Alice's Academy
Subverting Censorship through Heteroqueer: How to do Straight Queerly (and get away with it) in the Novels of Doug MacLeod
Kate McInally
Kate McInally currently works as a research fellow, and teaches children’s literature at Deakin University, Burwood, Australia. Her particular research interests are feminist, queer and Deleuzean theory, representations of girl-girl desire in young adult fiction, and multicultural children’s fiction.
Kate McInally approaches censorship from perspectives we often overlook in censorship discussions: self-censorship and the censorship of evasion. Using two novels by Australian author Doug MacLeod, McInally explores the subtle queering of heteronormative ideologies, the art of, perhaps, gently twisting depictions of sexualities and desires rather than overtly transgressing the expected norms. McInally commends MacLeod’s humorous and incisive questioning of those hetero-norms, yet questions some of his editorial decisions, wondering if he has stopped short of the story he really hoped to tell.
- Caroline Jones, editor Alice's Academy
There are no official classificatory categories in Australia for children’s fiction [1]. Unlike film, television shows, computer games, some magazines, music, art and mobile phone content, fiction is exempt from the category of ‘literature’ that is classified by the National Office of Film and Literature. This exemption potentially fosters an intellectual and artistic cultural climate that could open up the field of children’s literature, inviting representations of diverse and non-mainstream characters. Further, because of the (official) non-censorship of children’s books, opportunities for critique of dominant cultural ideologies could be vigorously taken up to destabilise the hierarchies of ‘normal’ that persist in so many discourses that surround notions of childhood itself. While there is some evidence of this subversive strategy in Australian children’s and young adult fiction (specifically, in the novels I will discuss in this paper), the field of children’s fiction is not as open or critical as one might expect. It follows that the absence of official censorship/classification of books for children obviously does not mean that censorship does not exist. Rather, censorship exists on multifarious levels and is, arguably, considerably more pervasive due to its often covert nature. Such censorship not only encompasses which books teachers and librarians choose to include in libraries and schools, but is also instigated at both ends of the publishing trade: which books get accepted in the first place, and which books are marketed to win prizes and consolidate the reputation of the author (and as such the publisher). Parents, often the purchasers of these books, censor their children’s reading material through selection, as do booksellers through the promotion of the ‘top 10’ (or 20 or 100) books for kids. After ‘editorial input’, which may see whole sections of a manuscript cut or re-written, authors themselves may censor their material, even if unconsciously, for very many reasons, not least the need to write novels that will sell.
This kind of non-institutionalised censorship does not merely target the topic of this paper; queer sexuality in fiction for children and young adults. However, whenever non-hetero sexuality is the topic of a children’s novel I suspect it undergoes particularly careful scrutiny before being awarded the label of a ‘good book’ for kids. And yet it is pertinent to question, both in a discussion of censorship and in an analysis of genre (in this case both ‘children’s fiction’ and ‘young adult novels’) that is characterised by its overwhelming preoccupation with ‘identity’, why there are so few books that deal with queerness. In author Justine Larbalestier’s list of young adult queer novels, she was able to source just twenty three that have been published in Australia in the last 20 years. This amounts to censorship by omission. If such constraints mean that queer books are not flourishing, then perhaps strategies are needed whereby queer representations can fly ‘under the radar’ so to speak, of the gate-keeping practices that characterise what is acceptable in children’s literature; strategies that, as queer theorist Eve Sedgwick puts so aptly, “smuggle queer representation in where it must be smuggled” (1994, 3).
It is not just that, as Sedgwick states, we actively try to not bring our kids up gay (pertinent here because children’s literature is now well recognised as a highly influential socialising agent in child development), it is more markedly that gayness and queerness are still recognised as the ‘other’ that should be scrutinised for its political correctness before it is deemed acceptable reading. Effectively, while there are still gay and lesbian books, these are arguably written for and consumed by a particular readership; in other words, do not have mainstream appeal, unless, like the seminal Peter, (Kate Walker’s 1991 novel that has been widely acclaimed by critics) they are instructional, didactic and moralistic.
