Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

collectives that provide shelter and essential resources for precarious communities. While heteronormative
culture is sustained and reproduced by a wide range of institutionalised resources, queer culture depends on
more ephemeral elaborations: public sexual cultures such as gay bars, sex shops, and drag shows to name
but a few. However, more and more of Sydney’s queer venues are forced to close due to a severe decline in
revenue caused by the 2014 reforms. I want to ask if the lockout laws produce an urban space that
increasingly shuts down queer sociality and, accordingly, functions to regulate queer subjectivity. In other
words, do Sydney’s new lockout laws function to reproduce heteronormative hegemony?
Paul Kelaita
Suburban Queer
This paper considers the ways in which the suburbs are implicated in critical assumptions made around
queer identity. Through an examination of Bhenji Ra’s Slay Your Oppressor(s) (2016) a performance art piece
set in a suburban shopping strip in Sydney’s outer south-west, I address the relation between queer visibility
and forms of belonging. Mixing martial arts with vogueing Ra enacts a queer form of self-defence that
responds to the violence encountered by visibly feminine gay men and transgender people in the
Campbelltown area. The work points toward the descriptive limits of queer by invoking the tensions
between identification, embodiment and place. Combining Amelia Jones’ critique of “post-identity”
discourses with histories of contemporary art and suburbia in western Sydney, I attend to the way that
suburban queerness reveals a distributed form of belonging that revolves around the structure of “queer”.
5H
Digital Children: Play, Surveillance and Digital Making (Chair, Emma Keltie)
Bieke Zaman* & Donell Holloway
children’s hybrid Media Experiences
Looking back, Moving Forward: Reflections on an interdisciplinary project on
Over the past years, we have seen an increased interest of the toy and gaming industry in hybrid products
that combine physical and digital components. However, to date, little is known about how children and
their parents perceive and deal with innovative hybrid play scenarios. In this presentation, we report on the
findings from an interdisciplinary research project. The project revolved around the design and evaluation of
interactive multi-platform media experiences for young children (4-6y) involving physical, tradable,
personalized cards as well as 3D-printed toys. The findings of three waves of data gathering (analysis online
reviews, survey, user experience testing) show that hybrid playful products can tap in the potential of
physical play and alleviate parental concerns on digital play. However, whether hybrid toys effectively bring
together the best of the offline and online world depends on the actual implementation within families and
schools.
Donell Holloway & Lelia Green Say hello to the Internet of Toys
The Internet of Toys refers to a future where toys not only relate one-on-one to children but are wirelessly
connected to other toys and/or database data. While existing toy companies and start-ups are eagerly
innovating in this area, problems involving data hacking and other privacy issues have already occurred. The
Hello Barbie and VTech hacks in late 2015 are recent examples. This paper reviews and discusses issues
around the data security and safety of The Internet of Toys for child consumers who are usually too young to
fully understand and consent to data collection or understand other security issues. The array of sensors
added to Internet connected toys and the complex architecture servicing Internet connected toys make for a
complexity that could be designed to confuse parents and toy purchasers and which will further weaken
children’s data privacy and security. With data around children’s screen-based activities already collected by
133