Reconstruction 7.1 (2007)
Return to Contents, Race, Nationalism, Sexuality, Gender»
Unruly Corporeality: AIDS, Immigration and the Imagined Australian Body / Zoë Anderson
Abstract: Particular bodies within the Australian nation can be seen to threaten to disrupt and destabilize dominant notions of cultural citizenship. Understood through intricate intersections of ethnicity, gender and sexuality, 'Australianness' - and its correlation to the geographical nation - is constantly monitored. Crucial here is the manner in which boundaries of whiteness, and 'true Australianess', are reconstituted, fuelling avoidance of the ambiguities of national belonging and ensuring the enduring pathologisation of the 'un'Australian. In particular, discursive associations between HIV/AIDS and the 'foreign' as perceived contaminates to the nation operate to reinforce these understandings. Here, the threat of disease both informs, and is fuelled by, connotations to 'the foreign', often conflating the two in very literal ways. Discourses of pathology correlate here with visceral connotations of pollution and darkness. As such, HIV/AIDS has become a crucial site whereby cultural fears of the 'non-normal' coalesce; a meeting point for all manner of perceived threats to the 'white heteronormativity' of a healthy Australia. The relationship between Australian citizens - rendered knowable and safe through normalising hegemonies - and the nation becomes one of identification through these signifying practices of fetishised affiliation. The body is implicated in all aspects of these complicated matrices of identity markings, revealing the fluid and often contradictory manner in which the nation's cultural borders are articulated, assumed and performed, on, and through, the body. Indeed, as the taxonomies of national identity are reiterated and reaffirmed through discourses of the everyday, the boundaries rendering distinct those deemed truly 'Australian', by virtue of cultural appropriateness, become increasingly important in the desire to maintain the 'essential' nature of national belonging.
Why should bodily margins be thought to be specifically invested with power and danger? (Douglas 122)
<1> The unruly body is, in the language and symbolism of the nation, a threatening body. Characterised as failing to fit within boundaries, acting against the norms and having the potential to disrupt the 'normal', it evokes anxieties regarding perceived danger to national identity and the coherency of imagined nation. As Victor Turner has stated: "unruliness itself is the mark of the ultra liminal, of the perilous realm of possibility of 'anything may go' which threatens any social order" (41-42). One such way in which this manifests is through the regulatory machinations of sexuality, which can be utilised as a key site of referral in interrogating the parameters of national cultural borders in Australia. Sexuality is shrouded in the vocabularies and culturally constructed discourses of 'naturalness' and 'normality' that render it vital to any discussion of identity. Sexuality is a crucial mechanism in analysing 'Australianness': it is attached to notions of appropriate behaviour and hegemonic normalities. Cultural acceptance is often determined largely by 'acting Australian' rather than the legality of citizenship. Concurrently, fear of 'the foreign' is crucially not reserved for those outside our borders, but operates at an insidious and more anxious level when those who are legally Australian are/may be encoded within the framework of 'us' and 'them'. The multicultural rhetoric makes this space for 'Australianness' even more curious, ambiguous and contested.
<2> This article will explore the centrality of sexuality to perceived threats to the imagined nation by teasing out a way in which theories of the body can be effectively utilised in analysing 'Australianness'. The theme of danger and contamination prevalent in HIV/AIDS discourse and immunology operate in similar ways to language and symbolism associated with 'unruly' ethnicity within the multicultural nation. Correspondingly, this article will interrogate the ways that ethnicity and sexuality operate inextricably within this national framework of 'normal' and 'natural' identification and the consequences for the social body politic.
The Social/National body: Why Immunology?
<3> It is now commonplace to hear that the body can be used as a metaphor for the nation in all manner of cultural and social histories and theoretical explorations. The body is the crucial link between cultural identifications and the nation, simultaneously grounding it in a certain materiality (though understood only through language) and elevating it to a symbolic and metaphorical correlation, imparting significance to each individual. In the context of national affiliation and boundaries the body also carries the symbolic weight of constituting the nation and, as such, simultaneously existing as threat and under threat. Here, it is the symbolic coherency of the nation that is perceived to be under threat by notions of 'unruly' difference; in particular, those which do not conform to normalised codes of gender, sexuality or ethnicity amplify the anxieties of maintaining a contained and 'authentic' body politic.
<4> Immunology has utility as an effective tool in analysing these connections, especially given its contemporary connections to AIDS. As a vehicle for the crystallisation of the intricate relation between the health of the social body and that of the individual, AIDS acts as a crucial site of analysis. As an 'epidemic', AIDS has been stigmatised in large part through its connection to homosexuality, making it easily categorised as a corporeal manifestation of the social and moral 'degeneracy' of non-heterosexual activities (Sturken, 247). In this sphere, homosexuality and its manifold cultural connotations have become intricately involved with the way the body, as a bio-medical site, is read. In her analyses of the ways that AIDS as a discourse is created and perpetuated through the presumed objective scientific neutrality of immunology, Cindy Patton has illuminated the connections between the notion of epidemic as discursive narrative and the terror of homosexuality. The 'vectorial' nature of epidemics in turn speaks of the notion of ever more 'centres' being created (21). Here the fear of 'the other' is something evoked as 'unconfined', ever shifting. Instead of operating from a set site on the margins, it creates fresh positions within the body politic, evoking a correlation between the terror of shifting (growing) homosexualities, the detailed pathologisation of sexual 'deviancy' through the discourses of the medical body, and the 'body' of the nation. As Diana Fuss has argued, heterosexuality here requires the existence of the contaminating and predatory nature of its binarised other, homosexuality, to define itself (234).
<5> In addition, the manner in which biomedical discourse has delineated between health and disease has drawn upon the binaries that are not only related to those of homo/hetero sexuality but actually are informed by them. Patton states that
Epidemiology ... is performative. By sharply demarking pathogen and body, epidemiology created the scientific means to declare that some, but not all, conjunctures of body/pathogen are 'disease', even 'epidemic'.(21)
Here, one can extend these interrogations of sexual discourses to explore ethnicity and nation though the cultural assumptions concerning 'normal' activities, behaviours and appearances to assess the correlation between the hegemonic sexualised society and the national. Furthermore, the personified and gendered/sexualised language of AIDS discourse can elucidate the underlying naturalised codes of a national and social culture. Immunology, and its application to HIV/AIDS, can be utilised then not only as a demarcation of self/ other but as a metaphor for discussions of nation, culture and ethnicity.
Authenticity and 'the fake': the fragmented self and ethnicity
<6> Theorising ethnicity as a 'performance' is integral to this discussion as it elucidates the artificiality of coherent ethnic categorisation. This artificiality is in turn useful for exposing the regulatory machinations of identification, such as 'Australianness', and illustrates not only the ontological myth of an 'essential' ethnicity but of the contained and pure body/nation. Judith Butler's now well-known theories of the inversion and complex machination of the sex/gender/sexuality paradigm raise some interesting questions for ethnicity as a corporeal construction. A crucial element of her thesis is that the surface appearance of the body is not 'naturally' conterminous with its substance; that the 'performativity' of gender betrays its assumed authenticity (Gender Trouble, 179). That this performance can be disrupted and/or manipulated destabilises further these machinations of identity. The body's social decipherability, determined by adherence to cultural particularities of sex and gender, is read as 'natural' and 'normal' to create a fixed self, one that others can 'read' and be placed with ease. With interruption to any aspect of this creation the cultural matrix within which differences are managed becomes more intricate, fluid, and ultimately 'unruly'. Within this context 'authenticity' ceases to have meaning; for example, as Richard Dyer illustrates:
By taking the signs of masculinity and eroticising them in a blatantly homosexual context, much mischief is done to the security with which 'men' are defined in society, and by which their power is secured. If that bearded, muscular beer drinker turns out to be a pansy, how are they going to know the 'real' men anymore? (Cited in Weeks, 191)
If something as 'natural' as the sexed body is revealed to be unknowable before cultural inscription then what can we make of the 'inescapable' corporeal markings of ethnicity? Can it be argued that this very ethnicity is, too, constructed in specific times and places and that therefore the notions of 'national' and 'foreigner' or, more crudely, 'us' and 'them' are complicated not only by the obvious results of migration, but that the cultural codes actually responsible for the binaries between people, within the nation, are shape shifting and constructed around constantly evolving understandings of sexuality and gender?
