'This article explores how Patrick White is both an inheritor and a precursor of modernism and its queer and gendered legacies within mid-twentieth century Australia; these experimental legacies are still felt today, with queer authors producing even queerer texts amid the Australian literary landscape. Focusing upon his novel The Twyborn Affair (1979), I argue that White's use of modernist aesthetics enables him to achieve a complete corporeal identity by writing the queer body as, paradoxically, both fragmentary and fluid. His prose both resituates gendered binaries and boundaries, and enables ways of navigating the epistemological trauma enacted upon the queer self by heteronormativity. Attending to the fragmentation and fluidity that White's modernism unleashes, this paper is especially interested in the becoming of a queer self, and it seeks to salvage moments of queer desire from a fractured identity in contention with the conformity demanded by mandatory heterosexuality. These legacies that White leaves for us are especially pertinent to our present as his deconstruction of binary notions of gender and queer narratives "opens up" spaces where an articulation of an Australian queer self can recognise its inherently transgressive agency.' (Publication abstract)
