The common picture of the crystal methamphetamine user—whom politicians and media paint as the ‘ice addict’—is both familiar and dangerous. Often targets of wider ‘just say no’ campaigns on illicit drug use, the ice addict takes on a particular characterisation that links psychosis and mental instability with a clear trajectory of declining physical health. A quick Google image search of anti-ice campaigns globally reinforces this characterisation: images of before-and-after headshots reveal the supposed damage caused by the addictive qualities of the drug. An app, Ice Effex, even allows ‘users to apply the damaging effects of ICE use to their own face’ by digitally changing an uploaded photo of the user to reveal the impact of taking methamphetamine at three, six and twelve months.

Such depictions reinforce the notion that crystal methamphetamine is inherently dangerous and, what’s more, has deleterious health outcomes for the individual who chooses to use it.

The health risks associated with crystal methamphetamine have been well documented: there are risks of drug dependency, mental health issues, heart and other physical health factors, and increased transmission of blood-borne viruses such as HIV and hepatitis C. Of concern is the fact that Australian gay and bisexual men report higher rates of crystal methamphetamine use compared with the general population, with HIV-positive men more likely to use and inject crystal than their HIV-negative peers (Lea et al., 2016). This suggests that that there may be particular modes and patterns of use specific to this group of people. To date, though, little is known about the specific ways that gay and bisexual men use methamphetamine in Australia, and how particular forms and patterns of drug use relate to perceptions of risk and harm (Hopwood et al., 2016).

Consumed in the context of sexual encounters among men who have sex with men, crystal methamphetamine has been specifically associated with what is commonly referred to as ‘party and play’ situations in Australia and the USA, or ‘chemsex’ events in the UK. Indeed, crystal methamphetamine is by far the most common substance associated with drug-enhanced sexual activity in Australia (Lea et al., 2016), which suggests there are clear sexual health dimensions to crystal methamphetamine use among these men.

While the risks of such drug use are of concern in public health responses to the issue. The figure of the pathological drug-using individual is unhelpful because it creates inaccurate assumptions about crystal users and their practices that can impede effective health education, prevention and treatment. When we are asked to understand drug use as an isolated individualised event, any discussion of ‘addiction’ becomes untethered from the social and sexual contexts in which drug use occurs. Coupling an individualised focus on drug-taking decisions and presumptions of the ‘addictive’ pharmacological qualities of drug itself can result in a ‘rush to risk’ (Bryant et al., 2018) that elides any consideration of the collective pleasures and risk-reduction strategies that men actually employ to keep themselves safe from the drug’s potentially adverse effects.

One of the main gaps in the research we assessed is the issue that most crystal use is occasional and unproblematic and may not necessarily lead to harm. Consequently, those who use crystal methamphetamine in these ways simply do not see themselves represented in these depictions of the ‘ice addict’.

This dissociation has implications for the services that gay and bisexual men might use in relation to problematic drug use. For example, some harm reduction and health promotion material aimed at crystal users may appear irrelevant to them or may reproduce pathologised messages of danger, recklessness and harm, thereby reducing the chance of users accessing helpful service providers. By ignoring collective practices of care, health services miss opportunities to build on everyday practices of harm reduction and misunderstand or ignore the collective meanings of crystal use for those who use it. This might mean that those who use crystal for sex ignore messages about sexual and other health services available to them. Indeed, gay and bisexual men may benefit more from the combination of harm-reduction and sexual health programs. The social meanings that methamphetamine use carries and the ways in which the drug is used by gay and bisexual men warrant closer and more detailed study.

What does this mean for those of us tasked with research in this field, and how do we go about conducting in-depth, meaningful and relevant research on these practices? To tackle this issue, the Centre for Social Research in Health at UNSW Sydneypartnered with the Australian Research Centre for Sex, Health and Society at La Trobe University in Melbourne, ACON in Sydney, Thorne Harbour Health in Melbourne, the South Australia Mobilisation + Empowerment for Sexual Health in Adelaide, and the West Australian AIDS Council in Perth. In our NHMRC-funded research project, Crystal, Pleasures and Sex between Men, we are examining gay and bisexual men’s crystal methamphetamine use in four cities in Australia, with the aim of developing a detailed understanding of the ways in which crystal is used by gay and bisexual men, the pleasures and risks associated with its use, and the strategies these men employ to reduce risk.

