In the Wake of the Sexual Revolution: New Histories of Sexual and Gender Politics in Contemporary Australia

This special issue of Australian Historical Studies brings together scholars whose work explores the political impact of the sexual and feminist revolutions in Australia. The articles illuminate the connections and divergences between the sexual and feminist revolutions of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. They explore how and why these transnational movements had distinctive and transformative impacts in Australia, both expanding and narrowing ideas about sex, gender and sexuality. The articles also examine instances when questions of gender and sexuality have become sites of political contest, and the ways in which those contests intersected with other traditions and transformations in Australian political history.

The collection originated in the workshop, ‘Sexual Revolutions: Historical and Global Perspectives’, co-convened by Professors Penny Russell (University of Sydney) and Jane Kamensky (Harvard University) and held at the University of Sydney in November 2018. The workshop brought together scholars who were working on ‘sexual revolutions’ in many different temporal and regional contexts, though given the workshop’s location, an emphasis on Australia was perhaps inevitable. The idea of an edited collection on Australia’s sexual revolutions emerged from the workshop. Nonetheless, these articles represent only a fraction of the research discussed, and we extend our deep gratitude to all those who contributed to the workshop and who helped shape this collection, both in tangible and intangible ways. We would especially like to thank Jane Kamensky and Penny Russell for creating the event and for their generous intellectual leadership.

The articles presented here speak to key developments in Australian sexual and gender politics over the last fifty years, from the emergence of the Christian New Right and anti-feminist groups in response to the women’s and gay liberation movements, through to the debates prompted by the greater visibility of sexual and gender-diverse identities in the late 2010s. Together these articles require us to reassess the wider and ongoing impact of the sexual and feminist revolutions on Australian political culture. How did these revolutions create new forms of political engagement, and what were its possibilities and limitations? One of our central concerns is the ways that the sexual and feminist revolutions authorised new citizenship claims on the state in languages of intimate identity and personal experience. Many scholars have noted the ways these revolutions facilitated the emergence of a new political identity, the ‘sexual citizen’, who emerged at what Jeffrey Weeks called ‘the fateful juncture of private claims to space, self-determination and pleasure, and public claims to rights, justice and recognition’.¹ This collection makes clear that these new claims for rights and protections from the state were not the sole province of progressive movements: just as feminists and LGBTQ+ people developed new vocabularies to make these claims, so too did groups outside these movements, like anti-feminist women’s groups, conservative Christian organisations, right to life associations and advocates for Men’s Sheds.

Through a particular focus on the ways in which conservative and Christian groups both contested the new claims of sexual citizens and borrowed their strategies, this collection makes an innovative contribution to the political histories of Australia’s feminist and sexual revolutions. Australian historiography of these movements has typically situated them on the political left. Yet if these revolutions made the ‘personal’ ‘political’, then they also challenged the distinction between public and private life that was foundational for both left- and right-wing politics. This collection makes clear that political contests over gender and sexuality constituted new forms of right-wing politics in late twentieth- and twenty-first-century Australia, and that activists on both sides of these struggles were drawing on similar forms of political organisation, vocabularies and strategies to achieve their goals. Together, the papers suggest that Australian historians of gender and sexuality might generate new insights by paying closer attention to the rise of the New Right in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Australian political culture.

The collection also invites a wider definition of feminist and sexual revolution as we chart the development of new political identities and subjects via the evolving debates around sexual and gender diversity in Australia. Together, the articles highlight the linkages – and generational shifts – between the political landscape and activism of the 1970s and now, and the ways in which claims on the state to intervene in issues of sexual and gender liberation have been transformed. Health has been a particularly critical focus in the emergence and influence of feminist and sexual revolutions, and a key site in which homophobic and gendered discrimination has been challenged. In compiling this collection, we have also reflected on the unique interventions we make in our individual focus as historians of sexuality, gender and radical activism. Many of our contributors focus on subjects who have shaped the language, politics and activism of sexual and gender revolution in Australia, while also navigating backlash, conservatism, emotional and physical vulnerability and a commitment to health and empowerment. In telling their stories we are also charting what is still an unfinished project of sexual and gender revolution.

