Gayby Baby – From the politics of representation to the politics of care

Activism, social impact and representation

Our activist methods – research and documentary film-making – have capricious immediate effects and long half-lives. We produce artefacts that reside in the public domain and can be captured and used by others with different political agendas. In an era when complexity is often reduced to a sound byte, one needs to think gently and thoughtfully about the images one offers about other people’s lives. We both have direct experience of making our lives public in pursuit of justice. Maya (the film-maker) is the daughter of two lesbians and has undertaken several documentary projects, in collaboration with producer Charlotte Mars, that animate the experiences of children growing up in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Intersex and Queer (LGBTIQ+) ¹ families. In one of these films, Growing Up Gayby (2013), Maya was both director and subject. Jen (the researcher) was a ‘subject’ in a later film Gayby Baby (2015). Both films received considerable media attention in the fight in Australia for marriage equality (Long, 2016; Shannon and Smith, 2017). The feature film, Gayby Baby was also followed by array of impact-driven projects which triggered media controversy with ensuing public debate. The Gayby Project (the impact arm of the film) included art installations, short films, political activism, events, screenings, panel discussions and, significantly, Australia’s first education package representing LGBTIQ+ family structures for use in schools. In targeting the curriculum in schools, Gayby Baby not only represented the lives of the children in the film but engaged audiences in their everyday spaces and communities as a site for political intervention. In this paper, we use these steeling experiences on making ones’ life public in the film Gayby Baby to ground our thinking about the representational practices we deploy in our working lives.

Research and documentary film-making have some similar characteristics and discussion of ethics across the genres is generative. Both can provide the rich description that brings warmth and imagination to policy makers, politicians and journalists who are trained to concentrate on the scale of social problems rather than their detail, complexity and nuance. Scale focuses on population level stories and tends to eclipse the human everyday which can rouse a sense of connectedness and responsibility towards about marginalised peoples. A significant difference between the two fields is that academic and other research typically insists on anonymity for participants. In contrast, the power of documentary film-making lies in its claims to represent the real lives of the people who participate and it is expected that the subjects made visible in the film are laying open their lives and identities. In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in research which deploys some of the elements of documentary to provide points of recognition and empathy among research stakeholders through filmic devices which similarly make use of ‘the real’ (Mitchell, 2011). Digital stories are a popular format that rely on representations of real people and are used to educate the public on health issues. Scholarly attention is increasingly focused on how policy makers might consume and react to such outputs (Gubrium, 2009; Matthews and Sunderland, 2017).

Our respective fields of work are in the grip of new wave of ‘impact’ thinking which aims to maximise political leverage and contribute to social change. Social impact is currently an institutional focus in the funding criteria and agreements of the accountability-driven research-world (Australian Government, 2016). The question of impact also grows in sophistication in the documentary world as philanthropic funders increasingly look beyond audience numbers to the kinds of action ignited by this work. The impact agenda is a welcome movement for those with an activist inclination. However, the ‘trending’ associated with successful campaigns can generate a wake that can be both unruly and have unintended effects.

Social impact is not synonymous with ethics. We contend that attention to impact needs to be imbued with attention to the ethics of placing people’s stories at the centre of impact campaigns. In the film industry, long-standing and heated debates around ethics of care for documentary subjects exist alongside a dearth of mechanisms to hold film-makers or funders accountable for the effects of exposure on their subjects. The documentary world is better versed and resourced on strategies to maximise audience metrics and what is known in the industry as ‘splash’. While splash affords political leverage, it can also have adverse effects in the lives of those whose stories generate debate.

This paper offers some of the story behind the political leverage of Gayby Baby alongside reflections of how best to manage the wake of ‘impact’ on the lives of those who allow their stories to be at the centre of activist tools. This conversation is structured by an introduction to some key thinkers such as Paul Rabinow and Joan Tronto about the ethics in representative encounters. Their thinking about collaboration and sustained situated care resonates with our experiences and ignites our imaginations with a sense of possibility. We introduce our own experiences of being both filmic subjects and as producers of representations of others. Our insider/outsider status in activist representational practices with respect to the LGBTIQ + communities affords insights into what types of care practices may be of benefit. We connect our own experiences in the making of Gayby Baby to the conceptual resources to flesh out cautions and incitements about impact agendas. We then look to our respective fields for structural supports and norms which can contribute to ethical impactful representational practices. We conclude with some thoughts about practices that can support ethical reflection and the future development of principled impact practices.

