Gender, sexuality and cosmopolitanism in multicultural Australia: a case study

Responding to the paradoxical forces of globalization is a demanding but crucial endeavour. The changing landscape of culture and society across the world is so rapid and so complex that the need to clarify what is happening is imperative and urgent. We know that the effects of globalisation are uneven and deeply contradictory. Economic, social, cultural and political interdependence and mutuality are certainly key features of the twenty first century, but so are parochialism, atavism, fundamentalism, essentialism, poverty and exclusionary notions of belonging. We know that according to world indicators across a range of issues that endemic inequalities exist that cut across markers of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability, age and so on. Moreover, the postcolonial environment of the twenty first century is witness to the aftermath of centuries of Western colonisation affecting every part of the planet.