Not another mentoring talk
My own feelings about mentoring – and the category of ECR – are at best ambivalent. Mentoring in the professional neoliberal workplace of is one of those classic words that can be used to invoke or simulate institutional benevolence when there is actually a waning of reciprocity in the employment relation. Whereas once academia resembled a vocation, with a clear model of apprenticeship that led to security and stability, this is no longer the reality we face. This is part of the post-Fordist shift in economic capital and employment that is moving from organizations to networks. The form of recognition encouraged by the current regime is less about accumulation and duration of service, and more about flexibility and productivity. Put simply: you are only as good as your last five years, or even, it seems, three years. You only need to look at what is happening at my own university to see how this can play out.

Mentoring also suggests an ongoing interest in the development of a career, the gradual realisation of your individual potential. It’s not enough to have gotten the job. No, landing the job is just the first step in a constant process of planning, assessing and maximizing “opportunities”. From now on, there will be little if any time to sit back and acknowledge your achievements, and yet part of what I want to suggest today is that you must fight for this time. And beware of people offering “opportunities”!

This is because the system is set up to make you feel that you are never doing enough, just as technology has accelerated the amount of things we are expected to be able to do. This results in us all feeling like we are constantly behind, always “catching up”. How many times do you hear yourself saying that to people: “we must catch up soon”. The “catch up” is one of the principal manifestations of our present ontological bearing. At work, it occurs in small and large ways, whether it is the sense of defeat you feel in “wasting” an hour deleting email or the failure you might feel at not seeing your colleagues regularly for coffee. But mostly it presents as a chronic low level internalized suspicion of incompetence, that there just isn’t enough time to do everything you need to do properly.

While it feels highly personal, these are in fact the routine affects of organisational life today. It is worth recognizing the extent to which they are also the principal conditions of your labour that you can control – that is, once you appreciate that there is no temporal or spatial limit to the networked information economy that employs you. The network, which is to say the office, which is to say work and the prospect of doing it, will always follow you home. So part of what we need to imagine collectively is the degree of compensation we want for that new reality, as well as strategies to cope with it.

But I want to approach this in a slightly different way by focusing on the often forgotten fact that the university needs you. There is plenty of discussion about the competitiveness of the job market right now and an impending war for talent resulting from difficulties overseas. But there, as here, the system as a whole can’t afford to lose you. The market for higher education in English speaking countries may be transforming, and in Australia reconfiguring, but on a global scale it is not declining (Marginson 2011). Locally, recent research puts the figure of sector wide job losses through retirement as high as 35% (Hugo 2008, in Bendix Petersen, 2011). Current studies of workforce patterns being conducted here at the University of Queensland continue to identify the large numbers of employed academics who regularly contemplate leaving the industry, whether annually, month to month, or on a weekly and daily basis (I for one certainly count myself in most of these categories). There is genuine concern, which is to say that there is existing policy discourse, that recognizes a “lost generation” of academics that may or may not be recoverable. And while there are obviously many more PhD graduates now than previous decades, what I think this calls for is a level of strategic complacency among entry level staff that is currently under utilized.

By now you will have heard a lot about what you should be doing to get an academic career, and what to do once you’re on the cusp. You’ll have plenty of thoughts on the limitations of that formula. But the point at this stage is that you are all here; you’ve done something right to finish a PhD, or be hired, publish a book or win a grant. So now’s the time to make space to think about the kind of work you want to focus on doing more – and less – of. This involves identifying different styles of academic practice.

Expand your imagined audience
You can begin doing this by thinking about the audiences you want for your thinking and research. It’s tempting to think that the audience for your contribution is the reader, the person who happens to find your article or buy your book. This is only a very small audience. In relation to the multiple publics you address day to day, your readership may be the smallest. In teaching and research jobs, your audience includes your students (undergrad, postgrad) and your colleagues (department peers, committee colleagues, superiors). You probably engage in written communication daily with all of them – but do you count that writing as output? Do you count it as part of your intellectual project? If not, why not?

