Kerryn Drysdale

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• PhD
• Senior Research Fellow at UNSW Sydney

https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030157760#aboutBook This book takes the globally recognised phenomenon of drag king performances as an opportunity for critical inquiry into the rise and fall of an urban scene for lesbian and queer women in Sydney, Australia (circa 1999-2012). Exploring how a series of weekly events provided the site for intim...

For over a decade, attending events featuring drag king performances-a subcultural phenomenon where women consciously perform masculinity-proved a popular pastime in Sydney, Australia. Established within a broader tradition of live performance culture but also part of a wider urban night-time economy catering to lesbian patrons, Sydney's drag king...

Much research concerning drug use in the context of sexual activity among gay and bisexual men derives from public health scholarship. In this paper, we critically examine how the relationship between methamphetamine use and sexual risk practice is treated and understood in this body of research. While public health has made important contributions...

Sensory ethnography is a methodological approach to utilizing the senses as both an object for analysis and the mode by which research can be conducted. This entry provides an account of sensory ethnography that positions it broadly within the field of qualitative research, locating it as an approach that intersects with a variety of interrelated m...

Going to drag king performances – a subcultural phenomenon where women consciously perform masculinity – has proved a popular pastime in Sydney, Australia. Established within a broader tradition of live performance culture, and part of wider urban night-time economies catering to lesbian patronage, these shows provided a highly visible spectacle th...

Health equity is a fundamental concern within the broader health promotion aim of creating equal opportunities for health and bringing health differentials down to the lowest level possible. Cervical screening is just one example of a preventative health program where a health promotion lens is required to address entrenched health inequities. We d...

This report presents the findings from a research project on current LGBTQ+ inclusion in cancer clinical trials in NSW and recommendations on initiatives to increase LGBTQ+ participation in these trials. The project is part of the NSW LGBTIQ+ Health Strategy and the ongoing partnership, between ACON and Cancer Institute NSW. The project centres on...

Revising public health policy based on new data does not happen automatically. This is acutely relevant to the now undeniable evidence that many diseases develop differently between the sexes and may also be affected by gender. Current health and medical practices across the globe generally fail to cater for sex and gender effects in common disease...

Background There exist multiple regulatory layers for point-of-care (POC) testing to be implemented within Australia. This qualitative analysis sought to understand the pre-market barriers and facilitators to scale-up infectious diseases POC testing in primary care settings at the national level. Methods Key informant interviews were undertaken wi...

Language is important in health policy development. Policy changes in Australia to increase cervical screening offers a timely case example to explore the function of inclusive language in health policy. Gender and sexuality diverse people with a cervix have been largely invisible within health promotion programs, which has led to reduced awareness...

Sociological scholarship has begun to explore imaginaries of family and reproduction, yet less work has focused on the emerging social form of the donor family. In this article, we consider the embodied sociotechnical imaginaries of donor-conceived people, exploring their reflections, judgements, hopes, and predictions regarding donor conception. C...

The value of place‐based initiatives in the design and delivery of human services has long been recognised, but the need for hybrid service delivery to clients—that is any combination of online and in‐person modalities—has become more apparent in the wake of the COVID‐19 pandemic. At face value, there may be a perceived contradiction between the re...

This research briefing paper presents preliminary findings from the ‘Diverse Experiences and Understandings of Immunity in the Pandemic Age’ project, conducted in 2022-2023. The aim of this research was to identify how Australians from specific at-risk social and community groups experience and understand the relationship between immunity and good...

Participant recruitment for qualitative research often offers incentives (honoraria; financial compensation) to increase participation and to recognise lived expertise and time involved in research. While not necessarily a new concern for survey and other quantitative based research, ‘spam', ‘bot', and other inauthentic forms of research participat...

Introduction: Opioid agonist treatment (OAT) is associated with a reduced likelihood of hepatitis C incidence, nonfatal overdose, and (re)incarceration among people who inject drugs (PWID), yet factors underpinning decisions to access OAT in prison and postrelease are not well understood. The aim of the qualitative study was to explore the perspec...

