Bad News: The referencing, formatting and wording of this is fucked & munted.
Good News: I fixed the formatting and wording on the text submission document.
Enjoy...Or don't!
“ ‘Aileen, while we may not understand all the big words, what we know is you have talked up to the white women on our behalf. They did not know what they were in for when they educated you’ Everyone laughed and clapped their hands. This was classic mum, no frills, just straight on point.” – (Moreton-Robinson, 2020, p. XIV)
I would feel safer in a room of armed police than a room of White feminists; this is a sentiment many of my First Nations friends and family reflect.1
Yesterday, I submitted an assignment that was not only 3 whole days late, but also extremely likely to get me expelled. It left me with a lot of questions, tears and the realisation that my third subject from this semester had its final assignment due on Sunday but I have been so distressed it is nowhere near completion. So, I thought:
“What the hell is one more late submission deduction when you are unlikely to ever see the end of your degree either way – let’s go out with a 3/3 deduction bang!?”
And went to bed instead of submitting this essay on time.
This morning I thought:
“Well, I might as well take advantage of those free library journal articles to satiate the curiosity behind some of those questions, before my student access mysteriously disappears like my SFS access & basic human rights!”
And THAT is how almost 24hrs after the due date at 4:58pm on Tuesday 12th November 2024 – I ended up rewriting a whole 2000w essay that had previously been completed and ready for submission. Let’s get into it!
This is deeply confusing to me for countless reasons but the most alarming reason is that despite the fact Australia is still actively genociding First Nations people, almost every subject I am required to take spends at least one weekly topic dedicated to the ludicrous myth of “postcolonialism”.
How can we be “postcolonialism” when colonial violence is still killing my people and demanding we assimilate? Assimilation is one of the most brutal forms of violence First Nations people face, it requires disconnection from culture, ideologies, and communities; our whole ways of life become abandoned in exchange for adopting a set of “suitable behaviours” that in exchange, increases the value of our life to something *almost* tolerated as human.
When I find myself in White, colonised spaces- such as academia, it feels a lot like a performance when adhering to the expectations of those places; could gender not be part of this performance, too (Butler, 2020)?
Colonial violence is enacted in many ways (physical and non-physical) that remain invisible to an untrained eye, on top of this I think Australia has a very unique relationship with both colonialism and race. There seems to simultaneously be the idea that African American culture and identity is indistinguishable from the existence of Blak Australian culture, while African Americans often do not even view First Nations people as black and Australian racism is so very rarely based on the colour of someone’s actual skin. Language, clothes, behaviours, lifestyles, etc. all play into how people are perceived, grouped and targeted – my culture (Wiradyuri/Gamileroi) does not handle gender in the way of the colony, and my expression of gender has exposed me to more racism than it has Queer hate.
“The White Man fucks The Dark Mother” (Caputi, 2016, p.20)
This is modern colonial violence!
The White Man in question is representative of Capitalistic, Ethnocentric, and Patriarchal ideologies that are ravaging and destroying the planet as we speak. These ideologies have been born of greed for power, wealth and control: the sons of Neocolonialism. The Dark Mother happens to be representative of the planet, flora, fauna, and any non-assimilated humans: being violated and murdered by The White Man.
(A very familiar…and seemingly never-ending…story.)
I am going to encapsulate the umbrella ideals and actions of The White Man under the name of Colonialism going forward – for the sake of simplicity both reading and writing. Colonialism thrives on the power and control that comes from othering and dividing as many people as possible; this is how we ended up creating our global capitalistic ideology – the planet Earth got colonised. The Dark Mother while in her original form is representative of just as many things as Colonialism – for the sake of simplicity – is now becoming First Nations women. First Nations women recognise that we cannot transcend existence and that dominance is a pointless venture when everything is everyone, affecting each other all at once, all the time (Moreton-Robinson, 2020, p. XVIII). The term ‘colonial violence’ will generate the traditional and expected imagery of slave trades (Weeder, 2002, p.43), massacres of innocent people, and the displacement and disconnection of countless families and cultures from places and people they had always known; these are very real (and not entirely outdated) forms of colonial violence but we are only causing more harm towards the people Colonialism oppresses by pretending we have moved on and left it in the past. The reach of power and control that Colonialism holds in his possession has just become so vast it is systemically built into the foundations and institutions of dozens of countries; including our own. On top of the sexual domination, genocide of people and history of slavery – there is the erasure of culture (history, stories, land, families, knowledge, food etc.), removal of identity (art, language, religions, traditions, clothes etc.), and control (over education, law/Lore, citizenship, employment, housing etc.). The evidence of an alive and well Colonialism is hiding in plain sight for anyone with eyes to see.
