Suburban Queer: Infrastructure and Art in Greater Western Sydney

Abstract

Since the 1990s, cultural geographers have used a variety of methodologies to track the physical migration of queers toward inner-city space and explored the wider cultural imaginaries that have grown up around this phenomenon. This thesis engages with recent theoretical accounts of metronormativity, or the idea that queer subjectivities are best served by urban environments. Invoking Scott Herring’s concept of ‘queer infrastructure’ and Karen Tongson’s account of queer exurban performance cultures in Greater Los Angeles, I consider engagements of intra-urban space in contemporary queer art by Sydney-based artists and collectives. This research departs from longstanding and recent Australian critiques of suburbia, which tend to frame the suburbs through either class homogeneity or ethnic multiculturalism, and demonstrates how queer-identified artists negotiate the apparent disconnection between the queer and the suburban in their art practices. Chapters one and two track the emergence and consolidation of queer urban studies as an interdisciplinary field. Chapter three provides a new reading of Sydney’s queer history via a focus on suburban rather than urban cultures. Chapter four looks at how queer exhibition practices in the western and south-western suburbs of Sydney articulate institutional, cultural, and social ecologies that bridge centre and periphery. The subsequent chapters each focus on one artwork: a performance staged in an outer-suburban shopping arcade that combines vogue, martial arts, and life-history narration; a video work that redeploys infrastructural tropes from a Bronski Beat music video in order to consider the queer trajectory from suburbs to city and back; and another video work that documents a six-hour drive around greater Sydney by a group of eight queer friends. Overall, this thesis illuminates how contemporary queer art practices in Greater Western Sydney reposition queerness as a central part of the suburbs and the suburbs as a central part of queer Sydney.