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

for the human condition, and, (2) how they contributed to altering subsequent reflections on the space age
and its implications. The images are discussed with reference to production contexts, reception by different
audiences, and influence on ideas about the future of humanity in space. The images discussed were
reflected upon by influential contemporary philosophers (Anders, Arendt, Lacan, etc.), and thereby helped
shape the landscape of contemporary humanities’, and popular ideas about the near future.
David Minto
James Bond and the Queerness of Spies
This paper makes two main interventions. The first is to re-examine Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels
through the insights of queer studies to explore their vulnerability to a homoerotic reading in the context of
their time, suggesting how this intersects with their political unconsciousness. The second is to situate such a
queer reading of Bond amidst the broader cultural field created over time by public circulations of “the spy”
in the Anglosphere, paying particular attention to sexuality. Supposedly clandestine but paradoxically
popular, spies have long been strongly sexualized and gendered figures, and they remain so today. This
paper then moves from a queer reading of the Bond books in their historical setting to elaborate a broader
vision of the varied sexual politics of espionage’s acts and gazes. It leverages surveillance and secret agents
to think afresh about intimacy’s relations to governance.
7O
Public Discourse and Queer Lives (Chair, Michael Nebeling Petersen)
Maxime Garnery
contemporary US TV
National queers and model minorities: the construction of liberal benevolence in
The seemingly unproblematic increase in the number of queer characters inhabiting US TV series in the new
millennium relies on the legitimation of homonormative bodies to represent the US as a post-gay, sexually
modern nation. This operation takes place through two complementary ways: the construction of a premodern
homophobic (cultural, class, racial, etc.) Other; and the redefinition of citizens-to-be as objects of
liberal benevolence. This paper examines this second, more insidious process of televisual inclusion into the
nation, insisting on the discreet yet cordial relationship between “progressive” sexual representations and
the strict delineation of citizenship along the lines of race, gender, class, and culture. Through an
examination of Broad City’s Jaimé as a seemingly oxymoronic foreign gay patriot, and Sense8’s Nomi as
representative of the so-called “Transgender Tipping Point,” this paper identifies how national operations
are masked by a liberal construction of model minorities through sentimental politics of representation.
Rhys Herden
Revising Privacy: Same-sex marriages, the family and Personal Life
The prospect of legal recognitions of same-sex marriages in Australia can be understood in a multitude of
ways: as a step in a linear LGBTIQA rights discourse; as a moment to inscribe LGBTIQA identities with “sexual
citizenship”; as an indication of the lamentable success of heteronormativity; and as the transnational
revalorisation of “the family” in Western societies. This paper will demonstrate that these explanations can
be augmented by examining them through the lens of private and personal life. I will attempt to mediate the
positions held regarding privacy as it relates to LGBTIQA people, as exemplified by Boling (1996) and
Sedgwick (1990,) by demonstrating how we may theorise same-sex marriages as an opportunity through
which “private life” can be reimagined without complying to heteronormativity. This can be achieved by
critically examining feminist and queer critiques of privacy and family life alongside perspectives on the
changing contours of privacy and personal life.
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