Intimate borders: refugee im/mobility in Australia’s border security regime

ABSTRACT

This article contends that the rhetoric and logics of intimacy in Australia’s border security regime are central to dividing desirable from undesirable mobility, by distinguishing ‘deserving’ from ‘undeserving’ refugees in a politics of differential compassion. Insofar as intimacy is tied to senses of closeness and identification as well as ideas of morality and love, it is deployed by anti-refugee and pro-refugee advocates to cultivate certain affects (antipathy or sympathy, feelings of distance or belonging) by appealing to notions of strangeness vs commonality, victims versus perpetrators, moral similitude versus moral incompatibility, and corresponding values versus incommensurable ones. Focusing on the discourse surrounding the Asia-Australian border security regime that incarcerates refugees arriving by boat in offshore ‘processing centres’, this article demonstrates that sensationalist and sentimentalist portrayals of refugees as sexual perpetrators or sexual victims in media, government and political discourse work in tandem with a politics of differential compassion, privileging some refugees over others. It also traces how intimacy can generate alternative bordering practices by mobilizing feminine moral authority in networks of care to generate meaningful and material relationships with refugees that sometimes serve as the ground for a more transformative solidarity.

KEYWORDS:

• Borders
• refugees
• mobility
• intimacy
• violence
• Australia
• security

Acknowledgements

I want to thank the editors, Fran Martin, Audrey Yue and John Erni for their support and critical feedback as well as the reviewer. Thanks also to Joshua Pocius and Winnie Salamon for guiding me through the submission process. Finally, thanks to Thao Phan for her excellent research assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Gilbert Caluya (PhD, University of Sydney) is a Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne in Australia where he also teaches into the Gender Studies programme. His research focuses on the intersections of race and the cultural politics of intimacy across several cultural sites, including sexual subcultures, cultural citizenship, everyday cultures of security and digital cultures, while drawing on a range of feminist, queer, critical race, and other critical and cultural theories. He was a recipient of a prestigious ARC-funded DECRA Fellowship to research intimate citizenship in postcolonial societies (from which this article is drawn) and was most recently awarded an ARC-funded Discovery Project grant as a co-investigator to study the digital citizenship of diasporic youth in Australia.

Notes

1 ‘The refugees stuck on Manus: five years and counting – video’, The Guardian, 17 November 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/global/video/2018/nov/17/the-refugees-stuck-on-manus-five-years-and-counting-video [Accessed 18 November 2018]

2 An ‘asylum seeker’ is someone who has crossed a border claiming to seek asylum from persecution but whose claim has not been determined, whereas a ‘refugee’ is an asylum seeker whose claim has been recognised as legitimate. Since in public discourse they are often referred to collectively as ‘refugees’ I use that terminology here.

3 For example, there has been a lot of work on the mobility of educated or professional East Asian women to the West (Ho, 2006, Kim, 2011, 2016, Huang, 2014), and a large body of work devoted to international student mobility (see Fong, 2011, Collins et al., 2014, Tam and Araújo, 2017). Some draw attention to inter-regional mobility through international marriages (Yeoh et al. 2017) while others trace intra-state mobility, such as urbanization in Thailand (Mills, 2012). Some have used ‘mobility regimes’ to complicate stories of privileged mobility, such as Western tourists, ex-pats and lifestyle migrants to Asia (see Amit, 2007, Howard, 2008, 2009, Green, 2014). Within cultural studies, the study of Asian mobility has focused on Chinese female international students in Australia (Martin, 2014, 2017a, 2017b), Asian temporary workers in Australia (Robertson, 2014, 2016, Ho, 2017) and queer Asian diasporas (Manalansan, 2003, Benedicto, 2014).

4 Asian countries that are not a signatory include: North Korea, South Korea, India, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei, Burma/Myanmar, Cook Islands, Polynesia, Kiribati, Laos, Maldives, Micro Islands, Micronesia, Mongolia, Nepal, Niue, Pakistan, Palau, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Tonga and Vanuatu.

5 Except for the Philippines, which gained independence in 1946, all other countries were a colony, protectorate or under occupation: Japan was under US occupation, Papa New Guinea was an Australian colony, Cambodia was a French colony, Fiji was a British colony, Solomon Islands and Tuvalu/Ellice Islands were British protectorates, Timor-Leste/East Timor was a Portuguese colony, Nauru was under UN trusteeship and Samoa was overseen by New Zealand as a League of Nations Trusteeship.

6 In August 2001, as a response to the ‘Tampa crisis’, a standoff in which the Norwegian vessel MV Tampa carrying 433 rescued refugees was stopped from entering Australia’s territorial waters by the Australian Navy, the then Liberal Prime Minister John Howard devised ‘The Pacific Solution’.

7 Yet this detention was specifically defined as not constituting ‘immigration detention’ as per the Migration Act 1958 and thus were not provided visa application forms, legal advice and translation services while applying for asylum. Furthermore, section 494AA prevented proceedings against the Commonwealth of Australia relating to offshore entry or the status or detention of an offshore entry person.

8 The Rotherham child sexual exploitation trials in 2010 involving mostly British-Pakistani men followed by the 2012 trial of the Rochdale child sex abuse again involving British-Pakistani men, raised fears of ‘Muslim child grooming’ which were widely reported in Australia. The Cologne sexual assaults on New Year’s eve of 2015/2016, in which German women were caught in what was described as a gauntlet of groping and sexual assault involving hundreds of men of North African or Arab descent, was also widely publicized in Australia. The ‘Cologne sex attacks’ as it became popularly known was the key international media event that led to the widespread use of ‘rapefugees’ among the far right. Each of these events was widely circulated in Australia, particularly within Islamophobic, anti-refugee, white nationalist and other far right groups as proof of their fears about Muslims, while the term ‘rapefugee’ is often used in their anti-refugee or anti-Muslim protest rallies. Milo’s statements about Muslim refugees being good at rape was far from surprising. It was a predictable association that had been constructed over many years to portray refugees as sexually dangerous.

9 Tony Abbott used a similar strategy when stories arose in mid-2014 of refugee mothers attempting suicide to give their children/babies the opportunity to be refugees. Stories began to appear in mid-2014 about refugee mothers on suicide watch because, in desperation, they thought it might allow their children/babies to stay in Australia. In a Channel Nine’s Today show interview on 9 July 2014, Abbott recast this desperate act of self-harm as some kind of attack. He told the hosts that: ‘this is not going to be a government which has our policy driven by people who are attempting to hold us over a moral barrel … I don’t believe that people ought to be able to say to us ‘unless you accept me as a permanent resident I am going to commit self-harm … I don’t believe any Australian – any thinking Australian – would want us to capitulate to moral blackmail’ (Tony Abbott, emphasis in original, my transcription, taken from https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2014/jul/09/tony-abbott-asylum-seekers-moral-blackmail-video).

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the Australian Research Council (DE120101763).