<7> In her analysis of being marked as an 'ethnic' Chinese, Ien Ang suggests that her 'Chineseness' is an entity that displays enormous flexibility in meaning, something that is external of her sense of self. "In short, if I am inescapably Chinese by descent, I am only sometimes Chinese by consent. When and how is a matter of politics" (18). Ang's suggestion that there are shifting discursive locales through which her ethnicity is viewed, assumed and embodied is indicative also of the complex hegemony whereby 'good' ethnics can move further into the dominant culture through various modes of appearance and behavioural appropriations. However, as Homi Bhabha cautions us, this 'ambivalence' seeks to create the image of a "reformed, recognisable Other ... that is almost the same but not quite" (126). This 'same but not quite' status also calls into play the politics of ethnicity as a required performance that can achieve two ends: the assimilation of the foreign aspects deemed uncomfortable ('almost the same'), whilst domesticating ethnicity into something knowable. It is through destabilising and subverting this binary opposition that one 'queers' the notions of national affiliation and ethnicity, rendering the constructions of identity through by which these two act through and against each other, both empty and meaningless; a substance that, rather than existing a priori to the stereotypical representations, is found to be only manifested through the constant performance and repetition of the public identity itself.
<8> This notion of performing your 'authentic' ethnicity therefore actually complicates the impression of essences and interiority of the ontologically ethnic body. Rey Chow argues that one's ethnicity is a ritualised repetition through which 'authenticity' is enacted. Doing so, she argues, demonstrates a form of what is deemed 'self' mimicry (112). However, this paradox begs the question that if one's ethnicity is 'naturally' marked on the body, something 'inescapable' and 'natural', then why the directive to ensure the behaviour and knowledge of that ethnicity correlates in cultural terms to the body? In what way can the authenticity of one already visibly signified as ethnic be related to the norms of the dominant culture and constitute an expression of anxiety over ethnicity being 'recognisable' and 'known'? Butler argues that:
[T]o be called unreal, and to have that call, as it were, institutionalised as a form of differential treatment, is to become the other against which the human is made ... To be called a copy, to be called unreal, is thus one way in which one can be oppressed.(Undoing Gender,217-218)
The taunt of "You're not a real Australian" is underscored by a more insidiously destabilising insult, "you're not a real Asian/ Italian..." in the purist ethnic-heritage trope. In such a linguistic spatiality, the locale of 'multi-ethnic' is deemed too ambiguous, unknowable and ultimately culturally chaotic. This delineation between 'national identity' and 'cultural heritage' is performed through a deliberate separation, a binary predicated upon these two disparate factors. The hierarchy is maintained through the powerful assumption that national identity must trump heritage, one being allocated to the past, one to the present/future, unless you are 'truly' Australian, in which case heritage is identity, and the past informs the present in a 'natural' way (Gender based, 'naturally', upon Sex.) This desire and effective compulsion for definition, the demarcation of which renders hegemonic the racialisation of a gendered, sexualised 'norm', is both encoded in the popular discourse and enacted through a Foucauldian self-surveillance.
<9> Within this framework of exclusion, we find too that the body exists in the language of boundaries that facilitates the anxious regulation of acting 'appropriately' according to gender, ethnicity and/or sexuality, as well as of health and its connotation of wholesomeness. The 'authentic' self, being loaded with the implications of 'truth' and 'pure', must constantly defend those elements that threaten its coherency and containment. Here immunology can elucidate the ways in which these anxious mechanisms of boundary control are informed, and inform, the social control of the body politic, and the white heteronormativity of 'Australianness'.
Us and Them: Contradictions within the Australian (body) politic
<10> Here, following Anne-Marie Smith, I would argue that these discourses of exclusion are specifically, and consciously, not absolute. Her distinction between homosexuality as a 'radical' or 'simple' difference hinges on the ways in which it is utilised by the social order to systematically maintain the hegemony of norms and appropriateness. ('A Symptomology of Authoritarian Discourse', 311). In this manner, homosexuality is deemed acceptable in certain guises, one both 'known' and simultaneously 'private', which, as Smith contends, allows for an exclusionary element to be hidden behind the veneer of tolerance, only threatened by the few who 'ruin it for the rest' (314). As a strategic mechanism, this functions to reaffirm the 'norm' by promoting a type of acceptance. If the imaginary 'good homosexual' (i.e., don't ask, don't tell) whose sexuality is confined to the bedroom (the imperative to not 'flaunt it', in order to avoid disruption to the safety of a false normalised heterosexual public) then the 'good ethnic' is one whose 'cultural heritage/differences' are relegated to the realm of the private or the commodified. This dynamic is seemingly complicated by the celebration of certain manifestations of ethnicity such as food, dance and costume, indicating a high level of acceptance within the dominant cultural space. However, this public approval acts more as mechanism of containment through identification, such as in the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, than equality of identity. Such mainstream recognition is predicated on these groups having limited agency within the prevailing culture; their position being kept, if untidily, within boundaries of consumption, spectacle and the particularity of limited, controlled spaces of expression. This oscillating silencing and flaunting - sanctioned into acceptable avenues - is part of the ambiguous discourse of 'tolerance', relying on a 'domesticated' affiliation with identity (in both senses of the word; tame and within the home).
