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Contents Issue 38, April 2006
Editor: Elizabeth McMahon
Guest Editor: Guy Davidson
This issue presents a forum on Australian Social Attitudes: The First Report, a publication that presents the expressed opinions of 4300 Australian adults on a range of issues from family, work, politics, identity and nation, economics and globalization, media, and crime.
Megan Alessandrini assesses the Report’s findings on Australians attitudes to voluntary organizations and political participation, and to the so-called crisis of trust;
John Frow looks at two of the Report’s findings: attitudes to economic reform and to globalization;
Paul James focuses on issues of globalization, national identity, immigration and lifestyle consumption;
Catharine Lumby considers the data presented on attitudes to mass media and media power in Australia;
Elspeth Probyn looks at the attitudes around the Australian family, and at questions of trust in Australia .
Please feel free to contribute to this discussion.
We also present a collection of essays, themed as “Sexual Revolutions”, comprising innovative thinkers addressing topics of sexuality and representation: These include:
An Introduction by Guy Davidson
“Post-Gay in the USA“, a review essay by Robert Reynolds that looks at The End of Gay (and the death of heterosexuality) by Bert Archer; Homocons: The Rise of the Gay Right by Richard Goldstein, and Steven Seidman’s Beyond the Closet: The Transformation of Gay and Lesbian Life.
Monique Rooney’s essay “Networking In Fortress Los Angeles: Sexuality, Race And The Postmodern Metropolis In The L Word” reads the televisual lesbian as personifying the postmodern landscape she inhabits.
In his essay “Intrusion, or Where to from Queer?” Murray Pratt takes a moment to ponder whether a queer world would be more like the gay world or the straight world…
In “Making Queer for the United States of Empire” Paul Allatson identifies the ways ‘queer’ is deployed to strengthen the connection between compulsory heterosexuality and
compulsory consumerism.
The Eco Humanities
Place, presence, and philosophy underpin the Ecological Humanities offerings in this issue. Adrian Franklin writes about wilderness, while Sarah Bell and Michael Moller write about drought on farms. The two essays thus bring different types of landscape imagination into analytic focus, inviting us to consider the ‘how’ as well as the ‘why’ of our more contentious engagements with place. Kate Rigby‘s review essay “Minding (about) Matter: On the Eros and Anguish of Earthly Encounter” engages with Freya Mathews’ two recent titles: For Love of Matter: A Contemporary Panpsychism and Reinhabiting Reality: Towards a Recovery of Culture