Here I’m trying to offer ways to think about scale: the audience for your work can have local, national, and international reach. It’s a continuum of interaction and it all matters. One nice email can change the course of a student’s day, even her year; but we tend to want to think that it is our scholarly papers that will change the world. Identifying the many audiences for your practice is an empowering thing.

Publishing: realistic outputs, actual numbers.
How many publications is enough? Homework: check your university’s minimum requirements for research output. Some of my closest colleagues with dozens of publications still think they haven’t done “enough”. Yet they have already published more than most Professors had at the same age. There is a self-punishing dimension to the productivity imperative that today’s PhD graduates have experienced. It has genuine effects on people’s sense of self-worth as well as damaging effects on the research being conducted.

What helps with planning your writing and pacing it? Counting each stage of writing. When you are considering submitting something for publication, or wrestling with the fantastic “opportunity” that’s been offered, take account of how much time it takes to write even a short academic article. I can think of this many steps, but there are more:

Planning the proposal, proposing, planning the writing, writing, rewriting, proof-reading, peer review, recovering from peer review, response to peer review, proof-reading, editing.

Double that for co-authorship (done well).

From what I’m told, writing is like having a baby. We have amnesia about how painful it is, because the end product is so amazing. To push the analogy: try to remember the pain, and that it can be very hard to make happen by force! Also think realistically about how much time you have free to write without interruption, at which times of the year. i.e. without teaching, without meetings, without someone waiting for you to come home for dinner.

Grants: motivations for them – different types – which one is right for you?
DECRA. Discovery. Collaboration. Linkage. Non-ARC (all external income counts). On ARCs, it’s a known secret that the best track record for an ARC is a previously funded ARC. But there are exceptions. Time spent working up a collaboration should be weighed against more time spent on your own writing (track record). Also against how much the focus will change. Assessors will reward something that’s coherent and distinctively yours. Assessors will also be wise to opportunism, and don’t necessarily favour seniors who are overcommitted. Again, be cautious about accepting “help” from mentors: what’s in it for you vs. them?

Teaching and service: making it work for your research goals.
• Course design and content – rarely will your teaching directly match your research. But even overview courses can help keep you in touch with the field (and you can turn lectures into writing outcomes too, eg. book reviews for peers, feedback to colleagues whose work you set, etc).
• Don’t give written lectures every week. Find alternative delivery modes (eg. radio, TV documentaries, student participation). This maintains your energy and encourages others to get involved in the course content/experience.
• Marking: Plan to have it happening regularly over the semester to avoid binges. Continuous assessment helps, eg. small tasks to mark in class or during consultation hours.
• Approach marking in relation to your workload. How much does your workload formula give you for marking? Preparation? Supervision? eg. Honours. Stick to it. Tell your students. Keep records.
• Committee work: inevitable, so try to find things relevant to your research. But don’t go every time. Every third meeting, perhaps. And not when it challenges a research deadline.

Offloading: Claiming time for research
Make time to plan what you want to do. Keep that time factored in to each week. Often we avoid scheduling research time because it’s not face to face – other people won’t notice if we don’t show up. Think of your research hours per week in the same way you do face to face teaching.
• Try to write for a short period every day rather than blocks and binges.
• Maximize the best part of the day. PRIME TIME! Tell others when you are writing so they learn to contact you later.
• Write lists. Try to distinguish between things that you must do, should do, or what would be nice to do. Have daily/weekly lists and don’t be hard on yourself if you need more time.
• Learn to say no, and when you do, say why, or suggest alternatives. Recommending other people for a job can save several people time – and help others.

Invoke strategic complacency
Academics, like other professionals, navigate a range of internally and externally imposed pressures to be productive – and to conclude I want to get you to start getting in the habit of asking: to what end? The model of worker that is rewarded today is that which is endlessly, limitlessly productive. The university will take everything from you if you let it. There are minimum performance levels but you’ll note that there are no maximums. You will rarely be told that you are publishing too much.

