Identity, Perversity and Literary Subjectivity: Teaching Patrick White's The Twyborn Affair

Gender is acknowledged as a highly-vexed category in Australian history and culture. Its doctrine of mateship excludes women yet white Australian women were amongst the first in the world to be granted franchise. Mateship is a fiercely homophobic relation, yet Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras is one of Australia’s most celebrated international events. Australian literature rehearses similar contradictions and we find deep ambivalence around the categories of sex, gender and sexuality at the heart of the national literature and in writing that challenges accepted conventions of identity. Specifically, at the time of nation-formation in the late 1800s, and coinciding with the rise of nationalist discourses more generally, Australian literature commonly presents processes of identity-formation without stable definition or closure. Rather than shoring up national types, the literature betrays a fascination with perverse and volatile identities. This chapter addresses the question of teaching queer fiction in a literary and cultural tradition built on the ethos of mateship in and against perverse genealogies of national and gendered identities. It discusses teaching early colonial fiction from a queer perspective and then establishes connections between this early work and Patrick White’s staging of his own coming out in The Twyborn Affair (1979) as a moment that confronts the national imaginary with its own ambivalence