The boy in a dress: A spectre for our times

Introduction

This article illustrates the way in which the spectre of the ‘boy in a dress’ haunts contemporary debates around gender, children and young people and sexuality education in Sweden and Australia. These two contexts have been chosen because on the surface they appear to be politically very different and yet, as our analysis reveals, there are striking similarities around normative gender conformity discourse, although they play out differently. Within our two contexts, imaginaries of boys in dresses are both affective and productive in public discourse, and we illustrate how such a figure is deployed to represent a ‘tipping point’ between the tolerance and intolerance of gender diversity and racialized minorities within our two national contexts.

In order to build our discussion, two key moments will be analysed. Firstly, in Sweden in 2016 the department store Åhléns chose an image of a child of African heritage and indeterminate gender to be the face of their annual Lucia ¹ marketing. This caused significant controversy and sparked a ‘Jag är Lucia’ (I am Lucia) campaign featuring notable Swedish celebrities dressed as Lucia. Secondly, the 2017 Australian postal survey on Marriage Equality saw a ‘No’ campaign run from a conservative right group, the Coalition for Marriage, that included a television commercial featuring a concerned mother stating that, ‘School told my son he could wear a dress to school if he felt like it’. These critical incidents act as illustration of the power of cisgender normativity and whiteness within public consciousness as well as educational spaces because the fears articulated are around ostensibly ‘normal’ boys being encouraged to wear dresses at school, and of a child of colour playing a role reserved for an ethnic and cisgender female Swede. In the case of Sweden, the boy in a dress is also used to demonstrate modernity in the form of homotolerance (Røthing, 2008), and we show how ‘Jag är Lucia’ constructed an intolerant homophobic, obsolete ‘other’ to mainstream Swedish society. We examine the spectre of the boy in a dress as a symbolic figure that operates, for some, with the perceived potential to bring down society as we know it and therefore as a vehicle for denying the rights of trans* and gender diverse people.

We link the boy in a dress in Sweden and Australia to the rise of populist discourses within mainstream politics. These movements are evidenced within Australia by educational reform agendas that position the social justice issues of diversity, difference and inclusion as ostensibly individual ‘problems’ for individual students, rather than as social-economic-political structures that work to disadvantage whole groups of people (Reimers and Martinsson, 2016). In Australia, attempts to bring gender diversity into the mainstream collide with hegemonic masculinity that privileges the white, hetereosexual, cisgender male figure as a national ideal. This version of the Australian male is valorised in annual ANZAC ² commemorations (Johns, 2008), in sport (Wade, 2019) and within mainstream political discourse (Jansens, 2019). It positions the gender binary, like whiteness, as a priori (Moreton-Robinson, 2004), and therefore an epistemological clash ensues when trans*, queer and/or LGBTIQ issues come to the fore. This clash plays out potentially within all spheres of social life including education where the privileging of difference, including gender diversity, is positioned as a threat to national values (see for example Gray and Nicholas, 2019; Ward, 2018).

Conversely, in Sweden, equality and the tolerance of difference appear on the surface to have become ‘national values’. Norm Critical Pedagogy, which has its origins in the work of queer theorists, seeks to promote understanding of difference and diversity by challenging the privilege of the centre (Martinsson and Reimers, 2010; Reimers, 2010). It is considered to be ‘mainstream’ within Swedish education. However, Sweden, too, has seen the recent rise of a nationalist and populist party – the Swedish Democrats, who have likened Islam to Nazism, and argued for a total ban on seeking asylum in Sweden. The Swedish Democrats also have an explicit agenda against gender and norm critical perspectives in education. In parliament, they have motioned for a change in the curriculum for preschools to replace the current text ‘The Preschool has a responsibility to counteract traditional gender roles and should therefore provide pupils with the opportunity of developing their own abilities and interests irrespective of their sexual identity’ (Skolverket, 2016) with ‘In preschools, girls and boys shall be given the same rights and possibilities to test and develop without undue influence from adults’ (Sverige Riksdag, 2010).