Conceptual resources – ethics in representative encounters

Ethicists, Rabinow and Keller (2016) insist on collaboration as a core principle of ethical research. They distinguish collaboration from cooperation in terms of participant input into agenda-setting and insist on the importance of enabling problems to emerge in research and to be co-articulated with those that experience them rather than predefined by an already set research agenda (Rabinow and Keller, 2016). This is a step beyond informed consent where people are carefully informed about the project agenda devised by film-makers or researchers and instead engages them in dialogue about their own priorities and values for representation and activism. When participants articulate their own objects of concern, they are potentially more able to consider their support needs in the here and now as well as in an imagined future. These processes of collaboration can extend from conception to the making of research or documentary products to dissemination. Evans (2016) argues in favour of participatory dissemination processes that support collaboration and the co-production of research messages so that marginalised people can engage in dialogue with decision-makers. This may require capacity building along the way. People in marginalised positions are experts in their own lives but are not necessarily well informed about messaging policy makers and forms of knowledge production that are powerful. The idea of collaboration then is bound up with obligations to both work alongside and build the capacities of ‘subjects’, so they exit projects with skills that are valuable to them.

Collaboration and capacity building are not quick and dirty practices. Feminist scholars have called for slow research (Mountz et al., 2015), ‘slow’ geographies to address urgent issues and achieve meaningful change (Evans, 2016; Pain et al., 2014). It takes time to elaborate representational agendas and for people to build the trust needed to overcome hurdles of many generations of stigma and institutional failures. Trust is required for people to share the issues they want to really address and the selves they want to show standing by certain political agendas. The notion of slow geographies captures the learning that needs to be done for political agendas and constraints to be fully understood by both producers and subjects. It anticipates that outsiders need immersion in communities to appreciate which resources are most valued. It takes time to learn to work with these resources in ways that enhance the grain of community strengths rather than rub up uncomfortably against core values and sediments of distrust. Key activist social science researchers have argued that marginalised communities and young people specifically are so over-represented and misrepresented that research should not happen without their direct agenda-setting involvement (Appadurai, 2016; Fox and Fine, 2015). This, they argue, allows new group-centred leadership to emerge and/or be strengthened.

The literature on the ethics of care offers relational tools for working in contexts where one with the power of representational resources works with another who may be under-resourced. Joan Tronto’s (1993) influential work underscores the notion that our actions have relational drives, reciprocity and effects. Tronto presents the giving and receipt of care in its broader life-course context and focuses in on the minute exchanges and reciprocities in care practices to think about ethics. This levelling relational view humbles the unidirectional thinking that generates dichotomies between knowledge producers or learners, resource givers or receivers and underscores the inevitable interdependencies and continuums that flow between both positions. By humbling power, it invites one to have the courage to name the power imbalances that exist in any given situation and encourages relationships typified by a constant reach for an equal playing field. Put simply, we are reminded that we are all interdependent and will need others to advocate for us at some point and to ask ourselves how we would like to be treated. In Tronto’s (2017) most recent work, she argues that care responsibilities in the broadest sense are absolutely central to democracy. She argues that everyday life generates

duties to take steps to form personal relationships when we are best placed to fulfil another person’s important interests in experiencing the meaning, value, love and intimacy that personal relationships bring. Such duties cannot be reduced to formal structures such as families (though families will often create their conditions), or to contractual or market relations. By its nature, the real concrete existence of human relationships establishes the centrality of relationships in human life. (p. 37)