I’m interested then, in the ‘smuggling in’ of queerness through the very thing that characterises queer, the refusal to define sexuality and desire, and the insistence on deconstructing hegemonically acceptable ways of performing gender. To do this, as comic Australian author Doug Macleod does, involves deploying dysfunctional, or at least problematic heterosexuality to promote and celebrate queerness. Further, his work employs a destabilising of both the hetero-ness, and the queer-ness of his characters. His fiction is then, in my view, founded on an original and intriguing strategy in terms of children’s literature, and also a strategy that subverts the unarticulated but still accepted censorship of queer books for kids. I term his strategy an engagement with ‘heteroqueer’.
I use the term ‘heteroqueer’ to describe the characters in Macleod’s novels, Tumble Turn (2003) and I’m Being Stalked by a Moon Shadow (2006) because his protagonists do not easily ‘fit’ either of the binary taxonomies of gay or straight: Dom in Tumble Turn is in love with Princess Diana, Isabella Rossellini, Eliza Flett (the American girl at school), and his teacher, Ms. Havercroft. His fantasies about boys are more akin to what psychologists would describe as a ‘normal’ phase in (hetero) development, rather than a defined sexual orientation. But the novel resists this developmental discourse (which is, in itself, censorship of the legitimacy of same-sex desire in adolescents), by refusing closure regarding Dom’s sexuality. In this way, his sexuality reflects the fundamental tenets of queer: that sexuality is never fixed but rather is fluid, and open to change. Likewise, Seth in Moonshadow, is in love with Miranda, but unlike Dom, never exhibits any same-sex desires. However, the novel establishes at the outset that sexuality cannot be easily pinned down to gender norms; Seth’s attraction to girls with big muscles, such as his first crush on Opal Honey (bronze medallist in the Ms. Olympia body-building competition) queers his hetero desire by establishing his attraction for the masculinity of such girls. Indeed, when Seth first meets Miranda, his eyes “kept straying” not to her breasts, but to her sweaty brown arms with “well-formed triceps” (36). While Seth’s desire cannot be read as gay, metaphorically Seth has accepted his desire for both masculinity and femininity, a desire that critiques sexuality based on the repudiation of one sex/gender in order to establish a sexual identity.
Tumble Turn discusses gayness overtly. The ‘smuggling in’ of queer works differently in this novel, though a refusal to define Dom, rather than simply using the gay character, Uncle Peri, as a positive representation of gay sexuality. The novel takes the epistolary form of a series of emails between twelve year old Dom and Peri. Peri is estranged from the family because Dom’s mother is homophobic and bitter that her brother had won the affections of the man they both desired. While the text sets Uncle Peri up as the wise mentor figure, helping Dom with the ‘dramas’ of adolescence (and is traditional in this sense), it also works as a critique of western homophobic culture that displays anxiety or even paranoia if homosexual men are in a position of direct influence over young boys. Dominic experiences a range of ‘normal’ problems about his adolescent sexuality, wondering if he is attracted to boys as well as girls. However, in having to cope with negative reactions from adult perceptions of Dom’s expressions of homosexual desire, Dom internalises the worry and becomes anxious about his sexuality. The novel details the repercussions of expressions of desire outside dominant terms, and chronicles the consequences for boys who do not (quite) fit the hegemonic mould. Thus, while Dom is not gay, he is not straight either. His sexuality is only defined by hetero adults who evince anxiety and paranoia about his difference.
A primary strategy for disrupting sexual norms in the text is the construction of dysfunctional hetero adults as a foil for assessing Dom’s normality/abnormality. His parents exhibit little respect for each other, and lack emotional attachment. Both parents display a fixation with dominant masculinity; his mother with Dom’s masculinity (and expectations of heterosexual normativity), in her insistence that Dom play sport and take an interest in ‘boy things’ like cars, and his father with his own aging masculinity; Archy begins a rigorous fitness regime and purchases a ‘gentleman’s hairpiece’. While his parents obsess over the ways to be and become masculine, for men and for boys respectively, Dom concurrently experiences fantasies involving both women (and girls) and men (and boys). While he becomes anxious about the normality of these fantasies (and as such, displays how a society’s dominant ideologies might become internalised by young people), the cause of Dom’s real confusion is not his sexual orientation, but the disturbing changes in the relationships he maintains with those he loves. Dom’s father begins an affair with his school teacher (who is also one of the objects of Dom’s desire) and Dom must remain silent about this infidelity; his best friend ‘pashes’ his ‘girlfriend’, Elisa, thus causing Dom to question their friendship; and his sister has her feminisation enforced by their parents (when she is introduced to netball and hair streaks), and this impinges on her close bonds with Dom and initiates a disconnection between them. Thus, rather than exclusively focusing on any problems Dom might experience about his own sexuality, the novel instead looks at the problems inherent in heterosexual relationships and dominant gendered behaviour. That is, it ‘smuggles in’ a positive view of queerness by comparison to straightness.