<11> The promotion of the 'good' Other is predicated on an unspoken aspect of what Smith describes as 'self annihilation'. She argues that by performing a kind of 'self-closeting' - the "pseudotolerant homophobia of our natural homeland" ('Centring of Right Wing Extremism', 122) - the imaginary 'good homosexual' actually destroys its own collective and individual attempts at survival. In this way,
[t]otally isolated from the gay and lesbian community, bereft of political solidarity, alienated from sexual relationships and purified of every last fragment of 'abnormal' sexual desires, the 'good homosexual' would be the last homosexual ... We would, in effect, commit collective suicide, for we would destroy the conditions necessary to our survival as an alternative community and political movement. ('Centring of Right Wing Extremism', 122)
Such operations then beg the question, not only of examining how these machinations work through, and on, those deemed 'other', but for what purpose and with what degree of success. If the nation's borders correlate with the social body, is the anxious and insistent attention to its coherence inevitable? And, by focussing on the bodily 'inscriptions' such as sex and ethnicity, does coherence not just equate with an acceptable version of those identity markings, but somehow, surreally, seek a form of ultimate, and impossible, neutrality of identity? These elements controlling the parameters of the cultural nation are then, under interrogation, revealed not to be a calculus of normalisations but rather a strained and angst-ridden matrix of devices, fuelled by a momentum of panic and becoming ever more intolerant within the 'natural' confines of sex, gender and sexuality, enforcing an increasingly stricter surveillance of deviations, through surface discourses of 'tolerance' and 'inclusion'.
Monitoring our borders
Contagion, degeneracy and national/body boundaries
<12> One of the most potent ways in which boundaries are invoked as necessary is though the visceral discourses of contagion and degeneracy. Relying on emotive correlations between social and moral 'ills' (as culturally specified within an historical moment) and the health of the body (and thus, the body politic), these discursive mechanisms operate to enforce and normalise strict bodily (and social) boundaries through a language of disease, dirt and danger. Bashford and Hooker explain that:
Contagion requires contact, but it always implies more than this: it implies absorption, invasion, vulnerability, the breaking of a boundary imagined as secure, in which the other becomes part of the self. Contagion connotes both a process of contact and transmission, and a substantive, self-replicating agent, and is centrally concerned with the growth and multiplication of this agent (4)
This need for cultural regulation is manifested through surveillance: the panic over 'cancerous' ghettoes, the nation state not 'absorbing 'foreign' elements. The nation operates then as a vehicle for crystallising the cultural codes as conveyed through the security of a coherent social body. As Elizabeth Grosz states
Dirt is what disrupts order, and order is conceived of as an arbitrary arrangement of elements in relative stability or harmony. It is only through the attempted expulsion of the improper, the disarranging, the unclean ... that the representation of order can continue (201).
This pathologisation is directly correlated to notions of pollution, and the visceral connotations of 'darkness'. This web of regulatory mechanisms compound and render increasingly intricate connotations of all elements of 'darkness', funnelled through a simplistic layer of 'good' and 'bad', 'health' and 'disease', and functioning as a code for all manner of perceived ideological, social and moral problems. These associations are further complicated through notions of sexuality and ethnicity; 'whiteness' in particular is evoked as a symbol of purity and cleanliness (Dyer, 21). As Bashford has illustrated, 'whiteness' in Australia has long been associated with hygiene and wholesomeness, making 'race' "the business of public health" (Imperial Hygiene, 139). Sexual 'perversion', and its links to disease, are here cast as particularly threatening, with much of the stigma of AIDS being created by this assumed connection (Sturken, 247). In this manner, racism and concerns about 'sexual' disease inform each other, as cultural anxieties about threats to 'Australianness' are not only about the visible antagonisms of an increasing 'different' (sometimes dark) ethnic minority, but about the perceived danger of 'darkness' of culture and society as a whole. In this manner, AIDS does not exist separately to ethnicity as a social 'issue', but is integral to the filter that organises the complex normative association between sexuality and gender with the boundaries and health of the body and therefore the nation.
Invasion!
<13> The nation 'under threat' is symbolically positioned within the gendered discourse of vulnerability and femininity, and the supposed lack of strong, 'masculine' borders. This danger of violated national boundaries is shrouded in the language of 'invasion'. The feminine/ 'othered' body is posited as open and fluid, endangered by its own unruliness. The flux and instability of this concept of the body translates then to the body politic in direct ways. The lack of a fixed identity and the failure of the cultural boundaries to remain strong and coherent are perceived as undermining the bodily integrity. Grosz comments that bodily fluids can be understood as an emblematic failure to completely separate the inside and outside of one's bodily boundaries. Their 'unruliness' undermines the desired coherency of the corporeal subject, threatening the consistency and contained nature of the whole (193-194). In this social landscape, the perpetual threat of 'foreign' bodies is enhanced by the evidence of those who have become citizens but remain culturally different from the rest of the population.The form and location of these boundaries is not clearly marked, and alters in relation to specific elements of the 'foreign' and/or the 'unnatural'. These shifting borders are an aspect of the complexity of the notion of dualisms; the addition (or absence) of extra signifying markers on the body complicates and renders increasingly opaque the divide between people and groups.
<14> In biomedical discourse, we again find that this vocabulary of invasion is solidified through the personification of the threat, denoting HIV as somehow malicious, seeking to destroy through deception and infiltration. These discourses of invasion also predicate themselves upon the fear of infiltration that in someway manipulates the established body politic; for example:
Next the immune system finally recognises HIV as an invader. The B cells make antibodies against the AIDS virus. But those antibodies also end up attacking other immune system cells carrying the CD4 receptor because HIV resembles them ... The result: a handful of HIV causes the immune system to self destruct. (Cited by Sturken, 246) (emphasis added)
This immunology narrative then invokes panic at the way that a 'handful' of foreign entities can undermine a whole system, including having some of the established elements turn upon each other instead of fighting the 'invader'. In pursuing this narrative in the context not only of a fear of the 'spectre' of homosexuality preying on hetero culture, but in turn the notion of ethnic 'others' within the nation, one can further ask, in what manner do we 'police' the nation for 'outsiders' who are already deemed citizens (resembling 'us')? In the same way the 'beer drinker might turn out to be a pansy', how do we mark out difference where it doesn't take on divergence in appearance or behaviour? In what way does the unease over a 'handful' of 'foreigners' cause discourses such as 'multiculturalism' to take on a different emphasis? What are the mechanisms by which a nation uses the visible antagonisms of diversity to symbolise what is culturally foreign, and socially different? These anxieties are seemingly exacerbated by the very fact that often there is no intelligible marker for someone who is 'not one of us', and when complicated by the matrices of the destabilisation of the standard acts and appearances of heteronormativity, these notions of 'identity' within the nation are revealed, at best, to be tenuous.
Gendered/sexualised national borders
<15> How do the dynamics of a gendered - and sexualised - hierarchy of ethnicity fit into these relationships? In what ways do notions of a sexualised ethnicity (or a racialised sexuality) shape cultural nationalism within the national borders? Equating the feminine with the (male) homosexual operates through strange - and contradictory - notions of heterosexuality and normative gender. In addition, the health of the nation is associated with masculine strength, and impenetrable borders, positing both the feminine and the homosexual, as 'receptive' sexual bodies, as inferior and susceptible to 'outside' invasion (Waldby, 75). For Ann Pellegrini, the construction of the homosexualised Jewish body within Europe between the World Wars had direct relation to national borders and issues of 'race', as "the feminisation of the Jewish male body took on especial significance for the health of the body politic, which was identified with masculine vigour"(23). This interrelationship between 'race' and a specific gendered sexuality had further connotations for discourses of 'health', as:
The Jewish male's putative effeminacy came to signal 'the' Jewish people's 'racial' difference, effectively eliding differences between Jewish men and Jewish women ... many of the medical conditions for which all Jews were held to be at higher risk as a 'race' were the same conditions to which all women were believed predisposed as a 'sex'.(18)
Here the manner in which one is 'racialised' through factors other than physical visibility (an interior essence) interrelates with the correlation between femininity, homosexuality and inferiority within the nation state. That the nation/body is deemed more threatened by something 'weak', but 'dangerous', rather than direct force (the masculine) also reveals of the flexibility of the discourses linking gender, sexuality and 'race'.