Background: Compounding histories of injecting drug use and incarceration can marginalise people engaging with services, making it difficult for them to address their health and social welfare needs, particularly when they navigate community re-entry service supports. Drawing on Hall and colleagues' five components of trust, this paper seeks to un...

In Australia, the response to HIV, hepatitis C and hepatitis B has largely been through the constructed category of ‘blood borne viruses’ which treats these viruses as an interconnected set of conditions with respect to their mode of transmission. In this paper, we explore how people understand their viral infection, and compare the logics underpin...

Ageing with a chronic hepatitis B (HBV) or hepatitis C (HCV) infection is an emerging public health priority. For people living with chronic viral hepatitis, their disease progression into old age is both underpinned by their existing blood borne virus and the potential emergence of other infectious and non-infectious conditions. These twinned path...

Following calls to engage more directly with the materiality of sex in geographies of sexualities, we draw on our overlapping research to explore how sexual desire and social intimacy were entangled in the emergence and consolidation of lesbians’ and queer women’s social spaces from the 1980s onwards in Sydney, Australia. Though largely applied in...

In recognition of the broader relational aspects of viral infections, family support is considered important when someone is diagnosed with a blood-borne virus (BBV), such as HIV, hepatitis C (HCV) and hepatitis B (HBV). However, families’ own support needs are often not a priority in service provision within the BBV sector. In this article, we dra...

Relationship agreements are important for HIV prevention among gay and bisexual men (GBM) in relationships, with research earlier in the HIV epidemic often finding that agreements specified monogamy or condom use with casual partners. There is evidence that HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) has shifted sexual practices among some men in relations...

A virus has a social history. In the case of the hepatitis C virus (HCV) and HIV, this history is one involving stigma and discrimination, advocacy and activism, and recent dramatic improvements in treatment. These social histories influence the experience of people who live with the viruses, and those who work with them. One aspect of this is the...

The digital age is characterised by unprecedented access to technologies to understand our bodies, genetics and family histories. The last decade has seen a growing uptake of direct-to-consumer DNA testing, which is (re)shaping individuals’ identity narratives. Drawing on data from a national online survey with Australian donor-conceived people (N...

Background People who inject drugs (PWID) are overrepresented among prisoner populations worldwide. This qualitative study used the psychological concept of “ego-depletion” as an exploratory framework to better understand the disproportionate rates of reincarceration among people with injecting drug use histories. The aim was to illuminate mechanis...

Memes are a key feature of participatory digital cultures and have been found to play an important role in collective identity formation. Limited scholarship has explored the role of memes within closed communities, where perceived privacy and trust may impact the ways users demarcate the in-group (us) and out-group (them) through humor. This artic...

Trans and gender diverse people are globally recognised as being under-served in clinical services, with significant implications for their health. During a national reorientation of the Australian cervical screening programme – from Papanicolaou smears to human papillomavirus screening – we conducted interviews with 12 key informants in cancer pol...

Introduction Access to services is key to successful community (re-)integration following release from prison. But many people experience disengagement from services, including people who inject drugs (PWID). We use a case study approach and the notion of structural competency to examine influences on access to services among a group of PWID recent...

This paper explores the perceptions of 35 key informants (KIs) in a range of relevant health and community sectors regarding the stigmatisation of GBM's crystal methamphetamine use and sexual practice with view to informing stigma reduction efforts. A modified social ecological model was used to guide analysis and interpretation. At the individual...

Contemporary sociological work has emphasised that family is not static, but actively shaped by ideas of who and what makes family. Disclosure of an illness, including diagnosis of stigmatised infections such as HIV, hepatitis B virus and hepatitis C virus, can change the dynamics of family relationships. This paper draws on 61 qualitative semi‐str...

The term ‘chemsex’ references an identifiable set of circumstances and behaviours ascribed to gay male culture at the same time as operating as a politically salient category capable of spurring policy and programmatic responses. Increasingly, the word ‘scene’ is used in association with ‘chemsex’ in media reporting, expert commentary and research...

