Racial penal governance in Australia and moments of appearance: disrupting disappearance and visibilizing women on the inside

ABSTRACT

The paper considers the lives of women that are invisibilized by the racial penal governing mechanisms of the settler state. It demonstrates how a racial penal governance is configured historically by its interlockings with multiple and hierarchical systems of oppression that intervene differently in the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and women, convict women, racialized diaspora and marginalized white women. The paper engages with four ‘moments of appearances’ that interrupt and speak back to racial penal governance. Mirzoeff’s The appearance of Black Lives Matter (2017, https://namepublications.org/item/2017/the-appearance-of-black-lives-matter/) theorization of decolonial spaces of appearance is integrated to the analysis of historical and recent moments of appearance visibilized in the testimonials of Thomas Brune, the Aboriginal youth Co-editor of the Flinders Island Chronicle in 1837 in the Wybalenna prison Camp and of Zoe, Alison and Pamela who have lived experience of prisons. These are embodied moments that make lives in prisons appear and matter.

KEYWORDS:

• Incarceration
• race
• gender
• penal governance
• intersectionality
• women

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the anonymous referees for their guidance. A special thank you to the women who shared and trusted me with their life-narratives. I would also like to thank and acknowledge the inspirational work of WIPAN and Sisters Inside. I am really grateful for the feedback and encouragement received by Stephen Houston, Nicole Matthews, Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese. Finally, a very special thank you to the co-editors of this edition, Maria Giannacopoulos and Biko Agozino.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Note here that I will be using his European name because his birth name and country are unknown (see also Stevens, 2017).

2 To protect participants' confidentiality, pseudonyms are used throughout this article

3 The oral interviews were conducted with permission at the Women in Prison Advocacy Network and co-presented with Lana Sanders as ‘Punishable bodies and Racial Penal Governance’ at Is Prison Obsolete Conference, Sisters Inside, 19–21 October, 2016.

4 Sorry for Your Loss, Exhibition, 30 May–10 June 2018, Boomali Gallery, Sydney. Created by Jumbunna Research by Professor Larissa Behrendt and Associate Professor Pauline Clague, Dr Romaine Moreton and Dr Lou Bennett. It is described as ‘a collaborative community driven multisensory installation work giving voice to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women who have lost their lives in custody. We are more than statistics, we are more mothers, sisters and daughters. We have belonging, family and place Our absence does not go unnoticed, we do not just disappear, we will remembers’ (Behrendt & Clague, 2018, p. 3). For more details see also https://www.uts.edu.au/research-and-teaching/our-research/jumbunna-institute-indigenous-education-and-research/news-and-11.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lara Palombo

Lara Palombo is a casual Lecturer and Tutor at the University of Macquarie and Western Sydney University in the areas of Cultural Studies, Gender Studies and Criminology. Her PhD focussed on indefinite imprisonment in racial Camps of the settler colony of Australia. She has published in a number of journals including Journal of Global Indigeneity (2019), Journal of Intercultural Studies (2014), and Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies (2009). Lara is a member of the Ethics Advisory Board of the website Deathscapes: Mapping Race and Violence in Settler States. She is also a member of the Women’s Justice Network (previously known as Women in Prison Advocacy Network).