Provocative women in the border zone: Articulations of national crisis and the limits of women's political status

Abstract

How have assumptions about the management of reproduction and the control of women played a part in Australian border politics? In the past decade debates about the reproduction of the nation have had a particular importance alongside articulations of a sense of national crisis about ‘border security’ and the management of immigration. This paper will discuss the intersection of anxieties about difficult or defiant women with discourses of national biopolitics. I will focus on three popular texts produced in this period of heightened Australian border politics, all of which contain narratives about women and girls ‘in the border zone’ – that is, women who are imagined as not (or not really) belonging to the nation, as well as white, citizen women who transgress national borders in some way. In these narratives, themes of romantic love, sexual availability and female transgression are underscored by fundamental assumptions about women's place in national reproduction.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Jon Stratton and Suvendrini Perera for advice on refining the ideas in this paper, and two anonymous referees for their helpful suggestions.

Notes

 1. Tia and Josh, characters in Randa Abdel-Fattah's teen novel, Does My Head Look Big in This (264–5).

 2. I discuss this in more detail in an article entitled ‘Domesticating refugees: The border-crossing other in marking time’ (Phillips forthcoming 2009).

 3. It is important to note that, unlike the banning of religious symbols in schools in France, Bishop was simply advocating the banning of Muslim headscarves, rather than religious symbols in general. Presumably, then, under Bishop's proposed ban women who choose to wear headscarves as a symbol of other religious identities would be free to do so. Thus, Bishop's public statements were not as such part of a public discussion about the importance of maintaining the secular character of the public sphere, she was arguing much more directly for the right of the Australian state to practise religious discrimination.

 4. This anxiety about Muslims ‘marrying in’ demonstrates the key assumptions about religion, secularism and assimilation which underpin modern ideas of the nation as a reproducible entity. The possibility that a minority group is not willing to intermarry with people from the dominant culture presents a considerable problem for the way in which the nation is thought about. Similar anxieties have been felt about other religious minority groups with endogamous marriage practices, most notably Jews, since the beginnings of the modern nation-state. That is, the fact that Jewish religious law requires Jews only to marry other Jews conflicts with assimilationist discourses in the modern nation-state, by which it is assumed that assimilation includes exogamy (see Stratton 2000, 53–63, 127–8, 207, 259).

 5. I am drawing on Barbara Baird's useful application of Weinbaum's concepts to abortion debates in Australia; see Baird 2006, 203–5.

 6. At first glance, Molly appears to be unproblematically ‘white’, so, by default, ‘Anglo’. But at one point in the film Lyn Rule describes her grandfather (who, she claims, had acted in the silent film The Birth of White Australia) as being Irish. Molly's ‘ethnicity’ is, then, at least partly Irish. This is signalled in the use of Celtic music at certain celebrations they attend throughout the film. The fact that Molly's Irishness does not detract from, but rather contributes to, her whiteness is the product of a specific colonialist and assimilationist Australian history (see Stratton 2004). I have described Molly as Anglo-Celtic but it is important to remember that what this signals is that she appears to be Anglo-Celtic, she can pass for Anglo-Celtic – she could also, for example, have some Aboriginal or Italian heritage which is not played up in the film. After all, we never meet Molly's father. Of course, this is true of many people who appear to be white: I am simply trying to highlight that whiteness is something that is performed and has a shifting meaning in Australia. And the assumption that Molly is white rests on the naturalized notion of race as something that can be unproblematically reproduced from generation to generation, as Alys Eve Weinbaum (2004) suggests.

 7. Indeed, the theme of ‘whitening’ is invoked rather poignantly in one scene in which Molly and Lyn put blonde streaks in Mobarak's hair the night before his interview with immigration officers. Wearing a plastic cap tied under his chin as part of the hair dyeing process, Mobarak appears feminized and vulnerable. At the end of this scene when he is saying goodbye before going home in preparation for travelling to Canberra the next day, Mobarak is emotional and does not want to leave their house, and Molly and Lyn almost push him out of the door. Metonymically, then, this scene stands in for the underlying narrative in the film in which Mobarak subordinates himself to Anglo-Australian culture yet still cannot secure any certainty of belonging.

 8. Bishop's call for the Muslim headscarf to be banned can be thought of as a claim that there is a need for radical measures to ‘de-Muslim-ize’ Muslim migrants. Effectively, this removal of the headscarf would be the stripping of Muslims to ‘bare life’ – to mere biological life stripped of any political status so that they may be remade as Western subjects.

 9. See also the notion of the ‘borderscape’ employed by Suvendrini Perera and others in Rajaram and Grundy-Warr (2007).

10. In 2004, then Federal Treasurer Peter Costello suggested that fertile couples ‘should have one for the father, one for the mother and one for the country’. This was backed up by Howard's urging of childless Australian men: ‘come on, come on, your country needs you’ (cited in Farouque 2004).