Cruising the staged Wonderland: Scenographic photography and the queering of space

This article attempts to introduce and define the creative practice of ‘scenographic photography’ through the exploration of a body of practice-based research completed as part of a Ph.D. at the University of Tasmania in 2018. As research, it examines how traditionally representational forms of photography and scenography can inform each other through the more performative mode of ‘scenographic photography’, an interdisciplinary neologism operating between the performing, spatial and visual arts. Throughout this article, in attempting to define ‘scenographic photography’ as an emergent field, I will concurrently explore how queer space making was used as a critical tool for the research, visualization, execution and exhibiting of this body of work. The title of the body of work – Cruising Wonderland – refers to a specific ‘beat’ site in Sydney associated with illicit encounters and the homophobic violence it engendered during the 1980s, as well as an embodied means of re-presenting such traumatic histories. Within Cruising Wonderland scenographic scale-model making is adopted as a critical tool with which to interrogate specific sites of queer trauma. The inherent ‘wonder’ and fascination associated with the art of the miniature encourages the possibility of a reparative reading not always possible via the explicit documentary tradition of photographing actual sites of trauma. Once presented the audience are required to ‘cruise’ the darkened exhibition environment, like the ‘beat’ spaces referenced in the work, with an acute sensory awareness of their surroundings, of fellow spectators and how they, as participants within Wonderland, perform and are perceived by others. This immersive approach to engaging with the work is designed to encourage a process of empathic engagement, illuminating often-invisible histories, allowing us to move towards reparation through active re-witnessing.

Green your groin: Sustainability, men’s underwear and the wild

Men and the environment, it seems, have a tenuous relationship. This article considers the challenge of men’s underwear and sustainability by focusing on advertisements designed to sell ecologically friendly underwear. One of the challenges that I highlight is how we are to ‘read’ these advertisements. This article takes it as a given that images are polysemous. Drawing on queer theory, I propose a series of readings that align with Sedgwick’s practice of paranoid and reparative reading. In the case of the paranoid reading, I show how these advertisements might be read as indicative and proof of hybrid masculinity theory. From this vantage, I move to a reparative reading that imagines other possibilities, particularly around nature and the wild. The goal of these readings is not to have one dominate over the other, but to show the nuance and complexity of masculinities in/and nature.

Suicide justice: Adopting Indigenous feminist methods in settler suicidology

White settler colonies around the world have long reported disproportionately high rates of Indigenous suicides, a consequence of the continuing violence of imperialism. This article posits a need for interdisciplinary approaches to address this crisis and therefore turns to humanist methods developed in Indigenous and feminist scholarship. I analyze texts from U.S. psychologist Edwin Shneidman to rearticulate their relationship to what I call settler suicidology. I then evoke literary critic Eve K. Sedgwick’s reparative reading method to reimagine suicide prevention as suicide justice, reading the novel There There by Tommy Orange (Cheyenne and Arapaho) to advocate for distributive justice as a new approach to Indigenous suicide crises. My term suicide justice names increasing accountability between settler suicide workers and the communities they seek to serve.

J. M. Coetzee and Monstrous Vegan Performativity

Chapter 4 turns to the work of J. M. Coetzee, establishing a reparative means of confronting violence against the nonhuman. Framed in relation to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s notion of paranoid and reparative reading, this chapter suggests what might be done with our identification of the monstrous vegan as a pervasive literary trope. Focusing on Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello texts, this chapter reads Costello as a performative enactment of the monstrous vegan. The staging of veganism as performance is seen to enable a reclamation of joy, pleasure, and optimism: affective states often abandoned in order to bear witness to violence against nonhuman animals. The chapter argues that the literary staging of veganism as monstrous performance provides an important framework for re-investing in the possibilities of vegan identity: offering a mode of detachment that refuses moral purity or the claim of ‘the beautiful soul’ by acknowledging self-interest and an entanglement in the violence of representational strategies.

Trusting Women's Visions: The Discernment of Spirits in Julian of Norwich's Revelation of Love

Julian of Norwich intervened in the clerical discourses surrounding the discernment of spirits (Latin discretio spirituum), a method for observing differences between divine and diabolical causes of visionary experience. During the late Middle Ages in Europe, churchmen used methods of discernment in some prominent trials to examine female visionaries for sanctity or heresy. In these instances, discernment offers a medieval analogue to what critics such as Rita Felski, following Paul Ricoeur, have termed paranoid reading practices or the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” premised on demystifying the illusory nature of signs, as opposed to reparative reading practices or the “hermeneutics of trust,” which calls for restoring their meaning. In a climate when discretio spirituum came to prominence, Julian responded to the suspicious techniques developed to interpret women's visions and bodies by incorporating an innovative guide for discernment in A Revelation of Love that prioritizes trust over suspicion. Julian's trusting form of discernment offers a way to recuperate one of the most stigmatized aspects of femininity: woman's perceived susceptibility to diabolical influence. A Revelation of Love shows how apparently diabolical signs can indicate God's divine presence.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and the difference geography makes

Ruez and Cockayne point out that queer theorist Eve Sedgwick’s reflections on paranoid and reparative readings accompanying one another came directly out of her queer political as well as textual practice in the U.S. Wrongly dismissed as mundane, this crucial contextualizing work is something geographers do especially well. Indeed, understanding the context for Sedgwick’s theories of paranoid and reparative reading is vital as we reflect on how her concepts travel across time and space.

“Just a Couple of Queer Fish”: The Queer Possibilities of Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle

Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (1973) is a foundational work of lesbian literature and has been characterized as a queer text. This essay begins with resistance to reading the novel as a wholly celebratory queer text because of how it positions a form of essentialized lesbianism against queer sexualities that are coded as deviant and abnormal. Nonetheless, Rubyfruit Jungle brims with queer narratives, queer scenes, and queer characters. In the essay’s second half, I draw on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s model of reparative reading to engage with potential queer readings the novel affords. I show how readers can recuperate the queer sexualities the novel documents in ways that the novel – with its specific historical and political positionality – did not or could not account for.