The gay community in Australia has experienced a period of rapid change and integration. Over the last decade, the legal and social conditions for gay men have advanced in several areas, including the establishment of a nationally recognised right to same-sex unions, amendments to federal legislation that created legal recognition of same-sex de facto relationships, and nationwide anti-discrimination laws that protect men from unjustified distinctions. These changes, along with many others have resulted in a seismic shift in how male same-sex relationships are viewed in Australia and represented in our literature. A common thesis of novels published since 2017 is that gay men now occupy an unprecedented, and unexamined, position within what György Lukács (1974) called ‘totality’, or the abstract conditions of capitalism that result from the real object of human labour and social relations. In novels such as The Pillars (2019) by Peter Polites and The Adversary (2020) by…
‘I Want a Mortgage and Comfort’: Consumption, Totality and Identity in Australian Gay Fiction
Abstract
The 2017 Marriage Law Postal Survey marked a historic moment for the gay community in Australia, as it resulted in same-sex unions being recognised under law. For novelists, this historic change served as the impetus to re-evaluate the position of gay men as queer subjectivity became more articulable through the market and was no longer excluded from the social mainstream or, in Marxist terminology, totality. This presents a challenge: how do writers dispense with outdated taxonomies of oppression, while still identifying the unique ways in which those who exist along axes of sexual difference continue to be exploited and oppressed? This article examines The Pillars (2019) by Peter Polites and The Adversary (2020) by Ronnie Scott to identify ways in which this nascent dimension of gay life is being depicted in fiction, arguing that gay fiction in Australia can meaningfully represent, and critique, its relation to capitalism.
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Published 18 December 2023 in Volume 38 No. 3. Subjects: Gay & lesbian literature & writers, Homosexuality, Marxism, Sexual life & gender relations - Literary portrayal, Sexuality & sexual identity.
Cite as: Wilson, Rohan and Craig Bolland and Myles McGuire. ‘‘I Want a Mortgage and Comfort’: Consumption, Totality and Identity in Australian Gay Fiction.’ Australian Literary Studies, vol. 38, no. 3, 2023, doi: 10.20314/als.2e5c050333.
- Rohan Wilson — Rohan Wilson is the author of three novels, *The Roving Party* (2011), *To Name Those Lost* (2014), and *Daughter of Bad Times* (2019). Full details →
- Craig Bolland — Craig Bolland lectures in Creative Writing at QUT. Full details →
- Myles McGuire — Myles McGuire is a writer from Brisbane.Full details →