In particular, the concept of ‘sex-based sociality’ underpins the research design, data collection and analysis; that is, we examine the ways that drug-taking practices can shape sexual activity in networks of gay and bisexual men through the particular meanings gay communities and their members attach to sex and drugs. Acknowledging the complex intertwining of drugs, sexuality and sociality in its identities, practices, relations and meanings can provide opportunities to develop innovative and creative reconsiderations of current institutional and programmatic responses to gay men’s drug use in the context of sexual activity.

We still have a lot of data to analyse as we head into the third and final year of this study: so far 88 interviews have been undertaken with gay and bisexual men in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth, as well as telephone interviews with 35 key informants working in the health policy, sexual health, harm reduction and blood-borne virus prevention fields. Within the diversity of contexts and patterns of drug use gay and bisexual men revealed, one thing is clear: crystal methamphetamine use takes place in social and sexual contexts as a group or collective rather than as an individual activity. It is within these groups or collectivities that specific pleasures and risks occur and are meaningful and pleasurable for the men who engage in these activities.

For more information on the project, please see: https://csrh.arts.unsw.edu.au/research/projects/crystal-pleasure-and-sex-between-men/

If you would like to find out more about our research, please contact Kerryn Drysdale at k.drysdale@unsw.edu.au. Our first report,‘Sunshine on a rainy day’: Crystal methamphetamine use among gay and bisexual men in Perth, looks at the specific networks, practices and risk-reducing strategies in one of these cities (Hopwood, Drysdale, & Treloar, 2018).

The project team is led by Prof. Carla Treloar and includes Prof. Gary Dowsett, Dr Max Hopwood, Prof. Martin Holt, Dr Toby Lea, Prof. Peter Aggleton, A/Prof. Joanne Bryant, Dr Kerryn Drysdale, Mr Brent Mackie, Mr Colin Batrouney and Dr Helen Calabretto.

References:

Bryant J, Hopwood M, Dowsett GW, Aggleton P, Holt M, Lea T, Drysdale K and Treloar, C. (2018) The       rush to risk when interrogating the relationship between methamphetamine use and sexual         practice among gay and bisexual men. International Journal of Drug Policy55: 242-248.

Hopwood M, Cama E and Treloar C. (2016) Methamphetamine use among men who have sex with men in Australia: a literature review. Sydney: Centre for Social Research in Health, UNSW Sydney.

Hopwood M, Drysdale K and Treloar C. (2018) ‘Sunshine on a rainy day’: Crystal methamphetamine use among gay and bisexual men in Perth. Sydney: Centre for Social Research in Health, UNSW Australia.

Lea T, Mao L, Hopwood M, Prestage G, Zablotska I, de Wit J and Holt M. (2016) Methamphetamine         use among gay and bisexual men in Australia: trends in recent and regular use from the Gay      Community Periodic Surveys. International Journal of Drug Policy29: 66-72.

Kerryn Drysdale is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Research in Health, located within UNSW Arts and Social Sciences. Her disciplinary background is in cultural studies, with a particular focus on LGBTIQ social scenes, identities and practices. Kerryn’s current area of research lies at the intersection of social inquiry and public health, particularly in the experiences and expressions of health and wellbeing among same-sex attracted and sex/gender diverse people, people who use drugs, and people living with or affected by HIV and/or viral hepatitis. Kerryn is also interested in community-led approaches to harm reduction and urban LGBTIQ night-time economic reform.

Recently, a few friends and I walked up Mount Keira, the magnificent backdrop to Wollongong, my home, south of Sydney. After a challenging climb, we were rewarded with views across southern Wollongong and out to Lake Illawarra, where the forest meets and melds with the suburbs that stretch out toward the Lake’s shore.

This is a view of the city that is unfamiliar to me. Most often I approach Mt Keira from the north, and the vista is across the CBD and northern suburbs, out to the Pacific Ocean. The view was novel, unexpected and it jolted me enough to knock me out of a taken-for-grantedness and into puzzling over Aboriginal sovereignty. What would it mean, or do, if settler colonial Australians, such as me, deeply understood we were on Aboriginal country?

As we walked, clambered over rocks, kicked our toes on buttresses, pressed on despite the steep incline, stopped for a breather, talked animatedly about the forthcoming election or who’s doing what, when and how they shouldn’t or should -that we knew, unconditionally, that we were walking on sovereign Aboriginal land: Dharawal country.

