Rac(e)ing Questions III

21      In regards to my first point of inquiry, I focus on one particular symbol of Australiana that is used within the film, namely, the kangaroo. More specifically, I am interested in two instances where the image of a dead kangaroo would seem to suggest a particular representation of queerness within the film. In the first instance, the three main characters find themselves lost in the middle of the desert when their bus ("Priscilla") breaks down. One character, Bernadette, goes out in search of assistance. As her search goes on, Bernadette finds herself in increasingly isolated areas of the desert. Luckily, she is fortunate to see a vehicle heading towards her. She manages to flag it down, and is given a ride by the elderly white couple who drive it. Unfortunately for Bernadette, she must sit in the back of the vehicle along with a dead, and rather fly-blown, kangaroo. Things get worse upon her return to the bus, where she fetches her two travel companions to meet her saviors, only for them to drive off in a cloud of dust when one of the queer men appears in drag, whilst the other is covered in pink paint. The elderly couple by implication are depicted as homophobic or otherwise uncaring about the plight of the three stranded characters and their bus.

22      The second time we see the symbol of the kangaroo is later that night, when an Indigenous man comes across the three characters and their bus. He invites them back to his campsite, where a group of Indigenous people are sitting near a open fire over which a kangaroo is roasting. When the three characters arrive at the campsite they are depicted as feeling somewhat uneasy about the stares from the Indigenous people, and unsure about how to engage in social interaction. This appears to be broken down when, following on from one Indigenous man playing the guitar, the three characters perform a number in drag for their (seemingly appreciative) Indigenous audience.

23      There appears to me to be a stark contrast in the film between the symbol of the dead kangaroo as it is associated with the elderly white couple, and the roasting of the kangaroo by the Indigenous people. In the first instance, the kangaroo represents a form of shaming of the character of Bernadette, identified in the film as transgendered. She is forced to sit next to the dead carcass, and for her trouble is abandoned by her would be white saviors. Here we see a contrast between the white queer characters, who are the ones being abandoned, and the white (nominally heterosexual) characters, who are doing the abandoning. The next time we see the symbol of the kangaroo, however, we see the three white queer characters in the process of "being saved." Here the kangaroo may be taken to represent substance or aid offered, as opposed to the shame or discrimination offered when we first saw the symbol. The white queer characters are not only depicted as being saved by the Indigenous character, but are relatively straightforwardly welcomed (or indeed even embraced) by the group of Indigenous people. Here the symbol of the kangaroo implicitly aligns the white queers "on the side" of the Indigenous people — as engaged in a form of mutual recognition that stands in opposition to the imagery of the dead and rotting kangaroo associated with the elderly white couple. White queers in this sense are depicted as being on the side of "the good" — of those who are oppressed, rather than those who are doing the oppressing.

24      Likewise, within a paper written by Gilad Padva which focuses in part on the film, there is an implicit assumption that white queers are somehow beyond oppression. In his preliminary discussion of how camp representations can destabilise normative forms of representation, Padva suggests that the:

proto-camp gestures developed by men like the mollies may have actually worked to displace the epistemological clarity of dominant codes of identity. Therefore, the early modern origins of English camp may actually have been those well-informed political practices that deployed the representation of the body against the growing bourgeois attempt to shape and control the subject. (223)

Whilst interesting, Padva's argument makes the implicit suggestion that English camp was inherently distinct from a bourgeois identity, and thus did not attempt to "shape and control the subject." The question that I would ask of this is; exactly which men were "well-informed" in their engagement with "proto-camp gestures," and how may these men themselves have been, if not bourgeois subjects, at least subjects who stood to benefit from being (presumably) white men living in a society that accorded significant privilege to white men? Padva's imagery of "proto-camp" men may thus be seen to do very little to challenge how such men may have not only been engaged in "displacing the epistemological clarity of dominant codes of identity," but also in asserting new, and equally oppressive (white, masculine) codes of identity. In other words, to depict white queers as "displacing" oppressive social practices may demonstrate a failure to examine how white queers similarly stood to benefit from such practices.

25      To return to the film again, and to my second point of inquiry in regards to co-option, we may see how particular white queer forms of representation engender a particular logic of reciprocity that is based upon appropriation rather than acknowledgment. In the remainder of the storyline relating to the drag performance reported above, the three white queer characters notice during their performance that the Indigenous man who originally found them is merrily dancing along to the performance. This gives them an idea — to make him part of the performance! Thus we see a final set of routines wherein the Indigenous man is clothed in drag, and dances along with the three white queer characters. My concern with this particular representation is that whilst the Indigenous man in the first instance seems to offer a form of aid to the three white queer characters that acknowledges their need for help, their response to this aid is not an acknowledgement in return of the specificity of Indigenous experience, but rather is to some degree appropriative: it reads Indigenous experience through white queer experience. Of course my suggestion is not that the Indigenous man did not want to join in the performance, nor that he or the Indigenous characters were dupes of the white queers' performance. Rather, my point is that the form of reciprocity or relationship that is engendered between the two groups (white queers and Indigenous people) is one that appears to be largely directed by the white queers, and which does not problematise the white queers as being stranded upon Indigenous land. Rather, the white queers reciprocate the aid given to them by the Indigenous man by offering him a role in their performance, instead of themselves seeking to reciprocate on the terms set by the Indigenous man. As we are given no indication of the Indigenous man's sexual identity, we cannot interpret the accuracy of the white queers' reading of his dancing to the performance, nor what the Indigenous man's engagement with the performance meant for the man himself. Instead we are largely left with the viewpoint of the white queers.