<16> As Shah demonstrates in his analysis of 'Chinatown' the interrelationship between appropriate gender and sexuality, and maintaining the hygiene and potency of the nation, are intricately tied to ideas of 'race' and ethnicity that are constructed along lines of health, strength and vigour. Any interference to the 'natural' connections between sex-gender-sexuality then hold enormous threat to the nation at large. Shah states that:
The effete man was a particularly sinister figure. In both sexual scenarios and political debates, the effete man had lost his will and his moral compass, he was vulnerable to Chinese sexual and political seduction, and his activity jeopardised the vital interests of the race. Effete men demonstrated a careless disposition to race-mixing that undermined national strength and the perpetration of a properly gendered social order. (109)
Effeminacy poses a particular menace to the body politic and its essential national character, through the presumed perversion of normal codes of gender and sexuality: that a sexed man does not behave in an appropriate masculine manner. Furthermore, this 'weakness' implicates ethnicity and the nation by threatening to disrupt the socio-cultural borders of acceptability and the 'strength' of the nation.
Gendered/sexualised cellular boundaries
<17> In taking this investigation further, into the microscopic, we see similar connotations within the representation of the immune system under 'siege' from HIV, in which the T-cells are often denoted as heteromasculine figures, personifying the vigour and health of the nation, with the infecting virus rendered sneaky, insidious and shape shifting. Catherine Waldby argues that:
While sexual difference is used...to figure hierarchies of command, metaphors of masculinity are...used to indicate immunocompetence, the vigour and efficacy of the immune system. Femininity, effeminacy and emasculation are on the other hand used as analogues for kinds of immunocompromise, the term used to designate pathological deficit in immune system function. (66)
Indeed, as she further suggests:
HIV infection involves a kind of 'homosexualisation' or femininsation of the T cell and hence the whole immune system, the perversion of a highly organised system of heterosexual, masculine 'self-protection' which is equated with both the stability of a closed system and the interests of a mobilised nation state. (70)
If we follow this terror of feminisation/ homosexualisation into the 'racial' sphere the intricacies of identity and belonging within the nation become increasingly opaque. Those ethnic groupings denoted as 'feminised' are directly implicated in the panic surrounding the possible undermining of the 'body politic'; the need to solidify boundaries correlating to the fear of both having 'feminised' national borders, and being 'over run' (infiltrated?) by 'feminised' forces. The hierarchy monitoring sexualisation (and finding 'objective' crystallisation in the biomedical discourses) then is informed by, and informs, the classification and acceptance of various differing ethnicities within the dominant culture's borders. In the same way that the T cells become 'homosexualised' by a virus able to be initially undetected, those deemed 'ethnic' (despite nationally being citizens) evoke a visceral terror of the health of the nation being insidiously weakened by those who look the same but are not quite. In this way the visible markers of ethnicity actually become favourable to the apparently assimilated but culturally different. The pervading desire to mark others as a particular ethnicity, by celebrating their 'culture', then ceases to be an example of 'tolerance', but is one of anxious relief, of 'knowing' who 'they' are. The greatest threat, in the sexualised taxonomies of ethnicity within the cultural nation, reveals itself as being those who appear to have assimilated but who retain crucial, but hidden, markers of 'difference'.
