in conversation with Kathleen Quinlivan

Research on sex, education and queer theory bound Kathleen and I together for over twenty years. While Kathleen was undertaking her doctoral studies in Aotearoa New Zealand in the late 1990s, I was also working on my PhD in Australia. Our paths would inevitably cross. We first met in 1999 in Melbourne at the Australian Association for Research in Education conference when we were both doctoral students.

Our passion for research related to education, gender and sexualities was informed by the queer, feminist and activist communities in which we circulated in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, including during the ravages of the HIV pandemic. Kathleen was based at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. Before moving to academia, she had extensive experience as a secondary schoolteacher and this clearly informed her research in education. A cartoon featured in her doctoral thesis drawn by Linda James (Kathleen’s partner), depicts the multiple positionalities of Kathleen including feminist, educator, researcher, outsider, change agent, and (my personal favourite) haranguer. These different positionalities shine through in the two special issues of this volume of Sex Education journal inspired by Kathleen’s work.

From smellwalks, to pompomed vulvas; from gay anal sex to adventures in fisting – there is nothing banal about these volumes, just as there was nothing banal about Kathleen. Kathleen commenced her doctoral studies in the late 1990s, having already completed a master’s thesis in 1994 researching lesbian students’ experiences of secondary school. A publication related to the challenges of claiming a lesbian identity in education resulted from this work (Quinlivan Citation1996). It no doubt still has relevance for many teachers and students today. In the epilogue to her doctoral thesis Kathleen characterises the work as a journey ‘through a wilderness of failure’ (a decade prior to Halberstam Citation2011). Kathleen’s scholarship was prescient – noting key issues that would circulate in the field of sexualities education for decades to come.

Importantly for me (and I am sure others) Kathleen was also a very out lesbian. Working with her friend and research collaborator, Shane Town, in 1999 she co-authored a piece entitled Queer as Fuck? Exploring the potential of queer pedagogies in researching (Citation1999a). Kathleen and Shane were researching queer issues in education in NZ at a time when few people were willing to be out queer scholars in this space. Between them, Kathleen and Shane sought to address ‘the limitations of equity discourses that situate “queer youth as a disenfranchised minority”’ (Quinlivan and Town, Citation1999b: 509) arguing such discourse could have the negative effect of increasing queer young people’s feelings of alienation. This has proven to be an ongoing dilemma in research related to LGBTQI young people.

When I first met Kathleen, she was not keen to engage with a stranger about her work. Not long before, Shane had died of HIV. She was still profoundly affected by this loss. In retrospect, I have come to a different appreciation of that first encounter. I am more keenly aware of what it means to lose a close friend and collaborator – they are a rare thing in academia – and in life. Kathleen has demonstrated the value of such collaboration to me repeatedly over the course of my career.

We often travelled together – attending numerous retreats and conferences. In Madrid, I joined Kathleen and her partner, Linda, at a late-night performance of flamenco dancing, followed in the wee small hours of the morning by Kathleen’s own flamenco performance on the floorboards of our hotel room – trying out her new dance shoes. She was bloody indefatigable. At the American Educational Research Association conference in Philadelphia in 2014, where Kathleen was Chair of the Queer Studies Special Interest Group, she insisted that the annual business meeting should be brief and followed immediately by a disco – dancing ensued in the staid ballroom we were allocated, complete with a disco ball and DJ. These recollections might appear as trivial asides, but they were fundamental to getting the work done. For Kathleen work and pleasure were, if possible, entwined. Her capacity for pleasure and joy drew people towards her, and towards her work.

From 2011 to 2014, Kathleen and I worked together on a grant on sexuality education and cultural and religious difference in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand (with Louisa Allen, Clive Aspin and Fida Sanjakdar). Out of this research, Kathleen led an article discussing how the ‘cunning politic’ of (bicultural) recognition legitimates Māori ways of knowing in ways that privilege Whiteness – reproducing rather than disrupting networks of power and dumbing down Māori epistemologies. (Quinlivan et al. Citation2014, 393). Disrupting the working and effects of power was key to Kathleen’s work. The index to her most recent book Exploring Contemporary Issues in Sexuality Education with Young People (Quinlivan Citation2018) is emblematic of Kathleen’s approach to scholarship and to life. The terms discombobulation, destabilisation, deterritorialisation and experimentation together dominate the page references. Kathleen’s thinking is wild at heart. This wildness was guided by a phrase from the playwright Tony Kushhner – it’s a ‘non-stupid optimism’ – a phrase that Kathleen carried through from her doctoral research. She was very much alive to the challenges people face in the field of sexuality education. Increasingly her work focused on how through experimentation things might be otherwise.

Since I started in academia, I have been informed by and engaged with Kathleen’s ideas; she has been formative in my work. We have certainly not always agreed. This has been part of the power and influence of this relationship on my own thinking and development as an academic. As a person. Kathleen has been a significant figure for me – both because of her scholarship and because of who she was. While disagreement in academia might appear common, in my experience this is not the case. People might often critique somebody’s argument to a third person; they rarely let you know in person. I have valued and, much less often, regretted the candour we have shared. Sometimes our critiques of one another crossed lines. More often in my experience they propelled me to investigate what I was thinking, to ask myself why I am taking a particular route, or made me justify why I was not picking up particular threads.

