IRL I am constantly jamming podcasts into my head at 1.8X speed. No, not 2X, that would be unreasonable. It means that I begin every third sentence with “this podcast I listen to…” I consume news, pop culture, queer, and academic-ish stuff and quite often alight on gems of analysis or ideas that are highly generative. And if I don’t write them down the little nuggets dissolve in my brainrot. Doing regular podding–identifying these sparks–may help me retain at least some of what I am learning.
Bad Gays is one of my favorite podcasts though I don’t always listen to them right away, waiting for a time when I can devote my full attention (like a run) rather than letting it ooze through my brain with no absorption. I got the tip about the pod via Slate’s queer podcast Outward (I think? Or maybe the Culture Gabfest?) via June Thomas, also the host of their recap podcast of The Americans (also a banger). The conceit of the pod (now also a book!) is to examine “evil and complicated queers” in history to ask: Are they gay? Are they bad? The hosts–Huw Lemmy and Ben Miller, who academically trained historians who do great research and know how to spin a yarn.
This week was an unfamiliar (to me) story about Tracey Wigginton, a young woman from Queensland in Australia who murdered a man in the 80s, seemingly randomly, with two other women. The stabbing was especially brutal and bloody and obviously unusual because violence from women is seen as especially aberrant. They place the murder in context, in a deeply conservative Queensland that still criminalized gay male sex (and was considering criminalizing sex between women) and was especially homophobic in the shadow of the AIDs epidemic. Wigginton herself had been raised by her grandparents and was sexually, physically, and emotionally abused. The women who were with her, testimony in court, and the media claimed she was a deeply disturbed Satanist fond of blood play and BDSM who believed she was a vampire and was possibly suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder. The lurid media coverage depicted her as a grotesque, violent, sexually deviant villain whose lesbianism signaled not her love of women but a hatred of men. Worst of all, they repeatedly mentioned, she was fat. Corporal excess–she was (is) too much. (They discuss coverage of her parole from her life sentence that focuses on her continued fatness and the–shocking–reliance on social services while on parole since she has been behind bars since her teenage years and does not have great prospects for employment.)
They draw connections to the current transpanic! today in which queer individuals are connected with sexual deviance, grooming, and degenerate behavior whipping up a frenzy of fear. I was struck by their insight that it was easier to believe that Wigginton was a lesbian vampire who could turn herself into a pair of floating cat eyes (an actual allegation) than it was to believe she was abused by a man, specifically her (grand) father. As with transpanic! today actual violence against women is ignored to gesture toward the phantasmic figure of the deformed, unnatural “woman” (lesbian or trans) who supposedly poses the danger to innocent women when the call is literally coming from inside the house.
Their contextualization of Queensland was especially helpful for me as an ignorant American less familiar with the Australian political context. They helpfully describe the setting as that of Muriel’s Wedding, the Toni Colette movie about gender, sex, patriarchy, political corruption, and ABBA. That setting–where heteronormativity is a claustrophobic, stifling, and sweaty villain–was helpful in evoking a scene of a very unhealthy gender and sexual politics deeply entangled in the dysfunction of the nuclear family. We see Muriel nonetheless idealize the heteronorm through her fantasy of the Perfect Wedding set to ABBA.
Their characterization of the patriarchal local politics of the time brought to mind Carole Pateman (coincidentally the Australian theorist I know best.) In The Sexual Contract she specifies we must recognize the different modes of patriarchy. Paternal authority, modeled on patria potestas, the father-right over the lives of his wife/children/slaves, is hierarchical. In modernity, where these kinds of natural hierarchies are displaced, patriarchy is fraternal, among brothers who view one another as equals, with a prior exclusion of women in order to retain their sex-right. The sexual contract grants men sexual access to women (as wives) prior to the social contract which in turn is only among men (liberty, equality, fraternity!) who can be free and equal relative to one another. In the fraternal order Wigginton is a monster in part because of her refusal to grant men sexual access. The Lesbian has no value within the fraternal order because she is outside of both the sexual and social contract, unable to produce value as she places herself outside of any role in the family. Nor does she “contribute to society.” Her vampirism is to drain the life from men–in a literal sense as a murderer and in a figurative sense as a social welfare recipient.
Their conclusion was bad and gay but maybe not as bad as the social milieu that produced her.
transgender for everyone 
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