Milenkovic, James (2026) Rescripting ‘the closet’: Theoretical and conceptual renderings of Australian lesbian and gay ‘coming out’ narratives. PhD thesis, Victoria University.

Abstract

(Re)negotiated and (re)produced linguistically, materially, historically, geographically, politically, and socially as a relation to cisgender, heterosexual identity discourses, ‘the closet’ is a utilitarian and disciplinary apparatus of onto-epistemic violence. This project (re)considers ‘the closet’ and ‘coming out’ as technologies of subjectivisation (Foucault, 1988b): the (re)producing of gay and lesbian subjects. In this thesis, I draw on empirical data and philosophical, theoretical, and conceptual frameworks to think with theory (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, 2023), and to queer (mono)methodological, conceptual, theoretical, and disciplinary cohesiveness – like coding and thematising data. This project subverts normative temporal and spatial logics, positing ‘the closet’ as a unique interstitial space between absence and presence, being and non-being, place and no-place. It evokes symbolic-material discourses vis-à-vis rites of passage, liberation, protection, ritual, stratagems, (self) surveillance, and (self) censorship. This thesis brings into dialogue the ‘post’ paradigms of post qualitative (St. Pierre, 2011, 2018), post (non) representational (Anderson & Harrison, 2016; Vannini, 2015), and post foundational inquiry (Jackson & Mazzei, 2024). It situates the co-researchers’ experiences of ‘the closet’ and ‘coming out’ within plateaus to enunciate the protean, unfinishable, and unsettleable performative of ‘coming out’ for sexual and gender minoritarian subjects.

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