An edited transcript of a conversation between Kathleen and I, reveals much of what our mutual engagement involved. The conversation that follows captures Kathleen’s wildness and some of her passions and adventures in education and life. This wildness was underpinned by a passion for social and political change that was inspiring to be around. It is also fitting that Kathleen should have the last word in these two special issues of Sex Education journal inspired by her work.

Twenty years on from our first encounter in Australia, I visited Kathleen in Rangiora, near Christchurch, in 2019. This was one of many visits I was lucky to make to Kathleen and Linda’s beautiful home. Kathleen’s study was situated so she could look out at the garden from a second story window, admiring the produce and her roses; Linda’s art filled the walls; Chester the dog roamed the house; a hot tub was installed on the deck, and a red Mazda sports coupe was housed in the garage. Pleasure, hospitality and fun, all resonated through Kathleen’s work and through the rest of her life. During my visit I was keen to revisit some stories I had heard many times.

In the conversation that follows, we touched on a number of themes. Prior to visiting Kathleen, I had just read Newton’s (Citation2018), My Butch Career. Our thoughts on butch and femme cultures permeated the talk partially in response to this text. Kathleen came out in the 1970s; she was already a staunch feminist. Our conversation began with Kathleen’s experiences of attending university as a self-described ‘radical feminist’ at the time but moved on to her memories of living in Millerton, a small town on the west coast of the South Island of New Zealand.

Kathleen started out in Millerton with a husband, and she was teaching in nearby Westport. She ended up in the thick of a wild group of lesbians. I wanted to include these earlier stories here because for me they always informed the academic work that Kathleen later pursued. She lived within and amongst different cultures of feminism and sexuality and she eschewed essentialism from an early age. But she also took a lot from these times, engaging in pleasure, parties and activism. Later, she lived for a period in Botswana, and completed another stint of teaching, before completing her masters degree and doctorate at the University of Canterbury in the 1990s and early noughties.

Kathleen was always a bit of an outsider, in feminism, in the academy, and in the research topics and spaces she pursued. She was an outsider, but never a disinterested observer. Together these stories speak to the value of taking a plunge into the unfamiliar, even if failure might be the result. Maybe this is a valuable orientation for readers of Sex Education.

Kathleen Quinlivan (KQ): To be a young heterosexual feminist in the 70s was pretty hard. In the face of that whole thing around feminism is the theory and lesbianism is the practice … that whole determinist sort of thing … . The first time I ever met lesbians was in the 70s. So, I remember vaguely being kind of aware of it, then. I’ve got a photo of myself standing for women’s rights officer in about 1978. I was part of this feminist collective and we’ve got young middle-class university feminists. Someone needed to stand for this position and this fucking man stood for women’s rights officer. I was the radical feminist, then there was a moderate feminist, and there was this man.

Mary Lou Rasmussen (MLR): So, the vote was split among the women?

I can remember the first time that Donna Awatere-Huata came and talked; there was the whole sort of Māori renaissance and it was just so confronting … being a feminist was actually profoundly educational… we sat around and we had consciousness-raising groups, and we talked about our lives which was something that you hadn’t done before because women were just somebody you competed with for men really. So, it was a really big change.

I’ve been wanting to write this book for ages, with Rosemary du Plessia about documenting the complexities of 70s feminism. It was probably my most profoundly educational experience, and in multiple ways over a period of time. I just didn’t want to live a life like my mother, which is so fucking patronising.

She was heavily immersed in the Christchurch kind of butch femme lesbian scene before feminism … they had an amazing time. I’m really intrigued with the whole butch femme thing. I think I find it quite sexy. I think that that dynamic is there in relationships between women, however you roll around with it, it’s there. And it’s sort of erotically interesting in an Audre Lorde kind of way, sort of that whole idea of erotics is power …

So, she was talking to me about how middle-class, white, lesbian feminists basically fucking wrecked the whole butch-femme scene in Christchurch, and how angry she felt about that. She’s a writer, she writes poetry. She ended up becoming friends with white, middle-class, lesbian feminists who wrote poetry, too.

And then to kind of confront things about getting involved with; walking into, unbeknown to me, really the separatist community of lesbians on the West Coast and just trying to reconcile. I mean, it’s just not in my nature that kind of thinking. I hate anything that I feel squashes something.

In the beginning, as a straight feminist, I remember thinking, well, it’s my job to go into bat for lesbians as a feminist, that’s what I should do, it’s the right thing to do… and then at the same time, I was sort of ambivalent about it.

… so we all had parties together and we’d get drunk and talk about stuff. They loved flipping straight women. And they all had a uniform. I found that really hard because I was always quite femmi. They had army trousers with all the pockets, they were great, handy trousers because you carry heaps of shit in them. And then they had, like, football socks and sneakers and big baggy seaman’s jerseys. You know those navy-blue ones that you used to buy from the army surplus stores?