“If I was arguing that feminism had entirely faded away, then the enthusiasm on the part of younger women to attend feminist academic conferences and public talks would surely prove me wrong. Nor is this book a lament for what could have been. Instead, it has been an attempt to make an intervention which crosses borders of a range of academic disciplines, gender studies, sociology, cultural and media studies, with the aim of both animating further debate about the future of feminism inside and outside the academy, and of provoking further rounds of argument.” (McRobbie, 2009, p.132)
European settlers have a history of leaving Queerphobia as one of their signature stains on a colony (Crerar, 2008).
Anti-LGBT+ legislation in at least 38 African Nations(as well as countless outbreaks of poor sexual health) can be traced directly back to British Colonisation. British Colonisation can also be identified as responsible for the erasure of Indian Hijra communities (Sequeira, 2022).
Bayliss (2014) argues that the act of being Queer and First Nations is an act of decolonisation in itself, a way of flipping the mythologising of history back onto the oppressors who mythologised ours. Christian Missionaries are largely responsible for replacing First Nations cultures and beliefs with the ideas of purity and savagery that we still play directly into in the present day; something as simple as recognising the Arnhem Land Mimis (cheeky and mildly hedonistic genderless spirits who have been credited for the first rock paintings in West Arnhem Land as well as teaching the first Indigenous people of that area how to hunt and create their own art) as existing already undermines the binary of Man/Woman.
If you are not Queer but you are First Nations, simply being an ally could also be an act of self-decolonisation; the sistagirl community on the Tiwi Islands lost a significant number of their girls to suicide as a consequence of the lateral violence from not being accepted by their community – but, once they were, they were able to celebrate their Queer Identities and their Culture at Mardi Gras feeling loved and seen (Dias, 2017)!
To reiterate: Colonialism feeds off of Capitalism and Capitalism thrives off of being able to divide and other as many types of people as possible – so we are too busy creating or bridging divides to create a better world or prevent the destruction of the only planet we’ve got. Binaries and rigid concepts like Gender, Money, Race, and Class are often birthed and perpetuated by Capitalism to retain the dominant power and destruction of Colonialism.
“…this historical moment, this bizarre conjuncture functions as nothing less than the racism of the global gay left and the wholesale acceptance…rhetoric that fuels the war on terror and the political forces pushing for…a tacit acceptance of the pending occupation…” (Puar, 2017, p.xix)
“Feminist literature on whiteness and race in America, the black/white binary distinction works to reserve “race” for the African American Other. First Nations people largely remain invisible due to this distinction.” (Moreton-Robinson, 2020, p.xxvi)
It is not always so clear cut, though, there are layers and rules to the oppressive structures that Colonialism leaves in its wake. Racism is thought of intellectually as Dark Skin vs White Skin – but it is much more layered than that (I have touched on the topic of Queer spaces and other minorities replicating the oppressive structures that harm them amongst their own communities before [it is a very nuanced and largely unaddressed form of lateral violence I have written many pieces on]).
In Australia being Black, or experiencing racism is largely surrounding resistance or subordination, and Indigenous resistance is always inevitably framed as Indigenous Criminality (Cuneen, 2018). While in America, the experience of racism is often directly tied to the colour of someone’s skin above most other identity factors. The African (american) diaspora regularly rejects First Nations Australians as being “others” and with the increasing infiltration of American-Centric media in Australian platforms and discourse only worsens this divide, as the concept of “race” in australia has been boiled down to a singular and vastly different Identity + Experience than that of First Nations communities.
