Camp in the Country: Re-negotiating Sexuality and Gender Through a Rural Lesbian and Gay Festival

Abstract

ChillOut is Australia's largest rural lesbian and gay festival, and this article examines how the event both troubles and re-confirms normative understandings of sexuality and gender. To do this, we adopt a spatially sensitive, cultural geography approach, which asserts that spaces, bodies, and subjectivities are mutually constituted. In particular, we utilise theories of performativity, camp, and the spatial imperative of subjectivity. We apply these frameworks to a range of empirical material gathered at the 2006 ChillOut Festival from participant observation, media reports, in-depth interviews with participants and stakeholders, and a visitors' survey. Interpreting this data, we find that, on the one hand, increased participation at ChillOut challenges assumptions about the invisibility of non-heterosexuality in rural Australia, and that camp performances during the festival subvert conventional models of sexuality and gender. On the other hand, however, these sexualised performances reveal certain limits of, and caveats to, acceptable non-heterosexual subjectivities in rural Australia, particularly around age, class, and affluence. ChillOut, thus, provides an important interpretive window on how the straight/gay dualism is configured in relation to lesbian and gay tourism, revealing the contradictory and ambiguous qualities of lesbian and gay festivals in remaking heteronormative social worlds.