Our two moments act as examples of how homo and trans* phobia are deployed within broader populist discourses in Sweden and Australia, and we use the metaphor of ghosts and haunting in our analysis in order to illustrate what ‘modern history has rendered ghostly’ (Gordon, 1999); in other words, what it has attempted to erase and what persists. We also draw upon the notion of haunting to illustrate the way in which the spectre of the boy in a dress reveals the violence that conjures it, and to think about what this ghostly figure forces us to see (Butler, 1994; Gordon, 1999). The article examines how the figure of the boy in a dress works as a mechanism through which to assert that left leaning, progressive political correctness has ‘gone too far’ and that children and young people are ‘at risk’ from being exposed to non-normative gender presentations within schools and the wider public sphere. We also, however, view this haunting as one that reveals the ‘normative phantasm of compulsory heterosexuality’ (Butler, 1994). This divisive figure of the boy in a dress is also raced in different ways within the two contexts we put under the lens here, and we discuss both how race is operationalized within our two examples as well as what this means in terms of equity and the national psyche for Sweden and Australia.

The presence of the boy in a dress within populist discourse in Australia and Sweden reveals possibilities for how gender is able to be lived, understood and presented within nations that understand themselves as tolerant and progressive. Here, we draw upon the work of Wendy Brown (2006) and her call to reconfigure how we understand tolerance. Brown argues that far from being a benign set of individualized practices, tolerance is a mode of governing the conduct of the everyday that (re)produces identities in particular and hierarchical ways. At the same time, tolerance discourse attempts to depoliticize a process that deliberately demarcates the boundaries between objects made acceptable or tolerable (Gray, 2017). We use Brown's work to illustrate the ways in which the boy in a dress represents a tipping point where the limits of tolerance are breached, and aversive responses ensue (Gray, 2017).

We now move to offer an analytical overview of the two contexts, Sweden and Australia, and we focus upon conservative populism as it appears in relation to gender and race. We then examine the two critical incidents and finally conclude by thinking about how we can give tangible form to the spectre of the boy in a dress.

Populist conservatism, race, gender and moral panics in Sweden

On the surface, Sweden presents itself as not only a gender equal, but also as a feminist nation (see for example Martinsson et al., 2016). Ministers in the government self-evidently present themselves as feminists (Government Offices of Sweden, 2019), gender pedagogy and norm critique form part of the national curriculum for public education from preschool to upper secondary school (Skolverket, 2011, 2016, 2018), all workplaces with more than 10 employees are required to have a plan for gender equality (SFS 1991:433), the parental leave policies are generous (SFS 1995:584 and SFS 2018:1291), amongst other gender equity strategies. Taken together, these and other policies and articulations contribute to a self-conception and self-presentation where feminism, gender equality and homo-tolerance are made into essential traits of Sweden as a nation.

There are, however, both frictions and cracks in dominant public discourses and practices, as well as explicit challenges and resistance against gender equality policies and norms. This is evident not the least within populist conservative discourse in relation to sexuality and gender, although the way this is articulated in Sweden differs from how it appears in Australia. In 2014, the right-wing populist party the Swedish Democrats (SD), led by Jimmie Åkesson, secured 49 seats in parliament and became Sweden's third largest party. This party has links to Swedish Nazism, and their manifesto largely hinges upon race and immigration. For example, SD are against ‘special’ rights for the Indigenous Sami people of Sweden's northwest and are vehemently opposed to Muslim migrants entering Sweden. But although SD are pro-nuclear family, Åkesson has argued that the ‘Islamization’ of Sweden violates the rights of sexual minorities because Muslims are perceived to oppose same sex marriage and relationships, something that now represents Sweden's national values. When accused of homophobia, Jimmie Åkesson argues that SD's opposition to ‘mass immigration’ and ‘Islamization’ is in the interests of LGBTIQ persons, because in defending western, democratic values they are also defending gay rights (Aftonbladet, 2010).

