Multicultural Queer: Australian Narratives

By Peter A Jackson And Gerard Sullivaneds, New York: Haworth Press, 1999, 233 pages, paperback, $36.00. Reviewed by Dean Chan in the September 2001 issue.

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Recent resurgences in right-wing racism,anti-immigration hysteria, and homophobic hate crimes underscore the crucial and timely need for Multicultural Queer: Australian Narratives. Edited by Peter A Jackson and Gerard Sullivan, this volume comprises twelve essays about sexual and ethnic minorities, often written from the perspective of self-reflexive lived experience. The onus, however, is not on producing what contributor Abby Duruzcalls the 'quintessential 'multicultural coming-out story'.' (p 179) Instead, the writers are inscribed as pro-active and empowered subjects, narrating their selves into the context of Australian history -- at times sardonically or angrily, but always with passionate incisiveness and a sense of broader social consciousness. After all, liberation goes beyond the act of just affirming the individual voice.

About half of the essays are autobiographical in orientation, while the remaining contributions mainly take the form of scholarly research and empirical analyses. The essays are not strictly arranged according to thematic concerns; instead, they unfold as an echoing of parallel concerns refracted through multiple shared perspectives and contemporary experiences.

What the essays have in common is akeen attentiveness to power differentials in Australian multicultural society. Many of the writers address issues of racism and discrimination within both straight and queer communities. These concerns are surveyed using a variety of case studies -- both micro (be it in the form of specific interpersonal relationships or a personal ad), and macro (be it in terms of bureaucratic multicultural policies or HIV/AIDS issues). Such analyses attest to the on-going difficulty of accommodating differences under the rubric of official multiculturalism. To appropriate the words of contributors Baden Offord and LeonCantrell, the essays collectively foreground 'the tension between the ambiguity and fluidity of multisexual, multiracial, multicultural experience and the unambiguous representation and perpetuation of monocultural, monosexual rhetoric.' (p 208)

An important sub-theme under consideration is the potential erosion of self-esteem as a consequence of systemic racism within lesbian and gay communities. Essays by Annie Goldflam, Hinde Ena Burstin, Rose Kizinska, Audrey Yue and Tony Ayres examine selected instances of 'internal discrimination', so to speak. Ayres claims that one outcome of experiencing such discrimination is the propensity for the individual to develop a sense of self-loathing, thereby resulting in a form of internalised racism. (p 92) Kent Chuang offers a reflective exploration of being doubly marginalised as an 'Asian' in the 'gay community'. His account is especially notable in that painful life episodes are tempered with humour and incisive irony to produce a self-portrait of contradictory experiences and ambivalent allegiances. For as he admits, 'Even at my stage of mature 'enlightenment' I don't deny that sometimes it still feels good to be seen with pretty white boys and hunky guys on the [gay] scene, so who am I to point a finger at anyone?' (p 40) Personal and collective accountabilities are not always easily reconcilable. Furthermore, such frank admissions attest to the limitations of simplistic projects in coalition-building politics that are exclusively based on either sexuality or ethnicity.

Racism and homophobia are not mutually interchangeable terms and forms of discrimination. Race, sexuality and gender intersect to produce different registers of experience that may be dialogically commensurate but not directly interchangeable. Hence, Yue's urbane, cyber-savvy, polyvocal narrative on contemporary sexual politics, which engagingly intertwines creative expressionism with academic research, enters into critical conversation with both Ayres's broad-ranging account of immigration, institutionalised racism, gay magazines, and the Ideal Body, and Kizinska's insightful personal evocation of lesbian activist politics and community in Melbourne.

Community (however differently it may be prefaced with terms like 'lesbian and gay', 'gay Asian', 'Jewish lesbian' and so forth) is therefore not inscribed in this volume as a static and unified system. Instead, multiple community needs are posited as productive tensions between difference and sameness in coalition-building politics. In this respect,Multicultural Queer partially succeeds in fostering a 'greater appreciation of internal diversity -- on racial, gender, class and even sexual dimensions -- [as] a prerequisite if homosexual and transgender politics is to move beyond the 'ethnic' insularity of gay-based civil rights modelsof activism'. (p 22)

The point about the partial success of this volume has to be made on the basis of the following observations. To begin with,there is the problematic framing of 'multicultural queer' issues in seemingly predominant terms of ethnic minority issues, thereby potentially reductively inscribing multicultural discourse as discourse primarily about 'ethnics' or 'others' or what the editors characterise as 'those who are not of Anglo-Celtic background' (p 1) only. Even then, most of the essays focus on either 'Chinese' or'Jewish' perspectives, however varied these may be. In privileging such selectivity, the point about 'internal diversity' is perhaps made more readily apparent, but I would have appreciated broader editorial attentiveness to different inter-cultural dynamics and engagements within Australian multicultural society. The essays are also predominantly about gay and/or lesbian issues, with scant attention paid to, say, bisexual, transgender or transsexual issues, thereby operating in contra-distinction to the more inclusive 'queer' moniker in the volume's title.

Despite the foregoing misgivings,Multicultural Queer remains a valuable addition to on-going research in multicultural, queer, and Australian studies. The fact that these disciplines still need further and more specifically attentive cultural pluralisation is perhaps finally a significant point in itself.

Citation

• Dean Chan. 'Review: Multicultural Queer: Australian Narratives by Peter A Jackson and Gerard Sullivaneds' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), September 2001. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 30 July 2010].

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