Crystal methamphetamine (hereafter crystal) is associated with deleterious health outcomes, such as drug dependence and physical and mental health disorders. While some harms from crystal use can affect all users, there may be additional risks for people who combine the use of drug with sex. Compared with the broader population, gay and bisexual me...

Although some people within LGBTQ communities are at risk of developing some cancers at higher rates than non‐LGBTQ people, there is limited evidence of the outcomes of targeted cancer prevention and screening interventions for these communities. This scoping review examined key findings regarding the feasibility, acceptability and efficacy of eval...

The clinical management of blood borne viruses has changed rapidly in recent years. Yet social stigma remains a persistent issue. Families which include people with mixed viral status (also known as ‘serodiscordance’) play a critical role in supporting those who have been diagnosed with HIV, hepatitis B and/or hepatitis C. However, little is known...

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Using repeated, cross-sectional behavioural surveillance data from Australia, we assessed trends in relationship agreements and casual sex among HIV-negative and untested gay and bisexual men who had regular partners during 2013–2018. We conducted three analyses: (i) trends in relationship agreements and casual sex over time; (ii) bivariate compari...

The “my health, our family” research project was established to document stories of what serodiscordance (mixed infection status) means for Australian families affected by HIV, hepatitis B, and/or hepatitis C. A family mapping exercise was developed for the start of interviews as a way to conceptualize serodiscordance as a movement of “closeness” a...

n Australia, the crystalline form of methamphetamine (“crystal”) is a commonly used illicit substance associated with sexual activity among gay and bisexual men. Attention to psychoactive substance use among this population is the subject of increasing global concern regarding the intentional and simultaneous combination of sex and drugs, often ref...

Social Imaginaries extends the experience of a small world by investigating how Sydney’s social networks connected participants in an everyday way that simultaneously registered the drag king scene as a cultural phenomenon. This chapter puts forth the concept of Intimate Attunement to account for the charged singularities of desire that animated th...

What happens when scenes fade? This chapter looks back at the process by which Sydney’s drag king scene became intelligible at the moment of its decline. Utilising insights from Raymond William’s Structures of Feeling, the material provided by the study’s focus group participants is approached as part of a wider narrative process by which scenes ar...

This chapter moves to consider how the ordinary affects that characterize scene participation might simultaneously endure in cultural memory. Viewed from the moment of their decline, scenes anticipate their retrospective formation from their backwards-facing position. By examining a social moment that starts to feel historical, this chapter explore...

In emphasising affects, interactions and intimacies throughout, Intimate Investments in Drag King Cultures offers insight into the processes by which scenes are made to matter. The conclusion brings together those speculative moments that comprised the end of an era for Sydney’s local drag king culture, recognising that social worlds for lesbian an...

This second chapter introduces Sydney’s drag king scene as both a critical object and a case study into a social scene for lesbian and queer women during the first two decades of the 21st century. By animating the historical and contemporary dimensions of drag against the longer tradition of performing masculinity, this chapter documents some of th...

This chapter reveals a scene established by relations between people, places and practices. Using the concept described by one scene member of “participating without being directly involved”, this chapter offers a close examination of how everyday encounters coalesce around the spectacle of drag that forms the basis of a recognisable social scene....

This chapter introduces the conceptual and methodological framework through which to explore the tightly condensed world of lesbian social life. Advancing a position called Scene Thinking, this chapter reworks the concept of scene so it can be applied to describe the process by which the participatory nature of any cultural activity takes on social...

For over a decade, attending events featuring drag king performances—a subcultural phenomenon where women consciously perform masculinity—proved a popular pastime in Sydney, Australia. Established within a broader tradition of live performance culture but also part of a wider urban night-time economy catering to lesbian patrons, Sydney’s drag king...

Every Wednesday night is Dyke Night in the small cluster of suburbs collectively referred to as Newtown, approximately 5 kms from Sydney's centre. Dyke Night's popularity is evidenced by the groups of women seen weaving their way through the congested sidewalks that link the numerous venues temporarily catering to queer patronage. Drag king perform...