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Issue Details: First known date: 2017... 2017 'The Sex Thing Is Strange' : The Queerness of Barbara Hanrahan’s Fiction
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'This chapter explores Barbara Hanrahan’s notion that sexuality “can manifest itself in all sorts of ways” disrupts the naturalised binary logic that governs cultural intelligibility about what constitutes “real” sex and what remains unimaginable and unspeakable. It also highlights a preoccupation in her writing with non-normative sexual desires and identities that is akin to the critical concerns of queer epistemologies. The chapter takes Hanrahan’s contestation of normative thinking about sexuality as a starting point to critically examine the queerness of her “fantastic novels”. By reading Hanrahan’s fiction queerly we are offered a valuable critique that challenges the normalising power of heterosexuality and its claims to be the only intelligible and “natural” way to organise desire.'

Source: Abstract.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Claiming Space for Australian Women's Writing Devaleena Das (editor), Sanjukta Dasgupta (editor), London : Palgrave Macmillan , 2017 13603502 2017 anthology criticism

    'This volume explores the subterfuges, strategies, and choices that Australian women writers have navigated in order to challenge patriarchal stereotypes and assert themselves as writers of substance. Contextualized within the pioneering efforts of white, Aboriginal, and immigrant Australian women in initiating an alternative literary tradition, the text captures a wide range of multiracial Australian women authors’ insightful reflections on crucial issues such as war and silent mourning, emergence of a Australian national heroine, racial purity and Aboriginal motherhood, communism and activism, feminist rivalry, sexual transgressions, autobiography and art of letter writing, city space and female subjectivity, lesbianism, gender implications of spatial categories, placement and displacement, dwelling and travel, location and dislocation and female body politics. Claiming Space for Australian Women’s Writing tracks Australian women authors’ varied journeys across cultural, political and racial borders in the canter of contemporary political discourse.'

    Source: Publisher's blurb.

    London : Palgrave Macmillan , 2017
    pg. 227-241
Last amended 8 Nov 2018 16:05:15
227-241 'The Sex Thing Is Strange' : The Queerness of Barbara Hanrahan’s Fictionsmall AustLit logo
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