Like many other nationalist parties in Europe, the imaginary of gender equality and progressive sexual politics is used by SD and other conservative movements as a form of nationalism, providing a specific form of homo- and femo-nationalism that stigmatizes Muslims in the name of gender equality (Farris, 2017; Puar, 2007; Sörberg, 2016). At the same time, these movements also align with forms of anti-genderism (Kuhar and Paternotte, 2017), claiming that gender equality and sexual rights have gone too far – not least with a focus on children and schools as victims of progressive ‘gender experiments’, or the ‘denying of children to be children’ (Sotevik, 2019). This is an example of how the subject of children as victims of gender and sexuality politics and activism has proven fruitful in mobilizing conservative and populist ideology (Edelman, 2004). The spectre of the boy in the dress connects to broad political formations. For example, in August 2018, the party leader of the Christian Democrat Party, Ebba Bush Thor, claimed in relation to gender equality work that preschools must do away with ‘genderfluff’ and that preschools were in need of proper educators, not ‘politically correct Mrs Prysseliuses’ ³ (Högfeldt, 2018). Another example is the lobby group Familjen Först (Family First), who has arranged seminars in parliament focusing on the threat of ‘gender studies’ to children and schools. They have also funded research that critically examines how teaching about gender diversity may prove damaging to children (Familjen Först, n.d.). One of the invited lecturers was David Eberhard, a psychiatrist and social debater. In 2018, Eberhard published a book entitled The Big Gender Experiment that engaged in a critique of trans* issues and gender studies and posed this as a threat to the health and wellbeing of young people. Similar concerns were raised in 2019 in an influential documentary series broadcasted on Swedish Public Service, which claimed that the health service directed at young trans* people had become too progressive and liberal, even going so far as to describe it as a form of violence. The documentary gave way to a polarization of the debate, to a large degree giving credence to the assumption that ‘gender experimenting’ had gone too far (Gylling, 2019).

It is in relation to the above that the spectre of the boy in a dress can (re)appear as a figure that represents the limits of tolerance (Brown, 2006). In the case of Sweden, it is possible that the issue of sexual politics holds a specifically complex but powerful influence on the normalization and mobilization of racism, populism and conservative movements in ways that it is not possible to do within Australia. There are, however, striking similarities to the ways in which the idea of schools engaging with gender diversity is seen as ‘too progressive’ or as evidence that the left has ‘gone too far’. In 2016, there was a polarized and heated debate after the publication of an advertisement with a picture of a boy wearing a Lucia dress. Due to its symbolic status in terms of both Swedish traditions and femininity, the imaginary of Lucia often provokes controversies and debates, which are targeted at the conflict between progressive and conservative interests. This time, it was the department store Åhléns that chose an image of a child of African heritage and indeterminate gender to be the face of their annual Lucia marketing of clothes for preschool and school children. Following a large number of racist statements and comments on social media and the Åhléns Facebook page, the campaign was shut down at the request of the family of the boy that was pictured (SVT Hyheter, 2016).

In Sweden, the celebrating of Lucia on 13 December is a widespread custom that marks the beginning of Christmas. Dressed in a white gown with a red belt, and with candles on her crown, Lucia leads a singing parade with other characters, such as ‘maids’, dressed in white and carrying candles. Lucia is widely celebrated in schools and preschools with parades and singing performances to which parents and other relatives are usually invited, making Lucia into a self-evident Swedish tradition, linking to the past. In Swedish folklore, the night of Lusse (Lucia) was the longest and darkest night, a night of evil, and the celebrating of light represented how light overcomes darkness. Over the centuries, pre-Christian folklore has mixed with other traditions and Christian (Catholic) figures, as Saint Lucia of Syracuse. The stereotypical imagery of Lucia as a white, young female with long blond hair has been formed not least through sales strategies and advertising from the early 20th century, and through the nomination of Lucia in the form of voting from pictures of Lucia candidates in local newspapers (Strömberg, 2017). In recent years, such association with beauty pageants has been scrutinized and some former ‘official’ Lucia coronations have been replaced by performances organized by choirs or students (Carmbrant, 2015).

The use of Lucia by Åhléns led to the expression of many conflicting perspectives and interests. The hate that it received was both racist and sexist, directed at both the child's skin colour and his gender. In response, an anti-racist Facebook group started as a ‘Jag är Lucia’ (I am Lucia) campaign, for which several notable Swedish celebrities showed their support by posting pictures dressed as Lucia, including footballer Zlatan Ibrahimović and the minister of democracy and culture, Alice Bah Kunke.

In the aftermath of the controversy of the Åhléns Lucia campaign it was revealed that the hate attacks were also orchestrated by racist activists on social media. The anti-racist foundation Expo revealed that part of the hate attacks was organized in the extreme right-wing Facebook group ‘The Word is Free’. Screenshots from the forum show how members were requested to post comments: ‘Go to the site and write your opinion! It's disgusting how they make fun of our traditions like that’, and ‘Damn so much hatred they get. I just sit and smirk’ (Expo, 2016). This was not the first time that the expectation that Lucia should be white, blond and female had been challenged, but it was perhaps given more public recognition than before, and was a powerful example of how the spectre of the boy in a dress may be used to bolster heated debate and controversy that boosts a polarized political climate.