In universities today, it is also unlikely that you’ll meet anyone who doesn’t feel overworked. In this context, some of the strategies that can be most useful are discursive. To draw on some cultural studies terminology, you can use the hegemonic language – the commonsense of the university – to pursue counter-hegemonic goals. As academics, your goals are probably not even that radical: you want more time to read books and write. Have a weekend now and then. But it is increasingly obvious that these privileges, the ones that motivated many of us to join the profession in the first place, are unevenly distributed, particularly by age, race and gender. You need to understand that to be able to fight for it.

Replace productivity with strategic complacency. Use the discourse of productivity against itself. Start by using the language you hear routinely around you: “I’m just so busy”; “I can’t do it that day, today’s impossible”; “This week/month is crazy, I just can’t”. The best line I’ve ever been told to use is the simple: “I’m sorry, I’m fully committed”. If what people say is true, who will have the time to check what you’re actually doing? Take your own goals seriously, and set boundaries on doing more.

Setting up these strategies will help to see clearly the source for the multiple pressures you encounter – where they come from. Are they intrinsic (part of the make up of being an intellectual) or externally imposed? Are you just being polite when you don’t say no? Can you still be polite and excuse yourself from certain things?

Making time to organize and rationalize your time can mean you maximize the “good” parts of your job and make better decisions about minimizing what takes you away from them. This is also about developing some institutional nous. Learn whose job it is to take responsibility for things, who has the last say, so you don’t take on more responsibility than you will ever be recognized for.

P.S. The phrase “strategic complacency” is a hybrid term that is inspired by both the autonomist “refusal of work” tradition, and some very sound advice offered by my colleague, Chris Gibson, at the State of the Industry conference in 2009. In the closing session of day one, Chris urged us to exercise some “institutional irresponsibility” as an appropriate response to the more ludicrous conditions of our labour. This post is an attempt to bring these different influences to bear.

References
Simon Marginson (2011) ‘It’s a long way down: The underlying tensions in the education export industry’, Australian Universities’ Review, 53 (2): 21-33.

Evea Bendix Petersen (2011) ‘Staying or going? Australian early career researchers’ narratives of academic work, exit options and coping strategies’ Australian Universities’ Review, 53 (2): 34-42.

A section of the protest group then stormed the office of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. The final photo here captures Dean Duncan Ivison addressing the group after he was made to wait in turn following other speakers.

Thanks to Save USyd Jobs, USyd Greens and NTEU NSW for these images.

I love the photos especially because of the cubicles. Students fighting for their education in the very scene of administrative labour. But it made me think, how many will end up in a workplace just like this, whether or not their course options are cut? Does the consciousness-raising of this rally partly come down to realising what professional work now looks like? Especially given key staff in the faculty office – many of whom are themselves past and present students of the faculty – were live tweeting the events with empathy?

Protester/student/worker: the hybrid identity of cognitive capitalism.

Dream large of narcotising the practice of thought, of putting to sleep the old cultures of criticism, inquiry and analysis, in favour of a consumer opportunity. Culture becomes brand. Dream large of how to educate and polish up your young people, so that they think efficiently but within certain limits, and so that they never engage their passion and pain as sites of intellectual activity, or as sources of intellectual energy. Perfect stainless‐steel‐coated technocrats, taking care of their affects through sex and drugs. And otherwise, trained to be accomplished but docile consumers; much like the education of previous generations of upperclass young ladies to grace the drawing rooms of power without challenging them.

The faculty of arts become a finishing school in the decorative liberal arts? Graduates knowing ‘just enough to use the trope’, as an American cultural theorist has said, speaking of the death drive? The university become a place for te destruction of thinkers? And collegiality now amounting to little more than averting one’s eyes while some of our number peck more vulnerable members to death? Such a form of thought is paranoid, a nightmare.