Oh, God! I just couldn’t understand. I remember saying to one of them who later on became the person I was involved with, the woman I got into a relationship with and fell in love with, really, ‘Why do you persist in making yourselves look so fucking unattractive?’ And it just went down like a cup of cold sick.

… and you know what they tried to convince me of? [raucous laughter] … I remember talking to this woman … she said, ‘Well, it’s because relationships between women aren’t about what you look like, it’s about …’ and I’m, like, that must be fucking bullshit, like, surely if you want to fuck somebody you must at least fancy them. And you can’t be telling me that it’s all about who you are as a person, honey, do you know what I mean? Oh my God. [laughter]

And then once I got kind of into it … then I started to construct the sort of narrative around how I must have always been a lesbian … it was weird, really.

And then I had to come to terms … the ways that I didn’t fit … I didn’t want to be that kind. Separatism isn’t my thing, like, I was … it’s never been how I roll. I was still teaching in Westport, and still had kind of … I was teaching feminist books to kids – it was all that stuff with a broader political project that was really important to me … before I became a lesbian, I was … yeah, like, I always had that kind of political analysis.

I’d always kind of idealised lesbian feminism as … how amazing it would be … It’s not really how I’ve ever rolled, I’ve always been interested in political and social change, and I just think, well, that’s one way to do it … what I saw going on in that very small world was pretty fucking brutal.

There was also a lot of great parties and a lot of dressing up and fucking drinking and … it was entertaining, there’s no doubt about that. We had a fucking great time.

And, kids would be in endless conversations around, ‘Ooh, she’s a lesbian’, and, blah, blah. And then you had to either confirm it or deny it and people would try and protect you. I’d be out on yard duty, and I’d come across these conversations and kids would say things to me, like, ‘Oh, Miss, so and so’s saying the most terrible things about you’, and I’d say, ‘Well, what is that, Karen?’ And make them say, and they’d say, ‘But you’re not, are you?’. And I had to say to this kid, “Yeah, actually, you know, I’m a lesbian’, and it’s true what everyone else is saying”. Because they wanted to defend me and say, “No, ’he’s not. She looks like a girl”. [Laughs] So then you had to say, ‘Well, actually, yes, Karen, I am’, and the’’d say, ‘Well, I don’t care because I like you anyway’.

So, these kids would kind of go into bat for you. And I think I was protected by the fact that I was a relatively good teacher. That’s what I hated about the uniform, I thought, well, to be a lesbian, do you have to wear the uniform, and I didn’t want to wear fucking old army pants. And my arse was too fat for them. So I was, like, no. I love dresses and all that shit. I love dressing up. I’ve always loved clothes and all those kinds of things.

I was an English teacher. … all the queer kids basically mostly stayed away from me because I was too out. That was another consequence of it, which is kind of interesting. And they’d come to you later, like, after they’d left school, or …

But I do think the fact that I look like a girl has been … it means I didn’t get the kind of gender policing that you got … . And, of course I could pass, I didn’t, because I was political. But I could, you know what I mean? Whatever I did, I was more palatable.

I’d been teaching for 16 years by the time I was back up in Christchurch. I thought maybe it would be interesting to document the experiences of young lesbians in schools. I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I’ll do an MA. In the beginning, I thought, I’m probably not smart enough to do this so I’ll just do one subject first. [Laughs] Fuck, isn’t that terrible? I mean, I’m just, like, so shocked at myself even thinking that now.

Around that time, it was around ’96, actually, I was supported by the Post Primary Teachers Association to go and look at lesbian and gay programmes in schools in the States and in Canada. The only study award I’ve ever won. [Laughs] I finished my Masters in ‘96. And then I got the study award. That’s when I first met Arthur Lipkin in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I went to Project Ten in Los Angeles. It’s when I first meet Didi (Khayatt) because I went to the triangle programme in Toronto, and I visited Harvey Milk School in New York City.

Then I did the PhD … I wanted to try and re-culture a school to try and make it more affirmative of lesbian, gay and bisexual kids. And it was so hard to find a school that would take me on. [Laughs]

I finally found a girls’ school in Christchurch … the teachers were so resistant. It was like a working-class girls’ school. So, this was like, oh my God, 1997–2000. It was always feminists who got you access in … lesbian feminists were really leary about you; they were either really closeted or weren’t political … the project was an abject failure, right.

Well, because I wanted to re-culture the school to create a space for lesbian and bisexual kids, it was a girls’ school, and so I was into thinking about sexual fluidity then much more. And then I got really heavily into queer theory and thought, oh fuck, this is the way to go. This is so much more interesting, and it’s so much more aligned with my political interests, fucking let’s blow up the building. It was very lonely doing that work. If I didn’t have Linda [Kathleen’s partner], it was fucking traumatising being confronted with a hostile staff and the teachers, and it was quite lonely.

I came out of it with enough knowledge to be able to teach that stuff and galvanised enough to think it was important. Not that people that are training to be teachers ever want to fucking know about it. You always end up being that person that they hate really because you destroy their fantasies of this wonderful relationship they’re gonna have with kids.