A Fake and a Hysteric: the Captain of Team Australia
| DOI | 10.1177/0305829816659972 |
| Published date | 01 September 2016 |
| Author | Anthony J. Langlois |
| Date | 01 September 2016 |
| Subject Matter | Forum: Faking It in 21st Century IR/Global Politics |
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
2016, Vol. 45(1) 98 –104
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829816659972
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1. Cynthia Weber, Faking It: US Hegemony in a Post-Phallic Era (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1999).
A Fake and a Hysteric: the
Captain of Team Australia
Anthony J. Langlois
School of History and International Relations, Flinders University, Australia
Keywords
International Relations, Australia, sexuality, gender, queer theory, masculinity
Cynthia Weber’s provocative and at times hilarious book Faking it concerns US-Cuba
relations between 1959 and 1994.1 Reading it recently from Australia, I was frequently
arrested by the relief into which Weber’s observations threw the behaviour of a now
deposed prime minister, and the political culture which enabled his ascension to the
office. From Weber’s first paragraph, in which the American body politic is depicted
cartoon-like in heroic pose, ready for action anywhere, through to her final observations
about strategies which deny and defer knowing, Weber speaks directly to the fakery of
Australian public life.
I don’t propose to read Weber’s heroic cartoon figure onto Australia. For one thing,
while Weber describes her cartoon figure as ‘a white headless body of indecipherable sex
and gender cloaked in the flag and daggered with a queer dildo harnessed to its midsec-
tion’, the cartoon figure in the Australian context is most discernably male. This figure is
often stylised as a ‘dick’ or a ‘prick’, an arrogant bastard, a guy with a misplaced opinion
of himself, who thinks he is something notable that he most certainly isn’t. Moreover,
this figure is commonly depicted in ‘budgie smugglers’, very brief swimwear that leaves
very little to the imagination.
This is Australia’s recently ousted conservative Prime Minister. A hypermasculine
Aussie male, Tony Abbott won office by pitting himself in the most macho manner
against his two prime-ministerial predecessors – the woman, Julia Gillard, and the
Corresponding author:
Anthony J. Langlois, School of History and International Relations, Flinders University, GPO Box 2100,
Adelaide, SA, 5001, Australia.
Email: anthony.langlois@flinders.edu.au
659972MIL0010.1177/0305829816659972MillenniumLanglois
research-article2016
Forum: Faking It in 21st Century IR/Global Politics
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