The reader, then, is positioned to accept that it is not Dom’s sexuality or desire that is problematic, even though the other adult characters see it as such, but instead, the categories that (mistakenly) identify it. In a series of misunderstandings Dom is deemed ‘gay’, a ‘transvestite’ and a ‘pervert’. By illustrating that these definitional categories have no relation to any truth, the text demonstrates how Dom is pathologised by institutionalised knowledges that, as Foucault (1978) has argued, work through and with operations of power to construct particular and limited ways to be (sexually) ‘normal’. Thus, there is no bringing queer into the mainstream here, because the mainstream is filled with neurotic, paranoid and solipsistic adults: not a new textual strategy in texts for young adults, but one that is not often used to infuse queerness in the genre.
The first occurrence that is misread by adults, thus initiating their suspicions about Dom’s sexuality is when he, Dale (his sister) and his best friend Crystal (and one might note the gender-swapping of names here, since Crystal’s ‘real’ name is Christopher) dress up as witches for Halloween. Their motivation for the activity is twofold. In keeping with the Americanism of the occasion Dom notes that participation might afford the three children “lollies and probably thousands of dollars from our neighbours” (27). As well, however, the trio have been reading a text “about witchcraft through the ages” where, in a scene from Macbeth, the witches are pictured with “beards and they look excellent” (27). Historically, the gender distinction, or masculine/feminine binary, clearly carries significantly different meanings, so that when Dom is categorised as a ‘transvestite’ by his mother and her friend, based on a specific misrecognition (in that they were unaware of the historic-literary context of his cross-dressing), traditional and contemporary meanings of sexuality are muddled to exemplify that naming never names an essence (hetero/gay), but is merely a historically and socially determined identification. In the case of the label ‘transvestite’, such taxonomies are imposed by others and are based on ignorance rather than knowledge.
In fact, this cross-dressing is an entirely hetero exercise, but when Dom and Crystal stick cushions down their dresses to form busts, they both get an enormous amount of pleasure from their actions. Laughing so much that they couldn’t speak, they “flopped onto the bed, howling and rolling around, kicking their legs in the air” (29). While there is no (overt) same-sex desire between them, they both take pleasure in subverting the continual pressure to act out dominant hetero-masculinity through feminising themselves and rolling around on the bed (together). We can only speculate whether, had this episode ended in some overtly physical/sexual encounter between the boys, it would have been deemed ‘acceptable’ reading material for ten to fourteen year olds. Such an action would not have been outside the possibilities of the plot, because Dom fantasises about Crystal in his underpants. Yet Macleod refuses the easy strategy of defining Dom’s desires and instead opts for an ambiguity that not only has much to say about the potential queerness of heterosexuality, but also what and how much can be said about boys acting out desires with each other.
However, as Dom realises “…all actions have consequences” (132) and the consequences of this mistake provoke intense anxiety in Dom’s mother, Odette, over his sexuality:
Mum: It doesn’t seem a healthy way to behave.
Dad: What?
Mum: Boys wearing dresses.
Dad: I don’t want to discuss it any more.
Mum: Dotty [Crystal’s mother and mum’s friend/neighbour] thinks Dom is a transvestite” (30, italics mine).
The knowledge of what is ‘healthy’ is foundational to Mum’s misjudgement of Dom, but as this episode illustrates, knowledge is both hegemonic and fundamentally flawed. Sedgwick points to such flaws in western knowledge that structure ‘healthy’ sexuality and desire in binarised terms. She argues the structuring categories (homo/hetero) contain inherent contradictions, and while foundational to multiple other discourses, are, in themselves, a historical construction not containing any ‘truth’ about sexuality (1990, 1). Like the characters in Tumble Turn, people who identify as heterosexual (or gay, or bi or trans), she argues, are so variant in what, how and why they desire and experience pleasure, the categories are exposed as essentially unstable, because, simply, “people are different from each other” (1990, 81). Furthermore, Sedgwick argues that the almost limitless differences within any one category have “the unaccounted for potential to disrupt many forms of the available thinking about sexuality” (1990, 82). MacLeod’s novels essentially exemplify this view. Without defining his young characters as gay, the desires they experience cross sexual boundaries. Unlike novels such as Peter, in which the protagonist is fraught with fear and anxiety over his possible gayness, transgression here is depicted as lots of fun.
