Queer lust & daily anger.

Marshall, Daniel ; Harris, Natasha

Quotidian 1. Everyday, commonplace. 2. Recurring daily: in full quotidian fever (a fever recurring every day).

Queer 1. an umbrella term used to incorporate non-normative sexual practices, identifications and knowledges; for example, gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender/intersex/queer (GLBTIQ). 2. a critical term used to suggest the fundamental instability and the discursive variability of such practices, identifications and knowledges.

In 1986, the United States Supreme Court resolved in Bowers v. Hardwick (now overturned) that gay men's right to have consensual private sex was nowhere protected in the US Constitution. The men had been charged for engaging in sodomy (in their case, oral sex) and, in an effort to dissipate the scandal attached to these practices, a clerk from their legal team had written a memo to the presiding judges which read, in bold capitals: 'this is not a case about only homosexuals. all sorts of people do this kind of thing.' (1) This memo, and its failure to sway the judges, clearly points out the popular disciplining tendency of attributing to the gay man all the signs of taboo sex--reducing him to a sign of sexual deviance itself and thereby working to confine him to the representative boundaries of a generic, lurid visualisation of perversion. Moreover, the clerk's distinction between 'homosexuals' and 'all people' succinctly exposes just how easy it is in the popular imaginary to cordon the queer off, as a segregating practice, from 'the rest of us'. This rhetorical moment pulls into relief how public debates over sexual difference are so often marked by the almost irretrievable hopelessness of a 'homosexual = spectral other' characterisation that is contrasted against a decent straightness which is, of course, constituted by that very practice of contrast (although now, in the age of the ever-clean--hell, ever-cleaning--Queer Eye crew, dirtier sexual dissidents are wheeled out to wear our dirty laundry). The reality, of course, is that this disavowed sexual difference so often emblematised by the pervert faggot is by no means a static entity that can be identified and localised at the site of a sexual minority. To be sure, strange sexy things happen to people everywhere, everyday. Hence the quotidian, hence the queer.

In the inaugural issue of Traffic four years ago, Andre Spicer introduced the new journal as a comfort for postgraduates from the apparent loneliness and isolation particular to postgraduate study. Born from a desire to cultivate interdisciplinarity and collegial support, Traffic has consistently sought to bring researchers together--from their silos of departmentalised disciplinarity--on the common ground of a shared publication platform. In this issue, Traffic extends its commitment to interdisciplinarity by taking as its focus an influential--and, perhaps, prototypical--area of interdisciplinary research: studies of sexuality. Underpinning Spicer's identification of the need for a more supportive research experience is the simple acknowledgment that academic labour can be atomised and divorced from the material social relations that provide the support and the fuel for the monastic experience that postgraduate research so often resembles. Into this setting, pleasure and desire figure as animating and energy-giving resources for the lonely researcher. Reading playfully Spicer's identification of the endemic loneliness implicit in academic research, Quotidian Queer identifies pleasure and desire at the heart of the research practice. Indeed, throughout this issue the joyful, argumentative interactions of a variety of disciplinary knowledges--literary studies, art history, sociology, education, Internet cultures, confessional fiction, activist politics--come to produce their own sexy dynamics, cross-fertilising one reflection with another, queerly inseminating the community of work. Throughout this issue we witness diverse negotiations of the relationship between the scholar, intellectual practice and non-normative desires. Necessarily social, political and theoretical at the same time, commonly implicating the personal and the epistemological at once, the discussions contained herein offer rich insights into the intersections between lived research lives and intellectual engagements with sexuality in its various modalities.

The lion's share of Traffic's first issue featured wide-ranging contributions that reflected deep political misgivings about the escalating corporatisation of Australian universities. Unfortunately, that issue remains a pressing concern today. Quotidian Queer is similarly impelled by profound anxieties over the state of the nation--and, more precisely, over the reactionary posture to all matters sexual that appears to reign as God now. In this way we hope to renew Traffic's self-consciousness as a journal that is inevitably located in a troubled local research context and that it is most meaningful when it engages the political contests swirling around it directly. After all, with the Coalition Government's anti-student union legislation biding its time in the Federal Senate, the very future of this journal is deeply implicated in the politics of our time, Traffic's future resting, as it does, on the Liberal Party's ideological crusade to eradicate collective organising.

By theming this issue around studies of sexuality we acknowledge that, while sex researchers and teachers at the University of Melbourne receive considerable institutional support and resources, this is not the case across the nation. Indeed, the devotion of this issue to queer material is a deliberate attempt to employ Melbourne's enviable resources to highlight work being done here as the start of a conversation about resourcing nationwide and, we hope, to provide a resource in and of itself to those interested in the field. We also acknowledge that GLBTIQ people are not only poorly supported but also actively attacked in Australia today. The Government's obscene ban on gay and lesbian marriage amounts to only the most visible example of the institutional, emotional and physical violence queers combat daily.

It is with this sense of the current historical moment--its precariousness, people's fragility and their receptiveness to pain--that this issue hopes to highlight the history, the very recent history, of sexuality studies in a desire to kick-start linkages, hook-ups, disputes and campaigns. Indeed, these things have been the daily feature of life in the activist line: stapling together xeroxed zines, making dates with sexual partners, arguing with other volunteers over drip-filter coffee. With a spirited embrace of the rich confluence of sexual difference and theoretical debate Quotidian Queer wanders through some people's erotic everyday.

In so doing, this issue extends various aspects of Traffic's profile. The first obvious change is that this issue is split into four sections--Writing, Conversations, Retrospective and Reviews--thereby moving away from the article-based format of previous issues. Acknowledging the diversity of postgraduate research undertaken, and contesting the false distinction between critical thought and creative expression, Writing features, for the first time in Traffic, a fictional piece alongside critical research articles. Philip Thiel opens the journal with his queer reviewing of the work of British mystery writer PC Doherty and its engagement with Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Thiel focuses on Doherty's pulp literary rescripting of sexual ambiguity in Chaucer and he critiques Doherty's books as examples of a revisionist cultural practice that recasts queer literary histories in a decidedly homophobic vein. Against Doherty's renarrativising work, Thiel models a queer critical response that mobilises against a contemporary critical caution in queer thinking about history while retaining the non-normative spirit of such caution. In this way, Thiel negotiates the competing interests of a critical practice that sees political progress in the retrospective recuperation of historical homo-heroes and a poststructuralist approach that strenuously emphasises the historical specificity of homosexuality proper.

If debates about the historicity of male homosexuality reflect foundational, quotidian concerns for contemporary sexuality studies, then Kate MacNeill's work grappling with the looming discursive presence of AIDS activism in interpretations of the gay art of Melbourne artist Mathew Jones provides an example of how living with the virus has conditioned the daily cultural circulation of queer representations. In her article, MacNeill argues that AIDS-awareness campaigns not only helped congeal a particular image of the 'homosexual' in relation to a specific form of sexual activism, but that they also rehearsed particular expectations of queer visual imagery that, for all their worth, overdetermined the work of queer artists by narrowing the interpretive frame.

Sabdha Charlton extends this preoccupation with queer visual imagery in her analysis of online lesbian manga communities. Taking Yuriko, the boyish lesbian teen star of the bi-weekly serial 'Shoujoai ni Bokuen: The Adventures of Yuriko', as her guide, Charlton tracks yuri fandom and its complex series of engagements with popular and subcultural discourses about 'the lesbian'. Throughout she demonstrates how the question of a lesbian gaze becomes queerly inflected, and powerfully extended, by the context of the virtual community and its devotion to 'animated' women.

Alongside our contributor's considerations of sexual historicity, AIDS and Internet erotics, Joel Windle provides a new insight into that other daily discourse of sexual difference: gay marriage. In his article, Windle maps recent developments in French politics focusing on the heated public debate that followed the announcement by Greens mayor and parliamentarian Noel Mamere in April 2004 that he intended to preside over the marriage of two men. In his analysis of the political and historical context of the French debate, Windle usefully extends recent Anglophone discussions about the ideological circulation of gay marriage which, as he points out, are at risk of missing the importance of, and distinctions between, the framing of the debate in different settings. Through close analysis of the French Government's response to the controversy, Windle tracks the state's instrumentalisation of sexuality and its occlusion of the non-normative demands of gay marriage. Moreover, he argues that in the French debate, gay marriage itself has been constituted as a key site for the redefinition of Republicanism.

