This thesis is about border politics, in more than one sense. It looks at the recent period of anxiety about the control of Australian national borders (approximately, from the late 1990s until the 2007 Federal election), and attempts to understand how certain assumptions about women as potential reproductive bodies permeated biopolitical discourses in Australian national culture during this period. I employ the term ‘containment’ in order to make sense of this cultural moment. With reference to the work of theorists of modernity such as Michel Foucault and Zygmunt Bauman, I argue that containment is a key discourse in modern cultures—a way of thinking and speaking about confinement, control, management and order. It structures how we think about the management of populations and is a central part of the justification for the confinement of problem populations by modern political authorities. As such, then, it describes the ways in which the use of immigration detention for unlawful non-citizen asylum seekers has been thought about and accepted as reasonable in Australian national culture. / However, a discourse of containment has also been central to the thinking about gendered bodies in modernity, in particular to assumptions about the control of women’s bodies. The assumptions about the containment of women in the modern gender order are directly linked to ideas about political status, citizenship and sovereignty in modern nation-states. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s notion of ‘bare life’—the life that is excluded from the protections of citizenship and thus left unprotected from violence—I attempt to make sense of the connections between the immigration detention camp as a site where the modern state exerts control over the life of the nation, and that modern state’s attempts to control reproductive and reproducing bodies. The reducing of certain people to the status of bare life is, then, a gendered process. Women and men are stripped of political status in different ways because they are assumed to have, or potentially have, different kinds of political status. / I therefore consider how ideas about women as reproductive bodies were integral to the discourse and practices of containment which underpinned the use of immigration detention in Australia. These ideas were important at a number of levels. Firstly, ideas about women as reproductive bodies infused the thinking about national borders, border control and the management of national reproduction. Secondly, a racially inflected discourse about ‘women and children’ was of central importance in shaping the ways in which male and female asylum seekers in immigration detention were treated. In the techniques used to control and manage gendered asylum-seeking bodies, key modern assumptions about women as reproductive bodies, the family, sovereignty and violence are revealed. Furthermore, I argue that many popular culture texts which attempt to make sense of, or critique, Australian national border politics have reinforced the same gendered ideas about containment, the same naturalised assumptions about the reproduction of the nation, which underpinned exclusionist border politics and the use of immigration detention. Examining the intersection of gendered and national discourses of containment in national border politics reveals the gendered violence which infuses the modern social order.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/244327 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Phillips, Kristen |
| Publisher | Curtin University of Technology, School of Communication and Cultural Studies, Faculty of Media Culture and Creative Arts. |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | unrestricted |
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