The text uses Crystal, who embodies the most hegemonic masculinity in the text, to further illustrate that there is no clear relationship between desire and sexual taxonomies, ‘smuggling in’ a queerness that destabilises the character’s overt heterosexuality. Crystal is obviously ‘hetero’, as evident in his ‘pash’ with Elisa, and his bourgeoning sexual attraction to Dom’s sister, Dale, but he also experiences great pleasure from poems written, and delivered at a school visit, by a young, good-looking, charming author who writes about a giant bum/butt that crushes a house (112). This intertextual reference to Andy Griffith’s The Day My Bum Went Psycho (2001), attests to some of the differences within categories (adolescent, heterosexual) that render them contradictory: keeping in mind that children (and particularly pre/adolescents) are sexual beings, it is pertinent to note that Crystal is deriving pleasure from the representation of another boy’s bottom; a great deal of pleasure, according to Dom: “But Crystal still laughed and laughed. I pretended to as well” (113).
The text has established Crystal’s (hetero)sexuality, but in the light of this episode he is “marked by same sex influences and desires” (Sedgwick, 1990, 12). Again, Dom sees the differences between himself and Crystal in terms that refuse sexual or gendered binaries: “Some people think it’s weird that Crystal and I hang out together. Crystal barracks for the Demons [a football team]. I barrack for Buddha. Crystal is good at sport. I’m good at art” (13). The differences between them, then, might be summed up in Crystal’s advice about doing heterosexuality (being attractive to girls and getting a girlfriend) when he tells Dom, “The most important thing is appearance” (65, original italics). The reader knows, however, that things are not usually as they appear. One can see this attention to the deceptive nature of appearances (identities) working equally as well in MacLeod’s later novel, I’m Being Stalked by a Moonshadow.
Moonshadow could first be read as if it is writing back to the biting critique of heterosexuality presented in Tumble Turn because it is a heterosexual (as distinct from heteronormative) love story narrated by protagonist Seth, about his own romantic feelings for his object of desire, Miranda (amongst numerous other sub-plots). One could also read it as a critique of dominant cultural ideologies regarding sex and gender, but one that has censored the queerness that was so well written in Tumble Turn. However, I would argue that in this novel, MacLeod has been even more successful in the strategy of using sexual ambiguity through the concept of heteroqueer, so that rather than taking queerness out of this novel, he actually deploys it more subtly in order to critique, rather than normalise, heterosexuality as an indicator of normality and a measure of happiness.
The plot revolves around Seth and Miranda, who must hide their relationship, because their fathers are feuding. Indeed, this is a modern Romeo and Juliet story, albeit one with a twist. The queerness that is ‘smuggled in’ in to this novel, however, centres more on the text’s normalisation of gender non-conformity than any (albeit misconstrued) queer acts, as occurs in Tumble Turn. And yet, while Seth and Miranda are clearly sexed as male and female, and there is never a question of their attraction for each other, there are points in the novel that destabilise their desires as entirely ‘normative’, in the context of adolescent sexuality at least. One such clever example is when Seth articulates that he thinks Miranda’s name is perfect (‘Miranda’ is the name of a satellite that orbits around a planet):
‘[Miranda] That’s a moon’ I said.
‘I know’
‘It’s around Uranus’ (36).
It may appear that this reading of pun on a colloquial joke (Uranus/Your anus) may be far-fetched, but all of MacLeod’s fiction is scrupulously researched, and his use of humour is never without point. Seth’s comment that perfection lies in the region of ur/your (that is Miranda’s) anus may not be categorically queer (noting, of course, that queer can never be definitively categorised), except in the sense of its transgression of normative genital/vaginal desire: as such, it queers ‘normative’ adolescent heterosexuality. But it also ‘queers up’ language; it plays with accepted and acceptable meanings in its use of naming. The use of names to make statements was established in Tumble Turn, where every character’s name had a relationship to who they were (the interfering neighbour that thought Dom was a transvestite, for example, is ‘Dotty Ball’ and Dom’s neurotic mother is ‘Odette Dear’; O. Dear). So this novel, then, may be read as further investigation of Shakespeare’s Juliet asking ‘What’s in a name?’. In this case, the naming of desire as definitively heteronormative or straight, through Seth’s love of Miranda’s name, as something that circulates around Ur/your/her anus.
