Throughout his recent collection of essays, American Homo: Community and Perversity, Jeffrey Escoffier makes the claim that what's missing from discourses surrounding gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered (GLBT) issues is a reconciliation between the social and the psychoanalytic. Escoffier believes that these two camps have ceased trying to engage productively in discourse. If that is so, then perhaps Brett Farmer's new monograph Spectacular Passions takes up such a challenge. A Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne, Farmer continues in the recent tradition of Australian queer theorists by offering his readers a collection that connects psychoanalytic and social constructionist discourses through the trope of the fantasmatic.

Farmer takes as his charge Eve