From imprisonment to the politics of love, this project analyses the relationships between queer New Zealanders, citizenship and the state between 1900 and 2025. At this stage, the project’s publications consist of a series of journal articles that explore a range of settings and themes:

• daily life in prison, and psychological ‘treatment’, for men convicted of sex with other males between 1917 and 1970;
• the ramifications of homoerotic contact on New Zealand military bases during the 1940s and 1950s;
• the policing of sex between men in Canterbury during the 1950s, drawing on a complete set of court records for the decade;
• the depathologising of homosexuality during the 1970s;
• late-twentieth-century debates about gay and lesbian rights in relation to shifting cultural politics and HIV/AIDS;
• recent conceptions of equality and intimate citizenship;
• civil unions, marriage equality and the new politics of love;
• emerging debates over hate speech, conversion therapy, and other government legislation.

The project weaves together historical and sociological approaches as it explores the shifting relationships between private, public and political elements of queer experience.

Some work from this project has already been published: [view] 

In September 2022, Journal of Australian Studies published a special issue titled ‘Surveilling Bodies: Sexuality, Medicine and the Law’, co-edited with James Bennett from Newcastle University.