After dark in the antipodes: pedagogy, place and queer phenomenology

Abstract

This paper pursues issues of pedagogy, place and queer phenomenology in the context of what might be meant by the term ‘after‐queer’ or ‘what falls outside queer’ as we currently theorise, practice and locate queer. Inspired by Sara Ahmed’s account of how bodies become oriented by the ways in which they take up time and space, this paper investigates how bodies become oriented within and around the field of a television series that centres Indigenous terms and orientations and thereby, still further, problematises the directions and orientations of desire. The paper explores the narrative and queer and other couplings of an Australian tele‐series, The Circuit. It raises issues of audience, public pedagogy and we refer to guestbook discussion as we strive to foreground a methodology for working with sexuality and race that recognises and disturbs in order to read sexual and racial orientations as mixed and unfixed orientations.

Keywords:

• after‐queer
• queer phenomenology
• Indigeneity
• whiteness
• heteronorms
• The Circuit

Notes

1. SBS is a statutory body which receives funds every three years from the federal government to produce free‐to‐air TV and radio programming. According to the organisation’s website:

 SBS was established to give voice and exposure to multicultural Australia; to define, foster and celebrate Australia’s cultural diversity in accordance with our Charter obligation to ‘provide multilingual and multicultural radio and television services that inform, educate and entertain all Australians and, in doing so, reflect Australia’s multicultural society’. http://www20.sbs.com.au/sbscorporate/index.php?id= (accessed December 2, 2009).

2. Perth is the capital of Western Australia, a major city that is a long way from the Kimberley, geographically and culturally, a point made continuously in the cuts between the two locations within the series.

3. Bran Nue Dae ‘lampoon[s] the mixed‐up histories [of Broome] when the Aboriginal boy turns out to be the bishop’s son, and the German tourist is revealed as Aboriginal’ (Ganter, 2006, 249).

4. In 2005, a series of racially motivated mob confrontations took place in and around Cronulla, a beachfront suburb of Sydney, New South Wales. These riots were heavily reported in international and domestic media, and they sparked other confrontations around Sydney. This series of incidents has become known colloquially as the ‘Cronulla Riots’.

5. To see all entries in the Guestbook go to http://www21.sbs.com.au/thecircuit/index.php?pid=yoursay (accessed August 5, 2009). We have retained original spelling and grammar in the reproduction of this text.

6. The notion of blackness in Australia connotes Indigenous people and issues with the notion of people of colour, for instance, not taken up. Asian is about colour and culture and was until recently a loose rubric. The change in Australia’s refugee programme has also begun to shift the dominant discourse of ‘race’ in Australia and it would be true to say that Australia is currently in a major phase of reconfiguring ‘race’ as the Labour Federal government has apologised in Parliament to The Stolen Generations and initiated a path of bipartisan collaboration for redressing the gross inequities that characterise the circumstances of very, very many Indigenous people.