AustLit

'It might seem unglamorous now, but, in 1902, when the underground toilets formerly in operation at this site were built, women had just gained the right to vote and sit in Federal Parliament.

'These toilets were the first public women’s toilets built in Melbourne, with four water closets, two wash basins, a store room and an attendant’s room, they cost a penny to use and were an important, if often underrated, signifier of sanitary, technological and social reform. Beside the site sits Chris Reynold’s sculpture, “A History apparatus – Vessel Craft & Beacon”, a somewhat confusing and inauspicious sculpture with limited relevance to the site’s former use.

'Quinn Eades visits this location in his mind’s eye; deep in coronavirus lockdown, this once monumental toilet could be as far away as the moon, as bamboozling as the nearby statue or as portentous as any of our many possible futures. No one can clearly remember what the city used to be like at this strange time. But Quinn’s call to action is as political as the toilets once were: renaming a city, its spaces and histories; making space for women, trans and nonbinary people; respecting and returning to the land and environment; bringing art into unexpected places; and welcoming all bodies in all guises.' (Introduction)

'In 2017 the queer and gender-diverse community of Australia undertook an incredible campaign of everyday activism around marriage equality. As individuals and collectives we shared our personal stories with our networks – from social media, to workplace to school playground. We purged our tears and our rage – documented as poems, articles, photos, short stories, status updates, tweets, blog posts, political cartoons, and short videos. Many of us were shocked at the vitriol directed at us, to our faces, in our letter boxes and online, even in ‘secret’ Facebook groups. Many of us were hurt by the unspoken tensions and the conversations we couldn’t have with some of our nearest and dearest. By the end, we were truly exhausted.

'Yes, the vote was for equality. Yes, the legislation went through. Yes, we can get married now. But many of us have been left wondering whether it was worth it. Many of us are living with the ongoing grief of having our lives, and those of our children, be up for public debate.

'Whether you are ‘gay, straight, black, or white’—or beyond reductive binaries—this edited collection guides the reader through the highs and lows of the marriage equality postal vote. Combining serious scholarship, humour, manifestos, and simple tales of childhood, readers are flung into the emotional melting pot that constitutes a definitive turning point in Australian queer histories. These feelings are sticky and sometimes traumatic, but there is also catharsis in this compilation. This is also a counter-archive, one that consciously amplifies some of the voices that were drowned out by dominant campaigns, including those that questioned the value of marriage as a patriarchal institution or resisted the ‘we are just like you’ discourses that obscured complex families and queer ways of loving.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The following text was written as a collaboration between Virginia Barratt and Quinn Eades, as an experimental work of ekphrastic ‘writing with’ or ‘writing to’ (Gale & Wyatt 2018), taking as its subject an operatic performance entitled ‘Vocal Womb’ by Eve Klein, a music technologist, popular music scholar and an operatic mezzo soprano and composer.

'The operatic work, ‘Vocal Womb’, comprised two arias, based on poems written by Quinn Eades and Virginia Barratt, arranged in a ‘post-operatic’ mode, to use a term proposed by Jelena Novak to speak about theorising a body-voice relationship in contemporary, post-dramatic and media-augmented operatic works, ‘where interventions upon the body-voice relation open possibilities not only for expanding the borders of the opera world further, but also for what is considered body and voice in opera’ (Novak 2015).

'The original poems engaged with notions of affectivity, the phenomenology of panic, birthing, the post-linguistic and its role in writing trauma and the body, and écriture matière (Eades 2015), which is writing matter/the material. The poem/arias were arranged within a composition of samples, electronic noise, Eve’s own body sounds amplified by stethoscopes, and live sound and video feeds. The original poems, already products of ‘the remainder’ (Lecercle 1990), were thus further de/composed with the result that the affective ‘noise’ of the texts was amplified.

'The text ’Vocal Womb’ and the ekphrasis machine (we die) was the result of Barratt and Eades writing with and to the live arias in a constraint-based processual performance. In a dialogic relationship to the poem/arias, we were sensing the vitalities of the iterative always-becoming text, and coaxing out the new emergent poetics, feeding back in a spiralling exchange with our poems, and mining the remainder for the refrain.' (Introduction)

'Offshoot includes essays in life writing methodologies and approaches, as well as a series of creative work – poetry and prose – that engages with current life writing. This collection highlights the development and influence of the genre in the twenty-first century.

'Starting from the premise that life writing is a significant component of both contemporary artistic practice and scholarship, Offshoot provides a necessary re-evaluation of the mode, its contemporary sub-generic incarnations, as well as methodological and practical approaches. The book presents research on a wide range of approaches, including both traditional areas such as literature and creative writing and areas that have not previously been associated with life writing scholarship.

'With its multifaceted readings, Offshoot signals a shift in life writing research tending towards an expansive, hybrid, experimental, and rhizomic approach.' (Publication summary)

'In recent years we have seen an explosion of trans memoirs, but relatively few of these have a poetic sensibility or include poetry. In this paper I will extend the concept of ‘transpoetics’, first coined by trans writer and poet T.C. Tolbert in his edited collection Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (2013), who said in a recent interview that poetry meant ‘I could do things in language and create a world for myself that I didn’t know how to inhabit with my body’. I will posit that transpoetics carries all the markers of a dialogic form, despite the fact that Bakhtin privileged the novel over poetry and poetics, claiming that poetry could only ever be monologic. I then discuss Butler’s notion of performativity alongside Jay Prosser’s interventions against using the trans body as metaphor to destabilise gender norms, and finally meditate on drag, the practice of reading, and look at transpoetics as chronotope. By placing this work alongside my own autobiographical prose poetry, this paper also performs a heteroglossic, ‘both/and’ writing of the queer and trans body.' (Publication abstract)