School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 5 of 5
-
Item'Very unsure of what's to come': Salon worker experiences of COVID-19 in Australia during 2020(SAGE Publications, 2022)During Australia’s first nationwide lockdown due to COVID-19 in 2020, hairdressers and barbers were allowed to remain operating while beauty salons and similar businesses were ordered to shut. This article offers some preliminary insights into the impact of the pandemic on salon workers during the period, in particular the additional emotional labour required. Drawing on a survey of salon workers based in Australia (n = 92), this article considers the emotional labour involved in salon work in tandem with the impact of COVID-19 disruptions on this workforce. Results of the survey reveal the variety of emotional disclosures that salon workers generally encounter from clients and how these disclosures continued during the period, as well as the emotions experienced by workers themselves. Survey results suggest that many salon workers, who were themselves experiencing heightened levels of physical, emotional and financial vulnerability, were expected to continue their emotional roles for clients during a period of high anxiety and stress. This work suggests that future decision making ought to consider the impact on, and how best to support, all workforces who remain in operation during lockdowns, particularly emotional labourers, and not just those typically imagined as ‘essential’.
-
ItemNo Preview AvailableSensing the pandemic: revealing and re-ordering the senses(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2022-05-04)This article reviews an assembled archive of the literature published to date on the sensory dimensions of the COVID-19 pandemic. Just as sensory scholars have often highlighted periods of sensory revolution, we find that the recent pandemic has augured some notable shifts, albeit often on the more micro and domestic scale. We present a five-sense sensorium that offers an overview of how the senses have been engaged with by scholars during the pandemic, and what the major issues and themes have been. Drawing on the literature, we suggest that there have been shifts in our sensate experiences and an increased awareness of the sensory dimensions of daily life that may usually go unnoticed. However, we also note the many sensory-related inequalities have been revealed over this period, which continue to unfold unevenly as the pandemic continues. We argue that going forward sensory scholars ought to attend to these questions of inequality, as well as tracking the possible undoing of some of the sensory revolutions that may have taken place so far.
-
Item'Helps me feel more like myself': navigating bodies, emotions and identity in Australian queer salons(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2022-01-01)While hair and beauty salons are often thought of as spaces that reproduce normative ideals of gender and sexuality, the past decade has seen an increase in salons catering specifically to LGBTQ+ clientele. More broadly, research has shown that far from only treating ‘surface’ concerns, salons in general are sites of intensified affect, making them a unique space of entangled body, emotional, and identity work. This article draws on interviews with salon workers from 2017 and client responses to a survey about salons during COVID-19 from 2020, conducted in Australia. This article gives particular focus to salons catering to the LGBTQ+ community (‘queer salons’), as well as data from salon clients that identify as LGBTQ+. Drawing on this dataset this article offers insight into how queer salons challenge our expectations of what hair and beauty salons can do for queer precarity in terms of physical, emotional and identity vulnerability and trouble ideas of the salon as a space which merely reinforces normative ideals of beauty. Furthermore, this article considers how salons might provide a sense of safety and belonging for some LGBTQ+ people, especially within the context of a pandemic.
-
ItemNavigating “Normativity”: Kinship and Biphobia in Times of Crisis(University of California Press, 2022-04-01)As COVID-19 began to unfold, I found myself confronted with a second predicament: an identity crisis. After nearly a decade of dating queer-identifying people entered a partnership with an ostensibly straight cisgender man. Up to this moment I had thought of myself as loosely affiliated with the label of “bisexual”, but I often used the term “queer” as a way to signal my disinterest in occupying normative space. I also (regrettably) felt that this term distanced myself from my socially disparaged bisexual kin. ii Yet, as a cisgender woman dating a cisgender man, a seemingly “normative” partnership was precisely the location I began to occupy at the beginning of 2020. The wider context of the pandemic forced a shrinking of worlds and a return to the domestic. Local lockdowns escalated a sense of urgency around clarifying intimate personal networks. As such, the crisis context forced to me confront my internal battle around identity and normativity in a shrunken and hyper-domestic sphere. I wondered, with my so-called “opposite sex” partner staying with me in lockdown, was I suddenly living a heteronormative life? Where does bisexuality fit in to this question of normative sexual formations and partnerships? More generally, I wondered to what extent interpersonal arrangements that provide safety, security and comfort in times of crisis always align with the “normative”.
-
ItemNo Preview AvailableThe Refusal to Refuse: Bisexuality Trouble and the Hegemony of Monosexuality(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2022-05-11)This paper both revisits and productively draws on Judith Butler’s theory of sexuality offered in Gender Trouble, to consider how this foundational queer theory text inadvertently works to contain and bracket plurisexualities such as bisexuality. I consider how Butler at once rejects the idea of originary bisexuality provoked by psychoanalytic discourse on polymorphous perversity yet subsumes bisexual oppression into that of homosexuality. I interrogate Butler’s monosexual presumptions to extend their notion of the heterosexual matrix to account for an operational hetero/homo binary that both excludes plurisexuality as its Other and obscures this exclusion. Following this theoretical line, I consider how the asymmetric hetero/homo binary has been coded along the lines of comedy/tragedy in culture, and in contrast how bisexuality and other plurisexualities are often rendered impossible. I suggest that plurisexualities, representing a refusal to refuse the originary prohibition, “haunt” both straight and queer contexts alike.