Care is often understood as predicated on emotions such as ‘sympathy, empathy, sensitivity and responsiveness’ (Held, 2006: 10–11). However, emotional responsiveness itself does not inevitably set up the conditions for collaboration that are of benefit to those who struggle for resources, recognition or respect. Pettersen (2008: 59) argues that ‘spontaneous and affective reactions’ can potentially lead to paternalism and excessive control which confounds disadvantage and marginalisation. Ongoing ethical deliberation about the webs of power which entangles emotions has the possibility of interrupting established paternalistic patterns of relating to marginalised disadvantaged people. Ethical deliberation involves emotionally attuned analysis of the particularities of subject’s contexts and communication about their needs and goals. Pettersen (2008: 59) puts forward for the notion of ‘mature care’ as one based in reflective practices which prevent harm or restore health and promote well-being and flourishing in human interaction. Mature care can be understood as a ‘cultivable, relational virtue with social, intellectual and moral aspects’. Representing the lives of others for social change means seeking out scenic material that can spark an emotional connection with the issues. Mature care is an imperative to work with the person’s goals and values in the context of the power relations in their everyday and broader contexts. It is their goals and values which determine whether ‘sparks’ derived from aspects of their story support their flourishing or conversely create harm for them. A scene which depicts a parenting struggle between two adults, for example, may make compelling watching and indeed may create empathy and identification in an audience. Such an episode, however, may be understood by the participants as an interaction which depicts a familial value of dialogue, negotiation and consensus forming and perceive that its depiction supports the flourishing of the family. The same depiction in a different family may be understood by participants as an example of ineffective harmonising behaviours and may create harm for the family. Mature care seeks to understand these value frames and work with the family to depict their family life in ways that support them to flourish. This does not necessarily mean editing out all vulnerabilities. Rather, it requires working with participants, so the overall story that is told fits with their productive imaginings of the self and that the intervention of participation makes a strengthening contribution to their lives.

Tronto’s (1993) ethic of care attends to the time and spaces of relationships and argues that care is an ongoing process that takes the changing concerns and needs of the other as the basis of action. This has important implications for thinking through the time and space contexts of documentary. The issues that face filmic or research subjects necessarily take place in the local sphere but their everyday stories travel to national or global fields which then require different forms of care to be taken. If representations of people’s lives have purchase in national and global realms, subjects may need different supports to benefit from such exposure than in local familiar contexts. This consideration of the reach of messaging has important implications for consent processes which often shift from original conceptions so need to be redefined as ongoing practices throughout a project’s evolving lifespan.

When we engage with notions of care in representational practice, we are faced with the need for dialogue and the deployment of resources. The notion of an objective bystander capturing the ‘truth’ of a situation is long obsolete in research and documentary methods. However, when embedded in the politics of care, Rabinow and Keller’s (2016) call to collaboration makes a case for action beyond acknowledging the subjective position of the film-maker/researcher and suggests they negotiate a whole range of processes and content goals with research subjects. This inevitably complicated exercise is one that we will explore in the case of Gayby Baby.

The Gayby Baby experience

Challenges to reproductive/parenting rights of the LGBTIQ community have been a site of struggle for a long time. In 2001, the Australian Federal Government tried to amend the Sex Discrimination Act (1984) to enable state governments to discriminate against lesbians and single heterosexual women in the provision of fertility services. Then, prior to the 2004 Australian Federal election, the then Prime Minister John Howard publicly supported the exclusion of lesbian and gay people from marriage, claiming it was a sanctified union between two people of the opposite sex. As mentioned previously, the representation of children from same-sex families on children’s television drew public outrage. Now in 2017, the Australian people have just been through a non-binding, voluntary, postal survey about Marriage Equality that resulted in a 61% Yes and 38% No vote. The survey process positioned marriage equality as an issue that everyone was entitled to have an opinion on rather than a question of rights. This canvassing of ‘opinion’ opened the floodgates for hate speech directed to those in same-sex relationships. It generated feelings of vulnerability and anger in LGBTIQ+ lives and communities and undercut democratic processes in Australia (Brett, 2017).

