Televising the (R)evolution: Exaggeration, Urban Spectacle and the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.

Brian Morris, Media and Communications, University of Melbourne

b.morris@english.unimelb.edu.au

While the annual Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras encompasses a diverse range of events and cultural performances celebrating gay and lesbian identity including public lectures, a dance party, book launches, a fair, ceremonies of remembrance, and an arts festival the centrepiece of the Mardi Gras celebrations is its ‘‘public’’ parade. Over the course of its twenty-two year history, the parade has evolved from being a small, celebratory protest march to the largest annual street party in Australia. This paper utilises Susan Stewart’s theorisation of the notion of exaggeration and her genealogy of the parade form as a starting point from which to consider some of the consequences of the popular success of the Mardi Gras parade. In particular, the paper examines the way that the expansion and popularisation of this once local street parade has seen a proliferation and dispersal of the effects of Mardi Gras. The most significant recent development in that process has been the telecasting of the parade in various forms since 1994. Since the broadcasting of the event (first on public and then on commercial television), the contemporary parade has become a complex hybrid of located street performance and dispersed media event. I argue in this paper that the broad evolution of the Mardi Gras parade form signals a shift in our understanding of the nature of ‘‘everyday’’ experience of public spaces such as the street. More specifically, I extend the work of urban theorists who have argued that the shift from an industrial to post-industrial age has produced increasingly virtualised experiences of city-space.