Negotiating a different form of Republicanism, Joan Nestle steps out from the 'pink mist' of the American war machine to toast the life-affirming power of beat sex as portrayed in Henry von Doussa's 'Watchful Eyes'. In her remarks, Nestle bears witness to the value and the risk of von Doussa's bad sex in a time when that which is putatively good correlates with the advances of a globalising, capitalist enterprise. It is to nightmare thoughts about the coalition of the killing, of the Sadean images of torture and the palpable zones of silence from which no such incriminating proof has yet leaked, that Nestle's thoughts take her as she reads von Doussa's descriptions of 'gritty sex, of his characters on their knees or in each other's arms, trying to hold on'. It is almost as if she, herself, is trying to hold on as she fingers her way through these strange reactionary days of gays in the military, transphobic feminists and queer commodification until she finds her way back to recollections of her own warmly familiar femme days, fighting the state on her knees:

 Forgive me for taking you far from this place and time, to a working
 class beach in Brooklyn, New York, called Riis Park, after Jacob
 Riis, the crusading journalist who exposed the terrible sufferings
 of immigrant workers in lower Manhattan's tenements in the early
 years of the twentieth century. The year is 1959 and a young femme
 lesbian is getting an education in public sex from one of the older
 butch women who played softball in the field right behind the gay
 beach. 'You see this shopping bag,' she says to me, while we wait
 on the bathroom line, 'I always have one with me so if I meet a nice
 girl and I want to show her a thing or two, we can go into the same
 toilet and the cops will never know there are two of us in there
 because one of us will stand in the shopping bag and they will see
 only one pair of legs.

Sex and surveillance, and the sexualising of surveillance that animates the public sex scene, are crafted poignantly in Henry von Doussa's series of Rechyesque vignettes. Von Doussa's creative engagement with repudiated non-normative sexual practices importantly emphasises the necessarily sexual aspect of sexuality. This aspect can often appear to be elided in academic considerations of intellectual categories such as 'identity' or 'community' where the messy confrontationality of bad sex often loiters at one remove. 'Watchful Eyes' also compiles stories about everyday queer Australians and in a national context where queerness is suppressed or ridiculed and a gay and lesbian studies context where Australian content is so scarce, to give voice to queer Australian stories is powerful and precious indeed. Von Doussa tracks his protagonist as he burns up suburban streets, looking for sex. But the pleasure associated with sex in 'Watchful Eyes' extends beyond the sex the protagonist himself has, to a broader social view of the healthiness of quotidian queer sex:

 I'm hopeful of the connections I make in everyday places, in
 everyday ways. I'm comforted knowing that somewhere out there guys
 are touching, entering taboo zones, men in suits, neat and tidy,
 men wearing hard hats and overalls, old Italian men with
 potbellies, mincing queens drowning in Versace aftershave,
 university students on pushbikes--they reassure me, affirm my
 desires, they turn me on. And even if I don't participate in these
 panting, futile high jinks, I sleep more soundly knowing they
 happen.

Moving away from individually-authored pieces altogether, Conversations features transcripts of three discussions which provide a wide-ranging reflection on the interface between education and sexuality. Recalling the dearly yearned--for queer miseducation of Joan Nestle in that Riis Park cubicle, the discussions flesh out the hunger for bad knowledge that underpins and drives sexuality studies, the powerful human dramas of recognition, hurt and pleasure that so often accompany such hunger and the guerilla-style approach to intellectual practice which so powerfully marks the theorising of sexuality. 'Sex Work (Part One): Sexuality Studies At the University of Melbourne' is a roundtable discussion in which a variety of Melbourne academics--Steven Angelides, Brett Farmer, Annamarie Jagose, Sheila Jeffreys, Fran Martin, Graham Willett and Audrey Yue--reflect on the history of GLBTIQ research and teaching at the University of Melbourne. While by no means a comprehensive survey, 'Sex Work' offers an insightful snapshot into sexuality studies at the University of Melbourne since the early 1990s. Written by people who were instrumental in laying its foundations as well as others who now contribute to the ongoing programmes of teaching and research, it provides first-hand accounts of key research and teaching currently underway across a number of disciplines and it points out some of the major themes and debates that have dominated the study of sexuality. In 'Sex Work (Part Two): A Postgraduate's Perspective on Teaching Sexuality', Mary Tomsic throws a postgraduate's experience into the mix.