At Gayby Baby’s conception in 2011, debate over Marriage Equality in Australia was rising in volume, politicians were yelling across tables about who should have the right to marry. These arguments centred on the rights of children. It was argued that children being raised in same-sex unions were damaged by a lack of normative gender role-models and were deprived of their biological parentage as well as a concern that gender and sexuality orientations would be inherited in these children. Here, children in same-sex families are hypothetical points of argument and the very real experiences of generations of children raised in LGBTIQ+ families were erased in conservative political arguments. Gayby Baby was the first feature documentary to explore same-sex families from the perspective of the children imbued with the values of their own community and was produced over a 5-year period, with a rolling impact campaign before and after the film’s release.

The argument for slow geographies of collaboration is based in the idea that one needs to take time to understand the values and resources that support a community or individual. In the making of Gayby Baby, as child of lesbian mothers, Maya occupied a position as an insider and outsider. She set the political agenda for the film and accessed participants as a trusted insider. Her upbringing in a lesbian headed household in the 1980s–2000s meant she shared the cultural nuances of belonging in LGBTIQ+ subcultures and had direct experience of the homophobia directed towards children of same-sex families. However, the explosion of births among LGBTIQ+ identified peoples was only on the public radar after 2000, so Maya was telling stories about the next generation in a new political, somewhat insidious ‘tolerant’ landscape. This outside experience of being out of generation with the subjects of the film opened a genuine learning space about growing up as a gayby in the here and now.

As a producer of content, Maya wanted to reach beyond didactics that normalised same-sex families. She wanted to capture differences as well as the common glitches of family life that render same-sex families familiar to their heteronormative counterparts. The result was a simple yet brave decision to show queer parents making questionable choices alongside effective ones and kids struggling with insecurities (and delusions) spurred from incidents occurring both within and beyond the front door. These untidy everyday realities make families recognisable to children and became central to the project’s aim of enabling children in same-sex families to see their own lives represented.

However, such complexity needs to be handled carefully in a context where proponents of heteronormative families are looking for material to uphold their arguments about depravity or dysfunction in non-normative families. As authors, we collude here to develop an ethical exegesis of Gayby Baby as ‘two insiders’. However, our standpoints in the actual making of the film were not commensurable because of the positions we occupy in current political climate. Maya, as a child raised in a same-sex family, and Jen, as a parent in a same-sex family, are positioned quite differently in the conservative backlash. Conservative heteronormative arguments position children as innocent and the parents who choose to bring children into same-sex families as guilty, immoral and deviant. These divergent positions open us to different kinds of political undermining. Such differences in aligned political positions are important considerations to avoid conflating the diverse representational needs into simplistic political agendas. We argue that such tensions lie the core of relational activity in producing ethical representations. The emotional dimensions of mature care need to be applied to these real everyday specific tensions rather than to abstracted notions of discrimination.

As a producer with a strong child standpoint herself, Maya had to work to understand the divergent ‘parental’ standpoint, so she could work with children in ways that did not undercut the protective resources generated within families to buffer homophobic and other corrosive judgement. In this, she developed a model where the producer learns about the strategies and tactics of families and considers how these can be incorporated into the fabric of a film, its story-telling devices and its narrative.

In our respective roles – as filmic subject (and parent) and film-maker – we had ongoing, explicit conversations about the political gains of documenting difficult moments of parenting and the need for ongoing informed consent. It was discussed openly that in impact-orientated documentaries, the power to motivate an audience to action lies in depicting drama. Onscreen, achievements are only achievements when they are hard won. Battles, tensions, disagreements, mistakes, all need to be felt for resolution to be reached. It was through conversations about the dramatic storytelling that film-makers and subjects were offered the time and space to understand the mechanics of impact, and why one would choose to reveal such vulnerability alongside strength. In this case, it was fundamental that families were given reassurance that personal release was not fixed. These conversations could not have concluded at the beginning of filming with a release form, as it was impossible to predict the full effects of participation until after the film was released. Maya and Charlotte’s initial consent process became an ongoing one, where every new stage of film-making was up for negotiation. This ongoing consent process allowed the children the time and space to revisit their involvement as they grew to new levels of maturity and understanding. It is worth noting that this arrangement was undertaken in good faith only as industry standard release practices do not legally offer creative control to subjects. This is a battle that Maya is currently working to change.

