on). A suggestion that he might have been HIV-positive (later disproved) also occurred repeatedly. New Weekly devoted its coverage entirely to Cunanan, purporting (however inaccurately) to explain "the lust for fame and rich men that perverted" him (cover); it alone asserted Cunanan had worked as a transsexual prostitute. Increasing Cunanan's apparent perversion were repeated stories that he did this to support a wife and child. Cunanan's sexuality is directly associated with his crimes (see also Crowley): variations on the word 'killer' ('assassin', 'murderer', 'gunman') appear as many times as references to 'kinky' sex. Versace, on the other hand, becomes corporeal; he exists in terms of money, his family, and, finally, in terms of death (passive and active variations of that noun appeared 58 times). In life, Versace's (gay) body was transgressive; in death it was mutilated. By leaving the (transgressive, dead) body out altogether, Versace's narrative became a prosocial tale of capitalist success, a handsome, benign family man destroyed by the 'evil' of a perverted gay lifestyle (Crowley). II. Michael Hutchence Michael Hutchence hung himself -- accidentally or deliberately -- on the door-closing mechanism in his hotel room in November 1997. There are, of course, no photographs of his corpse. However, unlike Versace, Hutchence's body is liberally scattered throughout the text. Direct references to it appear 12 times, including three to his "naked body". We are told in every story that Paula spent 20 minutes alone in the Glebe morgue with his "body". References to his sexuality are also prominent, with variations on the theme (for example, "Michael Hutchence was sex on a stick" -- NW 23) appearing 30 times overall. There were articles on "his harem", featuring photographs of various girlfriends over the years, and Yates's description of his as "the Taj Mahal of crotches" appears repeatedly. Evidently, excessive heterosexuality is more acceptable than transgressive sex. This is quite clear from the determined "suicide" narrative. The British tabloids suggested that Hutchence died practicing autoerotic asphyxiation, a not inconceivable claim, given that some 1000 American men die annually of this practice (see Garos) and in light of Hutchence's apparently overwhelming sexuality. Australian magazines, however, only mentioned that possibility three times in 23 articles from 7 magazines. The assumed fact of suicide was mentioned (directly and euphemistically) 30 times. Suicide is apparently more acceptable than autoeroticism, and it certainly "fits" the Hutchence narrative. The only reason offered for Hutchence's apparently perplexing suicide was despair over the enforced separation from his family. Family is overwhelmingly important in the Hutchence narrative. Photographs of him with Paula and their daughter Tiger Lily, or Paula's and Geldof's three daughters, appear 25 times -- more than Hutchence appears alone (n=21). The total number of photographs of Hutchence with other people only amounts to 27, despite his high-profile career and high-profile lovelife for 18 years before he met Yates. Yates is Hutchence's "lover" more often than D'Amico was Versace's, but she was also his "soulmate", his "girlfriend" and, most often, "the mother of his child". Mention of Hutchence's familial role -- 'daughter/s', 'father/hood', 'dad', 'family' and so on -- appear 44 times. (The only comparable frequency is variations on 'death' such as 'died' or 'dead', not including references to suicide.) This, then, is where Hutchence is recuperated -- the excessive sexuality which, unsaid, may well have led to his death -- disappears completely in family life. Live Hutchence was a sexual wildcard; dead Hutchence is a role model of responsible domesticity. III. Mother Teresa Unlike Versace or Hutchence, Mother Teresa's body caused no trouble when it was alive, and, conveniently, wasn't mangled in death. Six of fifteen photos of her were of her dead body, including a close-up enlarged across two A4 pages. Also included are photos of people holding photos of her, which fits Wark's suggestion that re-presentation helps to create godliness (26). (Interestingly, Diana was the only other 1997 death treated the same way, confirming Frow's point that some deaths are qualitatively different and providing a point for further analysis.) There are photographs of people touching Teresa, and this is mentioned in the text (n=6) more times than her dead body itself (n=3). Interestingly, the fact that she died of a heart attack is nearly absent from the accounts (n=2), although her metaphorical heart looms large (n=9). It is the only part of her live body which was narratively significant. One reason that Mother Teresa's dead body is able to be present, in both pictures and photos, is that her flesh did not need to be replaced with pro-social narrative. Instead, her (tiny) body in life did what society wants women's bodies always to do: she was not just Mother Teresa, but a 'mother' to us all (n=8), chaste (n=3), and always described with diminishing adjectives (n=14). There was none of that pesky female sexuality to deal with, though gender was undeniably significant (she was described as "a woman" 11 times), and of course, it is there in her very name (shortened often to Mother, rather than to 'Teresa' -- she was a role, not a person). The only discourse more powerful -- and intimately connected -- is saintliness (n=38). The sexless (selfless), tiny, maternal body can be displayed, in death, as an icon of the good female. IV. Conclusion In their lifetimes, Michael Hutchence and Gianni Versace both displayed transgressive sexual personae, Hutchence's being excessive and Versace's being 'wrong'. In death, the media deals with this, unsurprisingly, by replacing the now absent bodies with a pro-social narrative. This is taking Foucault's proposition that the body is ultimately the site where ideology is practiced to a whole new realm, since ideology was forced to wait till the bodies stopped to reclaim them for its own. It also reinforces the sense that a "free" (live) body is somehow beyond ideology (Hutchence was apparently practicing just this when he died). Soon after Versace, Diana's death prompted stories of why the good die young (Bulletin 23 Sep. 97, 71-2). However, this article shows that, patently, the good live to 87 and those who die young often don't "come good" until they die. References Becker, Karin E. "Photojournalism and the Tabloid Press." Journalism and Popular Culture. Eds. Peter Dahlgren and Colin Sparks. London: Sage, 1993. 130-153. Crowley, Harry. "'Homocidal Homosexual': Media Coverage of the Versace Murder Case." The Advocate 741 (2 Sep. 1997): 24+. Frow, John. "Is Elvis a God? Cult, Culture, Questions of Method." International Journal of Cultural Studies 1.2 (1998): 197-210. Garos, Sheila. "Autoerotic Asphyxiation: A Challenge to Death Educators and Counselors." Omega -- The Journal of Death and Dying (Farmingdale) 28.2 (Feb. 1994): 85-100. Wark, Mckenzie. "Elvis: Listen to the Loss." Art and Text 31 (Dec.-Feb. 1989): 24-28. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Rebecca Farley. "The Word Made Flesh: Media Coverage of Dead Celebrities." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.3 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/dead.php>. Chicago style: Rebecca Farley, "The Word Made Flesh: Media Coverage of Dead Celebrities," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 3 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/dead.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Rebecca Farley. (1999) The word made flesh: media coverage of dead celebrities. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(3). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/dead.php> ([your date of access]).

"... sphincters have no souls."-- Germaine Greer. "Love." The Whole Woman. 222. "Place your hands on my (w?)hole, run your fingers through my soul..." -- Gary Stringer. "Place Your Hands." Glow. A remarkable pseudo-sodomitical sight gag in the Hollywood comedy film Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me brings to mainstream discourse two new queer desiring and desired figures: the man-fisting woman and the woman-fisted man. The simulated act of anal fisting occurs in a tent between leading male and female agents Austin Powers (Mike Myers) and Felicity Shagwell (Heather Graham). While Powers is on all fours, Shagwell inserts her hand and forearm into his utility bag and removes various objects including an opening umbrella and a gerbil. However, to a posse of astounded males hiding in the bushes, it appears in silhouette that Shagwell has inserted her fist into Power's rectum and is slowly removing the objects from deep inside his anal canal. This subversive heterosexual performance draws upon marginalised visual narratives of female and male sodomites. The queer man-fisting woman comprises a revolutionary feminist figure. Before surfacing to stake her claim in Austin Powers, the figure of the fisting woman gathered representational momentum in underground pornographic and erotic visual art discourses. Until recently, queer female sodomites penetrated males by finger or dildo, not by whole hand. For example, an erotic sadomasochistic (SM) drawing from the 1930s by Bernard Montorgueil (Néret backflap) depicts several clothed women stimulating the ani of various naked tied-up ejaculating men with small mechanical dildos. A pornographic photograph from the 1950s features a bikini-wearing woman with her strapped-on dildo in the anus of a naked reclining spread-legged man (Waugh 20). By the 1990s images of female-in-male fisting acts had appeared in coffee table art monographs. Jacqueline Kennedy's photograph Other Chambers (Salaman 138) depicts such a scene with only the braceleted arm and male torso showing. Andres Serranos' photograph The History of Sex (The Fisting) shows a fully-dressed erect woman with her fist in the anus of a naked man who poses on all fours at the bottom of the picture. One of Doris Kloster's SM photographs shows a man sandwiched between two women. The strapped-on dildo of one woman fills the man's mouth while that of the other woman projects into his rectum. These female sodomites seemingly merge the figures of the SM dominatrix and the female penetrator of males, to form a new creation that could be named the 'penetratrix'. Queer performance artist Annie Sprinkle, who (as "Queen of the Hellfire" SM club) fist-fucked a man up to her elbow (Heidenry 161), is one such pioneering penetratrix. Another is queer writer Zoë Schramm-Evans, who has documented her fistfucking relationship with a gay man in British journal, Body Politic. Schramm-Evans probably speaks for other penetratrices when she declares of her desires to fist the male anus: "I like a man who will lie on his back with his legs in the air -- who will offer his secrets in the way I offer mine. I consider this an equilibrium" (cited in Dowsett 28). The man-fisting penetratrix is a queer production that brings narratives of corporeal cross-sexual power relationships full circle: the penetrator is now the penetrated. The inscription of Felicity as 'top' would not work without Austin as 'bottom' -- a heterosexual male persona that embodies the pleasure of being penetrated by a female agent. The image of anal-receptive Austin draws on the pantheon of fisted gay, bisexual and heterosexual men that have featured in representations of the fisting female sodomite, such as those already mentioned. Other influential works might include Andres Serrano's photograph The History of Sex (Christiaan and Rose) (1996), which depicts a woman pressing the dildo worn over her vulva against a man's buttocks. The cover of Enema of the State, a compact disc by all-male heterosexual band Blink-182, contains a photograph of a smiling female nurse pulling a blue glove over her raised hand. The extended Shagwell-in-Powers fisting gag entails from a history of 'red hanky' SM representations of gay male anal erotica which has tested the diametric limits of the most dilatable orifice in the male body. Examples include Robert Mapplethorpe's photograph Helmut and Brooks, N.Y.C., 1978 (Danto plate 107), which shows one man's large forearm in another's anus, and the Mo' Bigga' Butt video which has two male hands in a male anus. One patron of the Hellfire reportedly could take "an entire rack of billiard balls up his rectum" (Heidenry 161). Such inter-male sexual practices produce "intense sexual pleasure while bypassing, to a greater or lesser extent, the genitals themselves" and involve "the eroticisation of non-genital regions of the body" (Halperin 47). In countenance to standard heterosexual productions in which "the phallus is monolithic and absolute", in these gay male productions "attraction to the penis, contextualized in a holistically eroticized body, is not always the focus of sexual desire" (Jackson 147). In Homosexual Desire, Guy Hocquenghem contended that the gay sauna, a private inter-male consensual sex sphere of the 1970s, would provide a pornutopian space for such "primary sexual communism" (111). In the contemporary popular screen production Austin Powers, the fisted man has become a public, post-orgasmic, de-phallicised object of heterosexual female desire. Man-fisting females and woman-fisted males con-fuse the modern sex/gender identities deployed this century to categorise desiring agents. At the end of his article "What Is Sexuality?", Gary Dowsett asks of the Schramm-Evans female-in-male fisting relationship, "in being fist-fucked by a woman is the gay man still homosexual? In committing sodomy with her arm, is Schramm-Evans still woman?" (29). We could ask similar questions about the gender identities and sexual desires of the queer women, men, and transgenderists, who have contributed to the imag(in)ing of the 'penetratrix'. The simple answer may be that all are 'bisexual/s'. However, gay, lesbian, bisexual and heterosexual categories of identity hinge upon desires for specific (similar and/or different) genital morphologies. These identities are upset by performances such as anal-fisting which inscribe organs with omnisexual, non-genital morphologies as objects of desire. In lesbian-in-gay fisting performances "not only has gender been exposed as a masquerade in the service of modern heterosexuality, sexuality has become a field of possibilities where the entanglements of bodies and pleasures and the manufacture of meaning are already bursting through their century-long confinement" (Dowsett 29). Feminists such as Germaine Greer have reformulated sexual metaphors to challenge narratives that define woman as castrated lack. In The Whole Woman, Greer explains that her earlier feminist text, The Female Eunuch, "attempted to provide a different version of female receptivity by speaking of the vagina ... as if it sucked on the penis and emptied it out rather than simply receiving the ejaculate" (39). She now notes that such "cunt-power" has "still to manifest itself". Instead, "penetration mania, the outsize dildo and the fist, [and] the world split open" (39) have manifested "in the last third of the twentieth century [when] more women were penetrated deeper and more often than in any preceeding era" (6). On all these accounts Greer is correct but offers only part of the story. Her desire to change (heterosexual) women's views of their (and male) anatomies is admirable, but such new (hetero)sexual metaphors alone may have negligible effects on male viewpoints. Let's also note that, in the last thirty years, more men were penetrated through the anus (and other orifices) deeper, wider, and more often than ever before (in medical and sexual, indeed, any contexts). Also significantly, more women actively penetrated more men (and more women) deeper, wider and more often than ever before. Man's world and body are also splitting open, and women, too, are wielding dildos and fists and medical equipment to make them split. Queer women who directly act on their desires to infiltrate male bodies (while doing as they desire with their own vulvae) also create cunt-power. It may be most difficult for theorists, including some queer theorists, who have cast the lesbian feminist "with or without dildo" as "the dreaded figure of castration and lack" (Probyn 46) to so typify a queer woman who twists her fist into a male anus. The potential power of the newly arrived male-fisting penetratrix is palpable for women and men. Thus, the penetratrix, as an image "freed from its post within a structure of law, lack, and signification, can begin to move all over the place. It then causes different ripples and affects, effects of desire and desirous affects. Turning away from the game of matching signifiers to signifieds, we can begin to focus on the movement of images as effecting and affecting movement" (Probyn 59). The moving image of Felicity Shagwell with her forearm supposedly in Austin Power's anus has the potential to unleash a new chain of queer sexual metaphors. It may be most difficult for theorists, including some queer theorists, who have cast the lesbian feminist "with or without dildo" as "the dreaded figure of castration and lack" (Probyn 46) to so typify a queer woman who twists her fist into a male anus. The potential power of the newly arrived male-fisting penetratrix is palpable for women and men. Thus, the penetratrix, as an image "freed from its post within a structure of law, lack, and signification, can begin to move all over the place. It then causes different ripples and affects, effects of desire and desirous affects. Turning away from the game of matching signifiers to signifieds, we can begin to focus on the movement of images as effecting and affecting movement" (Probyn 59). The moving image of Felicity Shagwell with her forearm supposedly in Austin Power's anus has the potential to unleash a new chain of queer sexual metaphors. What better way for men to understand some of the pleasure and pain involved in vaginal births or deep vaginal penetrations than to have (at least imagined) a large object going in and out of their rectum? Rather than trying to formulate such rhetoric, Greer claims that men are correct to resist regular ano-digital examinations for prostate problems. Now that heterosexual men have begun to experience physical insertions that rupture their monolithic masculinity, Greer discourages them. Critical reactions to the groundbreaking images of the male-penetrating female in Austin Powers have been mixed. In the national newspaper Evan Williams remarked rather uncomfortably that "the silhouetted extraction of assorted paraphernalia from Austin's backside -- go[es] on much too long". On national youth radio Michael Tunn rather excitedly praised the gag as "the funniest I've seen". At the cinema I attended, several adults giggled during the scene. I was bent over in hysterics while a young woman up behind me laughed most powerfully. Did the sudden stunned silence of a teenage male who had been sniggering with desire for Heather Graham's body hide his excited discomfort at the realisation of her phallic desiring power and his desire to be penetrated? Clearly, a chord had been struck deep within him. The positive subversive effects on children exposed to the graphic imaging of reversed bodily sex and gender rôles should also not be underestimated. The queer man-fisting woman reconfigures standard feminist sexual (pre)positions. To the heterocentric paradigm of woman-on-top and man-on-bottom have been added the queer figures of the woman-as-top and the man-as-bottom. The genito-centric anti-penetration agenda espoused in The Whole Woman denies the desires and effects of such man-penetrating female and woman-penetrated male agents. Austin Powers, on the other hand, celebrates these desiring figures in a climactic gender-fucking pièce de résistance. This Hollywood film only flirts with notions of fistfucking but is a credit to collaborating heterosexual actors Mike Myers and Heather Graham. Their queer simulated penetration scene comprises the film's most graphic and comedic representation of a (hetero)sexual act. At the end of the millennium, some women are taking matters of queer politics in hand, by raising their clenched feminist fists for a new sexual revolution. Some men are opening their ani wide to them and the pleasures and pains of (pomo)sexual equality, with rippling desires to become fulfilled queer male (w)holes. References Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. Dir. M. Jay Roach. New Line Cinema, 1999. Blink-182. Enema of the State. MCA 1999. Danto, Arthur C. Mapplethorpe. New York: Random House, 1992. Dowsett, Gary. "What Is Sexuality?: A Bent Answer to a Straight Question." Meanjin 55.1 (1996): 16-30. Greer, Germaine. The Whole Woman. London: Doubleday. 1999. Halperin, David M. "Becoming Homosexual: Michel Foucault on the Future of Gay Writing." Island 63 (Winter 1995): 44-51. Heidenry, John. What Wild Ecstasy: The Rise and Fall of the Sexual Revolution. Port Melbourne, Vic.: William Heinemann, 1997. Hocquenghem, Guy. Homosexual Desire. 1972. Trans. Daniella Dangoor. Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1993. Jackson, Earl. "Explicit Instruction: Teaching Gay Male Sexuality in Literature Classes." Professions of Desire: Lesbian and Gay Studies in Literature. Ed. George E. Haggerty and Bonnie Zimmerman. New York: MLA, 1995: 136-155. Kloster, Doris. Doris Kloster: Photographs. Cologne: Benedikt Taschen, 1996. Mo' Bigga' Butt. Dir. Steven Scarborough. Plain Wrapped Video, 1997. Néret, Gilles, ed. Erotica Universalis. Cologne: Benedikt Taschen, 1996. Probyn, Elspeth. Outside Belongings. New York: Routledge, 1996. Salaman, Naomi, ed. What She Wants: Women Artists Look at Men. London: Verso, 1994. Schramm-Evans, Zoë. "Internal Politics." Body Politic 4 (1993). Serrano, Andres. The History of Sex (The Fisting). 1996. ---. The History of Sex (Christiaan and Rose). 1996. Stringer, Gary, voc. "Place Your Hands." Glow. By Reef. Sony, 1997. Tunn, Michael. Lunch. Triple J. 4JJJ, Brisbane. 28 June 1999. Waugh, Thomas. Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall. New York: Columbia UP, 1996. Williams, Evan. "Knickers in a Twist." Weekend Australian Review 19-20 June 1999: 21. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Simon-Astley Scholfield. "Newly Desiring and Desired: Queer Man-Fisting Women." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.5 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/queer.php>. Chicago style: Simon-Astley Scholfield, "Newly Desiring and Desired: Queer Man-Fisting Women," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 5 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/queer.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Simon-Astley Scholfield. (1999) Newly desiring and desired: queer man-fisting women. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(5). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/queer.php> ([your date of access]).

Images of anal flesh have been flashed on Australian television in the popular animated American 'kidult' cartoon series, Ren and Stimpy (1991-95) and South Park (1997-). Ren and Stimpy relates the tales of two male human-voiced animals: Ren, a skinny hyperactive chihuahua, and Stimpy, his stupid fat cat friend. The "Son of Stimpy" and "Blazing Entrails" episodes of the series contain landmark references to the anus which have informed the broader range of representations of the orifice in the South Park series. South Park explores the lives of four pre-pubescent Colorado schoolboys -- Stan, Kyle, Cartman and Kenny. Commentary about the excessive depictions of violence and viscera in these masculinist comedy cartoons has avoided analysis of their representations of anal flesh. How have ani been represented in these popular cultural productions? "Son Of Stimpy" pioneered with a narrative of male anal birth. At Christmas, Stimpy passes his first fart. His bare buttocks gurgle and a fart cloud rises and disappears. Stimpy's anus is not visually (re)presented. His attempts to produce another fart fail. Stimpy and "Stinky" search desperately for each other. Stinky, the personified fart, resembles a wrinkled hybrid of Casper The Friendly Ghost and Tweety Bird. Appearing outside the closed window of Ren and Stimpy's bedroom, Stinky ogles the sleeping Stimpy's unreachable buttocks. "Oh why did I leave home? I'll never find a home as warm and snuggly as the one I left", he reflects on Stimpy's anus. Father and son eventually meet, the adult Stinky marries a rotting dead codfish, and the newly-weds then live in Ren's nostrils. As probably the most conspicuously homoerotic televised cartoon, "Son of Stimpy" also shows Ren flirtatiously snuggling up to Stimpy under some mistletoe, the pair sharing a bed, and reminiscences about their nuptials. Thus, the unavoidable thrust of this play is that Stinky-the-fart (the son) was farted (born) through the anus of Stimpy (the male mother) after sodomitical penetration by Ren (Stinky's father). Moreover, Stimpy's search for his fart-child and Ren's relishing of Stinky's smell provide a clear metaphor for Ren and Stimpy's continuing desire for more fun, fart-producing, "gay", an(im)al sex. Although Stimpy's anus and Ren's penis are not depicted, the fleshy intercourse between them (that produced the cherished Stinky) can hardly be ignored in the imagination of the viewer. "Blazing Entrails" includes a groundbreaking image of inner male anal flesh. The title refers to Blazing Saddles with its famous comedy scene involving bean-eating, farting cowboys. The plot loosely reworks that of Fantastic Voyage, with Ren taking a crazed Stimpy to see a scientist who inflates him into a giant. Ren then travels through Stimpy's (unseen) anal sphincter (in a significant departure from the plot of Voyage). Ren is shown reading The Bowel Daily News on a speeding subway train that travels along the giant Stimpy's rectum. After this close-up depiction of Ren's (total body) penetration of Stimpy's anal canal, Ren travels via various vital organs to Stimpy's brain, which he shatters. Stimpy soon recovers. The fundamental thrust is that Ren 'fucks Stimpy brainless' through his anus for another mutually happy ending. The South Park series (Parker and Stone) also contains spectacular depictions of anal birth, a personified anal product, and anal sex between male animals. However, none lead to consensual homoerotic ecstasy. In "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe", which spoofs Communion, Cartman is raped in his sleep by male space aliens who penetrate his anus with a probe. Thus 'impregnated', he experiences immense pain (and ridicule), until his blazing anus delivers an enormous satellite dish. Instead of Stinky-the-fart, South Park features the more 'fleshy' Mr Hankey, a non-denominational talking Christmas turd that resembles Mr Potato Head. "Big Gay Al's Gay Boat Ride" contains the only reference to 'gay' male sex in the series. Sparky, a stray "gay homosexual" dog mounts another male canine before anally raping yet another. The anus is not depicted in these scenes. Anything but eroticised, the unexposed human male anus is valorised in South Park as an arsenal of multiple farts which are either deployed as weapons against male enemies, or shared between male friends as penultimate acts of affection and sacrifice. In "Not without My Anus", Terrance and Phillip organise a stadium full of Canadians to don gasmasks and fart on cue, thus generating an enormous cloud of gas that kills Saddam Hussein. In "Chicken Pox", Phillip worries that he "won't be able to fart anymore", due to his anal cancer. After he and Terrance appear in surgery with their buttocks and heads (but not ani) exposed, the two men literally 'bond' through an (unseen) "anal transplant". Terrance donates half his anus to Phillip, who happily farts again after the successful operation. The "Cow Days" episode of South Park includes close-up images depicting the outside and inside of an anus. The Chamber of Farts sideshow ride first appears from the outside as a giant pair of pink body-less buttocks, decorated with a vampire bat, spider and cobwebs. After buying tickets, the schoolboys take the traincar ride into the Chamber through the front door -- a giant asterisk which designates the anal sphincter. Inside, the boys pass clothed male dummies (one with a bare front bottom) and a farting black oval anus. They exit through a back door between the spread legs of a farting clothed female dummy. This arrangement codes the anal chamber as female (or feminised), with the rear door configured as a 'pussy-farting' vagina, or (to borrow a gay term for the male anus), as 'backpussy'. Therein, the confusing boys-in-the-train-in-the-haunted-Chamber-of-Farts scenario seemingly expresses heterosexual male anxieties about engaging in (paid group) penetration of a female anus, because the act too readily evokes visions of the beastly queer male things gay men and Sparky do with (their or other) male ani. Eve Sedgwick has stressed that "there has been no important and sustained [modern] Western discourse in which women's anal eroticism means anything" (129). In the form of the Chamber of Farts, the eroticised female anus has been conflated by hysterical heterosexual males to mean something horrific. There are few other farting females in these cartoons. In the "Powdered Toast Man with Vitamin 'F'" segment of Ren and Stimpy, a girl and boy fart after eating Powdered Toast. An empowering image of an exploding atomic bomb is superimposed only over the fart-inflated pants of the girl. In South Park's "Not Without My Anus", Terrance's baby daughter farts once, but only to establish her resemblance to her father. Women contribute only in long shot to the fart cloud that kills Saddam Hussein. While the female anus is demeaned in South Park, other female flesh is overwhelmingly cast as terrifying. Barbara Creed has demonstrated that classic horror films feature seven female archetypes (archaic mother, monstrous womb, vampire, witch, possessed body, monstrous mother and castrator) that express male fears of the mythical vagina dentata. Versions of these 'monstrous-feminine' figures in South Park include the Conjoined Fetus Lady; Frieda (the herpes-spreading prostitute); Cartman's highly-sexed hermaphrodite-born mother; Aunt Flo (the red-haired "monthly visitor" who personifies menstruation and gives away a serial killer fish), Barbra Streisand's "spooky" face; Wendy and Ms Crabtree (with their gnashing teeth); and Stan's mother with her herpes-infected genitalia. While male genitals are celebrated in South Park, the anus is configured as the most grotesque zone of male flesh, sometimes through misogynist references. The penis and "chocolate salty balls" of the black man, Chef, are praised through descriptive (heterosexual) innuendo. One father's insult to another, "I wasn't born with a silver enema up my ass", exploits the experiences of birthing women who have received enemas. In Ren and Stimpy, on the other hand, horrific (hairy, muscled, excretive, male) flesh belongs to hyper-masculine bodies, and sex organs other than male genitalia are celebrated. The joyous anal birth of Stinky mimics, yet edifies, non-vaginal birth. Stinky-the-fart and his female codfish wife celebrate the joining of the odours of anal and vaginal flesh, which they respectively incarnate. Key episodes of Ren and Stimpy provided the seminal subversive representations of ani in the history of televised animated cartoons. In "Son of Stimpy" and "Blazing Entrails", the meta(eu)phoric valorisation of the creativity of gay anal eroticism, orgasmic farting, and gay fatherhood (through metadiegetic narratives of inter-male conception and anal birth) challenges the dominant homophobic culture which demonises the (anal) sexuality of gay men and denies them access to reproductive technologies and families. Ren and Stimpy also pioneered with a skit celebrating the farting power of the female anus. In South Park, these subversive themes have been twisted into misogynist and homophobic contexts. Perhaps the anal transplant innovatively satirises the seriousness of rectal (bowel, colon, and prostate) cancers. However, this scenario is overshadowed by the show's gynophobic grotesquerie of female flesh, exemplified by the disturbing graphic imag(in)ing of the sexualised farting female anus as a chamber of horrors. The representation of collective killer ani and inter-male (human and animal) anal rape as comedy, is also disturbing. There are no references to fleshy practices -- such as anal masturbation, pleasurable inter-male or inter-female human anal eroticism, or female penetrations of male ani -- which could upset the hetero-masculinist homosocial phallologocentric order. How sad. References Blazing Entrails." Dir. Bob Camp. Ren and Stimpy 4.43 (1994).Nickelodeon. The Ren and Stimpy Prime Time Show. TVQ10, Brisbane. 9 April 1995. Blazing Saddles. Dir. Mel Brooks. Warner Bros., 1974. Communion. Dir. Philippe Mora. Allied Vision, 1989. Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous~Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, 1993. Fantastic Voyage. Dir. Richard Fleischer. 20th Century Fox, 1966. "Powdered Toast man with Vitamin 'F'." Dir. John Kricfalusi. Ren and Stimpy 3.27 (1993). Nickelodeon. Big Breakfast. TVQ10, Brisbane. 14 May 1994. "Son of Stimpy." Dir. John Kricfalusi. Ren and Stimpy 2.19 (1992). Nickelodeon. The Ren and Stimpy Prime Time Show. TVQ10, Brisbane. 1995. Parker, Trey, and Matt Stone, dirs. "Big Gay Al's Big Gay Boat Ride." South Park 1.4 (1997). Comedy Partners/Celluloid Studios, U.S.A. SBS, Brisbane. 19 Oct. 1998. ---, dirs. "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe." South Park 1.1 (1997). SBS, Brisbane. 28 Sept. 1998. ---, dirs. "Chicken Pox." South Park 2.10 (1998). SBS, Brisbane. 12 Oct. 1998. ---, dirs. "Cowdays." South Park 2.13 (1998). SBS, Brisbane. 23 Nov. 1998. ---, dirs. "Mr Hankey." South Park 1.10 (1997). SBS, Brisbane. 5 Oct. 1998. ---, dirs. "Not Without My Anus." South Park 2.01 (1998). SBS, Brisbane. 31 Aug. 1998. Sedgwick, Eve K. "A Poem Is Being Written." Representations 17 (1987): 110-143. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Simon-Astley Scholfield. "How Funny?: Spectacular Ani in Animated Television Cartoons." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.3 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/funny.php>. Chicago style: Simon-Astley Scholfield, "How Funny?: Spectacular Ani in Animated Television Cartoons," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 3 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/funny.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Simon-Astley Scholfield. (1999) How funny?: spectacular ani in animated television cartoons. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(3). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/funny.php> ([your date of access]).

Introduction Gore Vidal, the famous writer and literary critic, was recently buried next to his long-term partner, Howard Austen. The couple, who met in the 1950s, had lived together happily for decades. They were in many ways the kind of same-sex couple frequently valorised in contemporary gay marriage campaigns. Vidal and Austen, however, could not serve as emblematic figures for this campaign, and not only because the two men had no interest in marriage. Vidal, who reportedly had over a hundred lovers, both male and female, once attributed the longevity of their relationship to its platonic nature; both men continued to sleep with other people, and they reportedly stopped having sex with each other after they moved in together (Vidal, Palimpsest, 131–32). A relationship that decoupled monogamy, romance, companionship, and sexuality, and reconnected them in a way that challenged the accepted truths of institutionalised marriage, stands as an implicit questioning of the way in which gay marriage campaigns construct the possibilities for life, love, and sex. It is this questioning that we draw out in this article. In his writing, Vidal also offers a perspective that challenges the assumptions and certainties of contemporary politics around gay marriage. In 1981, he wrote “Some Jews and the Gays” in response to an article entitled “The Boys on the Beach” by conservative Jewish writer Midge Decter. Vidal’s riposte to Decter’s depiction of the snide superiority of the “boys” who disturbed her beachside family holidays highlighted the lack of solidarity conservative members of the Jewish community displayed towards another persecuted minority. From Vidal’s perspective, this was because Decter could not conceive of gay identity as anything other than pathological: Since homosexualists choose to be the way they are out of idle hatefulness, it has been a mistake to allow them to come out of the closet to the extent that they have, but now that they are out (which most are not), they will have no choice but to face up to their essential hatefulness and abnormality and so be driven to kill themselves with promiscuity, drugs, S-M, and suicide. (Vidal, Some Gays) In response, Vidal made a strong case for solidarity between Jews, African-Americans, and what he termed “homosexualists” (or “same-sexers”). More importantly for our argument, he also contested Decter’s depiction of the typical homosexual: To begin to get at the truth about homosexualists, one must realise that the majority of those millions of Americans who prefer same-sex to other-sex are obliged, sometimes willingly and happily but often not, to marry and have children and to conform to the guidelines set down by the heterosexual dictatorship. (Vidal, Some Gays) According to Vidal, Decter’s article applied only to a relatively privileged section of homosexualists who were able to be “self-ghettoized”, and who, despite Decter’s paranoid fantasies, lived lives perfectly “indifferent to the world of the other-sexers.” In the thirty years since the publication of “Some Jews and the Gays” much has clearly changed. It is unlikely that even a conservative publication would publish an article that depicts all homosexualists as marked by idle hatefulness. However, Decter’s self-hating homosexualist continues to haunt contemporary debates about same-sex marriage, albeit in sublimated form. Critiques of gay marriage campaigns, which are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore, often focus on the politics of inclusion and exclusion, whether on the terrain of gender (non)conformity (Spade), or the campaigns’ implicit and racialised assumption of a white, middle-class homosexual couple as the subject of their efforts (Riggs; Farrow). While our article is indebted to these critiques, our argument is focused more specifically on the unintended effect of the Australian debate about same-sex marriage, namely the (re)creation of the married couple’s other in the form of the adolescent, promiscuous, and unhappy homosexual. It is here that we find the source of our title, also chosen in tribute to Vidal, who in his life and writing disrupts this dichotomy. We argue that the construction of the respectable white middle-class same-sexer who sits at the centre of gay marriage discourse relies on a contemporary manifestation of the self-hating homosexualist – the sexually irresponsible queer constructed in contrast to the responsible gay. The first half of this article traces this construction. In the second section, we argue that this process cannot be divorced from the ways that advocates of same-sex marriage depict the institution of marriage. While critics such as Judith Butler have attempted to separate arguments against homophobic discrimination from the need to advocate for marriage, we argue that the two are intrinsically linked in marriage equality campaigns. These campaigns seek to erase both the explicit critique of marriage found in Vidal’s article and the implicit possibility of living otherwise found in his life. Instead of a heterosexual dictatorship that can be successfully avoided, marriage is proclaimed to be not only benign but the only institution capable of saving self-hating queers from misery by turning them into respectable gay married couples. This is, therefore, not an article about today’s Midge Decters, but about how contemporary same-sex marriage supporters rely on a characterisation of those of us who would or could not choose to marry as, to return to Vidal (Some Jews), “somehow evil or inadequate or dangerous.” As queer people who continue to question both the desirability and inevitability of marriage, we are ultimately concerned with thinking through the political consequences of the same-sex marriage campaign’s obsessive focus on normative sexuality and on the supposedly restorative function of the institution of marriage itself. Hateful Queers and Patient Gays Contemporary supporters of gay marriage, like Vidal so many years earlier, do often oppose conservative attempts to label homosexualists as inherently pathological. Tim Wright, the former convenor of “Equal Love,” one of Australia’s primary same-sex marriage campaign groups, directly addressing this in an opinion piece for Melbourne’s The Age newspaper, writes, “Every so often, we hear them in the media calling homosexuals promiscuous or sick.” Disputing this characterisation, Wright supplants it with an image of patient lesbians and gay men “standing at the altar.” Unlike Vidal, however, Wright implicitly accepts the link between promiscuity and pathology. For Wright, homosexuals are not sick precisely because, and only to the extent that they accept, a forlorn chastity, waiting for their respectable monogamous sexuality to be sanctified through matrimony. A shared moral framework based upon conservative norms is a notable feature of same-sex marriage debates. Former Rainbow Labor convenor Ryan Heath articulates this most clearly in his 2010 Griffith Review article, excerpts of which also appeared in the metropolitan Fairfax newspapers. In this article, Heath argues that marriage equality would provide a much-needed dose of responsibility to “balance” the rights that Australia has accorded to homosexuals. For Heath, Australia’s gay and lesbian communities have been given sexual freedoms by an indulgent adult (heterosexual) society, but are not sufficiently mature to develop the social responsibilities that go with them: “Like teenagers getting their hands on booze and cars and freedom from parental surveillance for the first time, Australia’s gay and lesbian communities have enthusiastically taken up their new rights.” For Heath, the immaturity of the (adult) gay community, with its lack of married role models, results in profound effects for same-sex attracted youth: Consider what the absence of role models, development paths, and stability might do to those who cannot marry. Is there no connection between this and the disproportionate numbers of suicides and risky and addictive behaviours found in gay communities? It is this immaturity, rather than the more typically blamed homophobic prejudice, bullying or persecution, that is for Heath the cause of the social problems that disproportionately affect same-sex attracted adolescents. Heath continues, asking why, after journalist Jonathan Rauch, any parent would want to “condemn their child to…‘a partnerless life in a sexual underworld’.” His appeal to well-meaning parental desires for the security and happiness of children echoes countless insidious commentaries about the tragedy of homosexual existence, such as Decter’s above. These same commentaries continue to be used to justify exclusionary and even violent reactions by families and communities when children reveal their (non-heterosexual) sexualities. As for so many social conservatives, for Heath it is inconceivable to view a partnerless life as anything other than tragedy. Like Wright, he is also convinced that if one must be partnerless it is far better to be forlornly chaste than to participate in an “underworld” focused primarily on promiscuous sex. The opinions of those condemned to this purgatorial realm, either through compulsion or their own immaturity, are of little interest to Heath. When he states that “No families and couples I have interviewed in my research on the topic want this insecure existence,” we are to understand that it is only the desires of these responsible adults that matter. In this way, Heath explicitly invokes the image of what Mariana Valverde has called the “respectable same-sex couple”, homosexualists who are socially acceptable because being “same-sex” is the only thing that differentiates them from the white, middle-class norm that continues to sit at the heart of Australian politics. Heath goes on to describe marriage as the best “social safety net”, adopting the fiscal rhetoric of conservatives such as former federal leader of the Liberal party, Malcolm Turnbull. Turnbull argued in 2012’s annual Michael Kirby lecture (a lecture organised by Southern Cross University’s School of Law and Justice in tribute to the retired gay High Court justice) that same-sex marriage would save the state money, as other relationship recognition such as the 2008 Rudd reforms have. In one of the few passages widely reported from his speech he states: “There will plainly be less demand for social services, medical expenses, hospital care if people, especially older people, like Michael [Kirby] and [partner] Johan, live together as opposed to being in lonely isolation consoled only by their respective cats.” Same-sex marriage is not simply a fight for equality but a fight to rescue homosexualists from the immiserated and emotionally impoverished lives that they, through their lack of maturity, have constructed for themselves, and which, after a brief sojourn in the sexual underworld, can only end in a lonely feline-focused existence funded by the responsible citizens that constitute the bulk of society. We are told by gay marriage advocates that the acceptance of proper adult relationships and responsibilities will not only cure the self-hatred of same-sexers, but simultaneously end the hatred expressed through homophobia and bullying. In the most recent Victorian state election, for example, the Greens ran an online Q&A session about their policies and positions in which they wrote the following in response to a question on relationship recognition: “It would create a more harmonious, less discriminatory society, more tolerant of diversity. It would also probably reduce bullying against same-sex attracted teenagers and lower the suicide rate.” This common position has been carefully unpicked by Rob Cover, who argues that while there may be benefits for the health of some adults in recognition of same-sex marriage, there is absolutely no evidence of a connection between this and youth suicide. He writes: “We are yet to have evidence that there are any direct benefits for younger persons who are struggling to cope with being bullied, humiliated, shamed and cannot (yet) envisage a liveable life and a happy future—let alone a marriage ceremony.” While same-sex marriage advocates consider themselves to be speaking for these same-sex attracted youth, offering them a happy future in the form of a wedding, Cover reminds us that these are not the same thing. As we have shown here, this is not a process of simple exclusion, but an erasure of the possibility of a life outside of heteronormative or “respectable”, coupledom. The “respectable same-sex couple”, like its respectable heterosexual counterpart, not only denies the possibility of full participation in adult society to those without partners but also refuses the lived experience of the many people like Vidal and Austen who do not accept the absolute equation of domesticity, responsibility, and sexual monogamy that the institution of marriage represents. A Good Institution? The connection between marriage and the mythical end of homophobia is not about evidence, as Cover rightly points out. Instead it is based on an ideological construction of marriage as an inherently valuable institution. Alongside this characterisation of marriage as a magical solution to homophobia and other social ills, comes the branding of other models of living, loving and having sex as inherently inferior and potentially harmful. In this, the rhetoric of conservatives and same-sex marriage advocates becomes disturbingly similar. Margaret Andrews, the wife of former Howard minister Kevin and a prominent (straight) marriage advocate, featured in the news a couple of years ago after making a public homophobic outburst directed at (queer) writer Benjamin Law. In response, Andrews outlined what for her were the clearly evident benefits of marriage: “For centuries, marriage has provided order, stability, and nurture for both adults and children. Indeed, the status of our marriages influences our well-being at least as much as the state of our finances.” Despite being on the apparent opposite of the debate, Amanda Villis and Danielle Hewitt from Doctors for Marriage Equality agree with Andrews about health benefits, including, significantly, those linked to sexual behaviour: It is also well known that people in long term monogamous relationships engage in far less risky sexual behaviour and therefore have significantly lower rates of sexually transmitted infections. Therefore legalisation of same sex marriage can lead to a reduction in the rates of sexually transmitted disease by decreasing stigma and discrimination and also promoting long term, monogamous relationships as an option for LGBTI persons. Here same-sex marriage is of benefit precisely because it eradicates the social risks of contagion and disease attributed to risky and promiscuous queers. To the extent that queers continue to suffer it can be attributed to the moral deficiency of their current lifestyle. This results in the need to “promote” marriage and marriage-like relationships. However, this need for promotion denies that marriage itself could be subject to discussion or debate and constructs it as both permanent and inevitable. Any discussion which might question the valuation of marriage is forestalled through the rhetoric of choice, as in the following example from a contributor to the “Equal Love” website: We understand that not everyone will want to get married, but there is no denying that marriage is a fundamental institution in Australian society. The right to be married should therefore be available to all those who choose to pursue it. It is a right that we chose to exercise. (Cole) This seemingly innocuous language of choice performs a number of functions. The first is that it seeks to disallow political debates about marriage by simply reducing critiques of the institution to a decision not to partake in it. In a process mirroring the construction of queers as inherently immature and adolescent, as discussed in the previous section, this move brands political critiques of marriage as historical remnants of an immature radicalism that has been trumped by liberal maturity. The contribution of Alyena Mohummadally and Catherine Roberts to Speak Now highlights this clearly. In this piece, Roberts is described as having used “radical feminism” as a teenage attempt to fill a “void” left by the lack of religion in her life. The teenage Roberts considered marriage “a patriarchal institution to be dismantled” (134). However, ten years later, now happily living with her partner, Roberts finds that “the very institutions she once riled against were those she now sought to be a part of” (137). Roberts’ marriage conversion, explained through a desire for recognition from Mohummadally’s Muslim family, is presented as simply a logical part of growing up, leaving behind the teenage commitment to radical politics along with the teenage attraction to “bars and nightclubs.” Not coincidentally, “life and love” taught Roberts to leave both of these things behind (134). The second consequence of arguments based on choice is that the possibility of any other terrain of choice is erased. This rhetoric thus gives marriage a false permanence and stability, failing to recognise that social institutions are vulnerable to change, and potentially to crisis. Beyond the same-sex marriage debates, the last fifty years have demonstrated the vulnerability of marriage to social change. Rising divorce rates, increasing acceptance of de facto relationships and the social recognition of domestic violence and rape within marriage have altered marriage inescapably, and forced questions about its inevitability (see: Stacey). This fact is recognised by conservatives, such as gay marriage opponent Patrick Parkinson who stated in a recent opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald that a “heartening aspect” of the “otherwise divisive” debate around gay marriage is that it has marked a “turnaround” in support for marriage, particularly among feminists, gays and other progressives. Malcolm Turnbull also explains his transition to support for same-sex marriage rights on the basis of this very premise: “I am very firmly of the view that families are the foundation of our society and that we would be a stronger society if more people were married, and by that I mean formally, legally married, and fewer were divorced.” He continued, “Are not the gays who seek the right to marry, to formalise their commitment to each other, holding up a mirror to the heterosexuals who are marrying less frequently and divorcing more often?” As Parkinson and Turnbull note, the decision to prioritise marriage is a decision to not only accept the fundamental nature of marriage as a social institution but to further universalise it as a social norm against the historical trends away from such normalisation. This is also acknowledged by campaign group Australian Marriage Equality who suggests that people like Parkinson and Turnbull who are “concerned about the preservation of marriage may do best to focus on ways to increase its appeal amongst the current population, rather than direct their energies towards the exclusion of a select group of individuals from its privileges.” Rather than challenging conservatism then, the gay marriage campaign aligns itself with Turnbull and Parkinson against the possibility of living otherwise embodied in the shadowy figure of the sexually irresponsible queer. The connection between ideological support for marriage and the construction of the “respectable homosexual couple” is made explicit by Heath in the essay quoted earlier. It is, he says, part of “the pattern of Western liberal history” to include “in an institution good people who make a good case to join.” The struggle for gay marriage, he argues, is linked to that of “workers to own property, Indigenous Australians to be citizens, women to vote.” By including these examples, Heath implicitly highlights the assimilationist dimension of this campaign, a dimension which has been importantly emphasised by Damien Riggs. Heath’s formulation denies the possibility of Indigenous sovereignty beyond assimilationist incorporation into the Australian state, just as it denies the possibility of a life of satisfying love and sex beyond marriage. More generally, Heath fails to acknowledge that none of these histories have disrupted the fundamental power dynamics at play: the benefits of property ownership accrue disproportionately to the rich, those of citizenship to white Australians, and political power remains primarily in the hands of men. Despite the protestations of gay marriage advocates there is no reason to believe that access to marriage would end homophobia while racism, class-based exploitation, and institutional sexism continue. This too, is part of the pattern of Western liberal history. Conclusion Our intention here is not to produce an anti-marriage manifesto—there are many excellent ones out there (see: Conrad)—but rather to note that gay marriage campaigns are not as historically innocuous as they present themselves to be. We are concerned that the rush to enter fully into institutions that, while changed, remain synonymous with normative (hetero)sexuality, has two unintended but nonetheless concerning consequences. Gay marriage advocates risk not only the discarding of a vision in which people may choose to not worship at the altar of the nuclear family, they also reanimate a new version of Decter’s self-hating gay. Political blogger Tim Dunlop encapsulates the political logic of gay marriage campaigns when he says, rather optimistically, that barring homosexualists from marriage “is the last socially acceptable way of saying you are not like us, you do not count, you matter less.” An alternative view proffered here is that saying yes to gay marriage risks abandoning a project that says we do not wish to be like you, not because we matter less, but because we see the possibility of different lives, and we refuse to accept a normative political logic that brands those lives as inferior. In casting this critique as adolescent, as something that a mature community should have grown out of, the same-sex marriage campaign rejects what we see as the most important social contributions that “same-sexers” have made. Where we think Vidal was mistaken back in 1981 was in his assertion that we “same-sexers” have been simply indifferent to the world of the “other-sexers.” We have also turned a critical eye upon “heterosexualist” existence, offering important critiques of a so-called adult or responsible life. It is this history that queer writer Sara Ahmed reminds us of, when she celebrates the angry queer at the family dinner table who refuses to simply succumb to a coercive demand to be happy and pleasant. A similar refusal can be found in queer critiques of the “dead citizenship” of heterosexuality, described by José Esteban Muñoz as: a modality of citizenship that is predicated on negation of liveness or presentness on behalf of a routinized investment in futurity. This narrative of futurity is most familiar to those who live outside of it. It is the story of the [sic] nation's all-consuming investment in the nuclear family, and its particular obsession with the children, an investment that instantly translates into the (monological) future. (399) In the clamour to fully assert their membership in the world of adult citizenship, same-sex marriage advocates negate the potential liveness and presentness of queer experience, opting instead for the routinised futurity that Muñoz warns against. Imagining ourselves as forlorn figures, standing with tear-stained cheeks and quivering lips at the altar, waiting for normative relationships and responsible citizenship is not the only option. Like Vidal and Austen, with whom we began, queers are already living, loving, and fucking, in and above our sexual underworlds, imagining that just possibly there may be other ways to live, both in the present and in constructing different futures. References Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. Andrews, Margaret. “A Health Check on Marriage.” The Punch, 13 Aug. 2010. 24 Sept. 2012 ‹http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/a-health-check-on-marriage/›. Butler, Judith. “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?” differences: A Feminist Journal of Cultural Studies 13.1 (2002): 14–44. Cole, Jules. “Marriage Equality Upholds the rights of all Australians.” Equal Love website, 24 Sept. 2012 ‹http://www.equallove.info/node/83›. Conrad, Ryan, ed. Against Equality: queer critiques of gay marriage. Lewiston: Against Equality Publishing Collective, 2010. Cover, Rob. “Is same-sex marriage an adequate responst to queer youth suicide?”Online Opinion: Australia’s e-journal of social and political debate, 22 Aug. 2012. 24 Sept. 2012 ‹http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=14017›. Dunlop, Tim. “There is no excuse.” ABC The Drum Unleashed, 8 Apr. 2010. 24 Sept. 2012 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/34402.html›. Farrow, Kenyon, “Why is gay marriage anti-black?” Against Equality: queer critiques of gay marriage. Ed. Ryan Conrad. Lewiston: Against Equality Publishing Collective, 2010. 21–33. Frequently Asked Questions, Australian Marriage Equality, 24 Sept. 2012 ‹http://www.australianmarriageequality.com/faqs.htm›. Grattan, Michelle. “Turnbull’s Gay Marriage Swipe.” The Age. 7 July 2012. 24 Sept. 2012 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/political-news/turnbulls-gay-marriage-swipe-20120706-21mou.html›. Heath, Ryan. “Love in a Cold Climate.” Griffith Review. 29 (2010). 24 Sept. 2012 ‹http://www.griffithreview.com/edition-29-prosper-or-perish/251-essay/949.html›. Mohummadally, Alyena and Catherine Roberts. “When Worlds, Happily, Collide.” Speak Now: Australian Perspectives on Same-Sex Marriage. Ed. Victor Marsh. Thornbury: Clouds of Magellan, 2012, 134–139. Muñoz, José Esteban. “Citizens and Superheroes.” American Quarterly. 52.2 (2000): 397–404. Parkinson, Patrick. “About Time We All Cared More About Marriage.” Sydney Morning Herald, 24 Aug. 2012. 24 Sept. 2012 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/about-time-we-all-cared-more-about-marriage-20120823-24p2g.html›. Rauch, Jonathan. Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America. New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2004. Riggs, Damien. “The Racial Politics of Marriage Claims.” Speak Now: Australian Perspectives on Gay Marriage. Ed. Victor Marsh. Thornbury: Clouds of Magellan, 2012. 191–201. Stacey, Judith. Brave New Families: Stories of Domestic Upheaval in Late Twentieth-Century America. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1998. Spade, Dean. Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2011. Turnbull, Malcolm. “Reflections on Gay Marriage: Michael Kirby Lecture 2012.” 24 Sept. 2012 ‹http://www.malcolmturnbull.com.au/media/speeches/reflections-on-the-gay-marriage-issue-michael-kirby-lecture-2012/›. Valverde, Mariana. “A New Entity in the History of Sexuality: The Respectable Same-Sex Couple.” Feminist Studies. 32.1 (2006): 155–162. Vidal, Gore. “Some Jews and the Gays.” The Nation. 14 Nov. 1981. 24 Sept. 2012 ‹http://www.thenation.com/article/169197/some-jews-gays›. —. Palimpsest: A Memoir. New York and London: Random House, 1995. Villis, Amanda, and Danielle Hewitt. “Why Legalising Same Sex Marriage Will Benefit Health.”17 Aug. 2012. 24 Sept. 2012 ‹http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=14004›. Wright, Tim. “Same-Sex Couples Still Waiting at the Altar For a Basic Right.” The Age. 31 July 2009. 12 Sept. 2012 ‹http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/samesex-couples-still-waiting-at-the-altar-for-a-basic-right-20090730-e2xk.html›.

As a former teacher and current researcher, I have personally heard as well as read about many different reasons why homosexuality, bisexuality, and, more generally, sexuality other than heterosexuality should not be discussed in the classroom. There is the argument that sexuality is the domain of the parent, not the teacher, and about the numerous religions that do not condone homo/bisexuality. I have read about teachers’ sense of discomfort with discussing sexuality and sexual orientation. Most frequently, I have come up against the argument that students are not certain of their sexual orientation until adulthood, that teaching about the range of sexualities might confuse ‘impressionable’ adolescents and that there are ‘no gay students in my class’ so such education is unnecessary. Contrary to this last point, research with same-sex attracted (SSA) adolescents has shown that they are first aware of their attractions to members of the same sex as early as 10 years of age (D’Augelli, Pilkington, and Hershberger) and begin to feel concrete about their sexual orientation between the ages of 14 and 16 years old (Rosario, et al.). As far as numbers of young people who are attracted to members of the same sex, recent research using random samples of secondary-school aged students has placed percentages between 2.5% (Garofalo, et al.) and 6.3% (Smith, Lindsay, and Rosenthal). However, as Savin-Williams points out, ‘the vast majority of youths who will eventually identify themselves as lesbian, bisexual or gay seldom embrace this socially ostracized label during adolescence…’, leading to speculation that reported percentages of SSA young people are actually conservative estimates rather than true figures (Savin-Williams 262). To date, no research has shown that adolescents have become homosexual because they were exposed to homosexuality as a topic within the school curriculum. In fact, it is quite the opposite, with many SSA students coming to terms with their homo/bisexuality despite it being pathologised within the curriculum and punishable by sanctioned victimisation within the school environment. The fact that heterosexuality is ‘policed’ and reinforced with the school context is not surprising. In his History of Sexuality, Volume 1, Foucault writes about sexuality as a locus of social control and points out that throughout history individual’s sexual thoughts, beliefs, and, ultimately, actions have been impacted by socially constructed sexual norms. Educational sociologists have taken this idea into the classroom, viewing heterosexuality as a part of the ‘hidden curriculum’, the social norms that students learn without them being part of the formal lesson (Plummer). In this sense, heterosexuality becomes part of students’ unspoken and assumed identity in the classroom and, because of socially sanctioned homophobia/heterosexism, being heterosexual becomes a form of cultural and social capital. In line with some teachers’ reluctance to discuss homo/bisexuality in the classroom are their attitudes toward homosexuality. A number of studies have highlighted the homophobic attitudes of pre-service teachers, primary and secondary school teachers, and counsellor trainees as well as their reluctance and discomfort with discussing homo/bisexuality in the classroom (Sears; Warwick, Aggleton, and Douglas; Barrett and McWhirter; Cahill and Adams). These negative attitudes can manifest themselves in a variety of ways detrimental to SSA students, from simply avoiding homosexual topics or issues to discussing these issues or topics in a negative manner. Recent research with same-sex attracted secondary school students spoke to this trend. When asked about ways in which homosexuality was discussed in the classroom, three main points were consistently raised: sexuality which is not heterosexuality is presented in a reduced form (i.e., male homosexuality); homosexuality is pathologised as either a mental illness or a precursor to infection; and, teachers exhibited prejudice against non-heterosexual sexualities that would not be tolerated in the instance of a racial or gender issue (Ellis and High, 221-2). Research in this area has also investigated the attitudes of secondary school students toward homosexuality, with results showing high levels of homophobia and strict gender role beliefs (Van de Ven; Price; Smith; Hillier; Thurlow); however, recent research has shown some improvement in students’ attitudes (Smith, et al.). Knowing what we know about the ways in which homosexuality is presented within the school setting (or in many cases simply not presented), coupled with the attitudes of the school community members toward homosexuality and gender roles, as reflective of societal norms, it is not surprising these sentiments manifest themselves in the form of victimisation for SSA students and students who are perceived to be SSA. While the ‘hidden curriculum’ reinforces heterosexuality as a covert form of victimisation, overt forms of victimisation of SSA students occur with alarming regularity. Research has highlighted stories of SSA students’ experiences of verbal and physical abuse, property damage, and social isolation within the school setting with a common theme being a lack of intervention on the part of the adult school staff (Jordan, Vaughan, and Woodworth; Flowers and Buston; Kosciw and Cullen). A good deal of research has positioned SSA young people as ‘at-risk’, using data which places heterosexual-identifying adolescents as a ‘control group’ and citing elevated drug and alcohol use, suicide attempts/ideation, and risky sexual practices among the population of SSA young people. This type of research problematises the SSA young people themselves, rather than the environments which they are subject to and the harassment they may be experiencing therein. A far smaller body of research has examined correlates of victimisation for SSA students, the results being exactly what one would expect. At-school victimisation of SSA students has been positively correlated with general risk outcomes such as negative mental health effects (D’Augelli, Pilkington and Hershberger; Rivers), drug and alcohol abuse, and suicide attempts (Bontempo and D’Augelli). Smaller still is the body of research that examines school-related outcomes for SSA students. Victimisation of these students has been positively correlated with their frequency of missed school days as a result of personal safety fears (Bontempo and D’Augelli) as well as their reported academic outcomes and educational aspirations (Kosciw). In light of the body of literature on how SSA students experience the school environment, a logical path seems to emerge. Societal norms surrounding sexuality contribute to adult school staff members’ attitudes toward homosexuality. These norms, coupled with the palpable attitudes of staff, effect the overall tenor of the school environment toward homosexuality which, in turn, contributes to students’ attitudes toward homosexuality. The sentiments of students and staff undoubtedly have a significant impact on how or if sexuality is discussed within the classroom, victimisation of SSA students, and whether or not this victimisation is punished or ignored by staff members. Consequently, victimisation of SSA students has been found to be correlated with both general risk outcomes as well as decreased academic outcomes. Clearly there is cause for concern. If SSA students are more likely to report decreased school outcomes and higher risk behaviours the more they report being victimised within the school setting, then the solution seems rather obvious – protect SSA students from incidences of at-school victimisation. Without doing so, schools are allowing an inequitable school experience for SSA students and students who are perceived to be SSA as well as breaching their classroom duty of care. That said, adolescents cannot be told simply to stop ‘teasing gay kids’. Instead, a school culture must be created wherein homophobia is not tolerated, and heterosexism is recognised as such and the power it has over individual’s thoughts and actions is brought to light. Towards that end, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender topics, issues, and historical/prominent figures must be discussed in the classroom and the historical discrimination of SSA persons should be taught in the same way that racial/ethnic histories of discrimination are part of the curriculum. Through education, homophobia can begin to be viewed in the same way as racism and religious discrimination are viewed – as ignorant and entirely unacceptable. Perhaps this sounds like some gay utopian dream, but I believe that at a future date society will progress to this level and that education is fundamental to the process. By silencing sexualities, educators are marginalising and disenfranching a definite population of their SSA students, not to mention the effects this has on students who have SSA family members or friends. Teachers are uncomfortable discussing homosexuality in the classroom? I am uncomfortable with SSA students missing school because they are afraid, leaving school early because they do not feel that they belong, and reporting decreased marks and lowered aspirations for tertiary education. Silencing (homo)sexualities is a bad idea, not only for SSA persons but for any society which has illusions of being civilised, modernised, or unified. References Barrett, Kathleen, and Benedict McWhirter. “Counselor Trainees Perceptions of Clients Based on Client Sexual Orientation.” Counselor Education and Supervision 41.3 (2002): 219-30. Bontempo, Daniel, and Anthony D’Augelli. “Effects of at-School Vicitimization and Sexual Orientation on Lesbian, Gay, or Bisexual Youths’ Health Risk Behavior.” Journal of Adolescent Health 30 (2002): 364-74. Cahill, Betsy, and Eve Adams. “An Exploratory Study of Early Childhood Teachers’ Attitudes toward Gender Roles.” Sex Roles 36.7/8 (1997): 517-29. D’Augelli, Anthony, Neil Pilkington, and Scott Hershberger. “Incidence and Mental Health Impact of Sexual Orientation Victimization of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Youths in High School.” School Psychology Quarterly 17.2 (2002): 148-160. Ellis, Viv, and Sue High. “Something More to Tell You: Gay, Lesbian or Bisexual Young People’s Experiences of Secondary Schooling.” British Educational Research Journal 30.2 (2004): 213-25. Flowers, Paul, and Kate Buston. “‘I Was Terrified of Being Different’: Exploring Gay Men’s Accounts of Growing Up in a Heterosexist Society.” Journal of Adolescence 24 (2001): 51-65. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. Garofalo, Robert, et al. “The Association between Health Risk Behaviors and Sexual Orientation among a School-Based Sample of Adolescents.” Pediatrics 101.5 (1998): 895-903. Hillier, Lynne. “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Unsure: The Rural Eleven Percent.” Health in Difference: Proceedings of the First National Lesbian, Gay, Transgender and Bisexual Health Conference, 3-5 October 1996. Ed. Anthony Smith. Sydney: Australian Centre for Lesbian and Gay Research, 1997. 90-94. Jordan, K, J Vaughan, and K Woodworth. “I Will Survive: Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Youths’ Experience of High School.” School Experiences of Gay and Lesbian Youth: The Invisible Minority. Ed. M Harris. Binghamton: The Harrington Park Press, 1997. Kosciw, J. The 2003 National School Climate Survey: The School-Related Experiences of Our Nation’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Youth. New York: GLSEN, 2004. Kosciw, J, and M Cullen. The 2001 National School Climate Survey: The School-Related Experiences of Our Nation’s, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Youth. New York: GLSEN, 2002. Plummer, Ken. “Lesbian and Gay Youth in England.” Gay and Lesbian Youth. Ed. G Herdt. New York: Harrington Park Press, 1989. 195-216. Price, James. “High School Students’ Attitudes toward Homosexuality.” Journal of School Health 52 (1982): 469-74. Rivers, Ian. “Long-Term Consequences of Bullying.” Issues in Therapy with Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Clients. Ed. Dominic Davies. Vol. 3. Pink Therapy. Buckingham: Open UP, 2000. 146-59. Rosario, Margaret, et al. “The Psychosexual Development of Urban Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Youths.” Journal of Sex Research 33.2 (1996): 113-26. Savin-Williams, Ritch. “Verbal and Physical Abuse as Stressors in the Lives of Lesbian, Gay Male, and Bisexual Youths: Associations with School Problems, Running Away, Substance Abuse, Prostitution and Suicide.” Journal of Counseling and Clinical Psychology 62.2 (1994): 261-9. Sears, James. “Educators, Homosexuality and Homosexual Students: Are Personal Feelings Related to Professional Beliefs?” Coming out of the Classroom Closet. Ed. K Harbeck. New York: Harrington Park Press, 1992. Smith, Anthony, Jo Lindsay, and Doreen A. Rosenthal. “Same-Sex Attraction, Drug Injection and Binge Drinking among Australian Adolescents.” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health 23.6 (1999): 643-46. Smith, Anthony, Jo Lindsay, and Doreen A. Rosenthal. Secondary Students and Sexual Health 2002: Results of the 3rd National Survey of Australian Secondary Students, Hiv/Aids and Sexual Health. Melbourne: Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, La Trobe University, 2003. Smith, George. “”The Ideology of ‘Fag’: The School Experience of Gay Students.” The Sociological Quarterly 39.2 (1998): 309-35. Thurlow, Crispin. “Naming the ‘Outsider Within’: Homophobic Pejoratives and the Verbal Abuse of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual High-School Pupils.” Journal of Adolescence 24 (2001): 25-38. Van de Ven, Paul. “Comparisons among Homophobic Reactions of Undergraduates, High School Students, and Young Offenders.” Journal of Sex Research 31.2 (1994): 117-135. Warwick, Ian, Peter Aggleton, and Nicola Douglas. “Playing It Safe: Addressing the Emotional and Physical Health of Lesbian and Gay Pupils in the U.K.” Journal of Adolescence 24 (2001): 129-40. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Mikulsky, Jacqueline. "Silencing (Homo)Sexualities in School ... A Very Bad Idea." M/C Journal 8.1 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0502/06-mikulsky.php>. APA Style Mikulsky, J. (Feb. 2005) "Silencing (Homo)Sexualities in School ... A Very Bad Idea," M/C Journal, 8(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0502/06-mikulsky.php>.

David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) is an extraordinary film that explores an often-violent intersection between the conditions of late-capitalist consumer society and contemporary masculine identities. Through examining examples of “fighting” in Fight Club, the article will discuss male bonding through homosocial (and somewhat homophobic) relations, and the blurring of “good versus evil” by an examination of problematised male subjectivity and representations of “inner” conflict. The article’s title “whom do you fight?” reminds us of a particularly powerful message in Fight Club about the workings of difference. The desire to create “others” and to fight them demonstrates a culturally specific failure to adequately address the psychical and physical issues of individuals, and cultures as a whole. Similarities and differences between Fight Club, the events of September 11 and it’s anti-terrorist backlash ensures that issues raised in Fight Club about fighting are now, more than ever, powerfully relevant in white western industrialised context. “Cut the foreplay and ask:” Male Belonging, The Homosocial and Homophobia In Fight Club, the male body is a site where the meanings, limits and excesses of contemporary masculinity are tested, defined and redefined. The afflicted male body in Fight Club—bruised, bloodied, broken, weak—is constructed as the more “masculine” or more “real” body in the film, in contrast to the clean white, crisp, upright, besuited male body of Jack’s boss. Bruised eyes, cut lips, and broken noses all produce modes of recognition, a group identity, and a sense of belonging between the men when they are outside of Fight Club. In daylight hours, fellow members nod and wink to one another in recognition and in tacit acknowledgement of shared belonging and secrecy of the club. Fight Club demonstrates the ways in which the fight-worn body is directly involved in struggles of power and claims of “authenticity” and identity. These vulnerable and excessive male bodies actively construct heterosexual masculine identity that depends upon, as Jonathan L. Beller notes, the “delimitation of homoeroticism via the narrative-prohibition of homosexuality” (Beller 1999). The continuum between the homosociality and homophobia has been well documented by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985). Sedgwick’s exploration of “male homosocial desire within the structural context of triangular, heterosexual desire” (16) is also relevant to the ways in which Jack and Tyler’s love interest, Marla Singer, provides a channel for, or disruption of, male homoerotic desire and homosocial bonding. The highly physical fighting that works to bind Jack and Tyler together is evocative of an unrealisable homosexual desire between the two men. The film self-consciously and humorously explores the homosexual undertones in a scene outside Lou’s Bar. When Jack wonders where he is going to stay the night Tyler states, “cut the foreplay and ask.” After their first fistfight outside the bar they sit next to each other exhausted, satisfied and content. Jack suggests “we should do this again sometime” while Tyler leans back, smoking a cigarette. When Tyler takes Jack back to his place, he leads Jack to a mattress. Pointing to separate rooms Tyler states “you, me, toilet, ok?” The scene of Tyler and Jack’s first fight is one of highly charged physicality, bodily contact, bloodletting and sexual references. When paralleled to the “you, me, toilet” dialogue it is suggested that now they are in a different and more personal environment (inside and private rather than outside and public), their bodies and fluids should not mingle. These adjacent scenes exemplify an idea that continues throughout the remainder of the film—that male physical bonding, even in the illegal and physically charged confines of Fight Club, is ultimately a heterosexual affair. When Jack becomes jealous that Angel Face (a member of Fight Club and Project Mayhem) may replace him as Tyler’s favourite, Jack viciously beats his face almost to the point beyond recognition. When Tyler questions Jack about the beating of Angel Face, Jack replies simply, “I felt like destroying something beautiful.” Hence, Jack not only “fights” to reassert his position in the masculine hierarchy of Fight Club and Project Mayhem, but also jealously ensures that Tyler (and thus himself) will not find Angel Face sexually and physically desirable. By making homoeroticism forbidden in the context of Fight Club, fighting works as an outlet for this desire. Fighting in Fight Club simultaneously draws attention to and attention away from homoeroticism. In another scene, the direct transmission of fluids between men, particularly blood, proves particularly powerful and horrifying. Tyler takes a violent beating from Lou, the owner of the bar where Fight Club is being secretly held. With his last ounce of strength Tyler pulls Lou down onto the ground spitting and spraying blood from his mouth onto Lou’s face, screaming, “you don't know where I’ve been, Lou! You don't know where I’ve been!” Out of horror, fear and revulsion, Lou and his sidekick beat a hasty retreat agreeing to let Fight Club stay in the basement of his bar. In this case, Lou’s fear of Tyler’s blood (in the wake of AIDS and other blood related diseases) is stronger than Tyler’s physical weakness at having been beaten savagely. This scene demonstrates the fine line between the acceptability of male bodies and fluids merging in a fight or brawl, but the horror of blood and other bodily fluids transmitted so blatantly between men. “Not my head, Tyler, our head:” Good Versus Evil or Inner Conflict? When Jack discovers that Tyler is he (and he is Tyler), he decides to put a stop to Tyler’s plan to blow up the buildings of major credit card companies. Here, the fight turns to one of good versus evil characterised by the idea of inner conflict. Tyler begins to function more recognisably as Jack’s doppelganger or “bad-self”; a villainous figure that must be found, destroyed and expelled from Jack’s head as well as the film’s narrative to give closure. Although Jack becomes a “good self” with moral conscience once he realises who Tyler is, his horrific, violent battle with Tyler is physically and psychically a battle with himself. Shots of Tyler and Jack fighting as two “separate” people, and then of a solitary Jack beating himself up and throwing himself down a flight of stairs captured by security cameras, demonstrate the complexity with which the fight between good and evil becomes a graphic struggle within a divided “self.” This is reminiscent of an earlier scene between Jack and his boss. In order to manipulate and blackmail his boss, Jack beats himself up by making it appear that his boss was responsible. In these two examples “fighting” works to suggest that the narrator is his own worst enemy. It implies that constructions of “otherness” (i.e. the flamboyant, hyper-masculine Tyler or Jack’s peevish, effeminate boss) in narrative cinema are projections of the narrator’s fears and desires; these characters exist only in relation to the narrator. The narrator needs these “others” in order to have a notion of “self”—but in this case the narrator’s self does not become stronger by fighting his enemies. In fact, the film explores how he is inextricably part of their construction. It demonstrates how much Jack is a part of the system and subjectivity he wants to fight. Fight Club 1999 and September 11, 2001: Whom Do You Fight? In 1999, Andrew O’Hehir said that the idea of destroying credit-card companies in the name of some form of liberation was, although a good idea, very unlikely. The likelihood of this happening, however, became apparent on the morning of September 12th 2001, when I told by a friend to turn on the news. “It’s like Fight Club!” I was assured. I am sure I was not the only one who noticed the disturbing parallels between the exploding buildings of Fight Club’s finale and the burning Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre in New York. The similarity was thematic as well as visual. In both cases, “covertly” trained “terrorist” groups, populated by disaffected, disenfranchised young men with a hatred for capitalism, aim targets at symbols of U.S capitalism and economic prosperity. While the potential problems, complexities and controversies of comparing a “fictional” film, such as Fight Club, with a “real life” event such as on September 11, are beyond the scope of this article, there are perhaps some ways in which the fight in Fight Club might inform how media constructions of the “war against terror” might be unpacked post-September 11. In Fight Club, the U.S gaze was turned inward and on itself, marking a moment that examined the conditions under which a violent retaliation against consumer capitalism might occur. It is worrisome that the same cultural reflexivity seen in Fight Club seems to have given way to renewed desires to fight the “other,” to name and identify “evil,” to declare a war on peoples and practices that seem foreign to some white western ways of life. It seems that the gaze that was momentarily turned inwards in Fight Club has now, in an act of psychic and cultural self-defence, turned outwards onto a Middle Eastern “other.” Perhaps now, more than before, Fight Club’s complex, multi-layered and self-reflexive examination of “fight,” and its ever-shifting relationship to the construction masculine identities in contemporary societies, is of particular cultural importance and relevance. Works Cited Beller, Jonathan L. ‘Fight Club's Utopian Dick.’ Pop Matters, 1999. http://popmatters.com/film/fight-club.html [accessed January 16, 2000]. O'Hehir, Andrew. ‘Fight Club,’ Salon.com, 1999. http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/1... [accessed November 2000]. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Links http://popmatters.com/film/fight-club.html http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/1999/10/15/fight_club Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Iocco, Melissa. "Whom do you fight?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 6.1 (2003). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/08-whodoyou.php>. APA Style Iocco, M., (2003, Feb 26). Whom do you fight?. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,(1). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/08-whodoyou.html

IntroductionJohn Berger provides a compelling analysis in Ways of Seeing on how we’ve been socialized through centuries of art to see women as objects and men as subjects. This way of seeing men and women is more than aesthetic choices but in fact shapes our ideologies of gender. As Berger asserts: “The art of the past no longer exists as it once did… In its place there is a language of images. What matters now is who uses that language for what purpose” (33).What happens when there are no historical images that represent your identity? How do others learn to see you? How do you learn to represent yourself? This article addresses the challenges that bisexuals face in constructing and contending with media representations of non-normative sexualities. As Berger suggests: “A people or class which is cut off from its own past is far less free to choose and to act as a people or class than one that has been able to situate itself in history” (33). This article seeks to apply Berger’s core concepts in Ways of Seeing studying representations of bisexuality in mainstream media. How bisexuality is represented, and therefore observed, shapes what can ultimately be culturally understood and recognized.This article explores how bisexuals use digital media to construct self-representations and brand a bisexual identity. Bisexual representations are particularly relevant to study as they are often rendered invisible by the cultural hegemony of monosexuality. Cultural norms ideologically shape the intelligibility of representation; bisexuality is often misinterpreted when read within the dominant binaries of heterosexuality and homosexuality in Western European culture. This work addresses how users adapt visual, textual, and hyperlinked information in online spaces to create representations that can be culturally recognized. Users want to be seen as bisexuals. The research for this article examined online social spaces created by and for bisexuals between 2013-2015, as well as mainstream media addressing bisexuality or bisexual characters. The social spaces studied included national and regional websites for bisexual organizations, blogs dedicated to bisexual issues and topics, and public bisexual groups on Facebook and Tumblr. Participant observation and semiotic analysis was employed to analyze how bisexual representation was discussed and performed. Learning to See Bisexuality Bisexuality is often constructed within the domain of medical and psychological classification systems as a sexual identity situated between one polarity or the other: between desiring men or desiring women as sexual partners or between being gay or being straight in sexual orientation, as most widely put forth by Alfred Kinsey in the 1950s (Kinsey et al., 1948; e.g., Blumstein, 1977; Diamond, 1993; Weinberg, 1995). This popularly held conception has a particular history that serves to reinforce the normative categories of heterosexuality and monosexuality.This history does not reflect bisexual’s accounts of their own experiences of what it means to be bisexual. Bisexuals in the spaces I study express their sexuality as fluid both in terms of gender (objects of desire do not have to identify as only male or female) as well as in terms of the lifespan (desire based on sex or gender does not have remain consistent throughout one’s life). As one participant remarked: “I think of bisexual as a different orientation from both homosexuals (who orient exclusively towards same-sex romance/sexuality) and heterosexuals (who orient exclusively toward opposite-sex romance/sexuality). Bisexuals seem to think about the world in a different way: a world of ‘AND’ rather than a world of ‘OR’.” Or as another participant noted: “I saw video a couple of months ago that described ‘bi’ as being attracted to ‘same and different sexed people.’ I considered my internal debate settled at that point. Yes, it is binary, but only in the broadest sense.”This data from my research is congruent with data from much larger studies that examined longitudinal psycho-social development of bisexual identities (Klein, 1978; Barker, 2007; Diamond, 2008). Individuals’ narratives of a more “fluid” identity suggest an emphasis at the individual level less about fluctuating between “two” possible types of sexual partners than about a dynamic, complex desire within a coherent self. Nevertheless, popular constructions of bisexuality in media continue to emphasize it within hegemonic monosexual ideologies.Heterosexual relationships are overwhelmingly the most dominant relationship type portrayed in media, and the second most portrayed relationship is homosexuality, or a serial monogamy towards only one gender. This pairing is not only conveying the dominant hegemonic norms of heterosexuality (and most often paired with serial monogamy as well), but it is equally and powerfully reproducing the hegemonic ideal of monosexuality. Monosexuality is the romantic or sexual attraction to members of one sex or gender group only. A monosexual person may identify as either heterosexual or homosexual, the key element being that their sexual or romantic attraction remains consistently directed towards one sex or gender group. In this way, we have all been socialized since childhood to value not only monogamy but monosexuality as well. However, current research on sexuality suggests that self-identified bisexuals are the largest group among non-heterosexuals. In 2011, Dr. Gary Gates, Research Director of the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, analyzed data collected from nine national health surveys from the USA, United Kindgdom, Canada, Australia and Norway to provide the most comprehensive statistics available to date on how many people self-identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender. While the population percentage of LGBT people varied by country, the ratio of lesbian, gay and bisexuals among LGBT people remained consistent, with self-identified bisexuals accounting for 40-60% of all LGBT populations regardless of country. This data is significant for challenging the popular assumption that bisexuals are a small minority among non-heterosexuals; indeed, this data indicates that non-monosexuals represent half of all non-heterosexuals. Yet we have learned to recognize monosexuality as dominant, normal and naturalized, even within LGBT representations. Conversely, we struggle to even recognize relationships that fall outside of this hegemonic norm. In essence, we lack ways of seeing bisexuals, pansexuals, omnisexuals, asexuals, and all queer-identified individuals who do not conform to monosexuality. We quite literally have not learned to see them, or—worse yet—learned how to not see them.Bisexual representations are particularly relevant to study as they are often rendered invisible in cultures that practice monogamy paired with hegemonic monosexuality. Members of bisexual spaces desire to achieve recognition but struggle to overcome bisexual erasure in their daily lives.Misrepresention: The Triad in Popular MediaWhen bisexuality is portrayed in media it is most commonly portrayed in a disingenuous manner where the bisexual is portrayed as being torn between potential lovers, on a pathway from straight to gay, or as a serial liar and cheater who cannot remain monogamous due to overwhelming attractions. Representations of bisexuals in media are infrequent, but those that are available too often follow these inaccurate stereotypes. By far the most common convention for representing bisexuality in visual media is the use of the triad: three people convey the (mis)representation of bisexuality as a sexuality in the “middle” of heterosexuality and homosexuality. For the purpose of this article, data analysis will be limited to print magazines for the sake of length and clarity.The 2014 New York Times Magazine article “The Scientific Quest to Prove Bisexuality Exists” (Denizet-Lewis) addresses the controversial nature of bisexuality. The cover image depicts a close-up of a man’s face, separated into two halves: in one half, a woman is nuzzled up to the man’s cheek, and the other half a man is nuzzled up to his ear. Presumably the man is bisexual and therefore split into two parts: his heterosexual self and his homosexual self. This visual depiction of bisexuality reifies the notion that bisexuals are torn between two polar desires and experience equal and concurrent attraction to more than one partner simultaneously. Furthermore, the triad represented in this way suggests that the essential bisexual is having simultaneous liaisons with heterosexual and homosexual partners.Within the convention of the triad there is also a sub-genre closely connected with hypersexualization and the male gaze. In these cases, the triad is commonly presented in varying states of undress and/or in a bed. An article in The Guardian from 11 April 2014 with the headline: “Make up your mind! The science behind bisexuality” (Browne) includes an image with three attractive young people in bed together. A man is sitting up between two sleeping women and smoking a cigarette – the cigarette connotes post-coital sexual activity, as does the smirk on his face. This may have been a suitable image if the article had been about having a threesome, but the headline—and the article—are attempting to explain the science behind bisexuality. Furthermore, while the image is intended to illustrate an article on bisexuality, the image is fundamentally misleading. The women in the image are asleep and to the side and the man is awake and in the middle. He is the central figure – it is a picture of him. So who is the bisexual in the image? What is the image attempting to do? It seems that the goal is to titillate, to excite, and to satisfy a particularly heterosexual fantasy rather than to discuss bisexuality. This hypersexualization once again references the mistaken idea (or heterosexual male fantasy) that bisexuality is only expressed through simultaneous sex acts.Many of these examples are salacious but they occur with surprising regularity in the mainstream media. On 17 February 2016, the American Association of Retired Persons posted an article to the front page of their website titled “Am I Discovering I'm Bisexual?” (Schwartz, 2016). In the accompanying image at the top of the article, we see three people sitting on a park bench – two men on either side of a woman. The image is taken from behind the bench so we see their backs and ostensibly they do not see us, the viewer. The man on the left is kissing the woman in the center while also holding hands behind the back of the bench with the man sitting on her other side. The man on the right is looking away from the couple kissing, suggesting he is not directly included in their intimate activity. Furthermore, the two men are holding hands behind the bench, which could also be code for behind the woman’s back, suggesting infidelity to the dyad and depicting some form of duplicity. This triad reinforces the trope of the bisexual as promiscuous and untrustworthy.Images such as these are common and range from the more inoffensive to the salacious. The resulting implications are that bisexuals are torn between their internal hetero and homo desires, require simultaneous partners, and are untrustworthy partners. Notably, in all these images it is never clear exactly which individuals are bisexual. Are all three members of the triad bisexual? While this is a possible read, the dominant discourse leads us to believe that one of person in the triad is the bisexual while the others adhere to more dominant sexualities.Participants in my research were acutely aware of these media representations and expressed frequent negative reactions to the implications of the triad. Each article contained numerous online comments expressing frustration with the use of “threesomes.” As one commentator stated: “Without a threesome, we’re invisible. It’s messed up. I always imagine a t-shirt with 3 couples stick figure like: girl + girl, girl + boy, and boy + boy. and it says “6 bisexuals.” What is made clear in many user comments is that the mainstream social scripts used to portray bisexuality are clearly at odds with the ways in which bisexuals choose to describe or portray themselves. Seeing through CapitalismOne of the significant conclusions of this research was the ways in which the misrepresentation of bisexuality results in many individuals feeling underrepresented or made invisible within mainstream media. The most salient themes to emerge from this research is participants’ affective struggle with feeling "invisible.” The frequency of discourse specific to invisibility is significant, as well as its expressed negatively associated experiences and feelings. The public sharing of those reactions among individuals, and the ensuing discourse that emerges from those interactions, include imagining what visibility “looks” like (its semiotic markers and what would make those markers “successful” for visibility), and the articulation of “solutions” to counter perceived invisibility. Notably, participants often express the desire for visibility in terms of commodification. As one participant posted, “their [sic] is no style for bi, there is no voice tone, unless I'm wearing my shirt, how is anyone to know?” Another participant explicated, “I wish there was a look. I wish I could get up every day and put on the clothes and jewelry that identified me to the world when I stepped out of my apartment. I wish I was as visible on the street as I am on facebook.” This longing for a culturally recognizable bisexual identity is articulated as a desire for a market commodification of “bisexual.” But a commodified identity may be a misguided desire. As Berger warns: “Publicity is not merely an assembly of competing messages: it is a language in itself which is always being used to make the same general purpose… It proposes to each of us that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying something more” (131). Consumerism—and its bedfellow—marketing, aim to sell the fantasy of a future self whereby the consumer transforms themselves through material objects, not transforming the culture to accept them. Berger further elicits that marketing essentially convinces us that we are not whole the way we are and sells us the idea of a wholeness achieved through consumerism (134). Following Berger’s argument, this desire for a commodified identity, while genuine, may fundamentally undermine the autonomy bisexuals currently have insomuch as without a corporate brand, bisexual representations are more culturally malleable and therefore potentially more inclusive to the real diversity of bisexual identified people.However, Berger also rightly noted that “publicity is the culture of the consumer society. It propagates through images that society’s belief in itself” (139). Without any publicity, bisexuals are not wrong to feel invisible in a consumer culture. And yet “publicity turns consumption into a substitute for democracy. The choice of what one eats (or wears or drives) takes the place of significant political choice” (149). A commodified identity will not likely usher in meaningful political change in a culture where bisexuals experience worse mental health and discrimination outcomes than lesbian and gay people (LGBT Advisory Committee, 2011). Bisexuals Online: New Ways of SeeingThe Internet, which was touted early as a space of great potential for anonymity and exploration where visibility can be masked, here becomes the place where bisexuals try to make the perceived invisible ‘visible.’ Digital technologies and spaces provide particularly useful environments for participants of online bisexual spaces to negotiate issues of invisibility as participants construct visible identities through daily posts, threads, videos, and discourse in which bisexuality is discursively and visually imagined, produced, articulated, defended, and desired. But most importantly these digital technologies provide bisexuals with opportunities to counter misrepresentations in mainstream media. In the frequent example of intimate partners in the physical world rendering a bisexual’s identity invisible, participants of these online communities grapple with the seeming paradox of one’s offline self as the avatar and one’s online self as more fully integrated, represented, and recognized. One participant expressed this experience, remarking:I feel I'm more out online that offline. That's because, in the offline world there's the whole ''social assumptions'' issue. My co-workers, friends, etc, know I have a boyfriend, wich [sic] equals ''straight'' for most ppl out there. So, I'll out myself when the occasion comes (talking abt smn I used to date, the LGBT youth group I used to belong to, or usually just abt some girl I find attractive) and usually ppl are not surprised. Whereas online, my pic at Facebook (and Orkut) is a Bisexual Pride icon. I follow Bi groups on Twitter. I'm a member of bi groups. So, online it's spelled out, while offline ppl usually think me having a bf means I'm straight.The I Am Visible (IAV) campaign is just one example of an organized response to the perceived erasure of bisexuals in mainstream culture. Launched in January 2011 by Adrienne McCue (nee Williams), the executive director of the Bi Social Network, a non-profit organization aimed at bringing awareness to representations of bisexuality in media. The campaign was hosted on bisocialnetwork.com, with the goal to “stop biphobia and bi-erasure in our community, media, news, and entertainment,” Prior to going live, IAV implemented a six-month lead-up advertising campaign across multiple online bisexual forums, making it the most publicized new venture during the period of my study. IAV hosted user-generated videos and posters that followed the vernacular of coming out and provided emotional support for listeners who may be struggling with their identity in a world largely hostile to bisexuality. Perceived invisibility was the central theme of IAV, which was the most salient theme for every bisexual group I studied online.Perhaps the most notable video and still image series to come out of IAV were those including Emmy nominated Scottish actor Alan Cumming. Cumming, a long-time Broadway thespian and acclaimed film actor, openly identifies as bisexual and has criticized ‘gaystream’ outlets on more than one occasion for intentionally mislabeling him as ‘gay.’ As such, Alan Cumming is one of the most prominently celebrated bisexual celebrities during the time of my study. While there are numerous famous out gays and lesbians in the media industry who have lent their celebrity status to endorse LGBT political messages—such as Ellen DeGeneres, Elton John, and Neil Patrick Harris, to name a few—there have been notably fewer celebrities supporting bisexual specific causes. Therefore, Cummings involvement with IAV was significant for many bisexuals. His star status was perceived as contributing legitimacy to bisexuality and increasing cultural visibility for bisexuals.These campaigns to become more visible are based in the need to counteract the false media narrative, which is, in a sense, to educate the wider society as to what bisexuality is not. The campaigns are an attempt to repair the false messages which have been “learnt” and replace them with more accurate representations. The Internet provides bisexual activists with a tool with which they can work to correct the skewed media image of themselves. Additionally, the Internet has also become a place where bisexuals can more easily represent themselves through a wide variety of semiotic markers in ways which would be difficult or unacceptable offline. In these ways, the Internet has become a key device in bisexual activism and while it is important not to uncritically praise the technology it plays an important role in enabling correct representation. ReferencesBarker, Meg. "Heteronormativity and the Exclusion of Bisexuality in Psychology." Out in Psychology: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Queer Perspectives. Eds. Victoria Clarke and Elizabeth Peel. Chichester: Wiley, 2007. 86–118.Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books, 1972.Blumstein, Phillip W., and Pepper Schwartz. “Bisexuality: Some Social Psychological Issues.” Journal of Social Issues 33.2 (1977): 30–45.Browne, Tania. “Make Up Your Mind! The Science behind Bisexuality.” The Guardian 11 Apr. 2014.Denizet-Lewis, Benoit. "The Scientific Quest to Prove Bisexuality Exists." New York Times 20 Mar. 2014.Diamond, Lisa. Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and Desire. Harvard UP, 2008.Diamond, Milton. “Homosexuality and Bisexuality in Different Populations.” Archives of Sexual Behavior 22.4 (1993): 291-310.Gates, Gary J. How Many People Are Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender? Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law, 2011.Kinsey, Alfred, et al. Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. Philadelphia: Saunders, 1953.Klein, Fitz. The Bisexual Option. London: Routledge, 1978.Leland, J. “Not Gay, Not Straight: A New Sexuality Emerges.” Newsweek 17 July 1995: 44–50.Schwartz, P. “Am I Discovering I Am Bisexual?” AARP (2016). 20 Mar. 2016 <http://aarp.org/home-family/sex-intimacy/info-2016/discovering-bisexual-schwartz.html>.

Over the last decade or so, much has been written about the possibilities offered by the internet for creating sites of community based on exchange, collaboration, and reciprocity. Since Howard Rheingold published his polemic, The Virtual Community, in 1993, much has been written on this subject. The notion of just what constitutes ‘virtual reality’ has been extensively debated; however, ‘community’ is almost universally assumed to be good. There are failed communities and successful communities, but the critique of ‘community’ itself as a concept stops there. How, then, do we account for websites that create a sense of community precisely through the promotion of hatred and violence, and on which hatred of others is what the community ‘has in common’? Community as Good: The Origins of Virtual Community The term ‘community’ suggests communication; indeed, the work derives from the Latin communicare, which, as Peter Gould explains, ‘originally meant to share, to join and to unite” (3), and from which is also derived the verb ‘to communicate.’ Hence, accounts of online culture draw on this definition of community, suggesting that computer technology brings people together by allowing them to communicate. Such proximity is, therefore, privileged over geophysical location. In recent debates about cyber-culture, definitions of online community tend to define community through the concept of ‘shared interests’. What is more, some accounts of cyber-culture share a certain view of online community as inherently liberating. The Bad Community: God Hates Fags God Hates Fags is perhaps one of the best-known far-right sites on the Web. It is a non-interactive website, set up and maintained by Benjamin Phelps, pastor of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, in association with his grandfather Fred Phelps, who originally founded the church in 1964. Phelps first achieved notoriety in 1991 when he organised a picket of the San Francisco Pride Parade, to ‘warn this evil city that they’re going the way of Sodom’. In 1997, the church’s members were ordered by the American Supreme Court to limit their picketing activities after they targeted a local Episcopalian church that they claimed had promoted gay rights. Since the ruling, church members have continued their campaign of homophobic picketing. However, it is as an online promoter of homophobia and other forms of hatred that Phelps has achieved notoriety on an international scale. On paper, Westboro Baptist Church’s Website seems like the perfect example of the Net’s utility as a means of giving voice to small, marginalised community groups, and of bringing together people who share ‘a commonality of interests and goals’. However, this, like other Christian fundamentalist sites, challenges the view of such networks as essentially liberating (though they are certainly utopian in tone), since their shared interests happen to include insisting that creationist dogma be taught in schools, picketing the funerals of those who die of Aids or as a result of homophobic attacks, and promoting violence against lesbians and gay men. God Hates Fags sees itself as both a site of community and as a pressure group fighting a desperately immoral liberal society. It also draws on the idea of a society becoming good through the erasure of certain marginalised subjects, with the erasure to take the form of individuals suppressing their sexual identity in real life, not just online. While God Hates Fags and other sites like it primarily express the fantasy of a post-apocalyptic New Jerusalem. They do so by referring to fantasies of the nation (as a space that must be purified in order for this apocalyptic transformation to take place), of the online community (here imagined as a community of haters), and of the local community producing the site (who, far from being a small, marginal force, are re-presented as a community of ‘knowers’ attempting to promote ‘the truth’ about life in the United States: that is, as a force for good). Fantastic communities are often unaware of their own violence, and the community that hates is no exception, although its claims to peacefulness often stretch credulity to a greater than usual extent. Here is Westboro’s description of its ‘peaceful’ protests: WBC engages in daily peaceful sidewalk demonstrations opposing the homosexual lifestyle of soul-damning, nation-destroying filth. We display large, colourful signs containing Bible words and sentiments, including: GOD HATES FAGS, FAGS HATE GOD, AIDS CURES FAGS, THANK GOD FOR AIDS, FAGS BURN IN HELL, GOD IS NOT MOCKED, FAGS ARE NATURE FREAKS [sic] … FAGS DOOM NATIONS, etc. (God Hates Fags) The site’s authors are able to claim such sentiments as ‘non-violent’ precisely because of the way that violence is imagined purely in terms of the physical act; that is, as embodied. Discursive violence, the violence of the text, is not recognised as such. Reading the passages above, I find it hard to maintain any sense of critical distance at the notion of picketing a funeral, and then going online to publicise the activity and exhort others to do the same. The site is frustrating precisely because it assumes the reader’s sympathy. For Phelps, a community of ‘fag haters’ already exists within the wider, corrupt national community of the United States; the site merely serves to unite this community and to provide it with resources. Nevertheless, the statement is itself part of the process by which the site attempts to construct a community through a process of rehabilitation, which aims to re-position hatred of homosexuals both as a political position and as an identity position. The site assumes that the experience of hatred, like that of other extreme emotions, has been wrongly constructed as essentially private, even impossible to articulate. Phelps assures us that it is not, that our hatred (and the reader is always assumed to be on side; the site is never defensive in tone, and never attempts to address its critics) is shared by others. The community exists in the bodies of individuals; by making hatred public and visible, the community can finally become visible in the public domain. This site, and others like it, provide a chilling new perspective on the notion of ‘shared interests’ as a basis for community, as well as giving an insight into the ways in which inequalities might not only translate from geophysical into online communities but actually be heightened, not least by the liberal rhetoric of free speech in which the intended victims of such assaults are urged simply to ignore them, even as they are imposed an ever-increasing number of victims (Porter 234-5). In order to justify their attacks on outsiders, hate sites reproduce discourses of virtual community alongside fundamentalist dogma. So, for example, Westboro Baptist Church claims that it is necessary to draw together a community based on a shared homophobic response in order to protect the larger community of the nation from destruction. In order to construct the virtual community then, it is necessary to mobilise fantasies of the nation as it might be in an ideal world. The community does not simply represent the wider community of the United States; that is, it is not a ‘virtual America.’ Rather, it draws upon a fantasy of the nation as perfectible, and this fantasy assumes a desire to purify the nation by destroying or expelling strangers. Despite the dystopian violence of Phelps’s vision, however, I do not think it is enough to argue that such manifestations are simply an example of a medium with great potential for spiritual growth falling into the wrong hands. Margaret Wertheim seems to predict the use of the Internet to promote hatred when she writes that ‘[t]here is every potential, if we are not careful, for cyberspace to be less like Heaven, and more like Hell’ (298). This reading of virtual culture tends to normalise the idea of a utopian internet community, from which deviations occur only as the result of insufficient vigilance. What is more, the invocation of a group of right-thinking cyber-citizens—the ‘we’ who must be ‘careful’—reproduces the very liberal rhetoric which, as I have argued, tends to perpetuate, or at least obscure, power structures within online communities. Indeed, the notion of ‘the online community’ invoked here seems, ironically, to reproduce the notion of a single unlimited community which, if it is not conterminous with all mankind exactly, is certainly conterminous with all (responsible) users of the internet. As I have shown, it is by drawing on the notions of universality and redemption that underpin utopian theories of cyber-culture that Phelps is able to present his site as a site of community. I would suggest, then, that the notion of a community that has the potential to be good but is constantly under threat from deviant outsiders, is inadequate. Rather, it is necessary to pay attention to the ways in which utopian rhetoric might in itself play a role in reproducing inequalities that exist in society more generally, both online and off. References Gould, P. “Dynamic Structures of Geographic Space.” Collapsing Space and Time: Geographic Aspects of Communications and Information. Eds. S.D. Brunn and T.R. Leinbach. London: HarperCollins, 1991. 3-30. Porter, J.E. “Liberal Individualism and Internet Policy: A Communitarian Critique.” Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st-Century Technologies. Eds. G.E. Hawisher and C.L. Selfe. Logan: Utah State UP, 1999. Rheingold, H. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. HarperPerennial, 1993. 16 Oct. 2002 http://www.well.com/www/hlr/vcbook/index.html>. Wertheim, M. The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. London: Virago Press, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Ferreday, Debra. "Bad Communities: Virtual Community and Hate Speech." M/C Journal 8.1 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0502/07-ferreday.php>. APA Style Ferreday, D. (Feb. 2005) "Bad Communities: Virtual Community and Hate Speech," M/C Journal, 8(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0502/07-ferreday.php>.

One of the most distinct places the politics of affect have played out in Australia of late has been in the struggles around the mandatory detention of undocumented migrants; specifically, in arguments about the amount of compassion border control practices should or do entail. Indeed, in 1990 the newly established Joint Standing Committee on Migration (JSCM) published its first report, Illegal Entrants in Australia: Balancing Control and Compassion. Contemporaneous, thought not specifically concerned, with the establishment of mandatory detention for asylum seekers, this report helped shape the context in which detention policy developed. As the Bureau of Immigration and Population Research put it in their summary of the report, “the Committee endorsed a tough stance regarding all future illegal entrants but a more compassionate stance regarding those now in Australia” (24). It would be easy now to frame this report in a narrative of decline. Under a Labor government the JSCM had at least some compassion to offer; since the 1996 conservative Coalition victory any such compassion has been in increasingly short supply, if not an outright political liability. This is a popular narrative for those clinging to the belief that Labor is still, in some residual sense, a social-democratic party. I am more interested in the ways the report’s subtitle effectively predicted the framework in which debates about detention have since been constructed: control vs. compassion, with balance as the appropriate mediating term. Control and compassion are presented as the poles of a single governmental project insofar as they can be properly calibrated; but at the same time, compassion is presented as an external balance to the governmental project (control), an extra-political restriction of the political sphere. This is a very formal way to put it, but it reflects a simple, vernacular theory that circulates widely among refugee activists. It is expressed with concision in Peter Mares’ groundbreaking book on detention centres, Borderlines, in the chapter title “Compassion as a vice”. Compassion remains one of the major themes and demands of Australian refugee advocates. They thematise compassion not only for the obvious reasons that mandatory detention involves a devastating lack thereof, and that its critics are frequently driven by intense emotional connections both to particular detainees and TPV holders and, more generally, to all who suffer the effects of Australian border control. There is also a historical or conjunctural element: as Ghassan Hage has written, for the last ten years or so many forms of political opposition in Australia have organised their criticisms in terms of “things like compassion or hospitality rather than in the name of a left/right political divide” (7). This tendency is not limited to any one group; it ranges across the spectrum from Liberal Party wets to anarchist collectives, via dozens of organised groups and individuals varying greatly in their political beliefs and intentions. In this context, it would be tendentious to offer any particular example(s) of compassionate activism, so let me instead cite a complaint. In November 2002, the conservative journal Quadrant worried that morality and compassion “have been appropriated as if by right by those who are opposed to the government’s policies” on border protection (“False Refugees” 2). Thus, the right was forced to begin to speak the language of compassion as well. The Department of Immigration, often considered the epitome of the lack of compassion in Australian politics, use the phrase “Australia is a compassionate country, but…” so often they might as well inscribe it on their letterhead. Of course this is hypocritical, but it is not enough to say the right are deforming the true meaning of the term. The point is that compassion is a contested term in Australian political discourse; its meanings are not fixed, but constructed and struggled over by competing political interests. This should not be particularly surprising. Stuart Hall, following Ernesto Laclau and others, famously argued that no political term has an intrinsic meaning. Meanings are produced – articulated, and de- or re-articulated – through a dynamic and partisan “suturing together of elements that have no necessary or eternal belongingness” (10). Compassion has many possible political meanings; it can be articulated to diverse social (and antisocial) ends. If I was writing on the politics of compassion in the US, for example, I would be talking about George W. Bush’s slogan of “compassionate conservatism”, and whatever Hannah Arendt meant when she argued that “the passion of compassion has haunted and driven the best men [sic] of all revolutions” (65), I think she meant something very different by the term than do, say, Rural Australians for Refugees. As Lauren Berlant has written, “politicized feeling is a kind of thinking that too often assumes the obviousness of the thought it has” (48). Hage has also opened this assumed obviousness to question, writing that “small-‘l’ liberals often translate the social conditions that allow them to hold certain superior ethical views into a kind of innate moral superiority. They see ethics as a matter of will” (8-9). These social conditions are complex – it isn’t just that, as some on the right like to assert, compassion is a product of middle class comfort. The actual relations are more dynamic and open. Connections between class and occupational categories on the one hand, and social attitudes and values on the other, are not given but constructed, articulated and struggled over. As Hall put it, the way class functions in the distribution of ideologies is “not as the permanent class-colonization of a discourse, but as the work entailed in articulating these discourses to different political class practices” (139). The point here is to emphasise that the politics of compassion are not straightforward, and that we can recognise and affirm feelings of compassion while questioning the politics that seem to emanate from those feelings. For example, a politics that takes compassion as its basis seems ill-suited to think through issues it can’t put a human face to – that is, the systematic and structural conditions for mandatory detention and border control. Compassion’s political investments accrue to specifiable individuals and groups, and to the harms done to them. This is not, as such, a bad thing, particularly if you happen to be a specifiable individual to whom a substantive harm has been done. But compassion, going one by one, group by group, doesn’t cope well with situations where the form of the one, or the form of the disadvantaged minority, constitutes not only a basis for aid or emancipation, but also violently imposes particular ideas of modern western subjectivity. How does this violence work? I want to answer by way of the story of an Iranian man who applied for asylum in Australia in 2004. In the available documents he is referred to as “the Applicant”. The Applicant claimed asylum based on his homosexuality, and his fear of persecution should he return to Iran. His asylum application was rejected by the Refugee Review Tribunal because the Tribunal did not believe he was really gay. In their decision they write that “the Tribunal was surprised to observe such a comprehensive inability on the Applicant’s part to identify any kind of emotion-stirring or dignity-arousing phenomena in the world around him”. The phenomena the Tribunal suggest might have been emotion-stirring for a gay Iranian include Oscar Wilde, Alexander the Great, Andre Gide, Greco-Roman wrestling, Bette Midler, and Madonna. I can personally think of much worse bases for immigration decisions than Madonna fandom, but there is obviously something more at stake here. (All quotes from the hearing are taken from the High Court transcript “WAAG v MIMIA”. I have been unable to locate a transcript of the original RRT decision, and so far as I know it remains unavailable. Thanks to Mark Pendleton for drawing my attention to this case, and for help with references.) Justice Kirby, one of the presiding Justices at the Applicant’s High Court appeal, responded to this with the obvious point, “Madonna, Bette Midler and so on are phenomena of the Western culture. In Iran, where there is death for some people who are homosexuals, these are not in the forefront of the mind”. Indeed, the High Court is repeatedly critical and even scornful of the Tribunal decision. When Mr Bennett, who is appearing for the Minister for Immigration in the appeal begins his case, he says, “your Honour, the primary attack which seems to be made on the decision of the –”, he is cut off by Justice Gummow, who says, “Well, in lay terms, the primary attack is that it was botched in the Tribunal, Mr Solicitor”. But Mr Bennett replies by saying no, “it was not botched. If one reads the whole of the Tribunal judgement, one sees a consistent line of reasoning and a conclusion being reached”. In a sense this is true; the deep tragicomic weirdness of the Tribunal decision is based very much in the unfolding of a particular form of homophobic rationality specific to border control and refugee determination. There have been hundreds of applications for protection specifically from homophobic persecution since 1994, when the first such application was made in Australia. As of 2002, only 22% of those applications had been successful, with the odds stacked heavily against lesbians – only 7% of lesbian applicants were successful, against a shocking enough 26% of gay men (Millbank, Imagining Otherness 148). There are a number of reasons for this. The Tribunal has routinely decided that even if persecution had occurred on the basis of homosexuality, the Applicant would be able to avoid such persecution if she or he acted ‘discreetly’, that is, hid their sexuality. The High Court ruled out this argument in 2003, but the Tribunal maintains an array of effective techniques of homophobic exclusion. For example, the Tribunal often uses the Spartacus International Gay Guide to find out about local conditions of lesbian and gay life even though it is a tourist guide book aimed at Western gay men with plenty of disposable income (Dauvergne and Millbank 178-9). And even in cases which have found in favour of particular lesbian and gay asylum seekers, the Tribunal has often gone out of its way to assert that lesbians and gay men are, nevertheless, not the subjects of human rights. States, that is, violate no rights when they legislate against lesbian and gay identities and practices, and the victims of such legislation have no rights to protection (Millbank, Fear 252-3). To go back to Madonna. Bennett’s basic point with respect to the references to the Material Girl et al is that the Tribunal specifically rules them as irrelevant. Mr Bennett: The criticism which is being made concerns a question which the Tribunal asked and what is very much treated in the Tribunal’s judgement as a passing reference. If one looks, for example, at page 34 – Kirby J: This is where Oscar, Alexander and Bette as well as Madonna turn up? Mr Bennett: Yes. The very paragraph my learned friend relies on, if one reads the sentence, what the Tribunal is saying is, “I am not looking for these things”. Gummow J: Well, why mention it? What sort of training do these people get in decision making before they are appointed to this body, Mr Solicitor? Mr Bennett: I cannot assist your Honour on that. Gummow J: No. Well, whatever it is, what happened here does not speak highly of the results of it. To gloss this, Bennett argues that the High Court are making too much of an irrelevant minor point in the decision. Mr Bennett: One would think [based on the High Court’s questions] that the only things in this judgement were the throwaway references saying, “I wasn’t looking for an understanding of Oscar Wilde”, et cetera. That is simply, when one reads the judgement as a whole, not something which goes to the centre at all… There is a small part of the judgement which could be criticized and which is put, in the judgement itself, as a subsidiary element and prefaced with the word “not”. Kirby J: But the “not” is a bit undone by what follows when I think Marilyn [Monroe] is thrown in. Mr Bennett: Well, your Honour, I am not sure why she is thrown in. Kirby J: Well, that is exactly the point. Mr Bennett holds that, as per Wayne’s World, the word “not” negates any clause to which it is attached. Justice Kirby, on the other hand, feels that this “not” comes undone, and that this undoing – and the uncertainty that accrues to it – is exactly the point. But the Tribunal won’t be tied down on this, and makes use of its “not” to hold gay stereotypes at arm’s length – which is still, of course, to hold them, at a remove that will insulate homophobia against its own illegitimacy. The Tribunal defends itself against accusations of homophobia by announcing specifically and repeatedly, in terms that consciously evoke culturally specific gay stereotypes, that it is not interested in those stereotypes. This unconvincing alibi works to prevent any inconvenient accusations of bias from butting in on the routine business of heteronormativity. Paul Morrison has noted that not many people will refuse to believe you’re gay: “Claims to normativity are characteristically met with scepticism. Only parents doubt confessions of deviance” (5). In this case, it is not a parent but a paternalistic state apparatus. The reasons the Tribunal did not believe the applicant [were] (a) because of “inconsistencies about the first sexual experience”, (b) “the uniformity of relationships”, (c) the “absence of a “gay” circle of friends”, (d) “lack of contact with the “gay” underground” and [(e)] “lack of other forms of identification”. Of these the most telling, I think, are the last three: a lack of gay friends, of contact with the gay underground, or of unspecified other forms of identification. What we can see here is that even if the Tribunal isn’t looking for the stereotypical icons of Western gay culture, it is looking for the characteristic forms of Western gay identity which, as we know, are far from universal. The assumptions about the continuities between sex acts and identities that we codify with names like lesbian, gay, homosexual and so on, often very poorly translate the ways in which non-Western populations understand and describe themselves, if they translate them at all. Gayatri Gopinath, for example, uses the term “queer diaspor[a]... in contradistinction to the globalization of “gay” identity that replicates a colonial narrative of development and progress that judges all other sexual cultures, communities, and practices against a model of Euro-American sexual identity” (11). I can’t assess the accuracy of the Tribunal’s claims regarding the Applicant’s social life, although I am inclined to scepticism. But if the Applicant in this case indeed had no gay friends, no contact with the gay underground and no other forms of identification with the big bad world of gaydom, he may obviously, nevertheless, have been a Man Who Has Sex With Men, as they sometimes say in AIDS prevention work. But this would not, either in the terms of Australian law or the UN Convention, qualify him as a refugee. You can only achieve refugee status under the terms of the Convention based on membership of a ‘specific social group’. Lesbians and gay men are held to constitute such groups, but what this means is that there’s a certain forcing of Western identity norms onto the identity and onto the body of the sexual other. This shouldn’t read simply as a moral point about how we should respect diversity. There’s a real sense that our own lives as political and sexual beings are radically impoverished to the extent we fail to foster and affirm non-Western non-heterosexualities. There’s a sustaining enrichment that we miss out on, of course, in addition to the much more serious forms of violence others will be subject to. And these are kinds of violence as well as forms of enrichment that compassionate politics, organised around the good refugee, just does not apprehend. In an essay on “The politics of bad feeling”, Sara Ahmed makes a related argument about national shame and mourning. “Words cannot be separated from bodies, or other signs of life. So the word ‘mourns’ might get attached to some subjects (some more than others represent the nation in mourning), and it might get attached to some objects (some losses more than others may count as losses for this nation)” (73). At one level, these points are often made with regard to compassion, especially as it is racialised in Australian politics; for example, that there would be a public outcry were we to detain hypothetical white boat people. But Ahmed’s point stretches further – in the necessary relation between words and bodies, she asks not only which bodies do the describing and which are described, but which are permitted a relation to language at all? If “words cannot be separated from bodies”, what happens to those bodies words fail? The queer diasporic body, so reductively captured in that phrase, is a case in point. How do we honour its singularity, as well as its sociality? How do we understand the systematicity of the forces that degrade and subjugate it? What do the politics of compassion have to offer here? It’s easy for the critic or the cynic to sneer at such politics – so liberal, so sentimental, so wet – or to deconstruct them, expose “the violence of sentimentality” (Berlant 62), show “how compassion towards the other’s suffering might sustain the violence of appropriation” (Ahmed 74). These are not moves I want to make. A guiding assumption of this essay is that there is never a unilinear trajectory between feelings and politics. Any particular affect or set of affects may be progressive, reactionary, apolitical, or a combination thereof, in a given situation; compassionate politics are no more necessarily bad than they are necessarily good. On the other hand, “not necessarily bad” is a weak basis for a political movement, especially one that needs to understand and negotiate the ways the enclosures and borders of late capitalism mass-produce bodies we can’t put names to, people outside familiar and recognisable forms of identity and subjectivity. As Etienne Balibar has put it, “in utter disregard of certain borders – or, in certain cases, under covers of such borders – indefinable and impossible identities emerge in various places, identities which are, as a consequence, regarded as non-identities. However, their existence is, none the less, a life-and-death question for large numbers of human beings” (77). Any answer to that question starts with our compassion – and our rage – at an unacceptable situation. But it doesn’t end there. References Ahmed, Sara. “The Politics of Bad Feeling.” Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association Journal 1.1 (2005): 72-85. Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973. Balibar, Etienne. We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Trans. James Swenson. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004. Berlant, Lauren. “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy and Politics.” Cultural Studies and Political Theory. Ed. Jodi Dean. Ithaca and Cornell: Cornell UP, 2000. 42-62. Bureau of Immigration and Population Research. Illegal Entrants in Australia: An Annotated Bibliography. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1994. Dauvergne, Catherine and Jenni Millbank. “Cruisingforsex.com: An Empirical Critique of the Evidentiary Practices of the Australian Refugee Review Tribunal.” Alternative Law Journal 28 (2003): 176-81. “False Refugees and Misplaced Compassion” Editorial. Quadrant 390 (2002): 2-4. Hage, Ghassan. Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society. Annandale: Pluto, 2003. Hall, Stuart. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London: Verso, 1988. Joint Standing Committee on Migration. Illegal Entrants in Australia: Balancing Control and Compassion. Canberra: The Committee, 1990. Mares, Peter. Borderline: Australia’s Treatment of Refugees and Asylum Seekers. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2001. Millbank, Jenni. “Imagining Otherness: Refugee Claims on the Basis of Sexuality in Canada and Australia.” Melbourne University Law Review 26 (2002): 144-77. ———. “Fear of Persecution or Just a Queer Feeling? Refugee Status and Sexual orientation in Australia.” Alternative Law Journal 20 (1995): 261-65, 299. Morrison, Paul. The Explanation for Everything: Essays on Sexual Subjectivity. New York: New York UP, 2001. Pendleton, Mark. “Borderline.” Bite 2 (2004): 3-4. “WAAG v MIMIA [2004]. HCATrans 475 (19 Nov. 2004)” High Court of Australia Transcripts. 2005. 17 Oct. 2005 http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/HCATrans/2004/475.html>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style McGrath, Shane. "Compassionate Refugee Politics?." M/C Journal 8.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/02-mcgrath.php>. APA Style McGrath, S. (Dec. 2005) "Compassionate Refugee Politics?," M/C Journal, 8(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/02-mcgrath.php>.

Introduction The first “Aquarius Festival” came together in Canberra, at the Australian National University, in the autumn of 1971 and was reprised in 1973 in the small rural town of Nimbin, in northern New South Wales. Both events reflected the Zeitgeist in what was, in some ways, an inchoate expression of the so-called “counterculture” (Roszak). Rather than attempting to analyse the counterculture as a discrete movement with a definable history, I enlist the theory of cultural memes to read the counter culture as a Dawkinsian cluster meme, with this paper offered as “testimonio”, a form of quasi-political memoir that views shifts in the culture through the lens of personal experience (Zimmerman, Yúdice). I track an evolving personal, “internal” topography and map its points of intersection with the radical social, political and cultural changes spawned by the “consciousness revolution” that was an integral part of the counterculture emerging in the 1970s. I focus particularly on the notion of “consciousness raising”, as a Dawkinsian memetic replicator, in the context of the idealistic notions of the much-heralded “New Age” of Aquarius, and propose that this meme has been a persistent feature of the evolution of the “meme cluster” known as the counterculture. Mimesis and the Counterculture Since evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins floated the notion of cultural memes as a template to account for the evolution of ideas within political cultures, a literature of commentary and criticism has emerged that debates the strengths and weaknesses of his proposed model and its application across a number of fields. I borrow the notion to trace the influence of a set of memes that clustered around the emergence of what writer Marilyn Ferguson called The Aquarian Conspiracy, in her 1980 book of that name. Ferguson’s text, subtitled Personal and Social Transformation in Our Time, was a controversial attempt to account for what was known as the “New Age” movement, with its late millennial focus on social and personal transformation. That focus leads me to approach the counterculture (a term first floated by Theodore Roszak) less as a definable historical movement and more as a cluster of aspirational tropes expressing a range of aspects or concerns, from the overt political activism through to experimental technologies for the transformation of consciousness, and all characterised by a critical interrogation of, and resistance to, conventional social norms (Ferguson’s “personal and social transformation”). With its more overtly “spiritual” focus, I read the “New Age” meme, then, as a sub-set of this “cluster meme”, the counterculture. In my reading, “New Age” and “counterculture” overlap, sharing persistent concerns and a broad enough tent to accommodate the serious—the combative political action of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), say, (see Elbaum)—to the light-hearted—the sport of frisbee for example (Stancil). The interrogation of conventional social and political norms inherited from previous generations was a prominent strategy across both movements. Rather than offering a sociological analysis or history of the ragbag counterculture, per se, my discussion here focuses in on the particular meme of “consciousness raising” within that broader set of cultural shifts, some of which were sustained in their own right, some dropping away, and many absorbed into the dominant mainstream culture. Dawkins use of the term “meme” was rooted in the Greek mimesis, to emphasise the replication of an idea by imitation, or copying. He likened the way ideas survive and change in human culture to the natural selection of genes in biological evolution. While the transmission of memes does not depend on a physical medium, such as the DNA of biology, they replicate with a greater or lesser degree of success by harnessing human social media in a kind of “infectivity”, it is argued, through “contagious” repetition among human populations. Dawkins proposed that just as biological organisms could be said to act as “hosts” for replicating genes, in the same way people and groups of people act as hosts for replicating memes. Even before Dawkins floated his term, French biologist Jacques Monod wrote that ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms. Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role. (165, emphasis mine) Ideas have power, in Monod’s analysis: “They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighbouring brains, and thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains” (Monod, cited in Gleick). Emblematic of the counterculture were various “New Age” phenomena such as psychedelic drugs, art and music, with the latter contributing the “Aquarius” meme, whose theme song came from the stage musical (and later, film) Hair, and particularly the lyric that runs: “This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius”. The Australian Aquarius Festivals of 1971 and 1973 explicitly invoked this meme in the way identified by Monod and the “Aquarius” meme resonated even in Australia. Problematising “Aquarius” As for the astrological accuracy of the “Age of Aquarius meme”, professional astrologers argue about its dating, and the qualities that supposedly characterise it. When I consulted with two prominent workers in this field for the preparation of this article, I was astonished to find their respective dating of the putative Age of Aquarius were centuries apart! What memes were being “hosted” here? According to the lyrics: When the moon is in the seventh house And Jupiter aligns with Mars Then peace will guide the planets And love will steer the stars. (Hair) My astrologer informants assert that the moon is actually in the seventh house twice every year, and that Jupiter aligns with Mars every two years. Yet we are still waiting for the outbreak of peace promised according to these astrological conditions. I am also informed that there’s no “real” astrological underpinning for the aspirations of the song’s lyrics, for an astrological “Age” is not determined by any planet but by constellations rising, they tell me. Most important, contrary to the aspirations embodied in the lyrics, peace was not guiding the planets and love was not about to “steer the stars”. For Mars is not the planet of love, apparently, but of war and conflict and, empowered with the expansiveness of Jupiter, it was the forceful aggression of a militaristic mind-set that actually prevailed as the “New Age” supposedly dawned. For the hippified summer of love had taken a nosedive with the tragic events at the Altamont speedway, near San Francisco in 1969, when biker gangs, enlisted to provide security for a concert performance by The Rolling Stones allegedly provoked violence, marring the event and contributing to a dawning disillusionment (for a useful coverage of the event and its historical context see Dalton). There was a lot of far-fetched poetic licence involved in this dreaming, then, but memes, according to Nikos Salingaros, are “greatly simplified versions of patterns”. “The simpler they are, the faster they can proliferate”, he writes, and the most successful memes “come with a great psychological appeal” (243, 260; emphasis mine). What could be retrieved from this inchoate idealism? Harmony and understanding Sympathy and trust abounding No more falsehoods or derisions Golden living dreams of visions Mystic crystal revelation And the mind’s true liberation Aquarius, Aquarius. (Hair) In what follows I want to focus on this notion: “mind’s true liberation” by tracing the evolution of this project of “liberating” the mind, reflected in my personal journey. Nimbin and Aquarius I had attended the first Aquarius Festival, which came together in Canberra, at the Australian National University, in the autumn of 1971. I travelled there from Perth, overland, in a Ford Transit van, among a raggedy band of tie-dyed hippie actors, styled as The Campus Guerilla Theatre Troupe, re-joining our long-lost sisters and brothers as visionary pioneers of the New Age of Aquarius. Our visions were fueled with a suitcase full of potent Sumatran “buddha sticks” and, contrary to Biblical prophesies, we tended to see—not “through a glass darkly” but—in psychedelic, pop-, and op-art explosions of colour. We could see energy, man! Two years later, I found myself at the next Aquarius event in Nimbin, too, but by that time I inhabited a totally different mind-zone, albeit one characterised by the familiar, intense idealism. In the interim, I had been arrested in 1971 while “tripping out” in Sydney on potent “acid”, or LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide); had tried out political engagement at the Pram Factory Theatre in Melbourne; had camped out in protest at the flooding of Lake Pedder in the Tasmanian wilderness; met a young guru, started meditating, and joined “the ashram”—part of the movement known as the Divine Light Mission, which originated in India and was carried to the “West” (including Australia) by an enthusiastic and evangelical following of drug-toking drop-outs who had been swarming through India intent on escaping the dominant culture of the military-industrial complex and the horrors of the Vietnam War. Thus, by the time of the 1973 event in Nimbin, while other festival participants were foraging for “gold top” magic mushrooms in farmers’ fields, we devotees had put aside such chemical interventions in conscious awareness to dig latrines (our “service” project for the event) and we invited everyone to join us for “satsang” in the yellow, canvas-covered, geodesic dome, to attend to the message of peace. The liberation meme had shifted through a mutation that involved lifestyle-changing choices that were less about alternative approaches to sustainable agriculture and more about engaging directly with “mind’s true liberation”. Raising Consciousness What comes into focus here is the meme of “consciousness raising”, which became the persistent project within which I lived and worked and had my being for many years. Triggered initially by the ingestion of those psychedelic substances that led to my shocking encounter with the police, the project was carried forward into the more disciplined environs of my guru’s ashrams. However, before my encounter with sustained spiritual practice I had tried to work the shift within the parameters of an ostensibly political framework. “Consciousness raising” was a form of political activism borrowed from the political sphere. Originally generated by Mao Zedong in China during the revolutionary struggle to overthrow the vested colonial interests that were choking Chinese nationalism in the 1940s, to our “distant, foreign brains” (Monod), as Western revolutionary romantics, Chairman Mao and his Little Red Book were taken up, in a kind of international counterculture solidarity with revolutionaries everywhere. It must be admitted, this solidarity was a fairly superficial gesture. Back in China it might be construed as part of a crude totalitarian campaign to inculcate Marxist-Leninist political ideas among the peasant classes (see Compestine for a fictionalised account of traumatic times; Han Suyin’s long-form autobiography—an early example of testimonio as personal and political history—offers an unapologetic account of a struggle not usually construed as sympathetically by Western commentators). But the meme (and the processes) of consciousness raising were picked up by feminists in the United States in the late 1960s and into the 1970s (Brownmiller 21) and it was in this form I encountered it as an actor with the politically engaged theatre troupe, The Australian Performing Group, at Carlton’s Pram Factory Theatre in late 1971. The Performance Group I performed as a core member of the Group in 1971-72. Decisions as to which direction the Group should take were to be made as a collective, and the group veered towards anarchy. Most of the women were getting together outside of the confines of the Pram Factory to raise their consciousness within the Carlton Women’s Liberation Cell Group. While happy that the sexual revolution was reducing women’s sexual inhibitions, some of the men at the Factory were grumbling into their beer, disturbed that intimate details of their private lives—and their sexual performance—might be disclosed and raked over by a bunch of radical feminists. As they began to demand equal rights to orgasm in the bedroom, the women started to seek equal access within the performance group, too. They requested rehearsal time to stage the first production by the Women’s Theatre Group, newly formed under the umbrella of the wider collective. As all of the acknowledged writers in the Group so far were men—some of whom had not kept pace in consciousness raising—scripts tended to be viewed as part of a patriarchal plot, so Betty Can Jump was an improvised piece, with the performance material developed entirely by the cast in workshop-style rehearsals, under the direction of Kerry Dwyer (see Blundell, Zuber-Skerritt 21, plus various contributors at www.pramfactory.com/memoirsfolder/). I was the only male in the collective included in the cast. Several women would have been more comfortable if no mere male were involved at all. My gendered attitudes would scarcely have withstood a critical interrogation but, as my partner was active in launching the Women’s Electoral Lobby, I was given the benefit of the doubt. Director Kerry Dwyer liked my physicalised approach to performance (we were both inspired by the “poor theatre” of Jerzy Grotowski and the earlier surrealistic theories of Antonin Artaud), and I was cast to play all the male parts, whatever they would be. Memorable material came up in improvisation, much of which made it into the performances, but my personal favorite didn’t make the cut. It was a sprawling movement piece where I was “born” out of a symbolic mass of writhing female bodies. It was an arduous process and, after much heaving and huffing, I emerged from the birth canal stammering “SSSS … SSSS … SSMMMO-THER”! The radical reversioning of culturally authorised roles for women has inevitably, if more slowly, led to a re-thinking of the culturally approved and reinforced models of masculinity, too, once widely accepted as entirely biologically ordained rather than culturally constructed. But the possibility of a queer re-versioning of gender would be recognised only slowly. Liberation Meanwhile, Dennis Altman was emerging as an early spokesman for gay, or homosexual, liberation and he was invited to address the collective. Altman’s stirring book, Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation, had recently been published, but none of us had read it. Radical or not, the Group had shown little evidence of sensitivity to gender-queer issues. My own sexuality was very much “oppressed” rather than liberated and I would have been loath to use “queer” to describe myself. The term “homosexual” was fraught with pejorative, quasi-medical associations and, in a collective so divided across strict and sometimes hostile gender boundaries, deviant affiliations got short shrift. Dennis was unsure of his reception before this bunch of apparent “heteros”. Sitting at the rear of the meeting, I admired his courage. It took more self-acceptance than I could muster to confront the Group on this issue at the time. Somewhere in the back of my mind, “homosexuality” was still something I was supposed to “get over”, so I failed to respond to Altman’s implicit invitation to come out and join the party. The others saw me in relationship with a woman and whatever doubts they might have carried about the nature of my sexuality were tactfully suspended. Looking back, I am struck by the number of simultaneous poses I was trying to maintain: as an actor; as a practitioner of an Artaudian “theatre of cruelty”; as a politically committed activist; and as a “hetero”-sexual. My identity was an assemblage of entities posing as “I”; it was as if I were performing a self. Little gay boys are encouraged from an early age to hide their real impulses, not only from others—in the very closest circle, the family; at school; among one’s peers—but from themselves, too. The coercive effects of shaming usually fix the denial into place in our psyches before we have any intellectual (or political) resources to consider other options. Growing up trying to please, I hid my feelings. In my experience, it could be downright dangerous to resist the subtle and gross coercions that applied around gender normativity. The psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, of the British object-relations school, argues that when the environment does not support the developing personality and requires the person to sacrifice his or her own spontaneous needs to adapt to environmental demands, there is not even a resting-place for individual experience and the result is a failure in the primary narcissistic state to evolve an individual. The “individual” then develops as an extension of the shell rather than that of the core [...] What there is left of a core is hidden away and is difficult to find even in the most far-reaching analysis. The individual then exists by not being found. The true self is hidden, and what we have to deal with clinically is the complex false self whose function is to keep this true self hidden. (212) How to connect to that hidden core, then? “Mind’s true liberation...” Alienated from the performative version of selfhood, but still inspired by the promise of liberation, even in the “fuzzy” form for which my inchoate hunger yearned (sexual liberation? political liberation? mystical liberation?), I was left to seek out a more authentic basis for selfhood, one that didn’t send me spinning along the roller-coaster of psychedelic drugs, or lie to me with the nostrums of a toxic, most forms of which would deny me, as a sexual, moral and legal pariah, the comforts of those “anchorage points to the social matrix” identified by Soddy (cited in Mol 58). My spiritual inquiry was “counter” to these institutionalised models of religious culture. So, I began to read my way through a myriad of books on comparative religion. And to my surprise, rather than taking up with the religions of antique cultures, instead I encountered a very young guru, initially as presented in a simply drawn poster in the window of Melbourne’s only vegetarian restaurant (Shakahari, in Carlton). “Are you hungry and tired of reading recipe books?” asked the figure in the poster. I had little sense of where that hunger would lead me, but it seemed to promise a fulfilment in ways that the fractious politics of the APG offered little nourishment. So, while many of my peers in the cities chose to pursue direct political action, and others experimented with cooperative living in rural communes, I chose the communal lifestyle of the ashram. In these different forms, then, the conscious raising meme persisted when other challenges raised by the counterculture either faded or were absorbed in the mainstream. I finally came to realise that the intense disillusionment process I had been through (“dis-illusionment” as the stripping away of illusions) was the beginning of awakening, in effect a “spiritual initiation” into a new way of seeing myself and my “place” in the world. Buddhist teachers might encourage this very kind of stripping away of false notions as part of their teaching, so the aspiration towards the “true liberation” of the mind expressed in the Aquarian visioning might be—and in my case, actually has been and continues to be—fulfilled to a very real extent. Gurus and the entire turn towards Eastern mysticism were part of the New Age meme cluster prevailing during the early 1970s, but I was fortunate to connect with an enduring set of empirical practices that haven’t faded with the fashions of the counterculture. A good guitarist would never want to play in public without first tuning her instrument. In a similar way, it is now possible for me to tune my mind back to a deeper, more original source of being than the socially constructed sense of self, which had been so fraught with conflicts for me. I have discovered that before gender, and before sexuality, in fact, pulsing away behind the thicket of everyday associations, there is an original, unconditioned state of beingness, the awareness of which can be reclaimed through focused meditation practices, tested in a wide variety of “real world” settings. For quite a significant period of time I worked as an instructor in the method on behalf of my guru, or mentor, travelling through a dozen or so countries, and it was through this exposure that I was able to observe that the practices worked independently of culture and that “mind’s true liberation” was in many ways a de-programming of cultural indoctrinations (see Marsh, 2014, 2013, 2011 and 2007 for testimony of this process). In Japan, Zen roshi might challenge their students with the koan: “Show me your original face, before you were born!” While that might seem to be an absurd proposal, I am finding that there is a potential, if unexpected, liberation in following through such an inquiry. As “hokey” as the Aquarian meme-set might have been, it was a reflection of the idealistic hope that characterised the cluster of memes that aggregated within the counterculture, a yearning for healthier life choices than those offered by the toxicity of the military-industrial complex, the grossly exploitative effects of rampant Capitalism and a politics of cynicism and domination. The meme of the “true liberation” of the mind, then, promised by the heady lyrics of a 1970s hippie musical, has continued to bear fruit in ways that I could not have imagined. References Altman, Dennis. Homosexual Oppression and Liberation. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1972. Blundell, Graeme. The Naked Truth: A Life in Parts. Sydney: Hachette, 2011. Brownmiller, Susan. In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution. New York: The Dial Press, 1999. Compestine, Ying Chang. Revolution Is Not a Dinner Party. New York: Square Fish, 2009. Dalton, David. “Altamont: End of the Sixties, Or Big Mix-Up in the Middle of Nowhere?” Gadfly Nov/Dec 1999. April 2014 ‹http://www.gadflyonline.com/archive/NovDec99/archive-altamont.html›. Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1976. Elbaum, Max. Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che. London and New York: Verso, 2002. Ferguson, Marilyn. The Aquarian Conspiracy. Los Angeles: Tarcher Putnam, 1980. Gleick, James. “What Defines a Meme?” Smithsonian Magazine 2011. April 2014 ‹http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/What-Defines-a Meme.html›. Hair, The American Tribal Love Rock Musical. Prod. Michael Butler. Book by Gerome Ragni and James Rado; Lyrics by Gerome Ragni and James Rado; Music by Galt MacDermot; Musical Director: Galt MacDermot. 1968. Han, Suyin. The Crippled Tree. 1965. Reprinted. Chicago: Academy Chicago P, 1985. ---. A Mortal Flower. 1966. Reprinted. Chicago: Academy Chicago P, 1985. ---. Birdless Summer. 1968. Reprinted. Chicago: Academy Chicago P, 1985. ---. The Morning Deluge: Mao TseTung and the Chinese Revolution 1893-1954. Boston: Little Brown, 1972. ---. My House Has Two Doors. New York: Putnam, 1980. Marsh, Victor. The Boy in the Yellow Dress. Melbourne: Clouds of Magellan Press, 2014. ---. “A Touch of Silk: A (Post)modern Faerie Tale.” Griffith Review 42: Once Upon a Time in Oz (Oct. 2013): 159-69. ---. “Bent Kid, Straight World: Life Writing and the Reconfiguration of ‘Queer’.” TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses 15.1 (April 2011). ‹http://www.textjournal.com.au/april11/marsh.htm›. ---. “The Boy in the Yellow Dress: Re-framing Subjectivity in Narrativisations of the Queer Self.“ Life Writing 4.2 (Oct. 2007): 263-286. Mol, Hans. Identity and the Sacred: A Sketch for a New Social-Scientific Theory of Religion. Oxford: Blackwell, 1976. Monod, Jacques. Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970. Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. New York: Doubleday, 1968. Salingaros, Nikos. Theory of Architecture. Solingen: Umbau-Verlag, 2006. Stancil, E.D., and M.D. Johnson. Frisbee: A Practitioner’s Manual and Definitive Treatise. New York: Workman, 1975 Winnicott, D.W. Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis: Collected Papers. 1958. London: Hogarth Press, 1975. Yúdice, George. “Testimonio and Postmodernism.” Latin American Perspectives 18.3 (1991): 15-31. Zimmerman, Marc. “Testimonio.” The Sage Encyclopedia of Social Science Research Methods. Eds. Michael S. Lewis-Beck, Alan Bryman and Tim Futing Liao. London: Sage Publications, 2003. Zuber-Skerritt, Ortrun, ed. Australian Playwrights: David Williamson. Amsterdam: Rodolpi, 1988.

As the old technologies become automatic and invisible, we find ourselves more concerned with fighting or embracing what’s new”—Dennis Baron, From Pencils to Pixels:The Stage of Literacy Technologies Increasingly, cultural study is villainised by defenders of the academic tradition for luring English students away from the high-brow texts of the literary canon, a condition exacerbated by institutions' need for economic survival. In Britain in 1995 there were 1500 fewer English A-Level students than in 1994, whereas cultural studies students increased by approximately the same number (Cartmel et al. 1). Modern students of English are preferring more readily digestible on-screen texts which subvert the role of the author in favour of the role of the genre, a preference that allows readers/viewers to pay more attention to their own tastes, beliefs and identities than those of figures that produced great books, and their contemporaries. Modern cultural studies have a somewhat self-indulgent quality that many academics find distasteful, a kind of narcissistic celebration of the fact that media and mass culture operate as reflections of ourselves today instead of as windows into brilliant minds and historically significant moments. One of the most frustrating forms of this for defenders of traditional English studies is the adaptation of classic literature into commercial film and the ensuing analyses. The task of 'doing justice' to a classic novel in a modern film is fundamentally impossible. Whatever authenticity is strived for in an adaptation, the economic necessities of the modern film (sex appeal, celebrity, luridness) are bound to collide with academic notions of the original text and subsequently cause damage and widen the literature/media divide. A recent remake by Gus Van Sant of one of the most celebrated films ever made, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), has added new flavour to this debate. Van Sant's Psycho (1999) operates more as an homage to the classic film and as a piece of 'conceptual art' than as a simple remake (Romney 31). Almost every shot, every word, every piece of music from the original has been recreated in an attempt to celebrate rather than claim credit for the ideas which made Hitchcock's film such a pillar of the film canon, much in the same way as a screen adaptation of a classic novel validates itself via its established worth. What is interesting about the reaction to this film is that as far as I can tell most critics hated it. The new Psycho has been labelled a vulgar hack job, a grossly immodest attempt to improve on the unimprovable. What is it about the original film that has caused this reaction to the remake, and what does it suggest about critical/academic readings versus popular ones? In order to answer this question, we must look closely at the original film, and at what is different or similar about the new one, and most importantly, consider the source of this uneasiness that pervades the adaptation of one fictitious body into another. The plot of Psycho is pretty straightforward. Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), a disenchanted and fatally scatty secretary that wants to marry her lover Sam (John Gavin) steals forty thousand dollars from her boss so they can afford to do so. She skips town and stops at a motel run by Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) whose mother can be glimpsed and heard in a house nearby. Bates spies on Marion while she undresses, and just when she seems like she's going to return the stolen money she gets brutally stabbed in the shower. Norman finds her body and puts it in the car which he pushes into a swamp. Marion's sister Lila and Sam go looking for her, as does Arbogast, a PI who has been hired to find the money. Arbogast questions Norman and also gets brutally stabbed to death. When he fails to return, Lila and Sam go to the sheriff who tells them among other things that Mrs. Bates has been dead for ten years after killing the man she was involved with and then killing herself. All the while, we hear Norman talking to his mother and insisting on taking her down to the cellar. Lila and Sam search the hotel and eventually Lila finds a woman's stuffed corpse and Norman, dressed in old women's clothes, tries to stab her. Later a psychiatrist explains that the now incarcerated Norman is schizophrenic and had murdered his possessive mother because he was jealous of her lover. He had taken on her personality when drawn to a woman such as the fated Marion. What makes the film extraordinary is the use of action codes and an uneasiness that occupies the narrative through shot structure, real time, lighting, editing and sound. Hitchcock also deliberately disrupts the equilibrium audiences have come to expect from classic film narratives. The film opens as a crime story, turns into a murder mystery in which the lead character is the victim well before the end of the film. Psycho has a perplexing closure that denies the audience knowledge of the lost forty thousand dollars and Norman's unknown victims, and displaces sympathies and identities normally attached to lead roles. Norman's monstrous inner is developed with strange, angular lighting and a repressed homosexuality. The story unfolds in a very impersonal way, where the camera's omnipotence occasionally betrays the thoughts of its subjects. One brilliant moment involves the camera tracking between Marion while undressing and the money on the bed, reminding the audience of her deviousness and temptations, a mood heightened by her sexuality. The same technique is repeated after the shower scene, where the camera moves with Norman's gaze around the room towards the money, creating a bridge between the minds of the two enigmatic protagonists. All of these features of the original are reproduced in Van Sant's restaging in a manner that "subverts all audience wisdom about audience expectation" (Romney 31). The conversion from black and white into colour is the major technical innovation, cleverly highlighting details which speak volumes, such as Marion's telling bra's move from femme fatale black to aggressive orange. But it is the qualities of the film that remain the same which play on audience expectation, such as the shifty dialogue whose anachronistic sound reinforces the sinister subtext. The shower scene is bloodier, and Vince Vaughn's Norman is more blatantly homosexual, but the film is above all else a bold experiment and a deliberate challenge to accepted notions of originality. Perhaps the most critical moment for this intention is the retelling of the shower scene, the most famous horror scene in cinema history. Audience reaction to the shower scene was extreme when the film was first released in 1960. Hitchcock is said to have asked Paramount to allow him to remix the sound in the successive shots to accommodate audiences' "residual howling" (Branston & Stafford 49). The shower scene is the climactic moment for Van Sant's artistic intention: the absence of the same impact due to the audience's expectations of it questions what authority the critical reading has over the interpretation of antique films which are canonised and labelled as sophisticated or arty. What we come to expect from a remake that goes shot for shot is dismantled by the poignant illustration of the changes that have occurred since audiences have acquired a postmodern manner of regarding the on-screen world, particularly with the prevalence of films which stress the audience's participation in the attribution of meaning and value to the text, such as The Truman Show (1998), Scream (1997) or The Faculty (1999). Van Sant's Psycho uses the old-school to point out how our current attitude towards sexuality, violence and dementia have changed alongside our media culture, and most importantly he points the finger back to the audience, forcing us to recognise our new criteria for being frightened or aroused and our resistance to being inert receptacles of fictitious events and ideologies. John O. Thompson boils down the academic aversion to adaptation from book to film to four key points of resistance, three of which are applicable to the Psycho question: authenticity (the original is authentic, the adaptation is simulacrum), fidelity (the adaptation is a deformation or a dilution of the original), and massification (the original must be harder, more cognitively demanding, or the latter would not be the more popular for an 'unskilled' mass audience; Thompson 11). This last consideration is central to the critical response to Psycho. The overwhelmingly negative critical reaction to the film has given the audience very little credit for its ability to distance itself from the immediate narrative, a skill that is learned by default as we as viewers of postmodern media are exposed to more and more material that cleverly puts itself into a cultural context. The new Psycho may have surrendered its mysterious and disturbing nature but it has done so in favour of demonstrating how much we have changed, and in so doing has also managed to point out how critical appraisal of postmodern films fails to acknowledge the symbiotic relationship between mass audience and cinema art form. References Branston, Gill, and Roy Stafford, eds. The Media Student's Book. New York: Routledge, 1996. Cartmel, Deborah, I.Q. Hunter, Heidi Kaye and Imelda Whelehan, eds. Pulping Fictions: Consuming Culture across the Literature/Media Divide. London: Pluto Press, 1996. Romney, Jonathan. Guardian Weekly 17 Jan. 1999: 31. Thompson, John O. "Vanishing Worlds: Film Adaptation and the Mystery of the Original." Pulping Fictions: Consuming Culture across the Literature/Media Divide. London: Pluto Press, 1996. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Ben King. "Retelling Psycho." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.1 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9902/psycho.php>. Chicago style: Ben King, "Retelling Psycho," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 1 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9902/psycho.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Ben King. (199x) Retelling Psycho. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9902/psycho.php> ([your date of access]).

