Abstract
Show You’re Working Out explores representations of gender, space and violence in texts from and about the Pākehā (New Zealander of European descent) experience of the rural south of Te Waipounamu the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand. I take a feminist, queer, anti- and de-colonising stance, showing connections between the personal and structural violences of settler colonisation through analyses of existing literatures and creation of new texts.
My approach is one of queer scavenging. I choose texts that don’t fit the dominant narrative or don’t fit together within that narrative and juxtapose them, whether by means of literary analysis or by using more literal cut and paste and collaging techniques. This method allows me to reveal violences in settler coloniser narratives and to create alternative stories that try not to line up along settler coloniser lines.
I discuss settler coloniser violences done to and by rural Pākehā women and girls through analyses of Jillian Sullivan’s collection of essays Map for the Heart, and Rebecca Hawkes’ poetry collection Meat Lovers. I show how Hawkes’ and Sullivan’s writing illuminates the patriarchal gendering of rural Pākehā women and girls within the settler-coloniser-constructed places that constitute rural space. I also show how their writing highlights the queer and feminist community-making that can result from not conforming to their patriarchal place.
I demonstrate the (lack of) place for effeminacy in the rural south of Te Waipounamu in discussions of Michael Metzger’s autoethnographic theatre show The Changing Shed and Graeme Aitken’s semi-autobiographical novel 50 Ways of Saying Fabulous. My analyses of the texts make visible the gendered violences of settler coloniser organisation of space in the rural south: that a man’s place is in public and in charge, a women’s place is in the home, female masculine girls are allowed space to roam but effeminate boys have few safe places to go. Through analyses of Aitken’s and Metzger’s writing I also show how Pākehā can renovate colonising violences while wrangling their own freedoms.
Alongside considerations of these creative works, I also participate in story creation through a creative essay, zines, sewings, a documented exhibition and a collection of poems, titled Show You're Working Out. I use zines as a mode of interrogation to rebuild possibilities for one Pākehā woman, Hannah Hayes. I found Hannah’s story of being a bicycling saleswoman in the rural south of Te Waipounamu in the 1890s, written in a single paragraph of a family history folder at the Hayes Engineering Works & Homestead in Ōtūrēhua. My own story of the years I spent living in an abusive marriage in the rural south of Te Waipounamu collides with Hannah’s story in an essay about a bike ride taken with Jillian Sullivan and Laura Williamson on a track close to Ōtūrēhua.
Collectively, the literary analyses, essay, exhibition, zines, sewings and poems show my workings out about the violences of settler colonisation in the rural south of Te Waipounamu, and look to possibilities for queer, feminist and anti- and de-colonising horizons.