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The exhibition You Are Here has been staged at a timely moment within the development of gay political practices and theory in Australia. As this year's Mardi Gras celebrations were promoted as the biggest and most visible yet, so also the growing impact, in Australia, of a United States based 'queer' rhetoric and theory has provided a formative context for issues raised in this important show. For it is the relation between identity, sexuality and representation which is both the focus of queer politics and of this exhibition-a focus which is of course directly signalled in the exhibition's title. Yet, resurrecting an Althusserian vocabulary, we might ask who, in fact, is being interpolated here in that who exactly is this 'you' and what, if anything, underwrites the apparent certainty of both the statement and its mode of address.
In order to get some purchase on the issues of identity at play in this exhibition, it is useful to track the shift in identity politics signalled by the emergence of "queerness" .I Central to much of the language of gay liberation has been the notion that sexual identity is an essential or innate attribute or property of subjectivity and personality. Nowhere was this claim more evident than in the notion of 'coming out'. Yet while coming out certainly had (and continues to have) an important political and strategic function as an exercise in self-affirmation and as an assertion of the sheer existence and visibility of gays both individually and as a political group, such visibility arguably involved the imposition of an essentialist and teleological closure upon the intrinsic unfixity of identity, sexuality and desire. As such, it could also be... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline