Earlier this week the vote yes campaign received some amazing news. New polling from Essential Research highlighted a significant enthusiasm gap between yes and no voters.

This week, many of the direst predictions of those opposing the marriage equality plebiscite came true, as an awful anti-equality poster appeared in parts of Melbourne. 

Last week the TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale was released on SBS. In doing so the show has revilatised Margaret Atwood’s classic 1985 novel, being considered in many ways a prescient story to tell in our current political climate.

Over recent times, particularly since the plebiscite and Safe Schools debates within Australia, I have noticed a strong narrative of ‘suffering’ and ‘vulnerability’ within large parts of the queer community. Mainstream queer discourse has increasingly turned towards defining queer people as ‘vulnerable’, ones who have ‘suffered’ a great ‘injury’, and whose main quest is for those injuries to be fixed in some way.

This lecture was given to the GEND1001 class at the Australian National University in May 2017.

It’s been a couple of months, so it feels like time for another newsletter on everything that’s been happening in my world of writing and research.

Earlier this week I was lucky enough to be able to attend a Masterclass by Professor Nikolas Rose titled ‘Social Sciences and the Self in the Age of the Brain’. Professor Rose has a long history in sociology, with a particular interest in the intersection between conceptions of the self and subjectivity with biomedicine. 

This week I attended the symposium run by the ANU Gender Institute, How the Personal Became Political: re-assessing Australia’s revolutions in gender and sexuality in the 1970s.

I’m hoping that as I get going I will be able to use this blog as an update on my work and the things I’m researching as part of this project. Naturally though, this opens up the question, what is your PhD on?

For queer communities the 1980s and early 90s were defined almost solely by the HIV/AIDS crisis. The disease rocked gay communities around the world, literally taking hundreds of thousands of lives in its wake.

On New Year’s Day Jacobin magazine published a short piece by Atonio Gramsci called “I Hate New Year’s Day”.