C Brickell
Biographic Data
| ID | 9235 |
|---|---|
| NAME | C Brickell |
| GIVEN NAMES | C |
| FAMILY NAME | Brickell |
| SIGNATURE | BRICKELL C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Otago |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4304-5415 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 186 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Queerburbia: LGBTQ2S Suburban Place-Making
Queerness has so often been associated with inner cities: Sydney’s Oxford Street, London’s Soho, Berlin’s Schöneberg, to name just three. Suburban queer lives are often neglected, and the suburbs i
Making monsters out of pets: Non-binary identities in virtual spaces
Much of Western society remains predicated upon a self/other binary through which humans situate ‘self’ in contradistinction to ‘other’. Global socio-cultural debates have reinforced binary definitions and expressions, but the Internet – including Second Life, a Multi-User Virtual Environment – affords opportunities for individuals to express non-binary identities in contexts which are often perceived as safer than their everyday lives. Pseudonym…
The Cambridge World History of Sexualities
Volume I offers historiographical surveys and general overviews of central topics in the history of world sexualities. Split across twenty-two chapters, this volume places the history of sexuality in dialogue with anthropology, women's history, LGBTQ+ history, queer theory, and public history, as well as examining the impact Freud and Foucault have had on the history of sexuality. The volume continues by providing overviews on the sexual body, fa…
New Zealand’s Military and the Disciplining of Sex between Men, 1940–1960
Surveilling Minds and Bodies: Sexualities, Medicine and the Law
Aids, Love and the Law: From the Human Rights Act to Marriage Equality in New Zealand
The terrain of debate over lesbian and gay rights in New Zealand changed markedly between 1993 and 2013. This article compares parliamentary and public discussion of the 1993 amendments to the Human Rights Act, about which very little has been written, and the Marriage (Definition of Marriage) Amendment Bill of 2013, to track a range of ideological stances and discursive positions over a 20-year period. Those sceptical about lesbian and gay right…
Marriage Equality in Australia and New Zealand: A Trans‐Tasman Politics of Difference
New Zealand's Parliament legislated for marriage equality in 2013, over four and a half years ahead of the passage of similar legislation in Australia. Civil unions came into being in New Zealand in 2005 but had only been enacted at a state and territory level in Australia, often with a different name. How might we account for these divergences? This article offers a comparative account of the Australian and New Zealand situation in order to expl…
Karla Elliott: Young Men Navigating Contemporary Masculinities
The Dad Bod: An Impossible Body
The term “Dad Bod” first emerged in a 2015 article by college student Pearson and initially described a young male physique that balances fat and muscle and also connotes a relaxed lifestyle involving ample amounts of beer and pizza. The term has since gained in popularity and entered the household lexicon, often in relation to early-middle-aged men. Using Scott’s theory of “performative regulation” and digital articles from men’s health and fitn…
A short history of same-sex marriage in New Zealand
Is same-sex marriage a recent outcome of concerted political action, or does it have a much longer history? This article critically examines the historical tensions and complexities around same-sex marriage by focusing on the New Zealand context. It argues that same-sex marriage is not simply a matter of legal provisions, but also reflects shared customs and incipient forms of politics that took hold before the era of marriage equality and have s…
The Dialectics of Motherhood in 1950s New Zealand
While numerous historians have questioned the assumption that the 1950s were wholly conservative in terms of gender politics, few have systematically explored the nuances of debates over motherhood in particular. This article asks how depictions of motherhood in two popular New Zealand magazines reflected multiple voices that spoke of the complexities of mothers’ experiences and broader ideologies of motherhood during this era. It develops the co…
Transport cultures and young people's histories in New Zealand, 1880–1950
Queer trans-Tasman mobility, then and now
This article situates queer mobility within wider historical geographies of trans-Tasman flows of goods, people and ideas. Using case studies of women’s and men’s experiences during the early twentieth century and the twenty-first century, it shows that same-sex desire is a constituent part of these flows. Conversely, antipodean mobility has fostered particular forms of desire, sexual identity, queer community and politics. Rural and urban landsc…
Histories of Adolescence and Affect: Setting an Agenda
What did adolescence feel like in the past? This article explores the historical relationships between adolescence and affect – feeling, emotion and lived intensities – in order to explore this question. Drawing from a range of examples, it argues for a systematic consideration of the relationships between lived experience and broad historical shifts, in order to ascertain the ways individual affective lives have been shaped by changes in work, f…
Networks of affect, male homoeroticism and the Second World War: A Soldier's Archive
While geographies of affect are increasingly influential and geographies of sexuality well established, there is considerable potential for enhancing links between these subfields. This article explores the archive of a gay World War II veteran, revealing the intricacies of an intense same-sex wartime affair in New Caledonia and introducing the concept of ‘networks of affect’: the interconnected pathways through space and time that provide condui…
Affect and the history of masculinities
Purpose – Many scholarly disciplines are currently engaged in a turn to affect, paying close attention to emotion, feeling and sensation. The purpose of this paper is to locate affect in relation to masculinity, time and space. Design/methodology/approach – It suggests that historically, in a range of settings, men have been connected to one another and to women, and these affective linkages tells much about the relational quality and texture of …
Young People and the Shaping of Public Space in Melbourne, 1870–1914
Young People and the Shaping of Public Space in Melbourne, 1870–1914." Social History, 39(4), pp. 591–592
Sensation and the Making of New Zealand Adolescence
Many historians associate adolescent pleasures and subcultures with the mid-twentieth century. Sensations and their personifications, this article suggests, also formed a focus for commentary and experience during the second half of the nineteenth century and the years leading up to the First World War. There was a noisy public discussion around adolescence in New Zealand in which notions of sensation and pleasure played a key role. In scrutinizi…
Nature's good for you: Sir Truby King, Seacliff Asylum, and the greening of health care in New Zealand, 1889–1922
Waiting for Uncle Ben”: Age-Structured Homosexuality in New Zealand, 1920-1950
Townsend met twelve-year-old David Potts in a public toilet in Christchurch, New Zealand. \nTownsend, a separated income tax clerk of forty-seven, recalled that Potts approached him, \nat which point Townsend asked “if he went with many men.” Potts volunteered that he met \nmen in the toilets on Monday nights. According to Townsend,“He said he was waiting for \n'Uncle Ben.'I said 'What is Uncle Ben going to do?'He replied 'What the other men do.'…
Sexuality, power and the sociology of the internet
The internet is an increasingly important enabler and mediator of sexual relations in society. It has begun to transform older modes of knowing, experiencing and organizing sexuality. In light of an emerging social science literature, this article considers internet-mediated sexuality and its consequences for theorizing power. It looks at three ideal-typical strands of power in relation to sexuality: the constitutive, the regulatory and the unequ…
Sex, space and scripts: Negotiating Homoeroticism in History
There is now a rich literature on the ways sexuality is geographically situated, mediated and constituted. There is rather less on how sexual interactions are scripted within space and time. Drawing from symbolic interactionist literature on sexual scripts, this article investigates how some men negotiated sexual encounters in New Zealand during the nineteenth century, within particular spaces (streets, gardens, hotels and others) and in relation…
Visualizing Homoeroticism: The Photographs of Robert Gant, 1887-1892
How did 19th-century men understand and represent their same-sex desires in a time and place where homosexuality was publicly unnamable? In partial answer to this question, this article focuses on two photograph albums assembled by Robert Gant in New Zealand during the 1880s. It explores the themes implicit in these albums, and suggests that men like Gant could piece together homoerotic subjectivities by creating and collating visual materials. G…
Sexuality and the Dimensions of Power
Sex education, homosexuality, and social contestation in 1970s New Zealand
This essay examines the relationships between homosexuality and sex education in New Zealand during the 1970s. It argues that reading sex education debates and resources provides a useful way of exploring connections between the ontologies and politics of sexuality at that time. In particular, the advent of social movements concerned with sexual issues marked a turning point in homosexuality's appearance within formal and informal modes of sex ed…
Masculinities, Performativity, and Subversion: A Sociological Reappraisal
The study of masculinities has not escaped the influence of Judith Butler's writings on gender, performativity, and subversion. However, this article suggests that Butler's formulations of performativity and subversion express a lack of clarity and engender a number of problems with respect to agency, action, interaction, and social change. This article argues for reformulating performativity and subversion in a more explicitly sociological frame…
The Sociological Construction of Gender and Sexuality
This essay considers how we might come to understand social constructionism sociologically. It examines a number of related approaches to gender and sexuality that speak to sociological concerns and might be termed social constructionist: historicism, symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology and materialist feminism. By recognising that social constructionism is multifarious rather than unified, we find that each social constructionist approach …
Heroes and Invaders: Gay and Lesbian pride parades and the public/private distinction in New Zealand media accounts
Public space is constructed as heterosexual space in at least two senses. First, heterosexuality in public is regarded as unproblematic, whereas lesbian and gay identities are policed by subtle or overt means. Second, heterosexuality is not obviously marked in public. In this article these positions are used as a starting point to investigate the complexities of the relationships between heterosexuality, homosexuality and the public and private s…
