Abstract
This essay analyses key examples of language used during the recent case of Private Jake Kovco, the first Australian solider to die during Australia’s military involvement in Iraq. Kovco died not in combat but in his barracks room, shot in the head by his own pistol. In particular, the essay considers the implications of the military inquiry being told that Kovco may have accidentally shot himself while joking with his roommates ‘in a female/homosexual way’, the gun held to his head ‘almost to say this is so gay I would rather be dead’. Payne revisits Sedgwick’s concept of ‘homosexual panic’ to argue that the erasure of homophobia from the record of the incident (euphemised as ‘skylarking’) contributes to the normalisation of homophobia as an unworthy source of social and political panic, precisely because of the ‘systemic function’ Sedgwick attributes to homosexual panic in reinforcing heterosexual masculine entitlement.
Highlights
In April 2006, facing an increasingly distrustful public reception to its policy of military involvement in Iraq, the Australian government struggled to contain any further ‘collateral damage’ after the death of the first Australian soldier in Iraq
I analyse key examples of language used during the Kovco case in what I call a panic of reconstruction: attempts in media reports, ministerial press releases and inquiry testimony to restabilise the metonymic masculine and national embodiment of Private Kovco in the face of speculation and unknowing obscuring the circumstances of his death
A tension between key phrases from the testimony of one of Kovco’s roommates and the military inquiry’s ultimate findings illuminates the specific anxieties of homosexual panic that structures certain Western nationalist masculinities and the military culture built around their defence
Summary
In April 2006, facing an increasingly distrustful public reception to its policy of military involvement in Iraq, the Australian government struggled to contain any further ‘collateral damage’ after the death of the first Australian soldier in Iraq. I analyse key examples of language used during the Kovco case in what I call a panic of reconstruction: attempts in media reports, ministerial press releases and inquiry testimony to restabilise the metonymic masculine and national embodiment of Private Kovco in the face of speculation and unknowing obscuring the circumstances of his death.
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