Traveling Orthodoxies?: Sexuality and Political Correctness in New Zealand

Abstract

In the English-speaking world during the 1990s, the mass media contained much discussion of political correctness. Cultural politics in general, and ques- tions of gender, ethnicity, and sexuality in particular, have since been bound up in debates around political correctness. However, we might understand the term political correctness not as a description of a phenomenon but as a signifier that has traveled—from nation to nation and context to context—in search of a signi- fied. Here, Said’s discussion of traveling theory informs an investigation of the ways in which political correctness appeared in the New Zealand mass media during the 1990s and was applied to debates over sexuality in particular. I sug- gest that the particularities of this process reflected a dovetailing of (1) the dif- ferential cultural positions afforded to homosexuality and heterosexuality and (2) the discursive logics informing uses of the term political correctness.