If we must censor such readings, and focus instead on the critique of gender hegemony the novel presents, then at this basic level (one, I argue is not doing justice to the complexities of the text) this attention is, in itself, important, as articulated by Sedgwick. In ‘How to bring your kids up Gay’ (1993) Sedgwick identifies the effects of the cultural abjection of gender non-conformity, identifying it as a particularly insidious cultural strategy that reinforces hegemonic gender and heterosexual identities. She points out that non-compliant gender and sexual practices are often pathologised, and accredited to an ‘imbalance’ in hormones or genetic material. This is particularly relevant to Moonshadow, because the book is framed by the very notion of balance, as signified by the attention given to the yin yang symbol throughout the novel. The Taoist yin yang symbol is a unity of two opposite parts, but each part contains some of its opposite; nonetheless yin roughly translates to feminine while yang encodes masculine. It represents a balance of forces, but it also presupposes continual change. The yin yang is used in Moonshadow to argue against absolutes about ways to be feminine or masculine. However, because each side of the yin yang contains its other, we might also accept that according to this symbol, there is also some queerness in ‘straight’.
Seth, as mentioned earlier, is only attracted to muscle-y girls. He is ‘turned on’ by Miranda’s smell of dencorub (a sports liniment with a potent smell, usually associated with men’s locker rooms), which causes him “a disturbance in the trousers” (96), and fantasises about “her calf muscles bulging and her lustrous brown hair plastered to her forehead dripping with sweat” (69). But Seth had always had an attraction to ‘masculine’ girls, and early in the novel discusses this with his father:
‘I think I like girls who are yin with a tiny bit of yang’ I said.
That’s all right. It probably means you’re yang with a little bit of yin.’
‘Which bit of me was yin? My hair? My nose? My vertebral aponeurosis muscle? “(4).
Seth is not physically feminised in the text, he is tall and fit, but has unruly red hair and pale skin scattered with moles; he is simply different from hegemonic representations of masculine attractiveness. He is also juxtaposed with his brother Jack, who is excessively attractive to girls, but who also polishes his nails, uses hair and beauty products and enjoys wearing lycra. Because all girls find Jack attractive, however, his ‘yin’ is never in question, unlike Seth: when Jack discovers that Seth has a girlfriend he asks “Are you sure she’s not a boy?” (136). The kinds of balance that the novel posits as preferable, then, are oppositional to the kinds of binaries that hegemonic culture holds up as desirable for boys and girls.
Seth makes it quite clear that he is indeed “a straight boy” (143), who is not attracted to “surf-lifesavers with their tiny Speedos [brief bathing costumes] pulled up their cracks”, but only because he thinks it is “not a good look” (143). Seth, like Dom, is not gay. But like Dom, Seth is caught in a culture where there is entirely too much yang, as evidenced by the problems caused between the feuding fathers, Seth’s refusal to invite Miranda to his house due to the fear that the very attractive Jack would try to seduce her, his parents’ marital problems due to his father’s (overly yang) behaviour and his experience with Miranda’s ex-boyfriend who beats him up. Indeed, if hegemonic masculinity is considered the ‘natural’ way to be for a boy, Seth comments on this discourse, through the text’s metaphor of a bellbird eating a beautiful dragonfly, “proving how disgusting nature can be” (195). In the text’s affirmation of each protagonist’s attraction to both the masculine and the feminine through their desire rather than any taxonomised sexual identity, it suggests that a more balanced sexuality might ultimately be queer.
