Truth or Dare

Abstract

The performative identities of both Black and queer characters in film have been noted by academics in “Black queer diasporic theory” (Rinaldo Walcott) and artists such as Cheryl Dunye and Isaac Julien, with particular focus on the ways in which these identities have been constructed from both within and outside of their respective communities. Australian Indigenous and lesbian filmmaker Sonja Dare took the discourse one step further, however, in her 2007 release Destiny in Alice, a twenty-seven-minute mockumentary film which parodies a David Attenborough-style search for the rare “desert lesbian” of Alice Springs in Australia's outback. Her film actively pursues the intersection of cultural and sexual expressiveness and suppression, interrogates notions of belonging and exclusion within these communities, and challenges marginalisations of all subaltern identities in the evolving criticality of performing race, sex and gender in modernity.

Keywords:

• film
• queer
• Black
• diasporic
• Indigenous
• global South

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of FMS whose careful critical feedback has strengthened this article and the theorising behind it.

Notes

1. A brief survey includes but is not limited to the following: Bruce Beresford's The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972) portrays homosexuality in the United Kingdom as encountered by the naïve ocker Bazza and Auntie (again, queers for laughs). Man of Flowers (1983, dir. Paul Cox) has some lesbian moments, but only of the “gratuitous” kind. Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975, dir. Peter Weir) and Beresford's The Getting of Wisdom (1978) both relegate lesbian desire to schoolgirl crushes. Experimental film of the period included shorts such as Apartments (1977, dir. Megan McMurchy); We Aim To Please (1976, dirs Margot Nash & Robin Laurie); Farewell to Charms (1979, dir. Carla Pontiac); docos Witches, Dykes, and Poofters (1979, dir. Digby Duncan); Flesh on Glass (1981, dir. Ann Turner); and In Loving Memory (1992, dir. Leone Knight). Dallas Doll (1992, dir. Ann Turner)—remarkably starring Sandra Bernhard—was never widely released, but Love and Other Catastrophes (1996, dir. Emma-Kate Croghan) was. Slight improvements in the explicit category over the past twenty years include: Only the Brave (1994, dir. Ana Kokkinos), The Well (1997, dir. Samantha Lang) and The Monkey's Mask (2000, also dir. Samantha Lang), This Kiss (2007, dir. Kylie Eddy), all of which go further toward directly addressing a range of cultural and political questions in lesbian representation. There have also certainly been many annual queer shorts in DVD compilations, festivals and competitions including Queerscreen and Melbourne Queer Film Festival to name but a few. This list is not intended to be an exhaustive or nuanced literature review, but for further detail on this topic, see Deborah Hunn (2002).

2. Lesbian “characters” (or at least innuendo, which at times has been frustratingly synonymous) have appeared (albeit briefly) in such shows as Prisoner , Home & Away , Neighbours , Pacific Drive , All Saints , The Secret Life of Us , Last Man Standing and Kick . Similarly, lesbianism in Australian film has most often been suggested, stereotyped or psychotic: characters often just happen to be gay, are frequently played for laughs, or represented in ways in which the lesbianism is unashamedly gratuitous or demented, as in the recurrent “obsessive friendship” trope. See Hannah McIntosh's Representations of Gay and Lesbian Characters in Australian Film (2006) for one of the few online (popular, not scholarly) overviews.