School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses
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ItemA case of gender governance: the family court of Australia’s regulation of young people’s gender affirmation( 2020)Legal institutions govern gender: they shape and regulate how their subjects can be gendered and, in doing so, control how gender can manifest. This thesis interrogates how the Family Court of Australia governed gender through its regulation of young people’s gender-affirming hormone use. Between 2004-2017, in Australia, people younger than eighteen needed to obtain authorisation from the Family Court before they could use hormones manually—that is, before they could use hormones other than those that their bodies produced automatically—to affirm their gender. By analysing the 76 “reasons for judgment” that judges published in response to applications for this authorisation, this thesis explicates how the Court judged the legitimacy of its subjects’ manual hormone use. My analysis finds that the Court’s judgments were structured by three primary categories of discourse: discourses on the ontology of gender, the epistemology of gender, and the teleology of manual hormone use. Upon interrogating each discourse in turn, I argue that the Court’s judgments tethered the legitimacy of its subjects’ manual hormone use to the promise that this would help them to become normatively gendered. In this way, the Court’s regulation worked to ensure that subjects could only use hormones manually to avert, rather than affirm, manifestations of queerness. By launching a critique of the Court’s discourses on ontology, epistemology, and teleology and the mechanism of gender governance that they enacted, this thesis contributes to the broader scholarly project of documenting and challenging the means through which States curb the possibilities for queer modes of life.
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Item'West side' stories: visible difference, gender, class and young people( 2012)The impetus for this thesis emerged from my job as a youth worker and my dissatisfaction with the dominant ways in which young people are discussed and managed as ‘at risk’ and ‘disengaged’. I argue that, far from being disengaged, young people in Melbourne’s western suburbs are engaged in reading the power structures that influence their lives and have developed a range of strategies to operate within and against these classed, ‘raced’ and gendered structures. Throughout this thesis I contend that young people have agency (that is, the ability to act), and argue for young people to be recognised as astute social actors, from whom we can learn much about the way power operates and the strategies people use to live with social inequality. ‘West side’ stories explores how young people experiencing social disadvantage are ‘managed’ in public policy and how they are represented in academia. The qualitative research presented in this thesis problematises the dominant representations, by illustrating the ways in which visible difference, gender and class intersect and how these social divisions shape the lives of young people living in the west – a culturally diverse and economically disadvantaged region of Melbourne. It is argued here that whiteness is marked in the western suburbs and that Anglo-Saxon Australians are also visibly different because of their class location.