To return to the abstract index press the back button on your browser
Adele Murdolo
Working Women's Health
Keeping 'our' women safe: Containing Australian fear and danger through immigration detention
Immigration detention, introduced in Australia in 1992, has become a controversial but widely accepted method of 'processing' people who are living in Australia, or who arrive in Australia, without a valid visa. Debate about detention centres is fierce, polarised, and central to the way that participants of the debate envisage 'Australia'.
In this paper I discuss one aspect of the debate - the ways in which notions of fear and danger have been nationalised and gendered through prevailing discourses about immigration detention, refugees and asylum seekers. The notion of the 'national safety' has been used to justify the existence of detention. Within discussions of 'border protection', much is made of the need to maintain the 'integrity' of cultural borders as much as of physical borders. In these discourses, clear links have been made between the cultural/physical 'safety of Australians' and the cultural/physical 'safety/freedom of Australian women'.
Through a discussion of the myth of a nationalised notion of 'safety for women', I explore some of the options for Australian feminist activists who wish to challenge current practices of immigration detention.
Bio:
Adele Murdolo is currently the Executive Director of Working Women's Health, an immigrant women's health organisation based in Victoria. The service conducts multilingual health promotion, mainly with immigrant women who are working in both paid and unpaid employment.
Adele is from an Italian migrant background and has participated in activism on immigrant and refugee women's issues for over 12 years, in both academic and community forums. She has completed a PhD on the history of the women's movement and the feminist activism of immigrant and refugee women in Australia. She has published on a wide variety of issues relating to women's health, sexuality and media representations of second-generation immigrant women, and issues for women in immigration detention.
<adele@workingwomenshealth.asn.au>