A new study which analyses the Australian Curriculum Senior reading list has found diverse sexual communities are severely underrepresented in the selected texts.
Only two fiction books; The Great Gatsby and Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night – contained characters, experiences or relationships outside of the heterosexual norm.
Researchers from the Faculty of Education are concerned that a lack of queer identities or themes in the sample texts could send a message that “diverse genders and sexualities have no place in ‘our’ world and are best studied at a safe distance”.