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'... The issue arises out of the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia conference ‘Cultural Transformation’ held in December 2019, in Meanjin (Brisbane), on the land of the Jagera and Turrbal peoples. The articles in this special issue originate from this conference, and have thus been written and revised in the unusually difficult circumstances caused by the emergence of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Taking up (and indeed living) the theme of ‘precarious futures’, the authors of these papers canvass topics related to this issue, including: environmental transformations caused by climate change and species extinction; global food security; modes of protest in climate crisis and pandemic crisis; affective politics; colonialism; drone technologies; science fiction realities; futurist biologies; resurrection science and art; feminist hauntology; feminist futures and academic precarity; and current approaches in medical humanities to emerging health issues.' (Publication introduction)
Notes
Contents indexed selectively.
Contents
* Contents derived from the 2020 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
'My purpose is to consider the role that uncertainty might play in reimagining political responsibility in Australia. There is a growing body of scholarship that is re-examining what it might mean to be settler colonial and politically responsible. It urges settlers to not only comprehend their complicity in structures of violence and oppression – colonialism, environmental degradation, racial inequality, for example – but more so, to know how they are constituted by the racial logic of settler colonialism. In a sense, it is asking progressive settlers not to turn away from the uneven distribution of suffering, trauma and vulnerability towards the ease, certainty and satisfaction of much good white politics. I want to reflect upon how fundamental certainty is to the reproduction of settler colonialism. Or more so, the refusal of uncertainty, which is a denial of being implicated and the limitations of one’s knowingness. To do so, I bring critical Indigenous studies and settler colonialism into conversation with studies of emotion and affect. If the white settler emotional economy stymies anti-racism – innocence, fragility, anxiety – then emotions are a site for ethical and political action. Doubt and uncertainty don’t feel good, but they tell of other political possibilities, and ways to reform responsibility.' (Publication abstract)
'This article examines how two works of fiction depict male same-sex desire in Australian military history. The protagonists in the novel Bodies of Men and the short story collection The Boys of Bullaroo do not identify as gay or bisexual, yet they develop intensely intimate friendships that become sexual. The texts come from different literary and popular genres, but they both represent what Elizabeth Woledge refers to as intimatopias: ‘a homosocial world in which the social closeness of the male characters engenders intimacy.’ Intimatopic fictions of war are queer texts that challenge binary and normative understandings of sexuality because the characters’ sexual identities are not defined by (homo)sexual acts. Bodies of Men and The Boys of Bullaroo are intentionally ambiguous about the protagonists’ sexualities, which are neither fixed nor fluid, but rather expressed as demisexual extensions of intimacy. The texts also challenge Australia’s digger and Anzac mythologies by presenting soldiers as sensitive, vulnerable and non-heterosexual. As such, intimatopic fictions of war reimagine Australian military history and offer new, queer conceptualizations of same-sex intimacy, mateship and desire.' (Publication abstract)
