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Introduction
I am currently Associate Professor Gender and Sexuality at Western Sydney University, specialising in gender and sexual diversities, social and political theory, queer theory and feminisms, and most recently critical whiteness. My first book, Queer Post-Gender Ethics, was published in 2014 by Palgrave McMillan. My second book, The Persistence of Global Masculinisms, co-authored with Chris Agius, came out in 2018. My PhD was awarded at University of Edinburgh where I worked before moving to University of Portsmouth and then to Australia, and I was awarded an Australian Office of Learning and Teaching Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning in 2015.
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March 2012 - present
Publications
Publications (68)
Pornography scholarship is often dominated by discourses surrounding its alleged risks to viewers. Approaching sex and porn through the lens of ‘play’ rather than ‘drama’, this article concentrates on the everyday particularity of porn viewing, where media-related practices/technologies afford possibilities between porn users and digital objects. D...
There is now an expansive literature on the manosphere – the loosely connected groups of digital communities that revolve around men’s rights, aspirations and entitlements, and the perceived constraints upon these. Such studies have produced important critical insights into the collective and organized dimension of the networked harassment of women...
Aggregate porn sites remain one of the most popular methods to view porn today. Despite this, aggregate sites are subjected to considerable controversy because they rely on user-uploaded material that can be poorly moderated. As pornographic content becomes more expansive and varied, aggregate sites host an enormous panoply of pornographic content...
Non‐binary and genderqueer identities are increasingly discussed in public discourse and academia, but there remains a dearth of academic literature centred on non‐binary people's lives and experiences. When non‐binary people are included in research, it is frequently as an additive to explorations of trans identities and subsumed under the trans u...
This paper charts how, in interviewing across generations of assigned female at birth (AFAB) queers in ‘Australia’ about their experiences of lateral violence in LGBTQ+ communities, we found dominant narratives of joy, solidarity and empathy across differences, generations and intersections that demonstrate the ongoing world-making inherent to quee...
Quitar, trascender o anular o hacer ausente el sexo/género como elemento central de la individualidad es un objetivo que rara vez se persigue en la teoría o en el activismo relacionado con la deconstrucción del sexo/género. Incluso en la teoría queer y transgénero que imagina modelos o paisajes alternativos de identidad o del yo, el sexo/género gen...
Many Global North contexts are experiencing conflict in feminist discourses between supporters of trans and gender diverse self-identification and self-proclaimed ‘gender critical’ feminists who consider this to undermine feminist goals. We argue that the channelling of contemporary feminist discourse into defensive and oppositional channels has fo...
Violence and microaggressions against the LGBTQ+ community from those outside of the community is commonly known and understood within academic literature. However, there is limited comprehensive knowledge about violence and microaggressions that occur within LGBTQ+ communities. This scoping review helps to fill this gap in knowledge, analyzing and...
Workplaces are increasingly looking to expand their equity and diversity work to understand how to address
aspects of identity that intersect with gender or sexuality, and with genders and sexualities beyond binary
(M/F) understandings. There are solid business and moral cases that can be made for this expansion. The
Sexualities and Genders Researc...
Due to an overwhelming focus on Islamist extremism, western strategies to Counter or Prevent Violent Extremism (C/PVE) have largely neglected the growing far-right threat. In this article, we draw attention to the gender blind spot in C/PVE strategies by arguing that misogyny and masculinism go beyond ‘anti-women’ sentiment and align with the far-r...
This research explored WSU cisgender staff understandings of trans and gender
diversity (TGD), school-based support for TGD students and staff, and University
policy on TGD. A key aim was to identify the needs of staff in regard to working more
effectively with TGD students and staff in order to develop more inclusive policies
and practices and to...
Bent Street 5.1 – Soft Borders, Hard Edges, a special edition focusing on the trans and gender diverse community is now available.
Edited by Sam Elkin, Yves Rees and Tiffany Jones, this special midyear 2021 edition includes contributions by: Bron Richardson, Jordie Slonim, Jamie James, Kait Fenwick, Sav Zwickl, Damien W. Riggs, Carla A. Pfeffer,...
Sport settings have long been documented as exclusionary environments for sexuality and gender diverse (SAGD) people and a key location of discrimination. Sport is associated with well-being, and increasing physical activity for disadvantaged groups is a key aim for many governments. This study reports on 13 semi-structured interviews with young SA...
