About Me

Diane Stapleton (She/They) is an experienced researcher; educator; and writer. She is a neuro-divergent trans femme living on the unceded land of the Bedigal people. She was born into the remnants of the 1970s and raised near Mogoaillee and Narrung Dooral in the unceded land of the Darug people.

Around the turn of millennium, she undertook an undergraduate degree in Arts at the Nepean campus of Western Sydney University. While studying as an undergraduate, she majored in Text and Writing with a sub major in Culture and Society. This study program familiarised her with various theoretical approaches relevant to queer theory; gender studies; psychoanalysis; post-structuralism; critical theory; and cultural studies. With fondness, she remembers the courses co-taught by Dr. Maria Angel and Dr. David McInnes – traversing intersections between high theory and low culture; learning literary theory from Dr. Sabrina Achilles; ethnography and cultural theory from Prof. Greg Noble; media and political economy from activist, Peter McGregor; and creative writing praxis from Dr. Lynda Hawryluk.

Diane took advantage of the liberal program within her Arts degree and pursued a number of electives outside her major areas of study. A particularly interesting course she undertook in 2002 was Sexuality, convened by Michael Woods. This course welcomed students from a broad array of intellectual backgrounds and offered a multitude of perspectives on human sexuality. What made this course particularly interesting is that it gave two trans men living in so-called Western Sydney a platform to speak to the students about their lived experiences. This moment was invaluable to Diane because it demonstrated that what is proximal appears possible, and emphasised the importance of communicating our lived experiences to others.

In 2004, she completed her Honours thesis under the supervision of Dr. Maria Angel. Shock & Awe: The Affective Experience of Contemporary Horror used theories of affect to connect contemporary horror cinema to forms of pre-narrative cinema that foreground visual spectacle and feelings of astonishment. It was a pleasure to draw upon theoretical paradigms to which I had been introduced in my undergraduate years and to apply them to a film genre that has fascinated me since childhood. This work achieved a first-class result.

From 2005-2010, Diane worked as a casual academic at WSU in the Centre for Cultural Research. Her duties included working as a research assistant for Associate Prof. Virginia Nightingale and Prof. Anna Gibbs on an ARC funded project. This project investigated young people’s perceptions of media content; and operating as a tutor; guest lecturer; lecturer and course designer in different courses in the School of Communication Arts. The course she co-designed with her supervisor introduced postgraduate students to the creative industries, and she routinely gave lectures and guest lectures to undergraduate students on ways of conceptualising and measuring media audiences.

From the beginning of 2012 until 2017, Diane was enrolled as a Doctor of Philosophy at the Institute for Social Transformation Research in the School of Humanities and Social Inquiry at the University of Wollongong. Her doctoral thesis, Purity Meets Danger: Approaches to contentious images of minors was supervised by Prof. Mark McLelland; Prof. Brian Martin; and Prof. Sue Turnbull. It was an immense privilege to bring this project to such a courageous, erudite, and diverse team. This work is a Foucauldian assessment of the domains that inform our ways of representing and looking at images of children and young people. It sits at the intersection of critical childhood studies and porn studies – two fields of scholarship within the broader streams of gender and sexuality studies that foreground feminist and queer epistemologies.

Locating the contentious image of the child within juridical discourse; and within both popular and academic discourse; this work demonstrates a profound incoherence on the borders of permissible and objectionable. This work then evaluates the tools used to describe contentious images of minors within different juridical, forensic, and academic contexts. It proposes that synthesising these models with ideas from cognitive psychology and visual culture can be useful for making nuanced and reliable assessments of contentious images. This thesis received Examiners’ Commendation for Outstanding Thesis from both examiners and in 2018 this work was awarded the Professor Jim Hagan Memorial Prize for best PhD thesis completed in the School in the prior academic year.

From the start of 2018, Diane has worked as a casual academic in the School of Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales. During her time there, Diane has cultivated a reputation as a compassionate, knowledgeable, and enthusiastic teacher. Furthermore, she has demonstrated herself a committed and courageous course designer, prepared to teach in a broad range of courses outside her fields of expertise. She has taught in a diverse range of courses related to strategic communication; rhetoric and discourse analysis; journalism; data analytics; political economy of media; and advertising. Furthermore, she was tasked with developing a course to introduce postgraduate SAM students to research practices within the Humanities and has re-designed a postgraduate course on strategic communication and an undergraduate course on media ethics.

Diane is currently undertaking a Diploma in Counselling to obtain the skills and credentials to operate as a gender counsellor and peer support worker for the trans and gender-diverse community. Diane is concurrently conducting research that relates to the lives of trans and gender-diverse people.

Diane is a member of AusPATH/TPATH; LGBTIQ+ Health Australia; and Trans Pride Australia. She also volunteers with Trans Justice Sydney.

Diane is available for public-speaking engagements that centre the lived experience of trans and gender-diverse people; and to operate as a learning facilitator in events that seek to educate the LGBTQIA+ communities and their allies.

If you’re interested in collaborating with Diane or would like to otherwise get in touch, then please do so.

A list of publications is available at https://orcid.org/0009-0000-6415-9158