Kate McInally Kate McInally i(A79524 works by)
Gender: Female
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

Works By

Preview all
1 Subverting Censorship Through Heteroqueer: How To Do Straight Queerly (And Get Away With It) In the Novels of Doug MacLeod Kate McInally , 2008 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Looking Glass , vol. 12 no. 2 2008;
Kate McInally approaches censorship from perspectives often overlooked in censorship discussions: self-censorship and the censorship of evasion. Using two novels by Australian author Doug MacLeod, McInally explores the subtle queering of heteronormative ideologies, the art of, perhaps, gently twisting depictions of sexualities and desires rather than overtly transgressing the expected norms. McInally commends MacLeod's humorous and incisive questioning of those hetero-norms, yet questions some of his editorial decisions, wondering if he has stopped short of the story he really hoped to tell.
1 Not Quite White (Enough) : Intersecting Ethnic and Gendered Identities in Looking for Alibrandi Kate McInally , 2007 single work criticism
— Appears in: Papers : Explorations into Children's Literature , December vol. 17 no. 2 2007; (p. 59-66)

Kate McInally argues that in Looking for Alibrandi, Josie's specifically gendered quest for maturity' is one that 'erases multicultural identity' in all but its most overt manifestations (59). The analysis assesses 'intersections between raced and gendered indentity', with McInally stating that the narrative is fundamentally underpinned by an 'overwhelmingly monocultural ideology: that of acceptability attained through paternal sanction that transcends cultural heritage, to value aspirations of whiteness' (59).

McInally argues that 'Josie's aspirations for, and eventual acquisition of cultural capital is accessible only through her relationship with men' (59) a relationship based upon masculine domination which requires 'a feminine complicitness that the novel is all too ready to grant' (59). In her desire for 'economic, social and symbolic capital', Josie is required to 'move away from her Italianess to a position that is markedly more hegemonic' and while the novel may appear to overtly celebrate a 'multiculturalist agenda' this is offset against 'the way social capital accrues to an adolescent female who becomes 'daddy's little girl' (59).

For McInally, the novel's closure not only maintains and perpetuates cross-cultural relations whereby the 'other' is accepted, or tolerated, only for 'the ways they can enrich the host culture', it also ensures that Josie's 'mature subjectivity...is attained through her assimilation into dominant monomorality; accepting the rightness and whiteness of male domination...and patriarchal Australia as her embraced homeland' (66).

1 Starving Desire : New (Deleuzean) Readings of Anorexia in Australian Young Adult Fiction Kate McInally , 2006 single work criticism
— Appears in: Papers : Explorations into Children's Literature , December vol. 16 no. 2 2006; (p. 168-172)

McInally is concerned with fictional representations of eating disorders and uncovering any intersections between anorexia and girl-girl desire. McInally 'investigates this interface' in Killing Aurora (Barnes) and Leaving Jetty Road, (Burton) by drawing on the post-structuralist concepts of Deleuze and Guattari as a way of thinking beyond the binarised terms that shape and structure our lives and identities (168). For Deleuze and Guattari, 'desire is an affirmative mobile force that propels living things towards each other' (168) and it is this proposition that McInally utilises to critique hetero-normative cultural systems. She argues that anorexia is 'interrelated to the cultural insistence that girls move beyond intense, passionate and desirous relationships with each other, into normative heterosexuality', a sexuality that upholds western patriarchal capitalist paradigms that 'privilege lack over connection'(168). For McInally, Burton's novel follows this paradigm in its 'reductive and limiting ideologies regarding subjectivity, femininity and desire', while Barnes' novel offers a new and/or different way of reading desire which 'affirms its intense and connective potential outside binarised codifications' (172).

1 Reading Girls' Desire in Touching Earth Lightly Kate McInally , 2006 single work criticism
— Appears in: CREArTA : Journal of the Centre for Research and Education in the Arts , vol. 6 no. 2006; (p. 93-102)
1 Camphor Laurel : A Re-visitation of Desire Kate McInally , 2003 single work criticism
— Appears in: Papers : Explorations into Children's Literature , August vol. 13 no. 2 2003; (p. 27-36)
Kate McInally examines the relationships between adolescent girls as expressed in Camphor Laurel.
X