Whose `Special Treatment'? Heterosexism and the Problems with Liberalism
This article examines the circulation of heterosexist positions within several recent New Zealand media texts. It argues that a recent form of discourse engages liberal language and assumptions in ways that support the privileged position of heterosexuality and the marginalization of homosexuality. The examples given highlight not only the tenor of some recent representations of homosexuality, but also some problems within liberalism. Most notabl…
Sexuality, power and the sociology of the internet
The internet is an increasingly important enabler and mediator of sexual relations in society. It has begun to transform older modes of knowing, experiencing and organizing sexuality. In light of an emerging social science literature, this article considers internet-mediated sexuality and its consequences for theorizing power. It looks at three ideal-typical strands of power in relation to sexuality: the constitutive, the regulatory and the unequ…
Sexuality and the Dimensions of Power
The Dad Bod: An Impossible Body
The term “Dad Bod” first emerged in a 2015 article by college student Pearson and initially described a young male physique that balances fat and muscle and also connotes a relaxed lifestyle involving ample amounts of beer and pizza. The term has since gained in popularity and entered the household lexicon, often in relation to early-middle-aged men. Using Scott’s theory of “performative regulation” and digital articles from men’s health and fitn…
Queer trans-Tasman mobility, then and now
This article situates queer mobility within wider historical geographies of trans-Tasman flows of goods, people and ideas. Using case studies of women’s and men’s experiences during the early twentieth century and the twenty-first century, it shows that same-sex desire is a constituent part of these flows. Conversely, antipodean mobility has fostered particular forms of desire, sexual identity, queer community and politics. Rural and urban landsc…
Sex, space and scripts: Negotiating Homoeroticism in History
There is now a rich literature on the ways sexuality is geographically situated, mediated and constituted. There is rather less on how sexual interactions are scripted within space and time. Drawing from symbolic interactionist literature on sexual scripts, this article investigates how some men negotiated sexual encounters in New Zealand during the nineteenth century, within particular spaces (streets, gardens, hotels and others) and in relation…
Aids, Love and the Law: From the Human Rights Act to Marriage Equality in New Zealand
The terrain of debate over lesbian and gay rights in New Zealand changed markedly between 1993 and 2013. This article compares parliamentary and public discussion of the 1993 amendments to the Human Rights Act, about which very little has been written, and the Marriage (Definition of Marriage) Amendment Bill of 2013, to track a range of ideological stances and discursive positions over a 20-year period. Those sceptical about lesbian and gay right…
Networks of affect, male homoeroticism and the Second World War: A Soldier's Archive
While geographies of affect are increasingly influential and geographies of sexuality well established, there is considerable potential for enhancing links between these subfields. This article explores the archive of a gay World War II veteran, revealing the intricacies of an intense same-sex wartime affair in New Caledonia and introducing the concept of ‘networks of affect’: the interconnected pathways through space and time that provide condui…
Affect and the history of masculinities
Purpose – Many scholarly disciplines are currently engaged in a turn to affect, paying close attention to emotion, feeling and sensation. The purpose of this paper is to locate affect in relation to masculinity, time and space. Design/methodology/approach – It suggests that historically, in a range of settings, men have been connected to one another and to women, and these affective linkages tells much about the relational quality and texture of …
Nature's good for you: Sir Truby King, Seacliff Asylum, and the greening of health care in New Zealand, 1889–1922
Waiting for Uncle Ben”: Age-Structured Homosexuality in New Zealand, 1920-1950
Townsend met twelve-year-old David Potts in a public toilet in Christchurch, New Zealand. \nTownsend, a separated income tax clerk of forty-seven, recalled that Potts approached him, \nat which point Townsend asked “if he went with many men.” Potts volunteered that he met \nmen in the toilets on Monday nights. According to Townsend,“He said he was waiting for \n'Uncle Ben.'I said 'What is Uncle Ben going to do?'He replied 'What the other men do.'…
Surveilling Minds and Bodies: Sexualities, Medicine and the Law
Young People and the Shaping of Public Space in Melbourne, 1870–1914
Young People and the Shaping of Public Space in Melbourne, 1870–1914." Social History, 39(4), pp. 591–592
Traveling Orthodoxies? Sexuality and Political Correctness in New Zealand
In the English-speaking world during the 1990s, the mass media contained much discussion of political correctness. Cultural politics in general, and questions of gender, ethnicity, and sexuality in particular, have since been bound up in debates around political correctness. However, we might understand the term political correctness not as a description of a phenomenon but as a signifier that has traveled—from nation to nation and context to con…
Through the (New) Looking Glass: Gendered bodies, fashion and resistance in postwar New Zealand