The seemingly hetero-happy ending of Moonshadow could be seen to censor out queer possibilities, but as established throughout both this novel, and Tumble Turn, appearances are deceptive. I’d suggest that Moonshadow’s strategies of destabilising what seems to be the truth throughout the novel situates the ending of the text, where all the problems in heterosexual relationships appear to be resolved as, instead, open to change, ‘smuggling in’ ways to destabilise the hetero-happy ending. For example, the text titles each chapter with a ‘fact’: “Fact Thirteen. During its life an oyster changes its sex several times “(148). There are eighteen facts in all. However, the reader’s trust in fact, or truth, is subverted, because fact Ten states that “One of these facts is untrue”, thus causing suspicion in the reader’s mind as to what is or is not correct (123). Indeed, “Fact One: A giraffe’s tongue is fifty five centimetres long” (1) is not the fact that is “untrue” according to Seth. But even a cursory glance at internet sites demonstrate that what is presented as fact (by both Seth and ‘experts’ in the field), is merely an average; the fact of the length of a giraffe’s tongue is highly contestable. Equally, then, the fact of a definitive straight or gay, masculine or feminine is undermined. MacLeod has, in effect, queered up the facts through posing questions as to their truth or essence.
Instead, the knowledge that does help Seth and his father in their relationships comes from Dolly, a teenage girls’ magazine. Dolly provides “22 ways to know if he is Mr Right”, and Seth and his father both follow the guidelines in order to become desired by their respective partners, Miranda and Zilla. Importantly, however, this magazine is written for girls, so these male characters gain their successes only through identifying with a feminine script. This identification subverts or queers up what it means to be a man, by the character’s reliance on Dolly, rather than, say, Playboy, for advice. This rejection of hegemonic masculinity, though, is hardly a surprise since Seth begins his story by telling the reader that the family live an “alternative” lifestyle (2). The alternative to hegemonic heterosexuality presented in Moonshadow, then, might be heteroqueer: in that it is not a resolution to ‘too much yang’ but an interim measure of resistance, always open to change.
The subversive strategy evident in these novels - the use of heteroqueer to destabilise heteronormativity and gender-norms – is subversive precisely in the fact it evades rather than overtly challenges the multifarious manifestations of censorship that remain pervasive in Australian children’s fiction. And yet this is not to say that such novels are not inherently shaped by issues of censorship. I conclude here by returning to the process of publication that was influential in the finished manuscript of Tumble Turn. MacLeod’s first draft of this novel had the protagonist running away to stay with his transvestite aunt (who was also an alcoholic). Penguin suggested that having a young protagonist stay with a transvestite was untenable in terms of exposing children to excessive risk scenarios. MacLeod re-wrote the plot with the imposed distance (and therefore safety) of an email exchange. The transvestite aunt became Uncle Peri, an intelligent teacher and archaeologist who is a Buddhist. Perhaps the re-write produced a better book; it is certainly one that is refreshingly different from the usual gay novel that focuses on the trauma of the protagonist identifying their own gayness. Undoubtedly, however, it is a different book. Penguin is a publishing company that is savvy about its market, so this is not a reflection of its own moral position or that of the editor, but rather an informed analysis of what Australian culture deems suitable for children and young adults. This type of censorship might indicate that the government office that classifies literature is, as it stands, entirely unnecessary, because we are already doing its work.
1. I use the terms ‘children’s fiction’ and ‘young adult fiction’ interchangeably here, since my contention about censorship applies to both ‘categories’. Indeed, such ‘categories’ are inherently problematic, anyway, and are fraught with assumptions about developmental cognition, cultural appeal, levels of reading skill and so on. The two novels I analyse in this article resist categorisation (like the desire of which they speak). For instance, while these novels would appeal to upper primary school readers, they are interspersed with intertextual references that many younger readers may not recognise (at one point there is a discussion/joke regarding Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in Tumble Turn). I’m treating these novels as ‘boundary-crossers’ in both a theoretical and critical sense, and also in their membership to genre.
Works cited:
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1978.
Larbalestier, Justine. “Oz GLBT YA books (updated).” 1 July 2007. Justine Larbalestier: writing, reading, eating, drinking, sport. <http://justinelarbalestier.com/blog/?p=685>.
MacLeod, Doug. Tumble Turn. Camberwell, Australia: Penguin, 2003.
MacLeod, Doug. I’m Being Stalked by a Moonshadow. Camberwell, Australia: Penguin, 2006.
Sedgwick, Eve. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990.
---. “Queer and Now.” Tendencies, Durham: Duke U P, 1994. 1-23.
---. “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay: The War on Effeminate Boys.” Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory. Ed. Marina Warner. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. 69-81.
Kate McInally
Volume 12, Issue 2 The Looking Glass May/June, 2008
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"Subverting Censorship through Heteroqueer: How to do Straight Queerly (and get away with it) in the Novels of Doug MacLeod"
© Kate McInally 2008.
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