Or maybe I was thinking about the impossibility of being on country in a country dominated by settler colonialism. I’m not at all suggesting that we early-morning walkers were unaware of, or didn’t care about, Aboriginal sovereignty. Rather, I was contemplating the embodiment of settler colonialism: what it allows and disallows, and how pondering these questions can make many progressive settler Australians anxious.

How does settler geography inform my capacity to see and feel? More so, how does settler, or white, possession, have a hold over me -possess me? As Aileen Moreton-Robinson argues, contemporary colonial dynamics are much more than a physical possession of the land: they are a political possession. It takes a great deal of work, she writes, to maintain Australia as a white possession. I would add a great deal of emotional work.

A key concern of my recent book, Anxieties of Belonging in Settler Colonialism, is with how the taken-for-grantedness of settler authority plays out in the everyday. In particular, the feelings and sensations of everyday certainty, belonging and personhood that settler colonial legal and political structures give rise to (to borrow from Mark Rifkin) and the questions that are suspended and made moot by an all-encompassing settler sovereignty. My focus is settler anxiety: the much renowned, but little examined, settler condition. Settler political possession plays out as an evasion of the political, too often displaced by relentless worrying about Indigenous people.

My subjects of study are left-leaning settler Australians who want to engage with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, cultures and social issues. Rather crudely, I refer to them as ‘good white people’. More pointedly, my subjects are anxious white women. Historically white women have had significant involvement in Indigenous social issues, which are often contentious. Criticised by black activists, feminists and scholars as serving a white feminist socio-political agenda and failing to understand the history of racism. The book’s focus is highly emotional ‘feminised’ spaces, which are often over-looked as political encounters. My commitment is to examining the ‘settler problem’-analysing contemporary expressions of benevolent colonialism. Despite their good intentions, progressive settlers continue to respond to Indigenous politics and efficacy as a provocation.

Anxieties traverses multiple cultural sites – memoirs, film, cultural tourism and policy – and a picture emerges. By analysing varied cultural sites, I trace the anatomy of a particular colonial subjectivity – good white people – to argue that settler anxiety is an effect of, and a refusal to encounter Indigenous political claims and difference. Worrying about Indigenous people, together with embracing forms of Indigenous culture, acts to neutralise Indigenous agency. How does settler care and concern work to maintain colonial power relations?

Throughout the book, I pause over moments when, however accidentally, good white women are confronted with Indigenous political will, and it brings them undone. These women are made anxious, uncertain, and do not know how to proceed. These contests are material and embodied; not mediated through the media, film and books. In these contests, the white woman is out of place and out of her depth.

What can settler anxiety reveal about the complex cultural dynamics of Indigenous-settler Australia? Can anxiety teach progressive settlers how to make a home in an Australia that is sovereign Indigenous country? Staying with anxiety – being disturbed, halted and unsettled – provides ways to renew our imaginative life and contribute to creating ethical Indigenous-settler relations that do not rely on reconciliation, recognition and resolution.

If we closely examine the complexity of material encounters between settler and Indigenous Australians, we can see moments when settler anxiety gives way to a potentially radical political empathy. Settler Australians need to turn ameliorative projects into political encounters: to become dispossessed.

Lisa Slater is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Wollongong. 

Bluey is 6 years old. She has a sister, Bingo, who is 4. Her mum Chilli works full time, so her dad Bandit stays at home, occasionally having to do work in his office. Bandit loves to play and is easy going. His philosophy is all about letting people find their own way. Chilli is super organised; she is ready for anything.

Did I mention they’re all dogs?

This is the setting of the ABC Kids program Bluey. It is my new favourite show. I watch a lot of kids shows with my daughter Ruby, but this is the only one I will go out of my way to see every day. So what makes Bluey a better show than your standard Peppa Pigs or Octonauts? Simply put, it’s the games they play.

Play, for some time now, has been characterised as a tool for learning. This is not a new idea. The Montessori school system boasts play-based learning. Kids entertainment like Play School, Sesame Street, and the current king of Australian kids TV, Giggle and Hoot, are all grounded in the idea that when we play, we learn. Even the dreaded ‘educational game’ is sold on these pretexts. Done correctly, the approach of grounding learning activities in play can be very effective. However, this is more difficult to do than it might seem at first glance.

