AustLit

'The 2017 marriage equality referendum was conservative in reach—refuting the entrenched marginalisation of queer existence, a challenge to conflations of happiness (in fact, the ultimate “happily ever after”—marriage) and heteronormativity. The marriage equality debate was an ugly realisation of those discourses of exclusion and prejudice implicated in many Western values, and in Australian national identity broadly. In thinking through these issues, I return to Christos Tsiolkas’s novel Loaded (1995) for its queering of “happily ever after” myths via film referents. Ari’s paradoxical relationship to romantic tenderness is evident in his frequent first-person allusions to various films. A close reading of Loaded and the film’s allusions expose both the operation of exclusion and an individual’s response to that exclusion prior to marriage equality. Loaded invites reflection on these complexities in a call for the universal right to romantic happiness through its deployment of filmic tropes.' (Publication abstract)

'Christos Tsiolkas has occupied an increasingly central position in the contemporary Australian literary and cultural imagination. Starting with his novel Loaded (1995), Tsiolkas’s fiction engages with subject matter that speaks to his personal experience as both a gay man of Greek heritage and a writer concerned with larger social and political issues affecting a multicultural Australia. Examples of recurring themes in Tsiolkas’s fiction include the irreconcilability of Greek and Australian identity, racial and class intolerance, emergent sexual consciousness, and the conflict between familial obligation and individual expression. In contrast to these arguably “reader-friendly” themes—that is, themes that are accessible to a wide and non-specialist audience—Tsiolkas’s early novels (Loaded; The Jesus Man, 1999; and Dead Europe, 2005) possess a subversive edge in how they explore obscenity and social transgression. However, the publication of Tsiolkas’s fourth novel, The Slap (2008), signalled a new phase in his career, in which the formal rawness of his prose and his uncompromising representation of extreme corporeal states gave way to a simplicity in his written expression that mirrored the growing topicality of his subject matter. This change in purpose mirrors the shift in both the reception of Tsiolkas the writer and of his fiction. Prior to The Slap, Tsiolkas was viewed as a “cult figure” who, though of some critical interest, neither captivated the attention of a mainstream audience nor was celebrated by the literary establishment as an “Australian” writer whose fiction reflected purportedly national interests. However, the critical and commercial success of The Slap has ensured that both Tsiolkas and his subsequent fiction have been (re)cast as pivotal sites of commentary on contemporary Australian class and racial politics. Put another way, Tsiolkas’s “increasing visibility … as a public intellectual, if not a literary celebrity”, has resulted in changes to the form, language and subject matter of his novels, and also the ways critics receive and understand his career.' (Publication abstract)