Books & Literature

Book Review: Queer: A Graphic History, by Dr Meg-John Barker

An engaging, illustrated look at theories on gender, identity and sexuality & how normative differences tend to privilege one type of ‘being’ over its opposite.

Dr Meg-John Barker is an academic, psychotherapist and activist in the field of gender and relationships. Illustrator Julia Scheele runs One Beat Zines, a feminist zine collective. The text describes the development of queer theory and of normative binary differences in our culture and how they were/are presented as the usual, sometimes the only way to be.

The text discusses theories on gender, identity and sexuality from Freud; Masters and Johnson; Kinsey; the Women’s and the Gay movements; and challenges how normative differences tend to privilege one type of ‘being’ over its opposite such as male v’s female or straight v’s gay.

Although a serious topic, the book engages the reader through its wit and clever illustrations, which often make the point more clearly than pages of words might do. I especially liked the cartoon which depicts 2 women shopping for clothes against a back drop of a make-up counter and a display of women’s magazines with titles such as ‘Hair Now’, ‘Style’ and ‘Gloop’ (perhaps a clever word play about the nonsense on Gwyneth Paltrow’s goop website?).

One woman, clutching her head in despair, says ‘If I could just find the right outfit, everything in my life would fall into place’ while the other responds, ‘What gives you that idea?’ (page 67). This clearly illustrates the point which our consumerist culture would have us believe – that if only we bought the right clothes / worked on our figure / used the right make-up or detergent / ate the current superfood, then our life would be wonderful.

In discussing the development of the post-structural approach to gender and identity, the theoretical approaches of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler are made more understandable via text and graphics, without making the explanations simplistic. Their approach asserts that gender and identity are not fixed but are fluid and performative. Not performative in the sense that an actor performs a role, pretending to be someone else, but rather in the sense of one doing things differently and/or feeling different at different times and places or with different people.

We know this is the case in many other aspects of our lives – how we feel or behave differently with friends and family than we do at work or on formal occasions, so why should we expect gender or sexuality to be any different? The concluding message of the book is that ‘Queer = Doing not Being!’ (page 171) but the false binary, the ‘either/or’ division, reappears again and again in our identity-based, individualistic culture which thrives on putting us all into pigeon holes.

I recommend the book to older teens and adults who want to know more about queer theory and seek to develop insights into how prevailing cultural norms are not the only way of seeing the world but should be questioned and challenged. The reader is encouraged to view with a critical eye, ‘revealing the strangeness of normativity, disrupting the status quo’ (page 173).

Reviewed by Jan Kershaw

Rating out of 10: 8

Distributed by: Allen & Unwin
Release Date: October 2016
RRP: $24.99

More News

To Top