Historian and co-author Associate Professor Leigh Boucher explains how campaigning on a platform of personal politics has influenced law reform and human rights in Australia over the past 50 years.
In our book Personal Politics: Sexuality, Gender and the Remaking of Citizenship in Australia, we trace how activists, beginning in the 1970s, asserted that the ‘personal is political’. They created a new way to make claims for law reform, specific rights and the provision of services. As recent debates about domestic and intimate violence reveal, however, these questions remain unresolved in Australian public life. This new mode of making politics has produced questions we are still struggling to answer.
Activism: In their new book, co-authors Associate Professor Leigh Boucher, pictured left, and Professor Michelle Arrow, pictured right, showcase the minority voices that triggered political change in modern Australia.
This is a story populated and propelled by a cast of political actors who were made possible by that provocative new slogan. The pages are filled with the voices of outraged feminists, distressed trans kids, angry divorced fathers, and LGBTIQ+ activists who, at different times, have mobilised ideas about hope or despair to seek social, legal and political transformation.
And this is, perhaps, a central revelation of this book. These new modes of making politics have produced new lines of contest and disagreement about the rights and responsibilities of Australian citizenship; these contests, moreover, have been underpinned by stories about personal lives.
Key campaigns and their political settlements discussed in the book include the decriminalisation of sex between men, reforms to the laws about abortion, the birth of the Family Court in Australia, funding for domestic violence refuges, the provision of healthcare in the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the right of same-sex couples to marry, the emergence of men’s sheds and the attempted defence of the Safe Schools program.
It is a history that shows these new modes of making politics have not been the exclusive possession of so-called ‘progressives’; rather, the idea that ‘the personal is political’ has remade the terrain in which all politics is made.
Personal Politics is a reminder that the, albeit uneven, rights and protections that sexual and gender minorities enjoy today have been the product of storytelling and struggle.
The recent explosion of activism about domestic and intimate violence would benefit from the historical context provided by this book. It was feminists in the 1970s who first brought this issue to national attention, and this book reveals a long history of struggles for funding to address this intimate catastrophe.
Many observers in the recent debate wondered why this problem has proven so hard to address. Part of the answer can be found in these pages: successive state and federal governments have slowly but surely undone the centrality of feminist knowledge about this issue when designing their funding and policy settings. And it is this knowledge that has underpinned the most effective responses.
The story of refuge funding reveals another central insight of this book, namely, that the history of gender and sexuality does not follow a reformist or progressive path. This book reveals that the successes of activists are often partial and sometimes undone.
On the one hand, a story of progressive change provided a crucial justification for marriage equality (where it was represented as a final step in a progressive history of rights for gays and lesbians). However, for others in the rainbow community, particularly trans people, this story of progress was often used as an excuse for some activists to implicitly ask them to ‘wait their historical turn’.
Personal Politics is a reminder that the, albeit uneven, rights and protections that sexual and gender minorities enjoy today have been the product of storytelling and struggle. And like all historically produced regimes, these settlements can easily be wound back, reworked and undone.
It is a book that reminds us to resist complacency as well as think critically about the stories we tell when we make our politics. For it is through the consistent articulation of these stories in public that new political and social worlds have been created.
Personal Politics: Sexuality, Gender and the Remaking of Citizenship in Australia, Monash University Publishing, is available from 1 June, 2024.
Co-authors:
Leigh Boucher is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University.
Michelle Arrow is a Professor in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University.
Robert Reynolds is a Professor in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University.
Barbara Baird is an Associate Professor in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at Flinders University.