In 1947, French designer Christian Dior released the New Look, a style of women’s clothing characterized by long, stiffened skirts and wasp waistlines. For Dior, the fashion offered a glamorous, feminine look following many women’s more functional - and ostensibly masculine - wartime garb. The ‘Look’ arrived in New Zealand from Europe in mid-1948. The New Zealand debates around the fashion offer a useful ‘looking glass’ into contemporary cultural…
Heroes and Invaders: Gay and Lesbian pride parades and the public/private distinction in New Zealand media accounts
Public space is constructed as heterosexual space in at least two senses. First, heterosexuality in public is regarded as unproblematic, whereas lesbian and gay identities are policed by subtle or overt means. Second, heterosexuality is not obviously marked in public. In this article these positions are used as a starting point to investigate the complexities of the relationships between heterosexuality, homosexuality and the public and private s…
Whose `Special Treatment'? Heterosexism and the Problems with Liberalism
This article examines the circulation of heterosexist positions within several recent New Zealand media texts. It argues that a recent form of discourse engages liberal language and assumptions in ways that support the privileged position of heterosexuality and the marginalization of homosexuality. The examples given highlight not only the tenor of some recent representations of homosexuality, but also some problems within liberalism. Most notabl…
Through the (New) Looking Glass: Gendered bodies, fashion and resistance in postwar New Zealand
In 1947, French designer Christian Dior released the New Look, a style of women’s clothing characterized by long, stiffened skirts and wasp waistlines. For Dior, the fashion offered a glamorous, feminine look following many women’s more functional - and ostensibly masculine - wartime garb. The ‘Look’ arrived in New Zealand from Europe in mid-1948. The New Zealand debates around the fashion offer a useful ‘looking glass’ into contemporary cultural…
The Life of Brian: Masculinities, Sexualities and Health in New Zealand
Traveling Orthodoxies? Sexuality and Political Correctness in New Zealand
In the English-speaking world during the 1990s, the mass media contained much discussion of political correctness. Cultural politics in general, and questions of gender, ethnicity, and sexuality in particular, have since been bound up in debates around political correctness. However, we might understand the term political correctness not as a description of a phenomenon but as a signifier that has traveled—from nation to nation and context to con…
Sex instruction and the construction of homosexuality in New Zealand, 1920–1965
Historical analysis of sex education materials, as well as of the debates that surround them, can shed light upon the construction of sexuality in particular contexts. This article examines some of these materials and debates as a window into the construction of ‘homosexuality’ and ‘the homosexual’ in mid‐twentieth century New Zealand. It is argued that ‘the homosexual’ as a category was not clearly demarcated during this period, and that ‘hetero…
Masculinities, Performativity, and Subversion: A Sociological Reappraisal
The study of masculinities has not escaped the influence of Judith Butler's writings on gender, performativity, and subversion. However, this article suggests that Butler's formulations of performativity and subversion express a lack of clarity and engender a number of problems with respect to agency, action, interaction, and social change. This article argues for reformulating performativity and subversion in a more explicitly sociological frame…
Sexology, the Homo/Hetero Binary, and the Complexities of Male Sexual History
This article re-evaluates the emphasis on the ‘homo/hetero binary’, which appears in many discussions of sexuality since the late 19th century, by exploring several key European sexological texts and their classifications of sexual desire between men. It suggests that these writers offered not so much a nascent binary between ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’ individuals, but a complex and contradictory set of sexual ontologies that encoded liminal…
A symbolic interactionist history of sexuality
Many historians of sexuality explore how sexual subjectivity has taken shape in recent centuries, while historical sociologists tend to focus upon the intimate and erotic aspects of emergent social institutions. Symbolic interactionist sociology can add a new dimension to the existing debates, shifting the primary focus from the history of sexuality to a theoretically informed analysis of sexuality in history. This essay applies symbolic interact…
The Sociological Construction of Gender and Sexuality
This essay considers how we might come to understand social constructionism sociologically. It examines a number of related approaches to gender and sexuality that speak to sociological concerns and might be termed social constructionist: historicism, symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology and materialist feminism. By recognising that social constructionism is multifarious rather than unified, we find that each social constructionist approach …
Sex education, homosexuality, and social contestation in 1970s New Zealand
This essay examines the relationships between homosexuality and sex education in New Zealand during the 1970s. It argues that reading sex education debates and resources provides a useful way of exploring connections between the ontologies and politics of sexuality at that time. In particular, the advent of social movements concerned with sexual issues marked a turning point in homosexuality's appearance within formal and informal modes of sex ed…