In a recent special report, the Education Age revealed the case of 'Jane' (not her real name), a student teacher fired from a Victorian school when she told her students she was a lesbian. Jane's experience attests powerfully to the volatile relationship between education and queer sexualities, the material human consequences at stake and the indisputable fact that GLBTIQ teachers and students need more support than is currently available to them. Based on a roundtable discussion held in September 2004, six months before the story broke in the press, 'Breaking Through? Obstacles and Opportunities for GLBTIQ Educators' features Jane reflecting on the incident that led to her dismissal and on broader issues of homophobia in Victorian schools. Ray Misson, Michael Crowhurst, Joel Windle and Bronwyn McMahon contribute to the discussion and provide their own thoughts on related matters. Closing Quotidian Queer's preoccupation with education and sexuality is a retrospective of the trailblazing gay and lesbian education handbook Young, Gay & Proud. Produced by the Melbourne-based Gay Teachers and Students Group in 1978, this booklet became a major issue in politicking for the State election the following year. As a bookend to Jane's story--another Victorian story about politics, queers and the schools that fail us--this retrospective provides a timely critique of the deeply-held distrust of gays and lesbians in the classroom.

Of course, there have been certain legal and cultural improvements in the wellbeing of many gays and lesbians since the late 1970s and the sex panics of that time. For example, Young, Gay & Proud warns young gays and lesbians of the late 1970s that 'holding hands or kissing can be a crime--if it happens to offend a nearby policeman' (2). The fact that it may seem hard to fathom that something like holding hands--that most routine daily thing--could ever have been illegal, reminds us of the very recent historical arrival of gay and lesbian social justice in Australia, although Jane's story tells us that we still have a long way to go on this count. But the shift in fortunes of gays and lesbians--what we could call our most privileged sexual minorities if we add 'white' and 'middle-class' to the equation--should also draw our attention to more underdeveloped lines of critical investigation and political organisation. A number of academics in 'Sex Work' raise transgender issues as one of these crucial, yet under-acknowledged areas. In our Reviews section, we point towards other areas needing more attention and resources, including queer indigenous people, the sexual pleasures of people with disabilities and queer-critical engagements with gay and lesbian economics.

In this way, the journal closes by reaching out beyond itself, marking out new discussions and exchanges. As a reflection of the expanded national conversation that is required, reviewers for this issue have been sought from universities around the country. In addition to the book reviews, the section also features a review of the sixth Australian Homosexual Histories Conference and, acknowledging the 'Internetification' of queer community, a queer Australian blog. Pulling these diffuse interlocutors together, Quotidian Queer closes by broadening out the intellectual discussion and by inviting people in. It is our hope that Quotidian Queer captures a sense of the driving energy that devolves from our shared experiences of queer lust and daily anger, that it encourages people to organise--to evade the daily threats of paranoia, burn-out and anxiety--and to reflect on the queerly possible. Mine your outrage and share it around.

Finally, our thanks to our contributors, especially the generous contributions to our roundtable discussions, and to those people who helped out along the way: Fran Martin, Joan Nestle, Graham Willett, Graham Carbery, Gary Jaynes, Phil Carswell, Ken Lovett, Joel Windle, Michael Crowhurst, Michelle Smith, Kate Habgood, Merryn Shaw, Vyvyan Cayley, Helen Radloff, Johann Ruth and everyone at UMPA.

(1) Quoted in New York Times, May 25, 1993, A8.

(2) An Autonomous Collective of the Melbourne Gay Teachers and Students Group, Young, Gay and Proud, Melbourne, 1978, 42.