By the time of its release, the political climate in Australia was ripe for the Gayby Baby story and it spurred national controversy and rigorous debate beyond our original expectations. The slow geography of the film-making meant that there was significant time for us all – film-makers, parent and child subjects – to grow into the film and its potential impact and to test the waters. In early 2012, Maya and Charlotte launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise money to make the film. The publicity for the campaign-made national newspapers was discussed on ABC’s Q&A programme and trended on social media nationwide. The campaign raised over AUD130,000, which was the record for any film, fiction or non-fiction, at that time in Australia and led to further industry support. By reversing the participant experience and exposing families publicly prior to making a film, participants had a chance to test their desires to be involved in this personal way and to make informed decisions about the nature of their ongoing involvement.

The political and ethical dimensions of the film became more complex as the potential scale for impact grew. As this trajectory came into focus, film-makers and participants became more attached to its content and how the story was told. For example, it became more important that the film depict life beyond the inner-city lesbian enclave and for the film to be distributed beyond LGBTIQ+ settings. The parents in the film allowed some intimate and conflict-ridden interactions to be filmed, despite the potential for such moments to be used by detractors as criticism of non-normative families. As public opinion became more emotive and divided over marriage equality, it became clear that additional resourcing was needed to support the children in a major release and impact campaign. This resulted in child-friendly media training, regular communication and the constant reminder that editorial control would be a joint venture – elements of the design that build the capacity of participants.

Creating safety for participants is not only about providing resources. Family and community values are the most critical protective resource for children and they needed to be embedded in all aspects of process and product. Values protect one from vilification and children tend to be well practised in the use of concepts and values held dear in their family – it is their cultural capital. Being able to have a place at the political table where decisions are made about what to reveal and what to keep out of the public domain is critical to creating safety for participants and keeps the easily crossed lines of power in-balance at bay. In this way, duty of care is not only undertaken during the film-making but in the key messages of the film itself and how strength and empowerment is reflected back at these participants.

The release of Gayby Baby prioritised ‘impact’ over audience numbers – ‘eyeballs and profit’. This choice led an unprecedented decision to release the film in Australian schools halls before cinemas on Wear It Purple Day ² to take a stance on the eclipsed presence of family diversity in the national curriculum. This schools release of the film tirggered a front page of The Daily Telegraph story claiming ‘Gay Class Uproar’ ³ and a knee-jerk reaction resulting in the NSW Premier Mike Baird and Education Minister Adrian Piccoli banning Gayby Baby from being screened in its entirety during school hours. This was followed by multiple mentions and speeches by MPs in parliaments, heated debates on nightly news, politicians and public figures penning personal opinion pieces in the all major news outlets and a State-by-State battle which erupted when other state and territory leaders welcomed the film into schools. A rally was then organised and the mainstream media leapt into overdrive with over 2,000 media mentions in under 2 weeks. Street art and signage popped up encouraging pedestrians to ‘Calm Down and Watch Gayby Baby’.

Beyond the film release, the Gayby Project engaged in further activism. The Gayby Baby School Action Toolkit was developed – Australia’s first educational resource representing LGBTIQ+ families. The toolkit targeted educators and executive staff with information on how to support children from non-normative families in their classrooms and included student-facing multimodal lesson plans on family diversity. By this phase of the project, the ‘child’ participants were teenagers and new decisions needed to be made in terms of how exposed they wanted to be in their school communities. Some opted out of having the film screened at their school so they could maintain some level of anonymity. While everyone agreed that the resource should be distributed to all schools, it was also agreed that the kids maintained a sense of control over how exposed they felt in their immediate communities.

The process of collaboration and care in impact phase was an extension of our practices during production. By this stage, families and children were empowered to strategise alongside the makers and shape the impact campaign. They were subsequently equipped to stand beside the film as it held their core values at heart. However, it is important to note that there were no industry supports or blueprints ⁴ for working with participants collaboratively or in a capacity building way so some of the care work was expedited by resources which were unexpected or through the hard labour of difficult conversations.

Documentary and research resources for care in representation

The brackish, fertile waters of documentary film-making draw on the entertainment traditions of ‘fictional’ film-making, the realism of anthropology and the activism of campaigning. In the last decade, new technologies and economies have generated a new ‘impact’ orientated wave in the non-fiction feature film industry. In Australia, this was galvanised by Good Pitch² Australia, a ‘coalition model’ whereby film-makers, film subjects, film screeners, philanthropists, corporates and activist groups participate in the production process and then are catalysts in the distribution process. This has generated new possibilities and shifted expectations that film should not just represent political conditions but change them. The core purpose of impact documentary is to mobilise and support social movements. The wake of the impact rush carries its own challenges notably the ethics of working with communities and subjects in ‘impact-driven’ productions. ⁵

Traditionally, documentary industry norms have worked against the grain of ethical encounters and define high quality through the notion of unmediated veracity. The industry norms about the ownership of images, exposure and recompense for participants are only concerned with the rights of the film-maker. It has been considered appropriate that images and content were fully and unequivocally owned by the producers of the film. Film-makers use standard industry release forms at the onset of filming which require subjects to sign all rights to use their image, worldwide and into infinity, to the producers of the film before filming commences. It is the convention that subjects are unpaid, and their participation expected as a voluntary and honorary contribution to the film project. In the context of these standards and norms, the documentary film industry rarely acknowledges that many documentary subjects do not have the resources to negotiate their own safe exposure through ethical dialogue or legal avenues.

Questions of ownership and recompense flag the deeper issue of beneficence. What is of benefit to the people who participate? Participatory approaches in development studies, Indigenous, disability and other social science research have long eschewed the notion that researchers (and other non-fiction workers) can understand what is of benefit to marginalised ‘others’ without a considerable rigorous and careful collaboration process (Fox and Fine, 2015).

The documentary scholar Brian Winston concurs and argues that the areas of common law that impinge most on documentary film-making – those of consent, copyright, and the public’s right to know – invariably work to the benefit of the film-maker rather than the participant. The key to documentary ethics lies in the relationship between film-maker and participant, a relationship in which trust plays a great part. For Winston (1995: 240, 258), the only way to avoid the latter’s disempowerment is for the film-maker to become a facilitator for the participant’s self-advocacy.

The idea that film-makers and researchers encourage participants to set the agenda and co-design the work resonates with Paul Rabinow’s view of collaboration. This positions researchers and documentary makers as guides for effective practice and mean relinquishing creative control – a concept that makes content producers very uneasy. Currently, participatory practice and capacity building require film-makers to break established rules of the game. The ongoing consent that is central to collaboration is far from being a standard practice. It is not encouraged to show an edit at any working stage of production to subjects in a film for comment, and actively discouraged to offer any editorial control to a subject over how their image is portrayed.

The ethical conundrums in the industry are amplified in impact-oriented wave as the people represented are subject to higher and more sustained levels of public exposure. Film subjects are asked to speak publicly because audiences are often more likely to attend an ‘event’ than just a film that can be picked up on a handy device. The ethical norms in the documentary industry need to adapt to the changing industry through diligent debate about the critical issues that impact raises in the lives of those who agree to be represented in documentary. These shifts add another layer to already complex, arguably out-of-date, consent processes.

New developments in academia are pertinent to the development of ethical practice in documentary and vice versa. The academic research field is experiencing similar moves towards public impact and has infrastructures in place some of which are useful and some antiquated. While impact agendas are relatively new, they receive considerable resources. The UK Research Excellence Framework has been in operation since 2014 and the Australian Research Council is in the process of piloting a similar programme.

