[In Press] Writing themselves in : Indigenous gender and sexuality diverse Australians online

There has been limited exploration into the online engagements of people who are Indigenous and gender and sexuality diverse. There are, however, two separate bodies of literature that provide substantial insights into the digital involvement of Indigenous Australians, and gender and sexuality diverse people. Each has identified a myriad of complex negotiations, interactions and resistances that take place through the affordances of digital spaces, along with identifying impacts on well-being. This scoping review discusses dominant themes within existing research on these topics, and documents research that discusses an online blog entitled Archiving the Aboriginal Rainbow that is designed to foreground representations of Indigenous gender and sexuality diverse people. To contextualise this discussion, the paper begins with a review of scholarly literature that articulates and challenges the ongoing colonisation of Indigenous peoples’ gender and sexuality. The literature reviewed exposes new research directions. Namely, the importance of exploration into Indigenous gender and sexuality diverses peoples’ online engagements, and their interrelationship with well-being

[In Press] Competing discourses and cultural intelligibility : familicide, gender and the mental illness/distress frame in news

Familicide – the killing of a partner and child(ren) – is a rare and complex crime that, when it occurs, receives intense media coverage. However, despite growing scholarly attention to filicide in the news, little research to date has looked at how familicide is represented. Situated at the intersection of filicide, intimate partner homicide and very often suicide, how the knotty and confronting issue of familicide is reported on is telling of the discourses available to understand complex forms of family violence. In this article, we argue that reporting on familicide mirrors broader feminist concerns about the tendency to frame fatal family violence at the hands of men in individualised terms – often as driven by mental illness – at the expense of an accounting of gender and power. Here, we seek to elaborate on and contextualise what we call the mental illness/distress frame as part of the broader tendency towards psychocentrism. This is amplified in cases of familicide where cultural signifiers for the increasingly publicly conceived of issue of ‘domestic violence’ are often not apparent, leading to popularised psychological explanations to be assumed. The mental health/distress frame operates not only to obscure the role of gender and power in domestic and family violence; it obscures the connection between gender, mental distress and violence, naturalising (and gender-neutralising) mental distress and violence as a response to it. We argue that intersecting discourses – of gender, age, disability and the heterosexual nuclear family, for instance – operate in important ways to suggest, support and rationalise this frame. We illustrate these ideas through a detailed case study analysis of news reporting on a case of familicide in Sydney, Australia

Mobility tactics : young LGBTIQ+ Indigenous Australians' belonging and connectedness

Although previous research indicates a positive relationship between community belonging and well-being in Indigenous Australian contexts, little is known about how this relationship is experienced by Indigenous Australians who are gender and/or sexually diverse. Drawing from qualitative interviews with LGBTIQ+ Indigenous youth, we explore concepts of belonging and connectedness and how these concepts relate to their identities and lived experiences of ‘community’. Although many participants shared similar experiences of conflict and isolation from their Indigenous kinship or geographically located communities, they also emphasised the importance and collective transformative potential of Indigenous LGBTIQ+ community-building that is aroused when forging new communities of belonging and connectedness

Transforming colonial social suffering : strategies of hope and resistance by LGBTIQ+ Indigenous peoples in settler-colonial Australia

Although emergent literature has begun articulating the effects of settler-colonialism on Indigenous Australians’ gender and sexuality, little remains known about how contemporary colonial processes are being counteracted by Indigenous queer communities. Drawing on the qualitative responses within a larger survey with Indigenous gender and/or sexuality diverse people, we explore how strategies of hope and resistance are enacted in efforts to contest and transform colonial social suffering and to maintain and promote individual and collective wellbeing. While all participants share experiences of struggling for wellbeing against the ongoing effects of colonisation, they also reveal how they have fostered Indigenous queer networks to respond to and resist alienating and/or oppressive colonial structures of power. Additionally, some participants divulge how they harness adverse lived experiences as a motivator to challenge and change the intergenerational legacies of colonisation