PM and partner not the only victims of Sattler's questions

Howard Sattler's question to Prime Minister Julia Gillard, asking if her former hairdressing partner Tim Mathieson might be gay is recognisably mindless to most experienced audiences and those of us who have paid attention to the differential way in which a woman prime minister's private life and body have been treated in public discourse.

Sattler's comments, which resulted in his sacking from Fairfax's 6PR in Perth were later reinforced by Piers Ackerman on ABC Insiders as he argued the Canberra Press Gallery had been aware of such rumours for several years.

Most audiences are very aware of the inane nature of this commentary and debate, recognising that male hairdressers are not all gay, that the Prime Minister is not in a relationship with a closeted gay man, and that the line of questioning is insulting to the Prime Minister, to Mathieson and to the audience.

Both the comments and many of the responses that denounced the rumour-mongering open up several issues for how we think about and frame questions of gender, sexuality and bodies.

However, outrage and responses are part of a 'dance' that is undertaken when, socially, we express outrage at the absurd, the invasive and the ridiculous. It is a dance in which the public sphere engages the issue and, sometimes quite unthinkingly, ignores those who can be most affected by off-hand comments that unwittingly paint a picture of non-heterosexuality as undesirable or non-normal.

Privacy, Bodies and Sexuality

For three years Prime Minister Gillard's body and what she does with it has been the subject of public discourse in a way which most male politicians, except those subject to a scandal, are not. That has included the concerns over whether or not she is 'deliberately barren', using the empty fruit bowl metaphor as a figure in which pregnancy and food converge. It has encompassed dialogue over the shape of her body, including those from Germaine Greer and, more recently, the menu

With Sattler and Ackerman's comments about Tim Mathieson's sexuality, the focus on her body is now on what maybe she does not do with it - have a normative sexual relationship with her stated partner.

Part of this emerges from an ongoing discourse in which the Prime Minister is depicted by those with a political investment in the discussion as the ultimate 'liar', with the suggestion that she is keeping the 'true' nature of her relationship secret and an assumed role as a gay man's beard a secret. It is a gender issue because, as a woman politician, she is depicted simultaneously as hiding information about her corporeal life and hiding the doings of her body. Here, her body, the body of her partner and her embodied private existence are seen as public property.

This is not celebrity culture at play, in which the private happenings of those with self-sought fame are seen as being available for public discussion. Politicians' bodies are rarely the subject of public scrutiny in the same way; instead this is a disproportionate extent of focus on appearance, body and sexual behaviour or a woman politicians.

While the distinction between public information and private lives is blurred in all levels of communication from the everyday to critiques over security agency surveillance, Sattler and Ackerman's comments indicate the way in which Prime Minister Gillard as a woman politician has been accorded a reduced capacity to command respect for the private body that moves about in the private home in the context of a private relationship and private decisions over appearance, child-rearing and sexual behaviour.

Stereotyping

While it might be argued that as a public figure there is to be some expectation of the pain of a focus on the private realm of both herself and her partner, Sattler and Ackerman's comments have substantial implications for people in far more vulnerable positions, particularly non-heterosexual youth.

Partly, this is because they invoke a violent stereotype. Stereotypes work by linking an identity category with a set of expected behaviours or attributes, repeated and reinforced so that they solidify over time and become a 'natural' way to think about groups with which one might not necessarily have substantial knowledge or interaction.

In this case, Sattler repeated and reinforced a very old, tired stereotype that all gay men seek career roles as hairdressers and decorators and, conversely, that all male hairdressers are either gay or secretly gay.

While the falsehood of the stereotype is, today, very well-recognised, it does remain that some vulnerable younger people may not necessarily have the cultural literacy to see the linkage as a stereotype and instead read it as a derisive statement about both masculinity and sexuality.

Normativities

The second, more violent element comes not from the comments but from much of the public response that defended Prime Minister Gillard and slammed Howard Sattler. Although well-meaning, figures such as Derryn Hinch pointed out that Sattler was going too far to suggest that Mathieson might be gay.

As he put it, "This is just low-life stuff and Howard is being a coward on this . . . This was low life and it diminished the office of prime minister.".

While Hinch would be correct to assert that an unsavoury and, indeed, absurd focus on the sex life of any prime minister diminishes the respect with which the office has traditionally been held, the comment is open to being read as asserting that the accusation that a member of the Prime Minister's household is gay is abhorent. Abhorent because the accusation is "gay" rather than that there is an accusation at all.

This risks further cementing non-heterosexuality as non-normative and non-desirable (in a prime minister, a prime minister's partner, a politician or, indeed, anyone who is not a hairdresser).

Culturally, today, we very often recognise that a normal/abnormal distinction is too limited a way of understanding the complexity of human identity, taste, preference, orientation and behaviour. However, while we rarely today invoke concepts of normal and abnormal, a distribution of normativities that emerges from the language of social demographics is the typical frame through which we think about identity.

Although moveable feasts, sexual norms are asserted and subjects-particularly young teenagers-are invited to figure themselves on a distributional curve in terms of the proxiomity to the norm.

When commentators such as Sattler and Ackerman, and respondents such as Hinch continue to remark that non-heterosexual behaviours or identities are at a distance from a desirable norm, however ridiculous, that distance for young Australians is made even greater.

For those young people having particular difficulty in the awkward, complex process of developing a sense of sexual identity, and for those who have fewer cultural resources for understanding alternative ways of thinking about sexuality, even a momentary greater distancing of queerness from a 'norm' puts them at greater risk of being made to feel less-than-normal, which is a suicide risk.

While we might question how such ludicrous insinuations have an impact on the Prime Minister, her partner, the way we think about her body or her gender or, indeed, her chances of electoral success in September, it is the young and potentially vulnerable Australians who need to be noticed in this particular commentatorial dance. It may be win-or-lose for Gillard and Sattler but, for a small number of at-risk young queer persons, mindless stereotyping can be life-and-death.