Did you wake up this morning wondering: "What really is my true identity?" Or have you ever seen your favorite television news program do a spot on cultural identity? "Today we ask you the viewer about your cultural identity." Not likely. It is certainly not vital for each of us to be able to expound upon our personal identity issues and definitions (you don't necessarily have to talk about identity to know yourself and to be happy and well-rounded). And yet, with this said, a casual visit to the local "mall" for a dose of people/culture-watching is all that it might take to be reminded of the multitude of social, economic and political institutions that vie every day for a piece of your identity, and the identity of everyone else we share this society with. Some of these identity-mongers can be considered beneficial and welcome influences on our understandings of who we are and how we see the world and life itself. These groups may include your family, friends, religious community and the cultural knowledge or background within which you were raised. Other groups that seek strong identification with themselves or their products include nation states, corporations, entertainment products, political parties and some civic institutions as well. From our observations in the mall, you can see how many aspects of identity have to do with collective identifications common to members of groups, such as those mentioned above. Indeed, much of the recent work in academia on identity analyses how social systems in the current era of late modernity affect identity construction. Yet, if we are to try to glue together a total picture or concept of what identity is, we must also consider the elements of an individual's identity which can be better understood within the unique experiences and feelings of each person. To be sure, it would be a sad reality if the identifications that influence my behavior in the mall encompassed the totality of "my identity". To get at what identity is, or might be made of, we can first venture into a tragically brief history lesson on the evolution of the concept of identity. This evolution has been rather drastic over the past few centuries. Chapter One -- Identity before Hegel: in Western society, before the beginning stages of the industrial revolution, you were considered to be born with your identity. It was a mixture, perhaps, of your soul and your situation/position in society and family (i.e. depending on your father's occupation, your gender, ethnic group, etc.). This view varies greatly from the modern, "constructionist" conceptualisation of identity. Chapter Two -- Modern Identity: in intellectual and academic circles much of the constructionist work on identity was begun by Existentialist philosophers such as Nietzsche and Sartre. The most recent inquiries on the issue of identity have been within Cultural Studies and Postmodernist thought. The constructionist view sees identity as "constructed on the back of a recognition of some common origin or shared characteristic with another person or group, or with an idea" (Hall 2). Thus, identity is formed through experiences of, and identification with, certain events, rituals, social institutions and symbols of culture(s) in which an individual was raised and lives. In short, identity is not a given or static; it is an evolving construction within each of us. Now that history class is over, perhaps we should highlight three principal concepts from the constructionist's viewpoint on identity. First, cultural environment is of utmost importance to personal and collective identity construction. "Cultural environment" must be seen as encompassing, (1) the plethora of entertainment and information technologies -- cultural spaces that corporations fill with new and reconstructed cultural products --, and (2) more temporal symbolic spaces such as oral and written languages. So, the Power Rangers will have their say in the identities of their young minions, but family heritages will as well, provided that such spaces are available and experienced. Secondly, the amount of cultural/social power that different groups and interests have to influence identity at the individual and collective (group) levels is also a vital element in the identity continuum. The last point is that identity itself is inherently a social phenomenon; it is a product of society, rather than a preexistent element of a being human. Identity is here seen as a way in which people make sense of and understand the self through affiliation and bonds with other people and the signs (i.e., the culture) that societies have created. Manuel Castells, a prolific writer and social observer, offers some compelling ideas about how social structures in modern societies are instrumental in collective identity construction. Castells's hypothesis is that identity construction can be separated into three categories: (1) legitimising identity, which is introduced by the dominant (hegemonic) institutions of society to further reproduce and rationalise their privileges, power and domination vis-à-vis social actors; (2) resistance identity, emerging from actors within cultures that are marginalised by dominant discourses and power relations, and who therefore build "trenches of resistance and survival" against these forces; and (3) project identity, "where social actors, on the basis of whichever cultural materials are available to them, build a new identity that redefines their position in society and, by doing so, seek the transformation of overall social structure" (Castells 8). While Castells's theories deserve more in-depth consideration than can be offered here, for our purposes nevertheless they help to distinguish some of the boundaries and anomalies within identity. Resistance identity, for example, is for me a useful concept for explaining the impact of ethnicity and nationality on how people use various cultural products to build and maintain their identities. In the USA, there are many groups who share common histories, experiences of persecution and discrimination, and culture with other members of the group. African-Americans are the best known and most studied sub-cultural (i.e., not the dominant) cultural/social groups in the USA. Being African-American, or "Black", is experienced by the individual and the group in the home, at school and work, and through the mass media and literature. For Castells, being Black in the USA is a resistance identity which is constructed through negative experiences of bigotry, discrimination and, for some, a lower economic status, and also through positive experiences of Black culture, history and family. Returning briefly to the international scene, resistance identity may also be a reaction to the proliferation of US and English-language cultural products in local settings. With "American" mass media and political-economic dominance (at present in the form of neo-liberal policies), nationalism, regional cultural pride and preservation may involve some resistance to this increasingly intrusive order. We must remember that Castells's typology here deals with collective identity only. This is important to keep in mind, particularly because common stereotypes of people's identities often play on the ethnic and social-economic groups which people may or may not be a part of. An endemic assumption is that an "American", "Black", "Latino", or even a "yuppie" will possess an identity and personality common to their stereotyped groupings. One problem with concepts of identity is that it is easy to generalise or overdetermine them. A face-value understanding of legitimising identity, for example, may posit that it is the embodied association and identification with the dominant institutions of society. Yet, if you think about it, most members of society, including members of marginalised groups, possess aspects of a legitimised identification with mainstream society. Most people do identify with capitalist dreams of being important, wealthy and living a specific lifestyle. Furthermore, many people, regardless of ethnicity or other groupings, do participate in the capitalist society, political systems and parties, Western ideologies, religious institutions and values. My point here is not to generalise, but rather to suggest that most people who have or feel some resistance to the dominant society also identify with certain legitimised and accepted aspects of that same society or culture. One way to think about the difference between resistance identity and legitimised identity is to consider how members of marginalised groups have access to specialised social and cultural spaces which other groups do not. Blacks have access to the black community, Latinos to Latino communities, homosexuals to homosexual communities. Specific processes of socialisation, identity-building and reaffirmation go on within these groups that non-group members miss out on for a variety of reasons. What members of the dominant society have are opportunities for membership in other specialised spaces that they seek membership in due to interests, unique personalities, physical traits or situational experiences. These cultural phenomena include musical tastes, gangs or civil groups, sports and other school activities, and the list goes on and on. Depending on the level of marginalisation, many members of "resistance" groups may or may not participate in a variety of other identity groups such as these. Furthermore, the type of identification involved may be collective or largely unique to the individual. Even with identities that we may call collective, as with my example of African-American identity, the actual types of identifications, feelings and interpretations that an individual feels with reference to her or his group(s) certainly can vary greatly. Another place we might look for a better understanding of identity groups is the wide gamut of communities of interest thriving in cyberspace. The development of online communities-of-interest, which are seen by some writers as allowing breaks from some of the traditional social constraints of modern society, has led to theories and excitement about the postmodern nature of cyberspace. These communities have developed because they allow individuals to express parts of themselves which do not have many outlets in real-world lives. The ability to play with gender and other personal characteristics in chat rooms or MUDs also offers identity variations that are refreshing, exciting and at times empowering for some people (see Bradlee, Lillie). Yet these considerations, like many others that accompany discussions of "post-modern" identity, dwell on the positive. Identity developments can also lead to harmful behaviors and thought processes. The Internet has also grown to offer a plethora of spaces for many people, particularly middle and upper-class men, to engage sexual fetishes, via the use of pornographic Web sites, that certainly can have long-term effects on their identities and perhaps on intimate relations with real people. The Internet offers a vast number of cultural spaces that those who have the chance to be online can tap into and identify with. Many of these spaces have been colonised by corporate interests, and more importantly, these capitalist forces are the primary drivers of new software and hardware production that will shape the look and feel, if not the content, of the Net of tomorrow (Schiller). As dangerous and unfortunate as this may be, identity is not yet in danger of being the proxy and total creation of mega-multinationals. Collective identification often has its roots in temporal cultures, tradition, and, for some, resistance identity. The audio-visual and Internet industries might have installed themselves as cultural gatekeepers and producers (a dangerous development in itself), but they cannot create cultural identities so easily. Drawing on the ideas laid out above, we can posit that the individual (whether they know it or not) and the cultural background and family/community influences in which he or she grows up most likely have the largest role. Concepts of identity, particularly newer work in the constructionist legacy (the example here being Castells), can serve us well by helping to forge understandings of the role of (1) the individual and (2) group influences in our day-to-day integration of cultural spaces, products and genres into our identities, behaviors and belief systems. Although constructionist ideas are implicitly represented in how much of the popular culture and society articulates "identity", it is all too easy to get caught up in concepts of identity based on bigotry, religious fanaticism or over-generalisation. As you stroll through the mall this week you might then pause to consider, not so much the extent to which our collective selves are casualties of a vapid consumer culture, but rather, I suggest, how to productively conceptualise the complexities of modern identities. References Berland, Jodi. "Angels Dancing: Cultural Technologies and the Production of Space." Cultural Studies. Eds. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler. London: Routledge, 1992. Braddlee. "Virtual Communities: Computer-Mediated Communication and Communities of Association." Master's Thesis. U of Indiana, 1993. Castells, Manuel. The Power of Identity. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. Hall, Stuart. "Introduction: Who Needs Identity?" Questions of Cultural Identity. Eds. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay. London: Sage, 1996. Lillie, Jonathan. "The Empowerment Potential of Internet Use." Homepage of Jonathan Lillie. 3 Apr. 1998. 14 Oct. 1998 <http://www.unc.edu/~jlillie/340.php>. Schiller, H.I. "The Global Information Highway: Project for an Ungovernable World." Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information. Eds. James Brook and Iain A. Boal. San Francisco: City Lights, 1995. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Jonathan Lillie. "Tackling Identity with Constructionist Concepts." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.3 (1998). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9810/const.php>. Chicago style: Jonathan Lillie, "Tackling Identity with Constructionist Concepts," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 3 (1998), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9810/const.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Jonathan Lillie. (1998) Tackling identity with constructionist concepts. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(3). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9810/const.php> ([your date of access]).

Introduction This article argues in favour of same-sex marriage, but only under certain conditions. Same-sex marriage ought to be introduced in the Australian context in order to remedy the formal inequalities between lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) citizens and their heterosexual/cisgendered counterparts. One common method of justifying the introduction of formal same-sex relationship recognition has been via the promotion of LGBT “normalcy.” This article explores such a trend by analysing popular media and advertising, since media representations and coverage have been shown to affect the way the general public “learns, understands, and thinks about an issue” (Li and Lui 73). This article finds that the promotion of normalcy can, in fact, perpetuate hetero-norms, and only offer LGBT people an imaginary social equality. Such normalisation, it is suggested, is detrimental to a wider goal of gaining respect for LGBT people regardless, not in spite of, their identity and relationships. Yet, this article maintains that such imaginary equality can be avoided, so long as a plurality of possibilities for one’s intimate and familial life are actively legitimated and promoted. Australian Same-Sex Relationship Recognition The Relationships Act 2003 (Tas) was the first piece of Australian legislation to formally recognise same-sex relationships. This act allowed Tasmanian residents to register a partnership, although these unions were not recognised in any other Australian State. However, despite this State-based movement, as well as other examples of same-sex unions gaining increasing recognition in the West, not all legal changes have been positive for LGBT people. One example of this was the Howard Government’s 2004 reformation of the Marriage Act 1961 (Cwlth), which made explicit that marriage could only take place between one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others, and also refused to acknowledge same-sex marriages performed legally overseas. Furthermore, 2012 saw the failure of several Bills which sought the introduction of same-sex marriage at both the State and Federal level. Thus, same-sex marriage is still illegal in Australia to-date. But, despite these major setbacks, other progress towards same-sex relationship recognition has continued. At the Federal level, different-sex and same-sex de facto relationship recognition became formally equal over the period of 2008-9. Furthermore, it is both official Greens and Australian Labor Party policy to support equal marriage rights. At the State level, the example of recognising same-sex civil unions/registered partnerships has been followed by Victoria, the Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales, and Queensland. There are several reasons why same-sex couples may desire the right to marry. Some reasons are practical; in any given Nation-State where same-sex couples are without the right to marry, then same-sex partners are unable to claim the same benefits and undertake the same obligations as heterosexual married couples. They are formally unequal. On the basis of their empirical research Jowett and Peel argue that formal equality is a motivating factor for the same-sex marriage movement, noting that a likely incentive to engage in these unions would be security, since LGBT people have heretofore lived and continue to live with a very real threat of discrimination. This is largely why the option of civil unions was created in the West. The measure was first introduced by Denmark in 1989, and its purpose was to be a marriage-like institution, existing solely for the recognition of same-sex couples (Broberg 149). Although civil unions should theoretically offer same-sex couples the same legal benefits and obligations that heterosexual married couples receive, this is widely believed to be false in practice. The Netherlands has almost achieved full equality, at 96%; however, countries such as Belgium rate poorly, at 48% (Waaldijk 9). As such, it has been argued that civil unions are not sufficient alternatives to marriage. Amitai Etzioni claims, “many gay people feel strongly that unless they are entitled to exactly the same marriages as heterosexuals, their basic individual rights are violated, which they (and many liberals) hold as semisacred” (qtd. in Shanley 65). This opinion demonstrates that formal equality is a key concern of the same-sex marriage debate. However, it is not the only concern. The organisation Australian Marriage Equality (AME), which has been at the forefront of the fight for same-sex marriage since its establishment in 2004, claims that “Civil unions are not as widely understood or respected as marriage and creating a separate name for same-sex relationships entrenches a different, discriminatory, second-class status for these relationships” (Greenwich, The Case for Same-Sex Marriage 3). They claim further that, if recognition continues to be refused, it maintains the message that same-sex partners are not capable of the level of love and commitment associated with marriage (Greenwich, The Case for Same-Sex Marriage). Thus, AME claim that not only do the legal entitlements of civil unions frequently fail to be formally equivalent, but even the difference in name contributes to the ongoing discrimination of LGBT people. Although neither marriage nor civil unions are federally available to same-sex couples in Australia, AME argue that marriage must be primarily endorsed, then (Greenwich, A Failed Experiment 1). The argument is, if Australia were to introduce civil unions, but not marriage, civil unions would reify the second-class status of homosexuals, and would present same-sex relationships and homosexuality as inferior to different-sex relationships and heterosexuality. Thus, the title “marriage” is significant, and one strategy for demonstrating that LGBT people are fit for this title has been by promoting representations of sameness to the heterosexual mainstream. To achieve the status that goes along with the ability to marry, same-sex couples have typically tried to get their relationships publicly recognised and legally regulated in two ways. They have sought to (a) demonstrate that LGBT people do structure their relationships and familial lives according to the heteropatriarchal normative stereotypes of traditional family values, and/or (b) they emphasise the “born this way” aspect of LGBT sexuality/gender identity, refusing to situate it as a choice. This latter aspect is significant, since arguments based on natural “facts” often claim that what is true by nature cannot be changed, and/or what is true by nature is good (Antony 12). These two strategies thus seek to contribute to a shift in the public perception of homosexuals, homosexuality, and same-sex relationships. The idea, in other words, is to promote the LGBT subject as being a “normal” and “good” citizen (Jowett and Peel 206). Media Representations of Normal Gays In Australia, the normalcy of same-sex relationships has been advocated perhaps most obviously in television adverting. One such advertisement is run by Get Up! Action for Australia, an independent, grass-roots advocacy organisation. This ad is shot from a first-person perspective, where the camera is the eyes of the subject. It follows the blossoming of a relationship: from meeting a man on a boat, to exchanging phone numbers, dating, attending social events with friends, sharing special occasions, meeting each other’s families, sharing a home, caring for sick family members, and so forth, finally culminating in a proposal for marriage. Upon the proposal it is revealed that the couple consists of two young-adult, white, middle-class men. The purpose of this advertisement is to surprise the audience member, as the gay couple’s relationship follows the same trajectory of what is typically expected in a heterosexual relationship. The effect, in turn, is to shock the audience member into recognising that same-sex couples are just like different-sex couples. Hopefully, this will also serve to justify to the audience member that LGBT people deserve the same legal treatment as heterosexuals. The couple in this advertisement appear to be monogamous, their relationship seems to have blossomed over a length of time, they support each other’s families, and the couple comes to share a home. Projecting images like these suggests that such aspects are the relevant features of marriage, which LGBT people mimic. The second Australian advertisement from AME, features a young-adult, interracial, gay couple, who also appear to be middle-class. In this advertisement the families of the two partners, Ivan and Chris, comment on the illegal status of same-sex marriage in Australia. The ad opens with Ivan’s parents, and notes the length of their marriage—45 years. Ivan later claims that he wants to get married because he wants to be with Chris for life. These signals remind the viewer that marriage is supposed to be a life-long commitment, despite the prevalence of divorce. The advertisement also focuses on Chris’s parents, who claim that thanks to their son’s relationship their family has now expanded. The ad cuts between segments of spoken opinion and shots of family time spent at dinner, or in a park, and so on. At one point Ivan states, “We’re not activists; we’re just people who want to get married, like everyone else.” This reiterates the “normalcy” of the desire to marry in general, which is confirmed by Chris’s statement when he says, “It means that everyone would accept it. It’s sort of like a normal... A sense of normalcy.” This implies that to be seen as normal is both desirable and good; but more to the point, the ad positions LGBT people as if they are all already normal, and simply await recognition. It does not challenge the perception of what “normalcy” is. Finally, the advertisement closes with the written statement: “Marriage: It’s about family. Everyone’s family.” This advertisement thus draws connections between the legal institution of marriage and socially shared normative conceptions of married family life. While these two advertisements are not the only Australian television ads which support this particular vision of same-sex marriage, they are typical. What is interesting is that this particular image of homosexuality and same-sex relationships is becoming increasingly common in popular media also. For example, American sitcom Modern Family features a gay couple who share a house, have an adopted daughter, and maintain a fairly traditional lifestyle where one works full time as a lawyer, while the other remains at home and is the primary care-giver for their daughter. Their relationship is also monogamous and long-term. The couple is white, and they appear to have a middle-class status. Another American sitcom, The New Normal, features a white gay couple (one is Jewish) who also share a home, are in a long-term monogamous relationship, and who both have careers. This sitcom centres on this couple’s decision to have a child and the life of the woman who decides to act as their surrogate. This couple are also financially well off. Both of these sitcoms have prime Australian television slots. Although the status of the couples’ relationships in the aforementioned sitcoms is not primarily focussed on, they each participate in a relationship which is traditionally marriage-like in structure. This includes long-term commitment, monogamy, sharing a home and economic arrangements, starting and raising a family, and so on. And it is the very marriage-like aspects of same-sex relationships which Australian equal marriage advocates have used to justify why same-sex marriage should be legal. The depiction of on-screen homosexual couples (who are gay, rather than lesbian, bisexual, or trans) and the public debate in favour of same-sex marriage both largely promote and depend upon the perception of these relationships as effectively "the same" as heterosexual relationships in terms of structure, goals, commitment, life plans, lifestyle, and so on. A comment should be made on the particular representations in the examples above. The repetition of images of the LGBT community as primarily male, white, young-adult, middle-class, straight-looking, monogamous, and so on, comes at the expense of distancing even further those who do not conform to this model (Borgerson et. al. 959; Fejes 221). These images represent what Darren Rosenblum calls “but-for queers,” meaning that but-for their sexual orientation, these people would be just the same as “normal” heterosexuals. Rosenblum has commented on the increased juridical visibility of but-for queers and the legal gains they have won; however, he criticises that these people have been unable to adequately challenge heterosexism since their acceptance is predicated on being as much like normative heterosexuals as possible (84-5). Heterosexism and heteronormativity refer to the ways in which localised practices and centralised institutions legitimise and privilege heterosexuality, seeing it as fundamental, natural, and normal (Cole and Avery 47). If the only queers who gain visibility thanks to these sitcoms and advertisements are but-for queers, the likelihood that heterosexism will be challenged with the legal recognition of same-sex marriage drastically decreases. Appeals to sameness and normalcy typically refuse to critically examine heteronormative standards of acceptability. This results in the continued promotion of the “sexually involved couple,” realised according to particular normative standards, as the appropriate, best, or even natural trajectory for one’s intimate life. Thus, a key reason that some LGBT people have rejected marriage as an appropriate goal is because assimilative inclusion does not offer a legitimately respected social identity to LGBT people as a whole. When legal changes promoting the equality of LGBT people are predicated on their assimilation to heteronormative relationship criteria, this can only achieve “imaginary” equality and the illusion of progress, while real instances of homophobia, discrimination, marginalisation and hostility towards LGBT people continue (Richardson 394). Thus, given the highly specified representations of “normal” LGBT people, it is fair to conclude that there is a biased representation of same-sex relationships on-screen in terms of sex, race, ability, wealth, monogamy, and so on. The assimilationist strategy of publicising particularly gay identity and relationships as just like heterosexuality appears to depoliticise queerness and render lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people more or less invisible. This can be problematic insofar as the subversive role that queer identity could play in bringing about social change regarding acceptability of other sexual and intimate relationships is lessened (Richardson 395-6). The question that emerges at this point, then, is whether same-sex marriage is doomed to perpetuate hetero-norms and designate all other non-conformists as socially, morally, and/or legally inferior. Pluralisation Ironically, while some activists reject civil unions, their introduction may be crucial to support a “pluralisation strategy.” AME is, in fact, not opposed to civil unions, so long as they do not pretend to be marriage (Greenwich, A Failed Experiment 1). However, AME’s main focus is still on achieving marriage equality, rather than promoting a diverse array of relationship recognition. A pluralisation strategy, though, would seek to question the very normative and hierarchical status of marriage, given the strategy’s key aim of greater options for legally regulated relationship recognition. Regarding polyamorous relationships specifically, Elizabeth Emens has argued that,The existence of some number of people choosing to live polyamorous lives should prompt us all to [...] think about our own choices and about the ways that our norms and laws urge upon us one model rather than pressing us to make informed, affirmative choices about what might best suit our needs and desires.” (in Shanley 79) While non-monogamous relationships have frequently been rejected, even by same-sex marriage activists, since they too threaten traditional forms of marriage, the above statement clearly articulates the purpose of the pluralisation strategy: to challenge people to think about the way norms and laws press one model upon people, and to challenge that model by engaging in and demanding recognition for other models of intimate and familial relationships. When a variety of formal options for legalising various types of relationships is legislated for, this allows people greater choice in how they can conceive and structure their relationships. It also creates a political space where norms can be publicly assessed, criticised, and re-evaluated. Thus, the goal to be achieved is the representation of multiple relationship/family structures as being of equal worth, rather than fixing them in a relationship hierarchy where traditional marriage is the ideal. There exist many examples of people who “do relationships differently”—whether they are homosexual, polyamorous, asexual, step-families, and so on—and the existence of these must come to be reflected as equally valuable and viable options in the dominant social imaginary. Representations in popular media are one avenue, for example, which advocates of this pluralisation strategy might employ in order to achieve such a shift. Another avenue is advocacy. If advocacy on the importance of formally recognising multiple types of relationships increased, this may balance the legitimacy of these relationships with marriage. Furthermore, it may prevent the perpetuation of hetero-norms and increase respect for LGBT identity, since they would be less likely to be pressured into assimilation. Thus, same-sex marriage activists could, in fact, gain from taking up the cause of refusing one single model for relationship-recognition (Calhoun 1037). In this sense, then, the emergence of civil union schemes as an alternative to marriage in the West has potentially yielded something very valuable in the way of increasing options regarding one’s intimate life, especially in the Australian context where diverse recognition has already begun. Interestingly, Australia has come some way towards pluralisation at the State level; however, it is hardly actively promoted. The civil union schemes of both Tasmania and Victoria have a provision entitling “caring couples” to register their relationships. A “caring couple” involves two people who are not involved in a sexual relationship, who may or may not be related, and who provide mutual or one-sided care to the other. The caring couple are entitled to the same legal benefits as those romantic couples who register their relationships. One can infer then, that not only sexual relationships, but those of the caring couple as in Tasmania and Victoria, or possibly even those of a relationship like one “between three single mothers who are not lovers but who have thrown in their lot together as a family,” could be realised and respected if other alternatives were available and promoted alongside marriage (Cornell, in Shanley 84). While Australia would have quite some way to go to achieve these goals, the examples of Tasmania and Victoria are a promising start in the right direction. Conclusion This paper has argued that marriage is a goal that LGBT people should be wary of. Promoting limited representations of same-sex oriented individuals and couples can perpetuate the primacy of hetero-norms, and fail to deliver respect for all LGBT people. However, despite the growing trend of justifying marriage and homosexuality thanks to “normalcy”, promotion of another strategy—a pluralisation strategy—might result in more beneficial outcomes. It may result in a more balanced weight of normative worth between institutions and types of recognition, which may then result in citizens feeling less compelled to enter marriage. Creating formal equality while pursuing the promotion of other alternatives as legitimate will result in a greater acceptance of queer identity than will the endorsement of same-sex marriage justified by LGBT normalcy. While the latter may result in speedier access to legal benefits for some, the cost of such a strategy should be underscored. 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