However, regardless of lateral violence or misunderstandings of racial experiences, the overarching foundations and dynamics of racism remain the same: Stolen land, overincarceration, and the invisibility of Whiteness as an Institution.
W.E.I.R.D (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic)
Is a term coined by anthropologist, Joseph Heinreich, commonly used to highlight key ideological differences between Colonisers and Colonised:
“…tendencies toward self-enhancement and overconfidence. WEIRD people also rely heavily on analytic thinking… places people or objects into distinct categories and assigns them properties to account for their behavior. Here people get assigned preferences or personality…holistic thinkers focus on relationships, context, and interaction…person A is yelling at person B, an analytical thinker might infer that person A is an angry person while a holistic thinker worries about the relationship between persons A and B…”(Siliezar, 2020)
Analysis is the relationship White Feminism has with racism and First Nations women.
This intellectualising of humanity, connection, and experiences is exactly how White Academia is able to maintain the self-deception of sameness, equity and being a progressive, safe space. It creates a barrier that allows racism to be something that simply happens to “others” and not conscious and repeated choices on behalf of their own race that shapes their own lives and the lives of First Nations women (Moreton-Robinson, 2020, p. 177).
The closest White Academic Feminism can come to acknowledging their role in the oppression of First Nations Women is practicing ‘ecofeminism’ over traditional feminism; even ecofeminism falls short of acknowledging the integral role White Women have played in the commodification and destruction of First Nations women and The Earth (Salleh, 2020).
The Eurocentric goal of power, control and domination manifests it’s masculinity through Capitalism and Colonisation; while it’s feminine counterpart leans into the historical mythology set in place by the former, to generalise the experience of gender-based oppression to something entirely removed from race, by framing the progressions made exclusively for themselves (voting, education, legal protection) as heroic progressions for all – over acknowledging the reality that the privileges they have achieved were directly built off the back of resources stolen by their White Men.
When the First Invaders arrived, this took on the form of ‘rescuing’ First Nations women to keep as domestic slaves on their own stolen Countries or taking advantage of our communal mothering (Charbonneau et al., 2014) to contribute to the mass displacement of the child removal and Stolen Generations that are still ongoing; in present day it takes the form of censorship and forced Kings English assimilation in Academia, a denial of traditional knowledges unless we can communicate them “acceptably”, and a villiansing of our Matriarchal Culture based roles and responsibilities to prioritise holistic wellbeing of all mob and painting us into “Angry Blaks” when we self-advocate in traditionally masculine ways or refuse to abandon our First Nations men for White Feminism.
I do not want power, money, status – the success of Whiteness.
I want Blak babies to get a childhood before they see the walls of a prison cell they might never escape, I want Blak Women to be able to achieve a living wage without having to go through the trauma of Academic Assimilation, I want an acknowledgement from UTS that they have completely stereotyped and abused me in the name of White Feminism and Colonialism.
However, it seems only White Women ever get the things they want – so to maintain witnesses and protect myself from further brutalisation at the hands of “experts” on standpoint theory and Indigenous Australia – I have started my own act of self de-colonisation (which I prefer to call Indigenising – I love ‘othering’ dominant social groups #misandry) and begun uploading all of my assignments to the public domain whether it is a digital comm subject or otherwise (Farrell, 2017).
Maybe , UTS will eventually be able to see that I have already essentially self-published several legible PhDs and at the very least stop telling me I am illiterate for refusal to assimilate within the boundaries of White Academia & Feminism.
Finish time – 12:01 AM – so close yet so far from being a 5% deduction over a 10% – oh well, might as well go big AND go home time for bed and I will see if I am feeling brave enough for submission tomorrow!
Either way, I’m not sure I’ll ever see the end of this degree. If I don’t get expelled, I’m likely to drop out, I don’t have another semester of surviving this in the name of formal colony recognition for skills and knowledge I already know I possess (arguably, in more depth than about 75% of my teaching staff).
References
Baylis, T. (2014, April 16). The art of seeing Aboriginal Australia’s Queer Potential. https://theconversation.com/the-art-of-seeing-aboriginal-australias-queer-potential-25588
Butler, Judith. (2011, June 6) