Life Writing and Conflict: Love Wins

Between 2 September and 7 November 2017, a non-binding, voluntary postal survey of attitudes to legalising marriage equality was distributed to all Australians on the electoral roll. Various literatures responded to this event both directly and indirectly. This chapter considers Hannah Gadsby’s global hit stand-up comedy performance Nanette, published as a Netflix documentary in 2017; the 2018 anthology Going Postal: More than ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, a monograph collection of creative and critical responses by LGTBQISA+ writers to the Australian marriage equality survey; and Magda Szubanski’s year-long cross-platform and performative deployment of her personal autobiographical story. These texts respond to urgent social justice issues that narrate and testify to experiences of ideologically based and personally experienced conflict. These publications and performances of self and experience exist within an increasingly diverse spectrum of contemporary Australian literature and they offer a particular insight and constitute a distinctive mechanism by which individuals resist, reconcile, and articulate experiences of conflict in their everyday life.