This article returns to Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophical oeuvre in order to offer a way of thinking beyond contemporary feminist divisions created by ‘gender critical’ or trans-exclusionary feminists. The ‘gender critical’ feminist position returns to sex essentialism to argue for ‘abolishing’ gender, while opponents often appeal to proliferated...
The argument of this paper is that, despite their limits, gender ‘proliferations’ like nonbinary
and genderqueer are the most effective and pragmatic approaches to overcoming or dismantling the gender binary whilst also expanding the range of ‘cultural resources’ of gender in the meantime. We make this case with the political and ethical caveat, ho...
Although vasectomy is a safe and highly effective method of contraception, uptake is variable globally, with scope for increased engagement in high income nations. Very little qualitative research has been published in recent years to explore men’s perspectives on vasectomy, which represents a key opportunity to better understand and strengthen men...
This pilot study, conducted with same-sex attracted and gender diverse young people (SSAGD) aged 12-24 in NSW was conducted in order to contribute to positively addressing the increased inclusion of SSAGD young people in sport and physical activities.
The argument of this paper is that, despite their limits, gender 'proliferations' like non-binary and genderqueer are the most effective and pragmatic approaches to overcoming or dismantling the gender binary whilst also expanding the range of 'cultural resources' of gender in the meantime. We make this case with the political and ethical caveat, h...
Using content and discourse analysis this paper will analyse media reporting in three Australian incidents of backlash against speech acts by activists or commentators who spoke against dominant ideas of Australian-ness. These are Roz Ward (founder of Safe Schools Coalition) and her labelling of the Australian flag as racist, Yassmin Abdel-Magied a...
This article analyzes backlashes to queer and Indigenous diversity-affirmative practices in Australia that entail perceived loss of dominance by the majority culture. The case studies outlined here demonstrate how whiteness, nationhood, and (gendered) heterosexuality are playing out in parallel ways through populist backlashes that have the purpose...
Despite explicit focus on addressing gender inequality in educational settings in Australia, without challenging gender binarism, inequality will persist. This article demonstrates the everyday and implicit means through which hierarchical gender binaries continue to be perpetuated. Observational fieldwork undertaken in three Australian early child...
In 2016 the world witnessed a consolidation of a western brand of political 'populist authoritarianism' that is anti-globalisationalist and creates 'shared objects of loathing' in the popular imagination. This article engages with the implications of this affective and masculinist 'post-truth' era for higher education and analyses the narratives of...
Background: Alongside the growth in visibility of gender identities and presentations such as genderqueer, non-binary and gender neutral, there is ridicule and backlash in wider culture, as well as more subtle invisibility and misgendering. While there exists social psychology research about negative and positive attitudes to trans people, this is...
The contact hypothesis has been the go-to social psychology concept for promoting better relations between unequal social groups since its inception in the context of ‘racial’ de-segregation in the USA. The idea that contact between groups reduces prejudice has been applied to a range of dominant / subordinate social groups such as ethnic groups, h...
Identity is often regarded as something that is possessed by individuals, states, and other agents. In this edited collection, identity is explored across a range of approaches and under-explored case studies with a view to making visible its fractured, contingent, and dynamic features. The book brings together themes of belonging and exclusion, id...
Drone warfare has been the subject of intense debate and scholarly attention in recent years, with a clear focus on killing from a distance, the subjectivity of the drone operator and the impact of this form of warfare on militaries and soldiers. Few studies, however, have treated drone warfare to a gendered analysis. This chapter aims to explore d...
This chapter shows how masculinist logics play out in contemporary antifeminist, father’s rights and men’s rights backlashes, in alt-right discourse and broader anti diversity and anti-‘political correctness’ in both overt and increasingly subtle ways. These contemporary backlashes naturalise essentialised gender hierarchies and their intersection...
This chapter demonstrates how masculinism continues to haunt many attempts to account for or challenge gender-based violence or violence against women. While worthwhile and marking progress, approaches that target men for primary prevention still risk negating structural gendered elements that underpin the phenomenon and re-individualising solution...
The conclusion draws together the key themes covered in the book, highlighting key aspects of masculinism. It summaries the case study chapters and indicates how masculinism works across the various cases investigated. Finally, it points to some ways in which to conceptualise alternatives to masculinist framings and logics.
In this chapter, the move towards humanitarian intervention and the rise of human rights discourse is examined in terms of the politics of protection and international ordering. Since the end of the Cold War, human rights and human security has become a central focus of the international security agenda. Intervening to defend and protect human righ...
