Race and the Modern Exotic: Three 'Australian' women on global display

Abstract

his book tells the stories of three internationally successful ‘Australian’ performers of the first half of the twentieth century, in order to raise questions about femininity, transnational celebrity, race and Australianness. Annette Kellerman was an early twentieth-century swimmer, diver, lecturer, and silent-film star. Kellerman turned herself into a star through a modern, performative career centred on her own body – a very fit body that she used in spectacular ways to challenge older notions of weak, modest femininity. Through her international vaudeville performances and film roles, Kellerman played with gender boundaries, and the quasi-racial identity of South Sea Islander. Rose Quong was an actor, lecturer and writer who was born and brought up in Melbourne, but left Australia in 1924 and forged a career in London and New York. Quong also built a career based on her own body, through a careful appropriation of Orientalism. In Quong’s case, her body was the signifier of her Chinese authenticity, the essentialist foundation for her constructed, diasporic Chinese identity. While both Kellerman and Quong deployed their bodies strategically, and both were performers, Quong was modern in ways distinctive from Kellerman. Show more