“Australia has always been a queer sort of place full of big, butch, beefy bootmen, skipping kangaroos and blow flies. It still is…”
Gender Trouble Down Under takes up the “Oz bloke” hypermasculine, heterosexual fantasy and shows to what extent this sexual, gender and national stereotype is odd, partial and exclusionary, in a word, queer.
This re-reading of the Great Australian Legend demonstrates that Down Under is a paradise of perversion: buggury in the barracks between male convicts, cross-dressing bushrangers, bushmen as bent as a dog’s hind leg, randy jackeross ready for anything. And that is without counting the sportsmen in frocks, the queens in the desert, or Dame Edna Everage.
In Gender Trouble Down Under the Outback is outed.