y separately published work icon TEXT : Special Issue Website Series periodical issue  
Alternative title: Beyond Australia Queer
Issue Details: First known date: 2015... no. 31 October 2015 of TEXT Special Issue est. 2000 TEXT : Special Issue Website Series
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Contents

* Contents derived from the , 2015 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
Introduction : Queer Writing – Setting the Scene, Dallas J. Baker , Jay Daniel Thompson , single work criticism

'This act of writing produces something of a genealogy of the various notions of writing and text that have circulated within the critical or scholarly domain. It also discusses the convergence of notions of writing with certain ideas from Queer Theory, such as performativity (Butler 1990), that resulted in the emergence of what might be called Queer Writing. The article also acts as an introduction to the works contained in Beyond Australia Queer, a special Queer issue of TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses.' (Publication abstract)
Where Is Queer Studies Now? An Interview with Annamarie Jagose, Jay Daniel Thompson (interviewer), Dallas J. Baker (interviewer), single work interview
'Australia Queer was a Special Edition of the Australian journal Meanjin and was. a pioneering collection of queer Australian writing. It was published during a time (the 1990s) that saw the rapid rise of queer theory and politics. Annamarie Jagose was one of the editors of that special edition and her book Queer Theory (published by the University of Melbourne Press in 1996) was among the first to set the parameters for queer theory and queer studies. This brief interview with Annamarie Jagose focusses on where queer studies is now, nearly two decades after the release of Australia Queer.' (Publication abstract)
Écriture Matière : A Text That Matters, Karina Quinn , single work criticism

'In the mid 1970s, Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigiray (among others) famously placed a call for women to write their bodies as a way to break the bonds of patriarchal language structures and create a space for women’s writing by using the form now most commonly known as écriture féminine. For the last three years I have written a book called all the beginnings: a queer autobiography of the body, and what I have discovered is that écriture féminine is not enough. How can écriture féminine describe this particular body, that is genderqueer, and tattooed, and has lost its womb? What if, instead of écriture féminine, there was écriture matière? What if every body, when allowed to write, to tell stories, to speak, was able to enact a form of narrative and civil disobedience, an unerasing of the corporeal from text? This paper is the development of the concept of écriture matière, a call for all bodies to write themselves, as they find themselves, in this moment, now. It is a call to create a generative textual and material space that is anything but exclusionary: a text that matters.'
Behind the Green Door: A Story about Suffering and Hybrid Identity in the 1950s and 1960s, Nike Sulway , single work criticism
'This paper provides explores the life and work of Elsie Ruth (Lyn) Palmer (1934- 1969), an unpublished writer from Melbourne whose experiences as a lesbian writer during the 1950s form a framework for exploring a range of issues around failure, queer identity, and literary endeavour. By examining Palmer’s life and work in the broader context of her times, the paper argues for a re-examination of the current fashion for celebrating or embracing failure, connecting this rhetorical pressure to ‘embrace failure’ with an outdated Romantic notion of the suffering artist, and with suffering as a pre-condition for artistic excellence. The paper explores the ways in which this problematic fetishising of failure ignores the influence and impact of class, gender and sexual identity in the structure of suffering, and its resolution.' (Publication abstract)
‘Rupture and Rapture All at Once’ : Queer Australian Fiction 2000-2014, Damien Barlow , single work criticism
'This article provides a critical survey of queer Australian fiction spanning fifteen years from 2000 to 2014. Forty works of fiction in the forms of novels and short story collections are discussed. The survey is organised by a series of modes that I argue are prevalent within queer Australian fiction: contemporary realism, surrealism, historical novels and cosmopolitanism.' (Publication abstract)
Writing and Reading Queerly : Foucault’s Aesthetics of Existence and Queer Selfmaking, Dallas J. Baker , single work criticism
'Michel Foucault advocated an ongoing assembly and disassembly of subjectivity that constituted a kind of self-bricolage; a making and re-making of subjectivity that he saw as an aesthetic struggle towards an artistic ideal. Foucault described this process as an ethics of the self. The purpose of this transformative self-bricolage is to make philosophy a ‘way of life’. One of the examples Foucault gave of a technique used in such an ethics of the self – implemented to produce a desired or altered/transformed subject – was reflective writing. This article explores the ways that writing informed by Queer Theory can be used as a technique in a Foucauldian ethics of the self, especially within the context of the teacher-student relationship in the discipline of creative writing. It further argues that creative writing is an appropriate site for ‘ethical interventions’ into subjectivity and for explorations into how philosophy, in this case Queer Theory, can be applied as a way of life in which new forms of subjectivity are explored and produced. Furthermore, the paper discusses the way that queer readings of literary texts can also be part of an ethics of the self or queer selfmaking.' (Publication summary)
Difficult Belongings, Arjun Rajkhowa , Jay Daniel Thompson , single work criticism
'The emergence of queer theory and politics in the 1990s was widely touted as heralding a new era of sexual inclusivity. However, this has not proved to be the case for everyone. This fictocritical essay features three vignettes of gay male Asian migrants living in Australia. We suggest that the sense of belonging these men develop is complex and difficult. All three subjects find themselves straddling two artificially polarised worlds: the white and modern world of ‘gay Australia’ and the racialised and striated ‘migrant’ world. This work explores some intersections of sexuality, belonging, race and migration in contemporary Australia through alternating acts of scholarly and creative writing. ' (Publication abstract)
Still Here, Still Queer : A Personal Essay, Kelly Gardiner , single work essay
Can’t Look at the Night Sky, Alison Coppe , Gretta Mitchell , single work short story
I Go Far Away Sometimes : Queering the Book Review, Karina Quinn , single work prose
Two Lives, Arjun Sudhir , single work short story

