In this Q&A we speak to Associate Professor Leigh Boucher, from the Department of History and Archaeology, about his recent book exploring the last 50 years of activism in Australia and what keeps him interested in his area of research.
What is your background and what brought you to Macquarie?
I moved to Melbourne to attend the University of Melbourne as an undergraduate and then complete a PhD (though the 18-year-old version of myself would have been very surprised to find out he would later do postgraduate research). After some time in London on a research fellowship, I took up a position in a Department that later became History and Archaeology at Macquarie University. This was quite thrilling because it was, and remains, a leading department for historical research in gender and sexuality in Australia.
Tell us a bit about your current research and what makes it so important?
I am just bringing a project with Professor Robert Reynolds, Professor Michelle Arrow and Associate Professor Barbara Baird (Flinders University) to a close. We have spent the last five years or so investigating the history of feminist and LGBTIQ+ activism and its impact on citizenship since 1970 in Australia. Our book, Personal Politics (Monash U Press) was released earlier this month and it examines how accounts of personal and intimate experiences have transformed our political culture. The book, and project, emerged from a sense that questions of gender and sexual identity remain a contested and unsettled space in public life. Recent contests over the problem of intimate and family violence as well as children’s books about queer families suggest this remains the case. We hope a history of activism centred on gender and sexuality can give these debates some deep historical context. In our public life, this story is often told as a pleasing account of incremental progress and steps towards justice and equality. Our research has revealed a story in which the proliferation of claims on the basis of gender and/or sexuality has had a confounding impact on our political culture. The direction of change has not always been toward equality and inclusion, and sometimes these campaigns have further marginalised or excluded those whose lives and needs do not fit the narrative mould.
How did you originally become interested in your area of research, and what keeps you interested in it?
I suspect my own discomfort with the ways in which norms of gender and sexuality limit our lives was a central original driver of my research. I grew up in country Victoria where my love of playing netball provoked a lot of gendered jokes (and sometimes discomfort). Later, while studying at the University of Melbourne, I looked, like so many undergraduates, to units on gender and sexuality to try and help me understand and navigate my queer desires. This was also the moment in which the history wars about the realities and moral consequences of dispossession were raging in Australian public life; it is difficult to under-estimate the impact these had on a community of Australian historians. I suspect I am part of a generation of historians who have been animated by an attempt to both investigate the dynamics of settler colonisation as well as try and understand why this history provokes such heated responses. My favourite author, Margaret Atwood, once said that “writers write about the things that puzzle and worry them.” I think I am puzzled and worried by the ways in which gender, race and sexuality produce a gap between the promise of equality of justice and the realities of life in liberal democratic nation.
Is there something you would like staff to know about?
I’m part of a really interesting panel discussion for Pride Month at Macquarie that brings together researchers investigating sexuality. It promises to be a lively discussion about the importance and sometimes denial of positive emotions in queer life. We so often hear accounts of suffering and distress concerning sexual and gender minorities and I’m really fascinated by the ways in which this has shaped our histories of queer life, perhaps leaving out the joys and excitements that I think queer thinking can produce. The event will take place on the 26 June and you can RSVP here.
What do people always ask you when they find out what you do for a living?
People who aren’t familiar with academic life are often surprised to find out that I work in a university. I love a chat and can get a bit rowdy and excitable at times. People who imagine that historians spend most of their time quietly pondering the world in piles of books and documents often have trouble imagining me in that space. So, the question is often an expression of surprise that I am an historian in the first place. I think this says a lot about how some people imagine what we do and the professional lives we lead. In contrast to these assumptions, I’ve always found the university a rich space of engagement and shared enthusiasms. I quite enjoy providing examples of the sociability of research as well as the collaborative work of teaching and administration to shift the assumption that the natural home of an historian is in a quiet room.
What do you need to do your best work?
A quiet room. Just kidding (sort of). It’s taken me a long time to figure out the ‘formula’ that works for me, and I suspect it has changed over the years as my life outside of the university has changed shape. I suspect being well rested and having psychological bandwidth for all-consuming thinking is part of it. I know I produce my best ideas when I have people to talk to about the research I am doing. I also know that consecutive days on a research project seem to be the key to producing good work, even if only a couple of hours a day. I think we (researchers) need to get better at marking out time in our diaries and schedules for research and seeing this as just as immoveable as a meeting, a lecture or a tutorial. The admin task can probably wait for a few hours, and that meeting can probably be just as easily held a bit later. It’s too easy to push research time around based on what feels urgent but probably isn’t.
A personal quality you value in others?
If I’m being very honest here, I’d have to say a willingness to have a laugh and crack a joke. Most of my treasured professional and personal relationships are filled with laughter and a solid dose of wry humour. It is also something I think that queer culture has often employed to draw attention to hypocrisy, reveal political contradictions and sometimes just take those in power down a peg or two. This can sometimes get me into a bit of trouble, as my urge to produce that laughter can sometimes edge towards (and over) various lines and boundaries that others think should remain in place.