The crucial point here is that this version of Lucia challenged both its racist and sexist implications. It was through this intersecting symbolism that the image of this boy in a dress could be interpreted as provocative for conservatives as well as used as an example of change towards a more inclusive approach to Swedish culture and traditions, embraced by members of a society who position themselves as modern and progressive. The boy in a dress in this case is a spectre that expresses two contradictory and competing imaginaries of the Swedish and the role of so-called Swedish traditions. One is a performance of Lucia that signify inclusiveness, feminism, homotolerance, pluralism and modernity. The other is a performance of Lucia where tradition is seen as repetitions of a presumed original, stable and correct materialization of a white, blonde and female traditional Lucia. In the latter, the Swedish is constructed as constituted by white, blond bodies and essentialized gender roles. Lucia thus appears either as something to be defended or something that must be challenged and dispersed as a relic of the past.

The Åhléns advertisement and the political polarization that it manifested demonstrates how a boy in a dress can haunt the contemporary political landscape. In December 2018, two years after these events, the party leader of the Swedish Christian Democrats, Ebba Busch Thor, stated that she was happy that there had been no big controversy that year around the celebration of Christmas traditions. She claimed that it is necessary to be more careful in nurturing Swedish traditions such as Lucia and not let them be used for political purposes, by either the xenophobic parties or the left. She thus positioned herself and her party as the neutral and reasonable party. At the same time, she also managed to dismiss the controversy of who can become Lucia as an offence to what, in her view, is considered ‘our traditions’. Hate and progressive challenges are thereby positioned as equally weighted threats to the common good, and the boy in a dress, in this instance, disappears into the ether.

Populist conservatism, race, gender and moral panics in Australia

As a global phenomenon, contemporary conservative populism is not limited to racist rhetoric but includes other ‘shared objects of loathing’ (Brown 2006: 697) such as the undeserving poor, ‘liberated’ women and LGBTIQ people (Gray and Nicholas, 2019). Within Australia, popular and political discourse has had a particular focus upon schools and school age young people. It has included challenges to the mere presence of same sex attracted and gender diverse (SSAGD) young people, as well as fierce debates about whether schools should teach content around LGBTIQ histories and issues and provide professional development for teachers who support SSAGD students, and about whether current policy exemptions allowing religious and independent schools to discriminate against students and teachers who are same sex attracted and/or gender diverse should remain (Gray, 2018; Rasmussen et al., 2018; Ward, 2018).

Many such debates have focused on the Safe Schools Coalition, a programme that originated in the state of Victoria and became national in 2014 and that aimed to promote the positive inclusion of SSAGD students and to challenge trans* and homophobia in schools (Ward, 2018). By 2016, the programme had become the focus of intense media, and later political, scrutiny, with the conservative daily The Australian publishing over 90,000 words of negative criticism about Safe Schools (Law, 2017). Despite funding having being cut from the national programme, Safe Schools and its agenda around the positive inclusion of SSAGD students in schools are still a feature of political discourse around gender, sexuality and education and can be illustrated by Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who Tweeted days after he took office, ‘We do not need “gender whisperers” in our schools. Let kids be kids’, and in a radio interview stated that:

[Role playing same sex relationships makes my skin curl (sic)] for this reason, the values I have as a parent, that Jenny and I have as parents, that's where you get your values from […] I don't want the values of others being imposed on my children in my school and I don't think that should be happening in a public school or a private school. (McGowan, 2018)

Many in the LGBTIQ + community experienced the survey period as damaging, traumatic and hurtful. This applied especially to trans* people in Australia who were a particular target for the ire of the populist right, even though marriage equality may not necessarily apply to trans* lives (see for example Quinn Eades’ 2017 writing series I Can't Stop Crying).

The ‘No’ campaign was shaped by a desire to present same sex marriage as a threat to children and procreation and by arguing that being raised by same sex parents is harmful to children and young people. Another key part of the campaign was to deploy the rhetoric used by the conservative right in the battle over Safe Schools; within this matrix it was posited that ‘radical sex education’ and compulsory lessons around ‘gender fluidity’ would enter Australian classrooms as a result of same sex marriage. The idea of same sex marriage was also spoken of in terms of a ‘gateway’ to inter-generational, incestuous and inter-species marriage (Harrison, 2012).

