'Families can detonate. Some families are torn apart forever by one small act, one solitary mistake. In my family it was a series of small explosions; consistent, passionate, pathetic. Cruel words, crude threats... We spurred each other on till we reached a crescendo of pain and we retired exhausted to our rooms, in tears or in fury.
'Ari is nineteen, unemployed and a poofter who doesn't want to be gay. He is looking for something - anything - to take him away from his aimless existence in suburban Melbourne. He doesn't believe in anyone or anything, except the power of music. All he wants to do is dance, take drugs, have sex and change the world.
'For Ari, all the orthodoxies of family, sex, politics and work have collapsed. Caught between the traditional Greek world of his parents and friends and the alluring, destructive world of clubs, chemicals and anonymous sex, all Ari can do is ease his pain in the only ways he knows how.
'Written in stark, uncompromising prose, Loaded is a first novel of great passion and power.' (From the publisher's website.)
Head On
( dir. Ana Kokkinos
)
Australia
:
Head On Productions
,
1998
Z796585
1998
single work
film/TV
(taught in 6 units)
Set over the course of one night, Head On focuses on Ari, a handsome nineteen-year-old boy of Greek descent who finds himself torn between his traditional upbringing and his sexual identity. As he attempts to come to terms with where he fits in, Ari careens between hanging out with his friends and bickering with his family while also becoming involved in several heterosexual and homosexual encounters.
'The 1995 debut novel from Christos Tsiolkas (The Slap, Dead Europe, Barracuda) makes its mainstage premiere 25 years after the fact.
'Ari (Roy Joseph, Five Bedrooms) is 19, unemployed and aimless. He doesn’t want to be gay. He doesn’t want to be Greek. He doesn’t want to be anything. He finds an escape, of sorts, via sex, drugs and dance clubs. But, he doesn’t really fit in with the queens at The Peel any better than with family in his theía’s backyard.
'This is the story that established Tsiolkas as a provocative master of the written word. Adapted for film in the 1998 underground hit Head On, and now, in close collaboration with playwright Dan Giovannoni, Tsiolkas rewrites Ari’s odyssey for the stage with a 21st century perspective.'
Source: Matlhouse Theatre.
No Laughing Matter : Laughter and Masculinities in Contemporary Australian Fiction
Penrith
:
2023
28462670
2023
single work
thesis
'This dissertation explores the role laughter plays in the construction of masculinities in contemporary Australian fiction. The texts analysed are Christos Tsiolkas’ Loaded (1995), Melissa Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip (2018), and Tim Winton’s Breath (2008). The diversity of these novels allows for an analysis of Greek immigrant, Bundjalung, and Anglo expressions of queer and heteronormative masculinities in Australian literature. The role laughter plays in perpetuating, or challenging, masculine constructions is explored in this dissertation through laughter’s socially corrective and socially defiant functions. Socially corrective laughter is an expression of laughter’s superiority theory, as developed by thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes and Henri Bergson. In relation to masculine hegemonies, this dissertation examines socially corrective laughter’s agency in influencing individuals to conform to dominant discourses by ridiculing counter-hegemonic masculine identities. Socially defiant laughter achieves the opposite effect. This dissertation coins the term ‘socially defiant laughter’ to describe a means of laughing at hegemonic structures to resist the discursive control that hegemonic masculinities have over masculine minorities. While each of the masculine constructions explored in this dissertation convey divergent expectations, a communality is revealed in how Tsiolkas’, Lucashenko’s, and Winton’s expressions of laughter regulate the way individuals engage with these expectations. This dissertation thus shows that socially corrective laughter and socially defiant laughter are central to the acceptance or rejection of masculine hegemonies in Loaded, Too Much Lip, and Breath.' (Publication summary)
'David Malouf and Christos Tsiolkas represent very different generations of gay men with migrant backgrounds, but both use the novel form as a way of articulating gay experience. Malouf, born 1934, started out as a poet, and continued to publish poetry for his entire career. His work is exquisitely styled and highly verbally self-conscious. As opposed to the meditative, scholarly Malouf, Tsiolkas, born 1965, is far grittier and rancorous in his approach. Loaded (1995) details a world of drug use and casual sex, whereas Dead Europe (2005) overturns the traditional Australian nostalgia for and even pretention about continental Europe by examining its sordid post-Cold War reality. Though Malouf and Tsiolkas are very different writers, their concern with aesthetics, history, and what it might be to live in a community make their juxtaposition not just heuristic but inevitable. This chapter explores one convergence between them: their queering of mateship.' (Publication abstract)
'Based on Greek diasporic articulations of historical consciousness in Australia, this article introduces an analytical framework called ethnic compartmentalisation. Bringing Australian studies of ethnicity into dialogue with settler colonial scholarship, ethnic compartmentalisation examines how Greek migrants/settlers fragment their sense of belonging to Australia. By compartmentalising their sense of history, race, and migration, the segments of the Greek diaspora in Australia justify their ongoing settlement on Indigenous lands by separating or leveraging the multiple parts of their inherited migrant histories as insiders and outsiders.' (Publication abstract)
