I Want a Mortgage and Comfort’
Consumption, Totality and Identity in Australian Gay Fiction
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8892018 |
|---|---|
| Authors | R B Wilson (corresponding author), Rohan Wilson, Craig Bolland, M Mcguire (0000-0001-9832-1854) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Publication date | 2023-12-06 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Australian Literary Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0004-9697 • E-ISSN: 1837-6479 |
| Publisher | Australian Literary Studies (PUBLISHER • AU) |
| DOI | 10.20314/als.2e5c050333 |
| OpenAlex | W4389359613 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 6 |
he gay community in Australia has experienced a period of rapid change and integration. Over the last decade, the legal and social conditions for gay men have advanced in several areas, including the establishment of a nationally recognised right to same-sex unions, amendments to federal legislation that created legal recognition of same-sex de facto relationships, and nationwide anti-discrimination laws that protect men from unjustified distinctions. These changes, along with many others, have resulted in a seismic shift in how male same-sex relationships are viewed in Australia and represented in our literature. A common thesis of novels published since 2017 is that gay men now occupy an unprecedented, and unexamined, position within what Gyrgy Lukcs (1974) called 'totality', or the abstract conditions of capitalism that result from the real object of human labour and social relations. In novels such as The Pillars (2019) by Peter Polites and The Adversary (2020) by Ronnie Scott, we witness the depreciated powers of deviancy and transgression to disrupt the knowledge regime of capitalism: a system that is intent on subsuming social relations in such a way that all relations become commoditised. These novels represent an evolution in gay male cultural production in Australia, positing that by attaining social legitimation, gay identity has lost its revolutionary potential. We argue that this observation is supported by queer historical materialist theory and that there exists a continuity of ideas between these novels and theorists James Penney, Rosemary Hennessy and Kevin Floyd. By drawing on the concept of queer reification, we find new ways of understanding the interaction between bodies and behaviours, capital and the neoliberal state as depicted in contemporary queer fiction in Australia
Advertising · Aesthetics · Art · Business · Consumption (sociology · Identity (music · Media studies · Sociology · Australian History and Society · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Media Studies and Communication
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,33 |
| Citation span | 2023 - 2023 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |