Rac(e)ing Questions III

26      Having said all that, there is I believe a great deal of space left open to the white viewer to think about and challenge the particular reading that I believe the film provides. First in this regard, when the white queers join the Indigenous people by the campfire they are depicted as feeling uneasy, a feeling that we see reflected in the alternately inquisitive or disinterested gaze of the Indigenous people. In other words, the white queers are being seen, but not on their terms. Second, the Indigenous people who watch the performance largely engage on their terms — we are left unsure as to what their laughter at the performance signifies, and we are shown that their reception of the performance suggests a particular Indigenous reading of white queer. This appears in the incorporation of the performance into the music already being performed by the Indigenous people, where the white performance becomes in part an aspect of the broader Indigenous context of the evening. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the following day, when he again assists the white queers in returning to their bus and securing a tow truck, the Indigenous man asks of them "so you actually make money by dressing up like a woman?" This, I would suggest, implicitly reasserts an Indigenous reading of white queer representation, one that challenges the straightforward assumption that Indigenous people can be simplistically incorporated into white readings of Indigeneity. In this sense, white queerness becomes the other to Indigenous identity, rather than the other way round.

27      The challenge that Indigenous sovereignty presents here to the logic of white queerness is, I believe, indicative of the incommensurability that must be taken as a foundation to any dialogue between and Indigenous and white people (Haggis; Moreton-Robinson, Talkin'). In other words, rather than simply presuming a shared ground (as I have suggested the white queers did in attempting to incorporate the Indigenous man into their performance), it is important that white people acknowledge the differences that shape our experiences (through privilege) as distinct from those of Indigenous people. One example of this that I suggested in the previous section was in regards to white queer rights claims that trade on the rights claims of non-white people (e.g., in regards to segregation in the US). This is also evident in Padva's paper on Priscilla and camp representation. Drawing on the work of African American scholar bel hooks, Padva suggests not only that "the (straight) bourgeois attempt to manipulate the (queer) subject is similar to interracial relationship, especially between white dominant culture and black subculture" (222), but also that "[hooks'] claim for revision of black history and ethnic oppression can be associated with a demand for revision of queer history and heterosexist oppression" (223). Here Padva may be seen to engage in a form of co-option, whereby he presumes that the critique of racial oppression (as presented by hooks) can be mapped across to a (nominally white queer) critique of "heterosexist oppression." This form of co-option, besides running the dangerous risk of denying how white queers benefit from unearned race privilege and how white queers are never outside racism, also appears to depict people as being either queer or black. The question this begs of course is: "what does this mean for black queers?" Padva's paper would thus appear to attempt to make neat work of what is in practice nowhere near as neat: queer politics are never entirely outside of oppression, and the threat of co-option by white queers is the implicit flipside to critiques (in Padva's case of "bourgeois") co-option of white queers.

28      This leads me to my final point of inquiry, and one that also returns us to the earlier section on how white queers claim belonging. I believe that the film Priscilla provides us with at least two examples of how white queer belonging in Australia is unsettled often at the very moment where it is claimed. In the first example from the film, we see the bus stop abruptly when the driver (one of the white queer characters) first sees the massive expanse of the desert. The three white queer characters step down from the bus to take in the enormity of what they face, and in that moment, when one of them suggests "maybe we should have flown," we hear the music of didgeridoos, an instrument most commonly associated with Indigenous people. This I take as an example of the awe and potential fear that the white queer characters are faced with when they are forced to engage with something they either cannot comprehend, or which cannot be easily assimilated. As a result, whilst the white queer characters are engaged in traversing a landscape to which they claim belonging, the landscape itself challenges this claim to belonging. Furthermore, the didgeridoos that we hear would seem to suggest that whilst the landscape would appear to be somehow "uncanny" or unfamiliar to the white queers, it may not be so to Indigenous people (at least those who play didgeridoos!). Whilst of course it is problematic that the landscape is automatically associated with didgeridoo music, it nonetheless serves to demonstrate the anxiety that white Australians often hold in regards to belonging in this country.

29      The second example of how white queer belonging is unsettled appears in what may be read as the penultimate moment of the movie. One of the characters (the one who had previously abruptly halted the bus ride) tells earlier in the movie of the fact that "ever since I was a lad I've had this dream, a dream that I now, finally, have a chance to fulfill: to travel to the centre of Australia, climb Kings Canyon (as a queen), in a full-length-Gaultier-sequinned, heels and a tiara." Following their arrival in Alice Springs, and the subsequent storyline there, the three white queer characters proceed to do just that: climb a rather large mountain in full drag. Yet when they stand at the top, seemingly queens of all they survey, there appears to be a gap between a desire for the type of belonging or unity that the dream may have suggested, and the actuality of it. Once they are all "at the top," Bernadette states "It never ends. All that space." To which the "lad with the dream" asks "so what now?" The third character responds by saying "I think I wanna go home." This to me signifies the characters' recognition of a disjuncture between the dream of being in the imagined space "at the top of Kings Canyon," and the desire to "be at home": belonging does not appear to come easily being dressed in drag at the "centre of Australia." This is not of course to say that white queers are a priori excluded from belonging "at the centre," but rather that dreams of belonging, which I would suggest inform a significant part of a white national imaginary, are not so easily fulfilled when faced with "all that space." Home is something that the white queer characters "go back to," rather than being something they carry with them — in contrast to what Aileen Moreton-Robinson ("Still Call" 31) has referred to as Indigenous peoples "ontological relationship to land" — that Indigenous people carry their sovereign rights to belonging with them through their embodiment. White queer belonging in Priscilla is thus depicted as predicated on an anxious form of embodied belonging that only exists in particular "settled locations" that are taken as signifying in excess of "all that space."

30      So, to summarise, and to return to the paper by Padva one last time: camp, as represented in films such as Priscilla is not inherently political, where the term "political" suggests subversive or critical. Yes, certainly, Priscilla has a politics about it, one that speaks out about homophobia, stereotypes and queer identity. But that does not necessarily make it politically useful in the context of a postcolonising nation. Thus in contrast to Padva, who suggests that Susan Sontag's seminal text on camp misreads camp's political intent, I would not concur with his statement that "[camp] subculture's subversive aspects in fact politically challenge the social and cultural order" (217). Whilst it may be true that camp challenges particular aspects of the social order, as do queer politics and theory, they largely do so from the perspective of white queers, and with the agendas set by white queers. Camp, just like queer, may at times do much more than that, but to assume that it automatically does so would be to miss something crucial: that critiques of oppression may themselves not be free from enacting oppression. As I have suggested in this section, it is thus important that proponents of white queer politics in a postcolonising nation such as Australia examine their own assumptions, and challenge the privileges that they may presume.