Sensitivities abound these days.
People square off a patch and protect it, excluding all and any who do not belong.
Gone are the days when you can think someone from another nation’s hairstyle is pretty and replicate it, or like a pattern from a far-off land and buy a dress in that fabric.
It has all gone a bit too far, rendering almost every word, action or style now a danger zone, at high risk of offending someone or leading to accusations of appropriation.
And now there are suggestions that even actors should stay in their assigned national, cultural and sexual pigeonhole.
Poor Guy Pearce, who played a drag queen in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, copped it big time on Twitter last month for entering the fray around who should play which character on screen.
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He posted: “If the only people allowed to play trans characters are trans folk, then r we also suggesting the only people trans folk can play r trans characters? Surely that will limit ur career as an actor? Isn’t the point of an actor to be able to play anyone outside ur own world?”
He ended up deleting the post and apologising, so ferocious was the response
But his contrition for fanning the sensitivity fire made a pertinent point: to suggest acting can only come from an actor’s own lived experience is to annihilate their brilliance and imagination.
Take this need for boundaries a tiny step further, and it is considered culturally inappropriate if we cook a Middle Eastern dish if we are not from Turkiye or Iran, hang an Indigenous artwork if we are not Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander or don a kimono if we are not Japanese.
Where does it leave those of us who have no obvious cultural heritage – Australians in life but with a melting pot of lineage that might be our distant roots, but which doesn’t reflect our branches or our growth?
Let’s not bolster the barricades between expressions of gender, sexuality, culture, race and religion.
Let’s be careful in discussions around diversity and inclusion to not just make more boxes to assign people to or exclude them from.
Respect is key.
Yet, I can’t help but think that the more we embrace and honour the elements and trappings of other cultures and identities, the more integrated society becomes.
If we’re not allowed to, we’ll have sharper divisions and starker differences.
Dr Jane Stephens is a UniSC journalism lecturer, media commentator and writer.