Impact in research is built on traditional research structures where the measurement of quality (and thus likelihoods of future funding) is based on ranked academic processes of peer review that measured ‘scientific merit’ in terms of validity, value and ethics. A world of scholarly debate around validity, value and ethics has protected scholarly work from calcification and reification. However, academic quality and its twin, academic productivity are no longer the only criterion to be considered. The Australian Research Council now specifies that research impact is the demonstrable contribution that research makes to the economy, society, culture, national security, public policy or services, health, the environment, or quality of life, beyond contributions to academia (our emphasis). New measurement frameworks retain the peer review process and orientation. It is a critical element of ethical practice – high impact is a disaster if the underlying research is academically indefensible, lacks validity or is unethical.

The impact research agenda is embedded in an engagement agenda which emphasises collaboration in agenda-setting – notably ‘the interactions between researchers and research end-users–industry, government, non-governmental organisations and communities – for the mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge, technologies and methods, and resources in a context of partnership and reciprocity’. ⁶ This engagement agenda encourages research agendas to be co-designed with those that are represented. People are involved in defining their own problems and the processes that are used to gain insights into these problems. There is a plethora of ethical guidelines – the Ethical Research Involving Children compendium being the most pertinent to the representation of children and young people. ⁷

Many activist academics have cautiously welcomed the impact agenda. The nuances of these cautions focus on the demands to ‘evidence’ impact which have the potential to limit thinking about social impact to the myopia of metric accountability systems. The research world is filled with complex and sometimes covert accountability pressures. Practically, it takes considerable time for evidence on impact to become apparent and then there are difficulties in attribution. These challenges sit within the ethical and moral dilemmas that arise when vulnerable groups are involved in ‘engaged research’.

Academic impact and engagement resources are valuable for thinking about documentary making. As impact documentary develops ethical conceptual frameworks, it will have much to offer research ethics committees not least because of growing number of young people who do not wish for anonymity in their participation in civic and political struggles. The frameworks that guide ethical practice in universities must accommodate generational shifts in ideas about public and private.

Representation, care, ethics and beneficence

This paper has elaborated on some of the ethical issues involved in impact documentary making. We contend that the notion of slow geographies (Mountz et al, 2015) supports ethical practice as it enables researchers and documentary makers to take the time to enter communities with care and to develop shared understandings about the processes and intended and unintended outcomes of impact productions. This enables respectful collaborations to develop and the represented to take power in the ways their images and stories are deployed. We have shared these ideas through the case of Gayby Baby which began as a small film focused on positive representations of childhood in same-sex families and grew into a rallying point for the marriage equality struggle.

We raised the unforeseen challenges of making documentaries which are inherently unpredictable. We leant into the conundrum of consent and control, obsessed with finding ways to offer subjects a blueprint of risks, protections and negotiated safeties. It has now been 6 years of creating and campaigning with Gayby Baby and the children are turning 18 years old and have grown into mature young people. We could never have expected that Gayby Baby would be central to shifts in legislation for adoption equality, to have inspired a national debate with Gaybies and their families having a place on the map, or to have triggered countless articles, news programmes and major television shows to develop new content that represents the experiences of Gayby children. These are the immeasurable wins of making an impact-orientated documentary.

For those of us that sit on the inside of this project, our processes aimed at integrity through capacity building, subject agency, collaboration, rolling consent and mature care helped this relatively tiny, low-budget film into the world. The children have exercised leadership (as Fox and Fine (2015: 48) define ‘collectivist relational leadership’) in their participation in the film and related lobbying activities. The unforeseen rewards have been witnessing 10-year-old Graham bound onto stage eager to answer questions about a film that he felt was his, or 18 year old Ebony transition from a shy girl into to a strongly spoken young woman who flies overseas by herself to speak to crowds of hundreds about family equality. Prior to the closing of the postal vote about marriage equality in Australia, Gus and Ebony supported the YES campaign by directing their own short film for The Guardian (online) newspaper. As relaxed documentary veterans, they interviewed a younger generation of gaybies about their experiences of plebiscite and their views on marriage equality. ⁸ Countless other gaybies have hosted film screenings and stood up and spoken about their own lives in their own communities. This experience shows that developed notions of care and responsibility insist we attend ethically to the amplified pressures placed on subjects in impact documentary. When this is the foundation stone of documentary, film-makers can achieve impact both inside and beyond the stories they wish to tell.