You see, educational games and playful learning is something of a balancing act. Theoretical work in play and games from theorists like Johan Huizinga, Roger Caillios, Bernard Suits, and James Paul Gee (among many others) frame play and games as voluntary and temporary activities and attitudes. For Huizinga, play creates a temporary ‘other’ space, sometimes referred to as the magic circle, where a unique set of values and actions can exist. Suits, discussing games specifically, gives us this succinct quote saying “…playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles” (p.55). Most importantly, all these theorists recognise that games and playful activities are, primarily, fun. They are activities we engage in because we want to, not because we have to.

Any educational tool designed to be ‘playful’, be it a TV show, game, book, or classroom lesson, needs to successfully navigate the tightrope walk between voluntary and necessary, between fun and educational. These are not hard lines, either; often what is necessary can be approached as voluntary, given the right motivations. Without sounding too clichéd, learning actually can be fun.

Practically speaking, however, these elements have a hard time mixing. For example, the term ‘chocolate-covered broccoli’ is often used in educational games. The good-for-you learning, or broccoli, is covered in the delicious and enticing chocolate and kids are supposed to not know the difference. But kids are amazingly discerning, and can often tell when there is broccoli in their chocolate. More importantly, this mindset misrepresents the original idea; it devalues both the chocolate and the broccoli.

So, what makes Blueya success where other shows have failed? It presents broccoli as something that is as delicious as broccoli. To better explain how Blueyhas successfully tapped into play-based learning, I want to share two experiences I’ve had while watching the show.

The first experience focuses on an episode called ‘Bike’, where Bluey is learning to ride her bike without training wheels. She keeps falling off and eventually quits in a huff. She sits down next to her dad and explains that it is not fair, and that she’ll never be able to do it. Bluey and her dad, Bandit, then watch three other kids struggling with various tasks. Bingo is trying to get a drink from a water fountain, but is too short. Muffin is trying to put on a backpack, and Bentley is trying to swing on the monkey bars. They all go through the same frustration as Bluey. All give up in a huff. But, one by one, each child goes back to their activity, frustrated but actively trying to figure it out. Problem solving. Bandit sits of the bench, cheering each kid on. He gets genuinely excited when muffin gets his backpack on, when Bentley reaches for, and gets, the first monkey bar, and when Bingo finally gets a drink. After witnessing the incredible feats of kids doing something they had never done before, Bluey goes back to the bike and tries again.

The second concerns an episode titled ‘Yoga Ball’. In this episode, Bluey and Bingo are playing while their dad, Bandit, does some work in the office. Throughout the day, Bandit plays games with the kids using a yoga ball. They bounce up and down, get thrown onto a bed, and play ‘raiders’ where Bandit throws the yoga ball down the hall and the kids have to jump out of the way Indiana Jones-style. While Bluey and Bingo both enjoy these games, Bingo gets scared or hurt a few times because she is smaller. At one point, Bandit calls off the game when Bingo gets bowled over by the yoga ball. He tells Bingo to “walk it off.”

The end of the episode sees Chilli teaching Bingo to “use her big girl bark” and let her dad know when he is being too rough. “But Dad, we don’t want you to stop playing with us,” says Chilli, translating for Bingo.

I often identify with Bandit. He’s a stay-at-home dad who works in the odd hours in between looking after his kids. I too am sometimes told “I play too rough.” My response in the past was to talk about the risks in playing, and if you aren’t willing to get hurt, maybe you shouldn’t play. I believed at the time that I was instilling resilience in my daughter. But this episode changed my mind. It was pointed out to me by my wife that the episode is about consent. Teaching kids from a young age that it was their fault they got hurt because they agreed to the game was a precursor for far darker things.

I had not heeded my own research. When kids play, they are engaging in a voluntary exploration of the world. They are trying to figure it out. It’s not always obvious what, for example, pretending to be a dinosaur for an entire car ride up the coast might help them understand, but it is doing something. What’s more, how we as parents react and engage with these games has a massive impact. ‘Bike’ highlights the need for kids to be able to engage with the world on their own terms, even when that world becomes unfair. ‘Yoga Ball’, on the other hand, shows how kids, and adults learn to understand the world through games and play. We apply what we learn in the safety of our own worlds in the outside world. Thus, it is imperative that we understand how and why we play.

Actually, thinking about it, I may be getting more out of this show than my daughter.