Identity, Panic and 'Unruly' Australian Bodies
<18> That gender is understood only through the paradigm of a normative heterosexuality destabilises these ideas of the sexed body being immune to cultural construction. In this reading, ethnicity, whose relationship to the nation is never anything less than highly ambiguous and increasingly contested, becomes inexorably linked to sexuality and the assumptions about the naturalised social body. The gendering, and sexualising, of certain ethnicities is only one part of this process. This leads to another, more complicated dynamic, which raises more specific questions about which element of the 'natural' marked body occupies more weight in the dominant national arena. In pertaining to the specificities of Australian cultural citizenship, we can ask: Does 'Australianness' centre more on ethnicity, sexuality or gender? Which combinations render a subject 'more Australian' in the cultural borders? As the material and symbolic site of identification the body is implicated in all aspects of this complicated matrix of identity markings, revealing the fluid and often contradictory manner in which the nation's cultural borders are articulated, assumed and performed, on and through the body. It is the materiality of the body that grounds these theories of sexualities and ethnicities in the socio-historical world; it is the ontologically 'natural' status bestowed on the body that makes it the crucial site through which sexuality bonds to the nation. It is in the body that we can see that sexuality and ethnicity are intricately connected; not that they can be seen as operating together, but rather that they cannot operate without each other. Their link is indivisible - the 'evidence' being that they both appear marked on the body in 'innate' ways.
<19>The endless desire for classification, which predicates itself upon the 'natural' aspects of the body, therefore is destabilised and exposed when 'queered', revealing binary categorisation and homogeneity to be a fiction imposed and unquestioned through regulatory regimes. The 'unruly corporeality' that defines not only the individual body, but the social body en masse, relates explicitly, through these discourses, to the contours of the national body. The relationship between Australian citizens - rendered knowable and safe through normalising hegemonies - and the nation becomes one of identification through these signifying practices of fetishised affiliation. Perceived threats to 'Australianness' are therefore concerned less with strict national boundaries, and more with the cultural fluidity that renders decipherability terrifyingly obtuse, and the manner in which ethnicity within the multicultural nation needs to stay tame to appease fears that it is threatening that imagined 'essence' of the nation. This discourse of the 'heterosexual' nation, made up of clusters of healthy 'normal' people, is then easily manipulated by fearful rhetoric, one that can slide between 'objective' science and the potentially 'undermining' passivity of multiculturalism, without thought for the consequences.
Works Cited
Ang, Ien. 'On not speaking Chinese: Postmodern Ethnicity and the Politics of Diaspora'. New Formations, 24, Winter. (1994): 1-18.
Bashford, Imperial Hygeine: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health, New York,: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Bashford, Alison and Claire Hooker (eds.). Contagion: Historical and Cultural Studies, Routledge, London and New York, 2001.
Bhabha, Homi. 'Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse'.October, 28, Spring. (1984): pp 128-133.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge: New York, 1990.
Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. Routledge: New York and London, 2004.
Chow, Rey. The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Columbia University Press, New York, 2002.
Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. New York and London: Routledge, 1984 (first published 1966).
Dyer, Richard . White, London and New York: Routledge, 1997.
Fuss, Diana. 'Inside/Out'. Critical Encounters: Reference and Responsibility in Deconstructive Writing. (Eds) Cathy Caruth and Deborah Esch. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1995.
Grosz, Elisabeth .Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1994.
Patton, Cindy. " Migratory Vices'. Queer Diasporas: Sexualities on the Move. (Eds) Cindy Patton and Benigro Sanchez-Eppler. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000.
Pellegrini, Ann. Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race. New York and London: Routledge, 1997.
Shah, Nayan. Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Fransisco's Chinatown. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
Smith, Anne Marie. 'A Symptomology of an Authoritarian Discourse: The Parliamentary Debates on the Prohibition of Homosexuality', Cultural Remix: Theories of Politics and the Popular. (Eds) Erica Carter, James Donald and Judith Squires. London: Lawrence and Wishart,
Smith, Anne Marie. 'The Centring of Right Wing Extremism Through the Construction of an 'Inclusionary' Homophobia and Racism'. Playing with Fire: Queer Politics, Queer Theories. (Ed.). London and New York: Routledge, 1997.
Sturken, Marita. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, The AIDS epidemic and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Turner, Victor. "Frame, Flow and Reflection: Ritual and Drama as Public Liminality". Performance in Postmodern Culture. (Eds.) Michel Benamou and Charles Caramello. Madison: Coda Press, 1977.
Waldby, Catherine. AIDS and the Body Politic: Biomedicine and Sexual Difference. London: Routledge, 1996.
Weeks, Jeffery. Sexuality and its Discontent: Meanings, Myths and Modern Sexualities, London and New York: Routledge, 1985.
Return to Top»