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

There is an emerging market for what is generally termed “queer pornography”. Pornography made by
queer people, for queer people. This paper will focus on the engagement between pornography and queer
sexuality in contemporary pornographic genres. This involves considering, for example, how concepts like
“queer” are enunciated and deployed in contemporary alternative pornography, tracking how they are
positioned in relation to audiences and to production. This paper will unpack how texts are sorted and
sought out through their generic signifiers, and how for pornography, that means the identity categories and
bodies they represent and the actions they perform. This paper will focus in on how queer pornography
crucially sets up a series of promises about what a politically minded person can expect from the text. These
promises may be about industry conditions. They may be about the possibility of seeing more “authentic”
queer sex or sex-and gender-diverse bodies. This paper will raise questions about how genre and
pornography are related, considering the problems of classification and reception involved in relations
between visible bodies and embodied identities.
Jordan McArthur
Pinkwashing – or, the Cunning of Corporate Recognition
Debates about the corporatisation and privatisation of LGBTQ community events have become a significant
problem for queer politics in Australia and New Zealand. To secure funding as well as support for (neoliberal)
rights, LGBTQ organisations align themselves with national and multinational corporations. In turn,
corporations get to promote themselves as diverse and inclusive, changing their corporate culture, as well as
giving them access to queer cultural markets. For activists and some commentators, this is perceived as
“pinkwashing,” whereby these corporations support LGBTQ organisations in order to hide nefarious business
practices. Using a conceptual frame developed from anthropology and cultural studies, I argue that this
process is the cunning of corporate recognition, in which social recognition for LGBTQ organisations means
incommensurate queer worlds and subjectivities become displaced, excluded, and unintelligible. This is of
interest to popular culture as these corporations often brand and sponsor queer cultural worlds, precluding
other forms of queer alterities, futurities, and potentialities to create social and cultural change.
10P
Emergent Political Collectives: Publics, Commons and the Demos (Chair, TBA)
In this session we explore efforts to re-invigorate politics around the management of public resources and the care
of commonwealth. What’s at stake in this new politics is the disposition of things and relationships vital to life – the
provisioning of water, housing, energy, and caregiving are illustrative examples of where a new politics, both public
and common, is emerging. Wendy Brown in Undoing the Demos (2015) traces how economic rationalization has
become a dominant logic of social organization displacing, over time, all other ways of thinking and speaking about
social life – including core concepts that inform democratic theory and practice. Economic rationalization, as it
proceeds, makes it progressively more difficult to imagine ourselves either as members of a public – a community of
strangers facing shared challenges – or as custodians of a commonwealth – those spaces, relationships and
resources that we use and maintain without owning through time (Bollier, Think Like a Commoner, 2014). The
starting point of this session is that this process of economization is incomplete and often contested. The wellestablished
nomenclature of neoliberalism covers over diffuse and inventive efforts at re-municipalization of
resources, the use and care of common resources, and efforts at redefining civic life through new modes of making
things public and new experiences of being in common.
Gay Hawkins
Hybrid Assemblages: Water Markets and Publics
This paper investigates the impacts of bottled water markets on Sydney Water – a corporatized but publicly
owned authority providing universal access to water and sanitation. Rather than frame this analysis in terms
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