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“The Sex Thing Is Strange”: The Queerness of Barbara Hanrahan’s Fiction

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Claiming Space for Australian Women’s Writing

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Barbara Hanrahan (1939–1991) was born and raised in Adelaide, South Australia. She was an artist, printmaker and writer of fifteen works of fiction and auto/biography.

  2. 2.

    Candida Baker, Yacker 2: Australian Writers Talk About Their Work, (Sydney: Picador, 1987), 89.

  3. 3.

    Baker, ibid, 89.

  4. 4.

    Nikki Sullivan. A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory, (New York: New York University Press, 2003), vi.

  5. 5.

    Noreen Giffney and Myra Hird, eds. Queering the Non/Human, (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008), 4.

  6. 6.

    Barbara Hanrahan, Annie Magdalene, (London: Chatto & Windus, 1985), 87.

  7. 7.

    Carol Merli and Paul Salzman, “Barbara Hanrahan’s Annie Magdalene: The Inside Story,” Southerly 52:4 (1992): 108.

  8. 8.

    Hanrahan, Annie Magdalene, 100.

  9. 9.

    Hanrahan, ibid, 97.

  10. 10.

    Barbara Hanrahan, Michael and Me and the Sun, (St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 1992), 144–145.

  11. 11.

    Baker, 85.

  12. 12.

    Diana Brydon, “Barbara Hanrahan’s Fantastic Fiction,” Westerly 3 (1982): 41.

  13. 13.

    Arlene Sykes, “Barbara Hanrahan’s Novels,” Australian Literary Studies 11:1 (1983): 47.

  14. 14.

    Barbara Hanrahan, The Peach Groves, (St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 1979), 195.

  15. 15.

    Hanrahan, ibid, 29.

  16. 16.

    Hanrahan, ibid, 193.

  17. 17.

    Hanrahan, ibid, 21.

  18. 18.

    Hanrahan, ibid, 213.

  19. 19.

    Hanrahan, ibid, 44.

  20. 20.

    Barbara Hanrahan, Where the Queens All Strayed, (St Lucia, Qld: University Queensland Press, 1978), 21.

  21. 21.

    Hanrahan, ibid, 21.

  22. 22.

    Hanrahan, Where the Queens, 31.

  23. 23.

    Hanrahan, ibid, 25.

  24. 24.

    Pam Gilbert. Coming Out from Under: Contemporary Australian Women Writers, (London: Pandora Press, 1988), 66.

  25. 25.

    Julie Mott, “Interview with Barbara Hanrahan,” Australian Literary Studies 11:1 (1983): 40.

  26. 26.

    Hanrahan, Where the Queens, 64.

  27. 27.

    Hanrahan, ibid, 175.

  28. 28.

    See Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” Diacritics 16 (1987): 22–27.

  29. 29.

    Joan Kirkby, “Daisy Miller Down Under: The Old World/New World Paradigm in Barbara Hanrahan,” Kunapipi 8:3 (1986): 22.

  30. 30.

    Annamarie Jagose, Lesbian Utopics, (New York: Routledge, 1995), 3.

  31. 31.

    Barbara Hanrahan, The Frangipani Gardens, (St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 1980), 18.

  32. 32.

    Hanrahan, ibid, 17.

  33. 33.

    Hanrahan, ibid, 18.

  34. 34.

    See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, (Berkley: University of California P, 1990).

  35. 35.

    Hanrahan, Queens, 174.

  36. 36.

    Hanrahan, The Frangipani Gardens, 11.

  37. 37.

    Hanrahan, ibid, 11.

  38. 38.

    Hanrahan, ibid, 12.

  39. 39.

    See David Buchbinder, “Mateship, Gallipoli and the Eternal Masculine,” in Representation, Discourse and Desire: Contemporary Australian Culture and Critical Theory, ed. Patrick Fuery, (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1994), 115–37; Kosmas Tsokhas, Making a Nation State: Cultural Identity, Economic Nationalism and Sexuality in Australian History, (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001).

  40. 40.

    Hanrahan, The Frangipani Gardens, 22.

  41. 41.

    Hanrahan, ibid, 23.

  42. 42.

    Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn, “Introduction”, Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism, (London: Routledge, 1995), xi.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. La Trobe University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Damien Barlow

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  1. Damien Barlow
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Women and Gender Studies Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison , Madison, Wisconsin, USA

    Devaleena Das

  2. Department of English, Calcutta University , Kolkata, India

    Sanjukta Dasgupta

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Barlow, D. (2017). “The Sex Thing Is Strange”: The Queerness of Barbara Hanrahan’s Fiction. In: Das, D., Dasgupta, S. (eds) Claiming Space for Australian Women’s Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50400-1_13

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