‘Surrounded as we are by a masculinized populism that continues to enable insecurity, violence, and oppression, this book demonstrates the depth and breadth of the lineages that facilitate these masculinist practices.’
- Brent J. Steele, University of Utah, USA
‘This book shows how reactionary movements systematically mobilize masculine resentment...
This article offers an overview of the motivations and contexts for my wider work in post-gender ethics (Nicholas 2014 forthcoming). This considers whether gender and sexual difference itself can be eradicated, and what kind of positive mode of understanding oneself and others, and thus of conducting oneself and being sexual, could replace them. Th...
Can society operate without gender and even biological sex classifications? Queer Post-Gender Ethics argues that we could exist, formulate our relationships and be sexual in more androgynous ways. Outlining a political vision for how a post-gender sociality might be achieved, it presents queer social practices for a truly gender neutral world.
What can the historical persistence of gender tell us about possibilities for future selfhood not defined by gender? Is a more purposive way of being possible that is not reliant on the restrictions of binary sex/gender and if so, how? This paper continues work that proposes that a particular dominant mode of thought (or ethos) about the self and o...
This paper will outline how queer theory can inform academic literacies (AL) practice concerned with negotiating the inside/outside status of widening participation cohorts in university. In particular, it will consider the usefulness of some queer theory strategies for enabling non-traditional students without uncritically assimilating them in to...
This chapter will illustrate how resilient and compulsory dualistic gender is and how much it continues to be conceptually tied to and co-constitutive with notions of material sexual difference. I will present empirical examples of the personal and social difficulty of trans and intersex selfhood and how they offer evidence for the notion of bigend...
In proposing the eradication of gendered identity as I have thus far, there is a danger that, in challenging identity politics, one may inadvertently play into the conservative and negating impulses that many claims for recognition premised on foundational identity seek to challenge. This presents the ethical and political challenge ‘to deal with m...
Chapter 2 argued that one of the key explanations of the resilience of gender and the endurance of its hierarchical binarism is the assumption and construction of oppositional sexual difference. After proposing that bodies and subjectivity need not be framed and constituted in this way, I went on to propose that, owing to the way that sex/gender is...
Here I mean to consider how the ethical ideal that I broadly outlined in the previous chapter may be applied. It is a central tenet of deconstruction that all ‘saying’ (the context) must be done within the language of the ‘Said’ (which must, to an extent, assume universal meaning and understanding). In this respect, Critchley suggests that for phil...
The final part of this book aims to take on board and operationalise all of the precepts of the book thus far: that the attribution of sex/gender is restricting of freedom; that the self comes to be in relations with others and in social context; that there is the potential that this becoming could be more enabling; and that a collective enabling m...
In Chapter 3 I outlined the limits to the dominant, liberal ethico-political paradigm. Its formulations of the nature of being, and its congruent solutions for the problems of sex/gender are insufficient for analysing the realities of sex/gender and for overcoming its effects. This chapter seeks a more effective ‘ontological ethical’ (Stanley 1996)...
I have proposed in this book that radical deconstructions of biological sex and gender can be applied to reconstructive ethics to underpin a queer, post-gender ethics. This extends the project undertaken by queer theorists and gender-deconstructive theorists, and explicates the implications of these ideas for social change, towards a more inclusive...
In Chapter 1, I presented the problem that has inspired this book, that of the persistence of compulsory, oppositional gender. In this chapter I will offer an account of the ontology of gender that explains this persistence even in the face of significant attempts to challenge it. This ‘explanatory-diagnostic analysis’ (Benhabib 1985: 405), that is...
The previous chapter discussed some key sites for intervention that might foster individual subjects capable of perceiving themselves, and approaching the world with an androgynous ethos, and with a reciprocal code of conduct (ethics) — that is, subjects capable of resisting gendered subjectivation. In previous chapters I have outlined how greatly...
This paper is concerned with the gender politics of the contemporary international anarchist punk scene which seemingly extends the punk 'DIY' ethic to gender. This extension results in politics that seek to deconstruct gender as a site of authority and reconstruct it in autonomous non-hierarchical terms. Contemporary anarcho-punk and hardcore poli...
“Power often comes in deceptive packages” (Myers, 2002) Hello Kitty is the ultimate icon of Japanese cuteness. She/it is simply the image of a cat with black eyes, a button nose and no mouth wearing a pink bow on her head. A product without context, Hello Kitty is a blank signifier with the potential to be loaded with codes and meanings as diverse...
