Rac(e)ing Questions III

by Damien W. Riggs, University of Adelaide, Australia[1]I begin by acknowledging the sovereignty of the Kaurna people, traditional owners of the land upon which I live in Adelaide, South Australia. Thanks to Greg for support and proof reading, and to our foster child Gary, for bearing with me whilst I wrote this paper.

1      In this paper I ask some necessarily difficult questions of both myself as a white gay man, and of white queer politics and representation more broadly. Primarily, my intent is to examine what it means to speak from a political position as a white queer person living in a country such as Australia, one that has been referred to by Indigenous scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson as "postcolonising" rather than "postcolonial." Moreton-Robinson proposes "the verb postcolonizing to signify the active, the current and the continuing nature of the colonizing relationship that positions [Indigenous people] as belonging but not belonging" ("Still Call" 38). Moreton-Robinson contrasts this with the more common term "postcolonial," which she suggests is not appropriate in the Australian context, as "Indigenous belonging challenges the assumption that Australia is postcolonial because [Indigenous] relation to land […] [what Moreton-Robinson terms an "ontological belonging"] is omnipresent, and continues to unsettle non-Indigenous belonging based on illegal dispossession" (24). These points about the "postcolonising" status of contemporary Australia suggest to me that an interrogation of white queer belonging by white queers is of central importance to examining how queer politics operate, and their potential limitations in the Australian context.

2     In addition to my focus on what it means to engage in queer politics as a white person in Australia, I am also interested to look at how queer politics are always already gendered in particular ways. Here my interest is in examining how particular forms of queer representation achieve hegemony, and how these may, or may not, resist normative forms of gendered embodiment as they are currently configured under white heteropatriarchy (Riggs, "Caught"). In writing about gender as a white gay man I am thus interested in exploring how the first and last descriptors in this identity position may often result in a range of unearned privileges that greatly outweigh the central descriptor. Whilst queer politics have necessarily focused on discrimination (amongst other things) that results from the marginalisation of queer sexualities, my question is as to whether this focus may represent a failure to examine how such sexualities may still often be highly reliant upon particular normative assumptions around gender and race.

3     In order to engage in this examination, I first elaborate upon a theoretical framework provided by Aileen Moreton-Robinson ("Possessive"), namely what she terms "the possessive logic of patriarchal white sovereignty." Her cogent analysis of land rights decisions in Australia demonstrates how white people in Australia are invested in claiming particular forms of belonging and ownership, and how this serves to disavow Indigenous sovereignty. My interest in the framework she provides is twofold: first, to look at what it means to claim belonging as a white queer person in the context of a postcolonising nation, and second, to examine how such claims to belonging may represent a specifically queer investment in the hegemonic practices of the white nation. By focusing on how white queers may desire to belong to a particular white national imaginary, I propose that queer politics (as elaborated by white queers) may at times do very little to challenge how race circulates as a discourse in Australia that both privileges and oppresses.

4     Having outlined this particular interpretive framework, I go on to examine one particular site where representations of white queers may be seen to generate a relatively narrow version of queer politics, one that does little to address issues of colonisation and dispossession. My examination of the film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, alongside a reading of one particular paper that focuses on the politicality of the film (Padva), will serve to highlight how forms of white queer representation may at times be complicit with white hegemony in Australia. To sum up, then, my intent in writing this paper as a white gay men is to contribute to the burgeoning literature in Australia (Nicoll; Offord; Riggs, "What's Love"; "Possessive") and abroad (Bernard; Berube) that seeks to problematise the assumption that white queers are only and always oppressed, and that being queer places one outside of enacting oppression against others. More specifically, my aim is to demonstrate a form of white queer accountability that recognises the ground upon which I stand, and the relationship that I am in to the fact of Indigenous sovereignty.

White queer possessive investments

5      As the white Australian nation continues to be confronted by the fact of Indigenous sovereignty, alongside a growing acknowledgment of ongoing histories of colonisation and dispossession, there exists a profound uneasiness in relation to white claims to belonging in this country. For some white people, this uneasiness is routinely dismissed through recourse to discourses of "Indigenous violence," or the "civilising mission." Such discourses are used to justify colonisation and thus discount the histories of white violence that Indigenous narratives record (Riggs & Augoustinos). Yet in much the same way, white people in Australia who seek to challenge oppression may just as easily be engaged in disavowing ongoing histories of white violence (Riggs, "Benevolence"). This may occur when white people claim to "do good for the other," when white people (such as white queers) claim for themselves an oppressed subject position, or when white people presume that their anti-racist practice puts them outside of the discriminatory framework of racism.