Interventions, interceptions, separations: Australia's biopolitical war at the borders and the gendering of bare life

Abstract

Australian armed forces, police and customs officials have been waging a war to secure the nation-state's borders. This war peaks in spectacular mediatised incidents of violence at certain moments and, at other times, continues as a low level of surveillance, control and invisible violence. Those who attempt to enter Australian territory in order to seek asylum have been some of the most significant victims of this war's visible and invisible violence.

As with other wars, a discourse which links women with children as innocent, vulnerable non-combatants has helped to determine the ways in which Australia's war at the borders has been conducted. The discourse which constructs women as innocent and vulnerable is an effect of the different ways in which male and female bodies are reduced to bare life, stripped of political status. Where male bodies are stripped of political status so that they may be subject to violence, female bodies stripped of political status are constituted as mere reproductive bodies, ostensibly in need of chivalrous protection but also, I will argue, a threat to the life of the nation which should be violently controlled. The gendered ideas about the bodies which are the object of this war has meant that ‘women and children’ are, in certain instances, treated as a distinct group which can be separated out from adult men.

The need to be seen to conduct Australia's war against unlawful non-citizens with attention to the safety of women and children is pivotal in allowing this war to be thought of as a good war, a just war. I will argue here that this discourse about women and children is in fact crucial in allowing violence to occur, in disguising the violence of this war as benign control. The incidents in which women and children are separated out from men should be understood as a particularly insidious and significant kind of violence.

Keywords:

• bare life
• femina sacra
• ‘women and children’
• asylum seekers
• border crossing

Notes

1. Democrat Senator Andrew Bartlett, in Parliament on 9 October 2006, cited in Australian Council of Heads of Schools of Social Work (ACHSSW), 2006, p. 18. Senator Bartlett is a strong advocate for the rights of asylum seekers and has been particularly critical of the exclusion of offshore territory from the migration zone and the detention of asylum seekers outside of Australian territory. In the speech from which his comments are quoted here, Bartlett was marking the five year anniversary of an incident during ‘Operation Relex’ in which the Australian Navy forcibly returned asylum seekers to Indonesia. The Navy's actions were lawful under legislation passed through the Senate a few weeks earlier which authorised the use of force to remove asylum seekers from the migration zone and take them to an unspecified third country. For more details see the text of Senator Bartlett's speech on Australian Democrats website: http://www.democrats.org.au/speeches/index.htm?speech_id=1954.

2. My essay owes a debt to Suvendrini Perera's excellent exploration of what gender has to do with Australian border militarisation in ‘The gender of borderpanic: Women in circuits of security, state, globalisation and new (and old) empire’ (in press).

3. Emphasis in the original.

4. In one incident on board the SIEV 7, according to the Navy's records provided to the Senate Inquiry, a child was dropped (not thrown) into the water. The child was rescued and brought back to the boat by another asylum seeker who had jumped into the water (Senate Select Committee, 2002, pp. 542–543).

5. Asylum seekers’ accounts of what happened after being left in international waters were that twelve hours later the boat ran aground off the coast of Rote, and that three men disappeared, possibly drowned, when attempting to wade to shore, perhaps blinded by a combination of capsicum spray and conjunctivitis (cited in ‘To Deter and Deny’, 2002).

6. During the interception of SIEV 5 there had been a change in government policy directing the navy to return boats to Indonesian waters. However, this was only successful with SIEVs 5, 7, 11 and 12. SIEVs 8 and 9 were not returned to Indonesia (an attempt was made to tow SIEV 9, but it was unsuccessful, perhaps due to the protests of those onboard), as discussed in the navy's information provided to the senate inquiry (pp. 544–546) and SIEV 10 sank during interception. SIEVs 11 and 12, in December 2001, were both returned to Indonesia with the asylum seekers held on board the SIEVs and with less difficulty, perhaps due to smaller numbers of asylum seekers on board, and only a few children and women.

7. Four Corners’ report also contains a carefully worded response from Defence Minister Robert Hill in which he states that he has been advised that defence forces do not use ‘such equipment’, but then goes on to tacitly admit that some sort of force was used against the asylum seekers (‘To Deter and Deny’, 2002).

8. For clarity and simplicity I refer to the ‘Department of Immigration’ when describing the government department that has been responsible for administering immigration detention, visa matters, and border control. This department has gone through a number of name changes during the period under discussion, and has been responsible for other matters besides immigration such as policy affecting Indigenous people, multicultural policy, and citizenship. Each name change has its own particular ideological inflection.

9. Like many of the objects which the Australian Department of Immigration has the power to officially name (including the Department itself), these centres have been called by different names at different times. I am here following the current usage on the Department of Immigration and Citizenship's website, which now lists Port Augusta Residential Housing Centre (RHC) and Perth Residential Housing Centre.