The articles in this special issue unfold in broadly chronological order, beginning in the 1970s with Timothy Willem Jones’ article on the emergence of the New Christian Right. Jones offers an important analysis of the origins and rise to prominence of Australia’s New Christian Right, arguing that the movement did not simply spark conflicts over gender and sexuality but was ‘accomplished through them’. By engaging in a set of public, performative contests over sexuality, Jones suggests, the New Christian Right formed a new religious culture: ‘anti-feminist and anti-homosexual sexual values became not only a litmus test for religious orthodoxy, but also a new “religious” orthodoxy in its own right’. Michelle Arrow’s article on anti-feminist activism in late-1970s Australia examines the ways that anti-feminist women’s groups were both enabled and emboldened by the feminist movement. Anti-feminists argued against feminist involvement in policy-making on the grounds that feminists were unrepresentative of the so-called ‘silent majority’ of Australian women. Yet as Arrow demonstrates, there were some surprising overlaps between feminist and anti-feminist diagnoses of the problems facing women, especially on the difficulties both faced in attributing value to women’s unpaid care work. Isobelle Barrett Meyering extends these analyses of backlash politics through a case study of conservative mobilisations during International Year of the Child (1979). In particular, her article highlights Australian social conservatives’ persistent use of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1959) to position themselves as key players in the year’s activities, thereby enabling them to place their varied concerns about gender roles, the family and sexual morality on the IYC agenda.

Geraldine Fela’s article considers the revolutions occurring during the HIV/AIDS crisis through the prism of nurse/patient relations in HIV/AIDS wards. As Fela illuminates, nurses were critical to the radical shifts occurring in sexual health service provision during the early 1980s through to the late 1990s, and the fight against homophobia within medical institutions as well as wider society. As such, both nurses and their politicised gay male patients became frontline activists. Furthermore, Fela highlights how the exchanges between gay male patients and nurses helped to foster a shift in which nurses were seen as primary (not secondary) to the care of their patients. Leigh Boucher and Sophie Robinson explore how feminist values and language have been a central (albeit contradictory) force in the emergence of a therapeutic men’s movement in Australia. They focus on the Men’s Shed movement in particular and its aim since the late 1990s to reinstate ‘traditional’ pastimes and spaces of Australian masculinity. As Boucher and Robinson highlight, central to the emergence of Men’s Sheds has been the idea of a diminishing white settler masculinity, a perceived gender imbalance favouring women over men due to the gains of feminism, and background debates about the state of men’s health. Boucher and Robinson ask us to consider the implications of a movement that emphasises male separatism which has received ongoing support from government. Our final article by Barbara Baird and Robert Reynolds considers the Safe Schools controversy in the mid-2010s, with a particular focus on the ways that LGBTQ children and young people emerged in that debate as political subjects. They argue that these historically new sexual citizens employed vocabularies of harm, vulnerability and safety which have a much longer history. Claims of harm underlined the trauma experienced by many during the Safe Schools controversy, but Baird and Reynolds note that one of the effects of this often difficult debate was the production of queer community, a resource for ‘compensating for harm’.

We are pleased to include an additional research article unrelated to the special issue. Lorinda Cramer’s article provides a new perspective on the history of the iconic Chesty Bond singlet through a focus on its status as an everyday object. Cramer’s emphasis on the materiality of the singlet marks a departure from existing interpretations which have ‘read’ the singlet as a signifier of white, working-class manhood, and, more recently, as part of the uniform of gay hypermasculinity in the 1980s. Cramer’s richly illustrated account of the singlet’s history reveals the insights that emerge when historians reimagine material objects as ‘objects-with-agency’.

Thank you to all of the authors for their contributions, and special thanks to the editorial team at Australian Historical Studies for their support and rigorous engagement with our work: it has been a pleasure to work with Lisa Ford, David Andrew Roberts and editorial assistant Annalisa Giudici as we took the issue from proposal to production.

Notes

1 Jeffrey Weeks, ‘The Sexual Citizen’, Theory, Culture & Society 15, no. 3–4 (1998): 35–52. See also Ken Plummer, ‘The Square of Intimate Citizenship: Some Preliminary Proposals’, Citizenship Studies 5, no. 3 (2001): 237–53; David Bell and Jon Binnie, The Sexual Citizen: Queer Politics and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy (London: Blackwell, 1992).