Gender and Sexuality

This is a strange assortment of pieces. To someone who doesn’t move in any gay community, the anthology’s chief problem is its fissiparousness. There has to be a distinction between gay writing and writing by authors who are gay. The majority of contributors to Graeme Aitken’s book take gay life to be their subject, but several are included because they are gay, while not necessarily employing gay themes, or doing so indirectly.

Masculinity isn’t what it used to be. To begin with, it has gone forth and multiplied to become masculinities, for it is a requirement of a pluralist culture that diversity not only be acknowledged but cultivated. What has happened, of course, is that as women’s history has given way to gender studies, masculinity, which was formerly taken for granted as part of the dominant culture, is being put under the microscope.

Living the queer life in the inner-city suburbs of Sydney, it is hard not to become complacent, smug even. Like a magnet, Sydney draws lesbians, gays, bisexuals, queers, you name it, from all over the country. If you’ve grown up in rural Victoria, moved to Melbourne after compulsory schooling, and then fifteen years later have hit a certain mid-gay-life ennui, where else is there to go?

‘Though I disagreed with some of the strategies and was as troubled as I should have been by some of the more fundamental conflicts [of feminism], it was not until feminists of my own generation began to assert with apparent seriousness that feminists had gone too far that the fire flared up in my belly.’

‘This is the most urgently needed book of our time’, says the back cover of this short, non-fiction work of advice to adolescent males, whose subject is how successfully to become a real man. (This boast contrasts strangely with the counsel given not to brag.) My son, the one aged twelve, described the book as being about ‘the need to grow up into little John Marsdens’.

When I mentioned to one of my exceptionally brainy friends that I was reviewing Jocelynne Scutt’s recent collection of speeches and papers – most of which were written during the late 1980s and 1990s and which have now been edited for a two volume work entitled The Incredible Woman – I was, strange as it may seem, not surprised to hear her say that the very thought of reading anything by Scutt made her anxious. For while those of us who are familiar with Scutt’s work will be aware of how wonderfully accessible it is, those who are familiar instead with Scutt’s formidable reputation might well presume that her writing will be heavy­going. It’s not. And because Incredible is both accessible and an important contribution to feminist politics, it would be a pity if people shied away from it.

No icon better encapsulates the ethos of male culture than the pub. Sharing a beer in this bastion of male conviviality has been a defining experience in shaping Australian male identity. The pub as a cultural and social institution has attracted the attention of many historians, but none have considered the ubiquitous and yet mysteriously anonymous figure of the barmaid. Although represented in fiction and film, and up until recently, a part of the very fabric of pub culture, the barmaid remains an elusive figure in Australian history.

Much of the evidence and source material used in Depraved and Disorderly, particularly in Part One, will be familiar to the scholar of female convict history. But Joy Damousi provides some additional material which is both original and evocative. For example, her discussion of lesbianism and tattooing as both challenging to contemporary concerns about sexuality and social order, and as another means by which these women could express their own identities, provides evidence of the diversity of characters among convict women, as well as broadening our understanding of colonial society. More importantly, however, Damousi adds a further theoretical dimension to the already complex and contradictory historiography which surrounds the female convict.

The serious academic study of war has grown considerably in Australia in the last ten to fifteen years, bringing with it an often welcome diversification in focus and a willingness to subject old issues to fresh scrutiny. One sign of the increasing acceptance of war as a subject of serious study in the universities is the increasing number of university historians and other who, with little knowledge of or interest in the mechanics of war, nonetheless extend their work to include consideration of war and the military as these affect their particular areas of interest.