Ghosts of Leigh: scripting the monstrous effeminate

Ghosts of Leigh: scripting the monstrous effeminate

This article describes how a practice-led research methodology used to produce a creative writing artefact, a short play aimed at a high school audience, had a transformative impact on a number of levels: on the artefact, on the writing practice itself and on the author’s own self-knowledge in terms of gender identity and subjectivity. The creative writing artefact in question is a short stage play entitled Ghosts of Leigh, an exploration of the gender-bending club culture of the 1980s. The play is set in regional Queensland, Australia, which, at that time, was a strongly homosocial and homophobic environment. The script and this article explore the notion of effeminacy as a monstrous masculinity of considerable discursive potency that simultaneously disrupts both masculinity and femininity. The article also discusses how the practice-led research methodology itself facilitated the development of fresh understandings around effeminacy and how these new understandings interacted with the author’s lived gender and embodied subjectivity.

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