Same sex relationships therefore are a phenomenon that the populist right in Australia would rather did not exist (Brown, 2006) and, to use Brown's framework, they are tolerable until they demand equality with the heterosexual population, at which point we, the general public, need to be reminded of their abjection.

The Coalition for Marriage was one of the key organizers of the ‘No’ campaign. It was spearheaded by Lyle Shelton, a political activist and prominent social conservative who served as managing director of the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) from 2013 to 2018. Shelton was one of the loudest and most viscous critics of the Safe Schools Coalition, at one point likening the criticism he received for speaking out against the programme to the silencing of political dissidents in Nazi Germany (Woman's Weekly, ND).

The Coalition for Marriage, a branch of the ACL, argued that, ‘Same-sex marriage is a proxy war for much bigger things. The real battle is for the soul of our nation’ (Australian Christian Lobby, ND, https://www.acl.org.au/marriage_coalition). For many in the LGBTIQ community, marriage equality became about the right to exist in contemporary Australia. This debate illustrates Brown's (2006: 8) notion of tolerance as a force that ‘regulates the presence of the Other’ within the liberal, democratic nation state and of who belongs in the state and whose lives should be regulated by it.

Amongst the Coalition for Marriage campaign tactics was a television commercial featuring concerned Australian mothers expressing their fears around the links between same sex marriage and school-based programmes that ‘promote’ gender and sexual diversity. The first woman to appear is white and tells viewers that, ‘School told my son he could wear a dress next year if he felt like it’. This statement is designed to provoke memories of the Safe Schools Coalition and does this through raising the spectre of the boy in a dress to illustrate a left wing politics and political correctness having ‘gone too far’ and to reinforce the criticism of Safe Schools that led to the programme's reconfiguration in the same year – that ‘gender fluidity’ is dangerous and that young people are at risk from hearing messages that are positive about gender diversity within and outside of schools.

The second speaker in the commercial is Dr Pansy Lai, who states that, ‘When same sex marriage passes as law overseas, these kinds of programmes become widespread and compulsory’. Lai's statement is intended to reinforce the first and also to position Australian social conservatives and their children as existing within an international context where school-based programmes like Safe Schools become compulsory as a direct result of same sex marriage. Dr Lai is Chinese Australian and this reflects the race politics that shaped the marriage equality debate. Hegarty et al. (2018) have written about the relationship between heterosexuality, whiteness and nationhood in relation to the Australian same sex marriage postal survey, and argue that, ‘During the same-sex marriage postal survey, representations of the suburban back yard as normative, and contestations over who might express what kind of pride in what neighbourhood, both served to perpetuate idealized fantasies of white, middle class heterosexuality’ (Hegarty et al., 2018: 411), and that such positioning reflects Australia's settler-colonial history and the way in which normative versions of race, class and heterosexuality have shaped Australia's relationship to marriage since Australia was invaded in 1788. We contribute to this discussion by positing that Chinese Australians were tactically positioned as belonging to the ‘No’ campaign because of their Christianity, therefore assumed cultural differences related to racial and ethnic difference were sometimes mobilized by conservative forces to urge non-white groups to oppose same sex marriage and school-based education relating to LGBTIQ issues. This strategy has continued since the marriage equality survey – during the 2019 election, an unauthorized WeChat social media post written in Mandarin Chinese falsely claimed that if elected, the Australian Labor Party would roll out the Safe Schools programme to all schools in Australia. Such positioning of Chinese Australians as Christian and socially conservative provokes us to think about the complex ways in which race is deployed by the populist right. In our Swedish example, race is used both to illustrate the threat to Swedish nationalism and, through Jag är Lucia, as a way to celebrate Sweden's multiculturalism. Conversely, in Australia's same sex marriage debate, Chinese Australians were positioned as socially conservative and assumed to be against same sex marriage in a move that reflects what it means to belong in Australia and who and where particular communities belong (Hegarty et al., 2018).

