Author Description

History of Australian Aboriginal's colonization has had ill-effects on the performance of Indigenous gender relations, challenged the heteronormative conception of gender and directed Aboriginal people into shaping marginalized type of masculinities and femininities. This book, therefore, provides a trajectory of shift in gender enactment of Aboriginal men and women in Australia's pre and post-contact eras. The purpose is to account for the gender enactment of Indigenous people of Australia as has been veridically represented in Robert J. Merritt's The Cake Man and Jack Davis's The Dreamers in the1970s and the 1980s. The rich scholarship on Indigenous masculinity and femininity would provide this opportunity to better understand the mainstream notion of masculinity and femininity. In light of Judith Butler's de-essentialising notion of gender, this book analyses Indigenous gender roles and discusses the ways in which the perpetuation of these norms leads to the crisis of masculinity and Indigenous women's masculine gender achievements.