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

Kim Howells-Ng Fantasy and Fictions of Race: Casting Practices in Contemporary Fantasy Television
This paper critically interrogates racial casting practices in contemporary fantasy television drama, examining
the discourses that emerge to justify the inscription or erasure of racial identity in the creation of fictional
fantasy worlds. It contrasts the ahistorical colour-blindness of the new Doctor Who (BBC 2005--); the heavilycritiqued
racial casting of Game of Thrones (HBO 2011-); and the unapologetically politicised Cleverman (ABC
[Australia] 2016), which features an eighty-percent Indigenous cast. It asks whether fantasy works that attain
mass-audiences bear an ethical obligation to engage with the politics of representation, especially in light of
histories of colonialism and enduring inequality. This is juxtaposed with discourses of genre that posit
fantasy as a liberating (though often derided) space that may offer visions of worlds whose socio-political
history diverges from ours.
9O
Queer Kinships in Australia (Chair, Timothy Laurie)
The papers in this panel approach questions of queer kinship and intimate practices in Australia, with a focus on race
and new reproductive technologies, ‘anti-social’ queer community responses to queers who ‘breed’, and the
mononormativity of Australian de facto legislation.
Samantha Sperring
“Breeders”: queer anti-norms and community praxis
Taking the event “Engorged: Fucking (with) the Maternal” as its case study, this paper draws on Lee
Edelman’s polemic No Future and recent inquiries into queer attachments to anti-normativity to
problematise what it posits as the institutionalisation of queer “anti-norms” at the level of community
praxis. Within queer studies, the various interpretations of queer as a form of self-shattering and antisociality
have often been played against scholarship that focuses on queer “world-making” and futurity.
Tensions within Sydney activist networks parallel this tendency, in which “queerness names the side of those
not “fighting for the children” rendering engagements with ostensibly heteronormative ways of life, such as
child rearing, decidedly “un-queer”. The fixing of some “authentic” queerness to antisocial praxis, I suggest,
raises questions over the capacity to fulfil queer anti-norms alongside who is (and who ought to be)
represented within queer scholarship, and communities.
Jaya Keaney
Looking like a family: choice, biology and race matching in queer donor-conceived families
Queer Kinship Studies has long been interested in choice, as opposed to biological necessity, as a basis for
queer family-making (Weston 1991; Weeks et al 2001). This paper explores the relationship between choice
and biology in the narratives of Australian gay and lesbian parents who “race match” in selecting a sperm or
egg donor. Matching the race of donor and intending parents is the clinical norm in donor-conception,
allowing families to pass as if biologically related. Although gay and lesbian parents cannot pass in this way,
many place significant importance on race matching. This paper explores their motives. Tracing how racial
similarity can render queer families legible as related, I untangle how choosing a matched donor may
reproduce ideas of family as biological unit in racial terms, even as notions of biological necessity are
troubled in relation to gender.
Jessica Kean
De facto: sex and monogamy in Australian relationship case law
Under Australian Law two people can be declared a de facto couple if their relationship is deemed
“committed” and “marriage-like” in relation to their financial, social, sexual, practical and emotional
arrangements. This makes interpretation of de facto law a fascinating, condensed site of contemporary
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