Look to the dawn.

- Robyn Ferrell, ‘Income Outcome: Life in the Corporate University’

Following last year’s launch and initial MACS meetings I’m keen to hear thoughts on what events/ activities you would like to see continue in 2012.

For instance, the Melbourne model has decentralised the organisation of MACS events to different individuals and campuses. To adopt this approach, it might be worth setting up a steering committee of people from all of the different Sydney unis to take charge of hosting particular meet ups, talks or events across the course of the year. This could involve staff, students and graduates – anyone who is interested.

In Brisbane, where MACS began, we would take turns to host an event so that those on campus in each location had a chance to attend more regularly. This was a good way to make use of the momentum of the group and the benefits of cross-institutional meet ups while also servicing the needs of local staff and students.

(And in case it’s not clear, the benefits of cross-institutional meet ups include: socialising, getting feedback on your experience, comparing notes on your working conditions, advice on PhD tactics, sharing knowledge about opportunities and expectations in the industry/profession, finding jobs, finding a date!)

Lots of you will already be inundated with requirements and commitments based on your own enrolment, work schedule or program. So rather than make an arbitrary time to try to accommodate everyone, we might instead focus on fewer but more targetted meetings. We might also think about sponsoring particular sessions of local campuses’ and departments’ existing research seminars. That way we don’t double up on work or time commitments. 

These are just suggestions though. If MACS is to continue it will need to respond to your needs, rather than those imagined for you. This seems to be one of the classic mistakes of corporate mentoring models applied to the university context. Star professors in the midst of career victory laps are not always best placed to offer advice to students who face a radically different university experience and employment market. Still, wisdom and perspective are valuable qualities in any industry. Access to profs and other academic staff can be one of the many things MACS can deliver if you collectively ask for it.

Alternatively, or in addition, you might also want to maintain this as a space to talk together about routine, material or affective dimensions that accompany research life. Or an excuse for beers at the pub! These are not mutually exclusive… The online aspect to this blog and the facebook group does however suit a lot of people – to keep it going though, I need more people helping. You can become an administrator of both sites easily.

I am more than happy to contribute in all kinds of ways, e.g. suggesting relevant speakers or visitors to Sydney who might be able to address the group. I could also give talks or suggest friends, colleagues and/or students to do so if that would be good. But this is just a warning, I suppose, that I can’t see the group as sustainable without others taking an active lead.

Part of the reason I want to check in with you all now is that I’m heading to Brisbane to give a talk to “early career researchers” this week – a talk that will cover issues to do with publishing, grant applications, collaborations, and so on. If this might be the kind of thing that you want to hear, let me know – and have a think about where you might want to host it. MACS can be on campus or off, or a mixture of both. It’s really up to you

We can set the ball rolling with comments and suggestions for MACS’ future below. By way of inspiration, here’s a link to the preparations that went in to the grad student manifesto delivered at the State of the Industry Conference back in 2009. Do these priorities still matter? What support do you need that you aren’t currently getting? Ask and you may be surprised what can happen.

And as always, please forward this information and knowledge of the group to new students and staff in media and cultural studies in Sydney. There are plenty of us!

Preparing for a talk later this week, I have just been reading this article by Kieryn McKay and Kylie Brass published in the September 2011 issue of Cultural Studies Review. The authors, both graduates from PhD programs in Sydney, draw ‘a parallel between the appropriation of podcasting technology into the university and the current system of casual academic employment’. Their argument is that ‘the podcast and the casual academic represent “new” interfaces of outsourced academic labour’ (141), and that this poses a similar problem of isolation for academics and students.

The article is a textured and mobilising account of the material pressures on sessional staff, who share ‘an overarching experience of disenfranchisement’ (148). It highlights the consequences of a university sector that is apparently content to allow what is effectively a ‘simulacrum’ of both the traditional academic employment relation and the student experience – all in the name of flexibility.