References

Suits, B. (2005). The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia. Broadview Press. p.55

Short bio:

Dr Liam Miller is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Queensland. His field of research explores the philosophy of play and games, fiction, and belief, as well as the areas of cognitive science, machine intelligence, and human-centred technology. Dr Miller is interested in all areas of pop culture, especially those which involve talking cartoon dogs.

The language of masculinity uses a vocabulary of truth and realness to describe itself. Western culture assumes there is a true masculinity hidden deep within each man; we hear of ‘real men’, ‘natural men’, ‘the deep masculine’, and so on.

Such rhetoric necessarily invites a lot of questioning. What is a ‘real’ man? Why is it so important than men, above all else, be ‘real’? Does this phrasing not imply the possibility of a ‘fake’ man? Then how do we define a ‘fake’ man? Masculinity theorists have argued that a real man is increasingly defined by what masculinity is not, rather than what it actually is. Masculinity, for instance, essentially means ‘not feminine’.

I believe that masculinity’s attempts at invoking the rhetoric of ‘the real’ suggest an anxious desire to mask this condition of its identity. The very idea that masculinity has always needed Others threatens masculinity’s unspoken authenticity; if masculinity is a constructed identity, then how can it retain its position as the default or simply the human in Western culture?

I believe that masquerade is actually the practice which literalises this condition of masculinity. Masculinity viewed through the lens of Butlerian masquerade or gender performance theory becomes an interface, the point where two identities (the man and the costume) converge and fight for dominance.

Hence, my research project is an unmasking of masculinity in order to reveal the disguise itself rather than some ‘real’ identity underneath. I argue that masculinity is a performance but, more than that, masculinity is specifically the performance of naturalness. In other words, masculinity is a decorative layer or a social construct that masquerades as a gender ontology.

Starting from Judith Butler’s pioneering theory of gender as a performance, I look at four American films released across the 1990s: Point Break (1991), Face/Off (1997), Fight Club (1999), and The Matrix (1999). Each film has in common its genre (action) and the fact that each was released during a decade in American culture when masculinity was infamously pronounced as being in crisis. In this regard, I believe each film is a useful and necessary study in the performance of heterosexual, white masculinity. A study of the body literally in action becomes a study of the male body as a performance.

Images of masquerade, disguise, pretence, and doubling abound in 90s action cinema: from F.B.I. agent Johnny Utah going undercover to infiltrate a gang of surfers in Point Break, to Sean Archer and Castor Troy literally wearing each other’s faces in Face/Off, to the Narrator’s realisation that he is and has been Tyler Durden all along in Fight Club, and, finally, to Neo, Thomas Anderson’s superhero-like alter-ego in The Matrix. In fact, as I demonstrate in my research project, the men in these films rely on masquerade to work out and perform most aspects of their identities, including sexuality and homoerotic relationships, the body literally in action and wielding hegemonic dominance, and the notion of gender crises.

The significance of the action genre to the reinforcement and replication of masculinities is by no means a new concern. Key film theorists on the topic, such as Susan Jeffords, Yvonne Tasker, and Mark Gallagher, have each identified the prevalence of images of the family and fatherhood specifically in 1990s action cinema as a prime example of masculine anxiety about narratives of continuity. What is a new concern is an examination of the way in which masculinities in 1990s action cinema accomplish this narrative through images of male bodies in masquerade.

In fact, despite the wealth of material on action cinema, very little attention has been paid to the way masculinities are performed in these films; more often than not, what is studied is whether masculine protagonists conform to or deny notions of hegemonic masculinity and, hence, conclusions are based on what the film does to promote or discourage its continuation in wider American culture. Instead, my research takes this notion further; for as much as this notion of masking draws attention to a hysterical ‘putting on’ of masculinity – that can hence be subversively ‘taken off’ – it also splits the masculine subject.

Like a cell that paradoxically multiplies by dividing, masculinity’s continuation is predicated on doubling. As such, to study the representations of masculinities in action cinema from a performative gender theory approach has implications for not only the ways in which masculinities reproduce, but for the wider feminist project of denaturalising gender as well.

Short bio

Kate Bowen is a second-year postgraduate student at the University of Adelaide in South Australia, undertaking a PhD in English. Her doctoral research centres on masculine identity performance in American action cinema of the 1990s. Her wider research interests include contemporary American cinema, particularly genre cinema such as horror, and theories of novel-to-film adaptation.