Coming to terms: Race, class and intimacy in Australian public culture

Abstract

In queer theory ‘heteronormativity’ has become a central tool for understanding the social conditions of our sexual and intimate lives. The term is most often used to shed light on how those lives are patterned in a way that shapes and privileges binary genders and heterosexual identities, lifestyles and practices. Frequently, however, ‘heteronormativity’ is stretched beyond its capacity when called upon to explain other normative patterns of intimacy. Drawing on Cathy Cohen’s (1997) ground breaking essay ‘Punks, bulldaggers and welfare queens: The radical potential of queer?’, this article argues that analysing the political landscape of our intimate lives in terms of heteronormativity alone fails to adequately account for the way some familial and sexual cultures are stigmatised along class and race lines. This article gestures towards examples of those whose intimacies are unquestionably marginalised and yet non-queer, or at least not-necessarily-queer, placing Cohen’s ‘welfare queens’ alongside examples from contemporary Australia public culture to argue for the critical efficacy of the concept ‘mononormativity’ for intersectional analysis.