What is all the more fantastic about the piece is that the authors use a mix of foundational cultural theory (Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’), higher education research and current industrial campaign material to make their point. It is just the kind of activism fitting an increasingly professionalised discipline.

One of the reasons I started MACS was to provide a space for these kinds of debates to gain traction. Current working conditions in academia rely on the isolation of students and sessionals to continue. So if you have thoughts to share in response to the article, please do so here, or get in touch.

My research is intended to be an ethnographic exploration of the affects generated by the event of drag kinging. Via the notion of ‘communities of investment’, my research interrogates how different ‘flows’ or ‘layers’ of desire both constitute and represent various participants in the Sydney drag king scene. I ask: what are the ways in which the drag king scene constitutes and facilitates relations between bodies and desires? What are the ways in which these desires are embodied and articulated within this context, and what does this mean for participants invested in ‘the scene’? That is what I was trying to record that night.

Drag kinging is the lesbian subcultural practice, usually by women but sometimes trans- and otherwise identified- men, of a consciously enacted masculinity within the context of performance. It exploded in popularity in lesbian bar culture and queer scenes in the early 1990’s, and drag kinging has been increasingly recognised by participants as a viable subcultural phenomenon.

As the popularity of drag kinging has increased within lesbian and queer performance communities, academic interest has followed. As I developed my literature review, I began to run into difficulties in situating my research questions within the existing consolidation of drag kinging as an object of academic knowledge. Judith Halberstam, arguably the scholar on drag kings, produced a groundbreaking chapter in her 1998 text Female Masculinity, which highlighted drag king culture as a visible cultural phenomenon and a viable object of study. She produces a taxonomy of drag kings that looks to the embodiment and employment of masculinity in performance, for the wider project of illuminating the ‘transgendered’ or ‘gender-ambiguous’ figure as a symbol for the importance of promoting non-normative identities and practices.

This produces the drag king as a particular category of knowledge. In the current field of drag king scholarship, the figure of the drag king becomes the key theoretical figure for articulating drag king practices; he is elevated to be representative of drag king culture. I suggest that this produces a relationship between visibility and intelligibility. The primacy of his form enables a mode of analysis through which drag kinging can be understood as transgressive. Conversely, the relevance and meaning of drag kinging can only be identified through the affects of which the form is taken to be representative. This generates an established methodological approach to drag king research.

Subsequent scholarship has continued to produce knowledge about drag king practices within these two discursive frameworks of visibility of form and political effects. What interests me is this process by which research objects become concretized in scholarly work, and subsequent compulsion to approach those cultural practices in future scholarly engagement through those same frames. I suggest that this is the inevitable result of an archive predicated on the visibility of the drag king performer. But, what happens to other participants in drag king culture in this existing body of work? My concern is to move past this form of intelligibility produced about the drag king in order to approach drag king culture in a way that considers the multiple forms of investment by all participations in the event. How can I approach the ways in which the audience participates and the desires that are introduced, enacted and transformed, without positioning them in relation to the more dominant figure of the drag king performer?

The problem with an archive based on visibility is that is requires an additive approach premised on the priority of content. If one can find those missing people, objects or practices, it can be added to the existing archive in order to make it more ‘complete’. An additive archive, just like that process whereby cultural objects are turned into research objects, is based on the notion of visibility. This is because all it requires of the researcher is to bring the missing object into focus – to shine a spotlight on – to recover what is missing. It doesn’t allow for the interrogation of how the archive structure might privilege certain forms of engagement, or how alternative forms of engagement are restricted or constrained within that archive. An archive established on the visibility of the drag king form will not be fundamentally changed if the voices of audience members are simply added, as the underlying methodology is not identified and challenged. The drag king is still, so to speak, king.

