Heterosexuality and Race in the Australian Same-Sex Marriage Postal Survey

ABSTRACT

This article argues that race and class are central aspects of sexual citizenship in a Australia. It does so by investigating representations of heterosexuality that were produced and circulated during the 2017 same-sex marriage postal survey. Engaging with feminist and critical race theorists, we position same-sex marriage as not exceptional but part of a wider distribution of sexual citizenship within Australia's ongoing settler colonial history. We do so by introducing a number of illustrative examples of representations of heterosexuality produced during the survey. These representations reveal how same-sex marriage perpetuated heterosexual authority by asserting claims to authenticity and the occupation of space. We observe how heterosexuality in the survey material reproduced fantasies linking these three themes, for example, in an authentic white heterosexual family who speaks from their suburban backyard. It reveals that ceding to a bifurcated view of either progressive or conservative voices forestalls rather than advances other visions which may exceed the limited imaginings of sexual citizenship offered by the white liberal settler colonial state.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizenship
• marriage
• same-sex marriage
• heterosexuality
• race
• class

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Benjamin Hegarty is research fellow in gender and sexuality studies in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia.

Daniel Marshall is a senior lecturer in Literature in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. He is the Convenor of Deakin's Gender and Sexuality Studies Major in the Bachelor of Arts programme and of Deakin's Gender and Sexuality Studies Research Network.

Mary Lou Rasmussen is a professor of sociology in the College of Arts and Social Sciences at The Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. Her research focuses on building transdisciplinary understanding of sexuality and gender across diverse lifeworlds, taking account of issues related to sexual citizenship, cultural and religious difference and technologies of sexuality, education and health.

Peter Aggleton is a distinguished emeritus professor at UNSW Sydney, an honorary distinguished professor at The Australian National University, an adjunct professor in the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society at La Trobe University Melbourne, and a visiting professor at UCL in London.

Rob Cover is an associate professor in the School of Social Sciences at The University of Western Australia. He is a social, media and cultural studies researcher whose work focuses on the implications of media and digital cultures for minorities, particularly in respect to health, social integration, diversity, ethics and belonging.

ORCID

Benjamin Hegarty http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5240-1143

Peter Aggleton http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5966-4969

Rob Cover http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8815-2126

Notes

1 While our analysis of heterosexuality during the postal survey joins a significant body of contemporary feminist critique in the decade prior to the Australian same-sex marriage postal survey (Edwards 2007; Richardson-Self 2012; Walker 2009), less attention has been paid to the co-construction of gender, sexuality and race in Australia. Valuable engagement with same-sex marriage might also emerge out of Australian feminist engagement with the historical relationship between marriage and patriarchal authority in that context (see for example Lake 1994, 29).

2 For example, Jonathan Katz (1995, 47) shows how heterosexuality shifted from an association with sexual excess, to a way to justify increasingly common middle class practices of sex for pleasure throughout the West in the context of rapid economic changes.

3 The reason for holding the postal survey was not legislative: unlike in the Republic of Ireland, where marriage law is defined in the constitution and thus required a referendum to change, Australian marriage law is able to be changed through parliamentary process. Rather, the main justification given by the Prime Minister for the postal survey was to ‘give all Australians a say’ on the issue (Prime Minister of Australia 2017).

4 The Coalition for Marriage is an organisation funded primarily by Christian churches, including a number of dioceses of the Anglican and Catholic Churches, and the Australian Christian Lobby. Australian Marriage Equality is an activist group made up of diverse membership which has more recently focused on recruiting support and fundraising from corporate Australia (Christopher 2018)

5 Voting in Federal and State elections is compulsory for all Australians aged over 18 years of age, which helps to explain the high response rate to a voluntary postal survey. A total of 79.5% of enrolled voters participated in the survey in Australia.

6 Ann Stoler’s (1995) influential work considers how colonial projects of defining gender and sexuality – both in the colony and the metropole – rested on problematic attempts to establish the ‘facts’ of racial difference. Perhaps of more relevance to the present article, Judith Butler (2008) has described the ‘civilizational’ imperative that establishes the conditions for gender and sexual freedom in terms of the coercive and imperialist form of the nation-state (see also Povinelli 2006).

7 The Bachelor is a reality television show which ironises the heterosexual ideal by pursuing the premise of true love while actually featuring serial dating and multiple partners in a reality competition TV format – a single man amidst a group of women vying to be his choice, who are gradually eliminated as the show continues.

8 The choice of the phrase ‘Straight Lives Matter’ is an offensive and racist parody of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement in the USA. This is nested within a general appropriation and use of words and imagery usually associated with progressive politics, such as ‘straight pride’.

9 This information has been taken from observations of some of the reactions to this event that were expressed on various public Facebook groups on and around 23 September 2017.

Additional information

Funding

This research described in this paper was undertaken as part of the Belonging and Sexual Citizenship among Gender and Sexual Minority Youth (‘Queer Generations’) research project, funded under the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects funding scheme (project DP150101292). The views expressed are those of the authors, and are not necessarily those of the Australian Government or the Australian Research Council.