Conclusion

Our article has offered an analysis of two critical incidents that took place in Sweden and Australia respectively, both of which raise the spectre of the boy in a dress. Both of our cases have forced us to look at the ways in which conservative populist attempts at nation building within these two differently configured western liberal democracies harness race and gender identity in order to build a case against public and institutional tolerance of difference. Brown's (2006) work helps us to illustrate how these critical incidents represent a tipping point within tolerance discourse and, as such, reveal the subjects that conservative populism would rather did not exist. For Brown (2006), tolerance is far from the benign, power free and natural part of liberal democratic states that it is often represented to be. Instead, Brown argues that it is in fact ‘… a crucial analytic hinge between the constitution of abject domestic subjects and barbarous global ones between liberalism and the justification of its imperial and colonial adventures’ (Brown, 2006: 8).

Therefore, tolerance as a discourse regulates the presence of the Other and limits this presence to specific fields of private and public life. The subject who is marked as in need of tolerance is inevitably deviant in some way and, as such, in need of tolerance from a normalized majority. Our analysis of the spectre of the boy in the dress in Sweden and Australia demonstrates that, ‘Despite its pacific demeanour, tolerance is an intentionally unharmonious term, blending together goodness, capaciousness and conciliation with discomfort, judgement and aversion’ (Brown, 2006: 25). The populist right are therefore haunted by the persistence of queer/trans* people, despite their attempts to erase them from public life. As we show here, this haunting makes manifest the oppression of queer/trans* people within Sweden and Australia and reveals how gender, sexuality and race are brought together to evoke notions of (un)belonging within our two national contexts. Using haunting in this way as an analytical tool allows us to examine the oppression, disadvantage and violence that is revealed by the use of the boy in a dress within our two critical incidents.

The boy in a dress, as we understand it, is a figure that raises many questions about the limits of tolerance within our respective nations. On one hand, the Åhléns Lucia campaign attempted to deploy Sweden's tolerance, feminism and progressive politics in their Lucia marketing campaign – in the end, a black Swedish boy playing the part traditionally played by a white Swedish girl came to represent Sweden's tipping point rather than a celebration of its national values of progressiveness and norm criticality. Within Australia, schools ‘telling’ boys that they can wear dresses was used as yet another example of a ‘leftist agenda’ around gender identity and sexuality that had ‘gone too far’ and the spectre of the boy in a dress became a rallying cry against equal rights for people in same sex relationships.

Unlike the Swedish example, in Australia the boy in a dress has never been seen directly; he is perhaps half- glimpsed in the imagination. In both of our case studies, there is an attempt to force the boy in the dress out of sight, in Australia by using the figure as a rallying cry against same sex marriage, and in Sweden by the removal of the image from the Åhléns Lucia campaign. Gordon (1999) understands the ghosts that haunt the contemporary as symptoms of what is missing or has been excluded, and argues that: ‘Ghosts are never innocent: the unhallowed dead of the modern project drag in the pathos of their loss and the violence of the force that made them, their sheets and chains’ (Gordon, 1997: 22).

The paradox of the spectre of the boy in a dress is that the conjuring of him can also be deployed as a tool to make us look at, see and engage with the gender-questioning child who is, somewhere, seeking affirmation. In attempting to build a nation through refusing to tolerate same sex marriage and using children to persuade us, the Coalition for Marriage force us to look at the violence and force that comprise their arguments, and at the effect they have and continue to have upon LGBTIQ Australians whose mental health is currently amongst the poorest in the nation (LGBTI health, ND) (https://lgbtihealth.org.au/statistics/). Meanwhile, in Sweden, trans* people experience discrimination, harassment and low trust in public institutions when compared to the general population, and are more likely to experience violence, sexual harassment and assault (Zeluf et al., 2015). In arguing against the presence of gender diversity in schools and public life, we see a ghost that makes us listen to its howls for justice, and by failing to address the systemic oppressions and structural disadvantage faced by trans* people within the contexts under discussion here, populist discourse erases the notion of structural violence and inequality that trans* and gender diverse people face in both Sweden and Australia.

Through an examination of its ghostly nature, the spectre of the boy in a dress is revealed as a populist tactic that aims to further marginalize same sex attracted, gender diverse and ethnic minority groups. In response, we hope to exorcize this ghost and to reveal the many violences it attempts to conceal:

The ghost […] is not the invisible or some ineffable excess […] Haunting and the appearance of specters or ghosts is one way […] we are notified that what's been concealed is very much alive and present, interfering precisely with those always incomplete forms of containment and repression ceaselessly directed toward us. (Gordon, [1999]: xvi)

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