What I am working on at the moment is using the work by queer theorists to move towards an archive based on affective relations – an archive understood in terms of spatiality rather than visibility. Through the interventions of queer theorists into the forms and functions of the archive, the concept has been expanded to be now capable of capturing and constituting the ephemera and the affective relations of queer subcultural identities and practices. In demonstrating new capacities of the archive, we can now speak about archives of performance and desire, and the relationship between the two.

Both archives of performance and desire constitute and are reflective of the subcultural community that operates at an affective relation to them. Queer archives draw on an already established and recognizable ‘archive of feeling’ – of the fleeting, ephemeral moments, memories and experiences that render the performance and desires relevant and affective to participants. These archives draw their affective power from each other, where the individual is moved in the moment that collectively produced ephemera is mediated through bodies. This operates at the interplay between the shared and collective memories and fantasies that comprise queer desires and bonded experiences, and the individuality of the access and embodiment of each one’s own archives of memory and desire. Yet, in the moment of feeling, it simultaneously constitutes a new archive comprised of a moment of queer experience generated by the affective relation of those desires in the performance space, which can be drawn from in future moments. The affective relations between the collective and the individual play the key part in how these archives of desire are constantly regenerated.

If we can talk about archives predicted on spatiality, rather than visibility, then the researcher is necessarily imbricated in the construction and re-construction of the archive at every moment of interaction. True of any research, but especially so in relation to queer subcultures, the researcher builds on an existing affective connection, one developed from the intimacy of emotional investment. This means that the archive’s meaning emerges from the queer sensibility of the researcher rather than being intrinsic to its objects. Therefore the researcher, in reviewing the archives of performance and desire, likewise draws on, interprets, and feeds back into these archives, and, as with all participants within the subculture that is constituted and sustained by these archives, reconfigures them at the moment of connection to them. This generates the notion of the archival practice as an event, in which objects, participants and researchers are all necessarily imbricated. Accordingly, my interaction with my ex did not ruin my research for the night. Rather, my relationship with her was drawing on and reconfiguring the archives of performance and desire in that instance of affective connection. I, as well as she, was invoking a shift in these moments by virtue of individualised and collectivised participation at the event.

Auto-ethnographic accounts are a way of tracing these relationships between the researcher and other participants, and as participants themselves in drag king events. An archive, based on relations, proximity and layering – something than we might be able to call topography of the archive – is one where I form part of that terrain, essential as any other participant, venue, intoxicant, bar stool, etc. Therefore, the utility of queer approaches to archival methodology lies in how objects of knowledge can be reused, revitalised and revalidated. Instead of notions of intelligibility that have over-relied on the visibility of research objects, these queer approaches to archives recognize that intelligibility is produced as part of the affective register, in which I am also implicated. It provides a way of understanding the topography of the related drag king archives, the process of producing frames of reference to read that terrain, and the opportunities inherent in shifts in those frames.

This is a slightly modified transcript of Kerryn Drysdale’s presentation as part of the postgraduate panel, ‘Researching Queer Scenes, Spaces and Practices’, at last week’s workshop. Kerryn is a PhD student in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney.

When we did arrive, people were surprisingly welcoming, although when they asked if we would like to stay and if we were ‘queer’ I panicked a bit. I said – and I still find this funny today – that I wasn’t sure because I was ‘half’ queer. Of course people were quick to correct me and explain that ‘queer’ encompassed all sorts of non-straight sexualities and identities, and invited me to a queer women’s group called ‘Girlzone’ in the womyn’s room on Wednesdays. Although I found the name pretty awful, I went, and Girlzone would become an integral part of my time at University and ‘initiation’ into the queer scene.

It’s clear to me that my experiences in the queer scene have influenced my academic life and interests. Although I have an incredibly varied disciplinary background (from creative writing to psychology to cinema studies) I seemed to always write my undergraduate essays on the stock-standard weeks of ‘feminism’ or ‘queer theory’. Yet I often felt that what I was writing about remained wrapped up in a higher theoretical plane that didn’t address the very basic interactions and emotions I experienced within queer spaces. Often, I blamed academia for this – on Judith Butler’s inaccessible writing style, on the course coordinators who assigned our readings or on musty old academics who had no grasp on the ‘real world’. Yet, I would say that the older I get the more I realise how implicated I am in this too.

When given free reign over what to write my postgraduate diploma on, I still chose to do an in-depth analysis of Judith Butler. I guess I felt that to get at what ‘queer’ meant I had to engage with some of the most difficult writing on it, a process which often becomes overwhelming and disempowering, even as you feel like you are making some inroads into it. Of course there’s nothing wrong with Judith Butler per se – only that I was a culprit of what I sometimes felt she was guilty of: remaining locked on a theoretical plane. While my theoretical interests connected with my everyday ones, I still felt that I didn’t have a way to connect the two and felt invariably split in my life – manifest I think in my dual personas of academic and journalist – one who could talk freely and the other who could write about theory.

When I speak in the past tense like this you might be mistaken for thinking I mean a long time ago. But these are issues I still grapple with now and possibly partly why it took my thesis so long to get ‘off the ground’ so to speak. It’s still quite fresh and raw, but one of the things I want to do is engage much more closely with the events and emotions taking place within the queer scene and to question – and bring in somehow – my own relationship to it. So while I am now writing on how the concept of ‘queer’ has been strictly defined, policed and fought over within queer ethical scholarship, I am undertaking an ethnographic approach in my work to get to the bottom of how the same tensions have manifest within urban-based, radical activist communities in Sydney, Melbourne and Berlin specifically.

For example, when “Feminist Futures” happened in Melbourne last year I was quite upset about some of the fights and rhetoric that flew around queer forums about who should or shouldn’t be presenting. Sheila Jeffreys was part of a panel due to present on the topic of sex work, but was subject to a targeted campaign by many members of the queer community to remove her from the panel. She was deemed to represent the ‘past’ rather than the ‘future’ of feminism because of her views on the subject. And so I found myself ‘defending’ Sheila Jeffreys’ right to speak even though I feel politically quite at odds with her. Anyone who has been part of the queer community knows that to defend Sheila Jeffreys is social suicide. When I was invited to a facebook event encouraging me to protest against her inclusion in the “Feminist Futures” program, I felt it was finally time to speak up. But when I held out against the belief that anyone should be able to specify what a ‘future’ feminist looks like, I almost physically felt the blows directed at me in response. It was an extremely unpopular thing to say, and I still find myself avoiding eye contact with those who took me apart online.

So part of what I want to do in my thesis is tackle some of the things that have recently made me feel uncomfortable or unhappy within the queer community. Utilising an ethnographic approach helps me, I think, to ‘bridge’ the gaps I’ve felt between my academic and personal or ‘journalistic’ lives and to raise some of the important insights I have. But because I feel that the community (myself included) is often pressured to ‘band together’ and can be defensive in the face of criticism, this makes my task – and the political stakes – difficult. In many ways, I feel the anxiety of walking into the ‘queer lounge’ all over again. Somehow, although I have been variously embraced within and accepted into queer communities (at one point being a rep on the queer committee at Uni, being a journalist for ‘queer press’ and so on), I still have never felt completely comfortable in queer scenes and spaces, with the impression that I often say the ‘wrong’ thing or am resistant to trends within the community.

Fast-forward to this year and I’m writing a chapter about how arguments about ‘heteronormativity’ have become unhelpful within queer ethical scholarship and the community itself. Against the tide of many of my own friends critiquing the ‘drive to normalisation’ within queer communities, I have argued that the singling out people’s ‘normative’ behaviour for critique has had very damaging consequences. There seem to be very real pressures within the community – with no better way to put it – to be an ‘exemplary’ queer citizen, where ‘queer’ is very specifically and strategically defined against ‘inferior’ subjectivities like gay and lesbian, feminist and so on. Part of my task, then, is learning to draw on my own, and others’, lived experiences of these pressures in my work, something which drives my search for a methodology that can faithfully – and non-judgmentally – represent these pressures and their affective and emotive dimensions.

And yet, once again, I feel the fear of being unpopular in my stance – something that makes it very anxiety-provoking to write this paper. The idea that I could be saying the ‘wrong’ thing is something I’m trying to critique in my own work, but also something that still haunts my own involvement in these scenes and research work. I hope that by sharing some of these thoughts and feelings with you today I can go some way towards addressing my own difficulties in carrying out this research, and for others to share some of their own thoughts about how best to approach researching often politically and emotionally fraught spaces.

This is a slightly modified transcript of Kate O’Halloran’s presentation as part of the postgraduate panel, ‘Researching Queer Scenes, Spaces and Practices’, at last week’s workshop. Kate is a PhD student in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney.

I am still a bit overwhelmed by the quality of presentations and the quantity of people in attendance at both days. I wish I could have seen everything. It also seems significant that we could fill a lecture hall beyond capacity to debate Why Gender Matters in the middle of summer in 2012. This was a very happy Sydney moment.

Feel free to share comments and feedback on the event here. I will be posting a couple of the presentations in separate entries to follow. Thanks to everyone who helped make such a special day. As I said in my welcome – we need to enjoy and celebrate these spaces and discussions when they exist! Never take them for granted.

Cultural Studies Association of Australasia annual conference 2012

Hosted by the Department of Gender & Cultural Studies, University of Sydney

Dec 4th-6th (pre-fix pre-conference Dec 3rd)

Organising committee: Fiona Allon, Prudence Black, Catherine Driscoll, Elspeth Probyn, Kane Race & Guy Redden.

Call for Papers

Cultural studies has a long history of investigating material practices – indeed it was a founding tenet of British cultural studies – but recently a new turn or return to materialism seems to be emerging in the field. What this materiality now means is still open, but we suggest that it flags a renewed interest in questions of how to study cultural objects, institutions and practices (methods), what constitutes matter and materiality (empiricism), and how things (humans and non-humans) are being reworked at a time of global economic, environmental and cultural flux.

Our keynotes have all directed critical attention to these questions – to the more-than-human, to new philosophies of matter, to the gendered material and economic circuits of media, and to ‘the heavy materiality of language’. We have invited them to help us in reinvigorating what cultural studies can do today. They include: Ross Chambers (Michigan), Katherine Gibson (UWS), Lesley Head (UoW), Bev Skeggs (Goldsmiths, London), and Sarah Whatmore (Oxford).

We encourage proposed panels and individual papers that engage with the wide spectrum of issues flagged by our title, including submissions that focus on:
· the crossing of science studies and cultural studies;
· questions of method;
· the relation between culture and economy;
· cultural histories of objects and forms;
· new ideas about empiricism;
· placing sexuality, gender and race within the more-than-human;
· the materiality of texts and genres;
· the future and the past of material cultural studies;
· environmental humanities and changing ecologies;
· cultural studies within the anthropocene;
· cultural relations with/in primary and natural resources;
· the new materiality of globalism

Papers and panels not focusing on the theme are also welcome.

Please send submissions to csaa.2012@gmail.com by August 24th and include your name and affiliation. Abstracts for papers should be 250-300 words. Panel submissions must include three individual abstracts, a panel title and 100-150 word rationale for the panel as a whole.

We will advise all proposers of accepted papers within 4 weeks of this deadline. Please note that accepted presenters will need to register before their paper will be scheduled in the program.

There will also be a separate event, “Pre-Fix”, geared to the needs of postgraduates and early career researchers, on December 3rd. Details of this and the main conference will be on a dedicated conference website soon.

CSAA website: http://www.csaa.asn.au/
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