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Issue Details: First known date: 2018... 2018 'I Am No Longer a Fiction but a Real Human Being' : The Modernist Queer Body in Patrick White's The Twyborn Affair (1979)
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'This article explores how Patrick White is both an inheritor and a precursor of modernism and its queer and gendered legacies within mid-twentieth century Australia; these experimental legacies are still felt today, with queer authors producing even queerer texts amid the Australian literary landscape. Focusing upon his novel The Twyborn Affair (1979), I argue that White's use of modernist aesthetics enables him to achieve a complete corporeal identity by writing the queer body as, paradoxically, both fragmentary and fluid. His prose both resituates gendered binaries and boundaries, and enables ways of navigating the epistemological trauma enacted upon the queer self by heteronormativity. Attending to the fragmentation and fluidity that White's modernism unleashes, this paper is especially interested in the becoming of a queer self, and it seeks to salvage moments of queer desire from a fractured identity in contention with the conformity demanded by mandatory heterosexuality. These legacies that White leaves for us are especially pertinent to our present as his deconstruction of binary notions of gender and queer narratives "opens up" spaces where an articulation of an Australian queer self can recognise its inherently transgressive agency.'  (Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Hecate vol. 44 no. 1/2 2018 18645999 2018 periodical issue

    'In 2011 the Gillard government passed legislation regarding passports that allowed the choice of an X gender on them with the selection of gender not depending upon medical intervention, and in 2013 amended the Sexual Discrimination Act to make discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and intersex people illegal. In 2004, the Howard government had amended the Marriage Act to exclude same-sex marriage; in 2009 the Rudd government brought in legislation to remove discrimination for same-sex couples in 1985 Federal laws. Australia certainly has a plentiful supply of the former, though the still expanding oil industry is a major contributor to Australia having one of the worst records in the world on carbon reduction in relation to industry and export especially in relation to fossil fuels (and metals) extraction and trading. [...]if the big fossil fuel companies operating in Australia paid more tax- and one third pay none at all-there would be capital available for more investment and community involvement in sustainable energy generation. Morrison also signed off on what was agreed to be-at the Pacific Islands Forum urging global efforts to limit warming to 1.5 degrees-"critical to the security of our blue Pacific," but the LNP has no plans to develop a policy to substantially transition from fossil fuels to sustainable energy sources, even though recent developments continue to make this energy cheaper.' (Carole Ferrier, Editorial introduction)

    2018
    pg. 59-75
Last amended 10 Feb 2020 13:01:07
59-75 'I Am No Longer a Fiction but a Real Human Being' : The Modernist Queer Body in Patrick White's The Twyborn Affair (1979)small AustLit logo Hecate
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