Sexuality and the Dimensions of Power
Sex, space and scripts: Negotiating Homoeroticism in History
There is now a rich literature on the ways sexuality is geographically situated, mediated and constituted. There is rather less on how sexual interactions are scripted within space and time. Drawing from symbolic interactionist literature on sexual scripts, this article investigates how some men negotiated sexual encounters in New Zealand during the nineteenth century, within particular spaces (streets, gardens, hotels and others) and in relation…
Visualizing Homoeroticism: The Photographs of Robert Gant, 1887-1892
How did 19th-century men understand and represent their same-sex desires in a time and place where homosexuality was publicly unnamable? In partial answer to this question, this article focuses on two photograph albums assembled by Robert Gant in New Zealand during the 1880s. It explores the themes implicit in these albums, and suggests that men like Gant could piece together homoerotic subjectivities by creating and collating visual materials. G…
Waiting for Uncle Ben”: Age-Structured Homosexuality in New Zealand, 1920-1950
Townsend met twelve-year-old David Potts in a public toilet in Christchurch, New Zealand. \nTownsend, a separated income tax clerk of forty-seven, recalled that Potts approached him, \nat which point Townsend asked “if he went with many men.” Potts volunteered that he met \nmen in the toilets on Monday nights. According to Townsend,“He said he was waiting for \n'Uncle Ben.'I said 'What is Uncle Ben going to do?'He replied 'What the other men do.'…
Sexuality, power and the sociology of the internet
The internet is an increasingly important enabler and mediator of sexual relations in society. It has begun to transform older modes of knowing, experiencing and organizing sexuality. In light of an emerging social science literature, this article considers internet-mediated sexuality and its consequences for theorizing power. It looks at three ideal-typical strands of power in relation to sexuality: the constitutive, the regulatory and the unequ…
Nature's good for you: Sir Truby King, Seacliff Asylum, and the greening of health care in New Zealand, 1889–1922
Affect and the history of masculinities
Purpose – Many scholarly disciplines are currently engaged in a turn to affect, paying close attention to emotion, feeling and sensation. The purpose of this paper is to locate affect in relation to masculinity, time and space. Design/methodology/approach – It suggests that historically, in a range of settings, men have been connected to one another and to women, and these affective linkages tells much about the relational quality and texture of …
Young People and the Shaping of Public Space in Melbourne, 1870–1914
Young People and the Shaping of Public Space in Melbourne, 1870–1914." Social History, 39(4), pp. 591–592
Sensation and the Making of New Zealand Adolescence
Many historians associate adolescent pleasures and subcultures with the mid-twentieth century. Sensations and their personifications, this article suggests, also formed a focus for commentary and experience during the second half of the nineteenth century and the years leading up to the First World War. There was a noisy public discussion around adolescence in New Zealand in which notions of sensation and pleasure played a key role. In scrutinizi…
Histories of Adolescence and Affect: Setting an Agenda
What did adolescence feel like in the past? This article explores the historical relationships between adolescence and affect – feeling, emotion and lived intensities – in order to explore this question. Drawing from a range of examples, it argues for a systematic consideration of the relationships between lived experience and broad historical shifts, in order to ascertain the ways individual affective lives have been shaped by changes in work, f…
Networks of affect, male homoeroticism and the Second World War: A Soldier's Archive
While geographies of affect are increasingly influential and geographies of sexuality well established, there is considerable potential for enhancing links between these subfields. This article explores the archive of a gay World War II veteran, revealing the intricacies of an intense same-sex wartime affair in New Caledonia and introducing the concept of ‘networks of affect’: the interconnected pathways through space and time that provide condui…
Transport cultures and young people's histories in New Zealand, 1880–1950
Queer trans-Tasman mobility, then and now
This article situates queer mobility within wider historical geographies of trans-Tasman flows of goods, people and ideas. Using case studies of women’s and men’s experiences during the early twentieth century and the twenty-first century, it shows that same-sex desire is a constituent part of these flows. Conversely, antipodean mobility has fostered particular forms of desire, sexual identity, queer community and politics. Rural and urban landsc…
The Dialectics of Motherhood in 1950s New Zealand
While numerous historians have questioned the assumption that the 1950s were wholly conservative in terms of gender politics, few have systematically explored the nuances of debates over motherhood in particular. This article asks how depictions of motherhood in two popular New Zealand magazines reflected multiple voices that spoke of the complexities of mothers’ experiences and broader ideologies of motherhood during this era. It develops the co…
Sociology (32 works) · Gender Studies (29 works) · Gender Studies (21 works) · Human sexuality (15 works) · Political science (15 works) · Law (13 works) · Psychology (12 works) · Politics (11 works) · History (10 works) · Aesthetics (9 works)