Research background

'Homosexual activity is a criminal offense under Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, a code drafted by Lord Macaulay during British rule. Homosexual activity between consenting adults was decriminalised by the Delhi High Court in 2009, but it was overruled by the Supreme Court in 2013. Currently, homosexual sexual activity carries a ten-year sentence in India.' (Publication abstract)
Queer Aunt Charlottei"Charmed, Aunt Charlotte, charmed.", Nollie Nahrung , single work poetry
Exit Note to Academiai"The parallels are striking: the desacralisation, the shitting in their own nests,", Keri Glastonbury , single work poetry
Bonny Bundanoni"Wombats appear like body weather rocks, forces of shakti gathering at dusk", Keri Glastonbury , single work poetry
Unilaterally Headfuckyi"You’re my dream andro lover: hard of tricep, soft of belly. I would have eaten out", Keri Glastonbury , single work poetry
Queer Theory, Neoliberal Homonormativity and Social Utility for Queer Writing on Youth (suicide), Rob Cover , single work criticism
'Contemporary sexual citizenship is governed by neoliberal concepts of selfhood that both encourage subjects to manage their own risk and that establishes risks by creating hierarchies of affluence, self-commodity and belonging. These risks relate to the ways in which LGBT self-harm and sexuality-related suicide are conditioned and normalised, with continuing high rates of suicidality. While neo-liberal formations of sexual selfhood have created the conditions for writing and making sense of fictional and nonfictional narrative accounts in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific for the legalised expression and representation of non-heterosexuality, they continue and exacerbate risks that can lead to the cultural formations associated with youth suicide. The fact that non-heterosexual youth have traditionally made use of the ‘logics’ of non-normative sexuality given in queer writing calls for an ethical approach to the ways in which narratives of non-heteronormative sexuality are written. This article presents a framing account of how contemporary neoliberal forms of ‘homonormative’ queer cultures serve as a backdrop and context for queer creative representations that may be utilised as forms of support, frameworks for identity norms or projections of queer lives that can, arguably, exacerbate risks of suicide. It examines some of the ways in which we can come at the conditions that make queer youth suicide possible and thinkable from a queer culturalist angle, allowing us to consider how suicide risks are creatively represented, produced, or contributed to.' (Publication abstract)
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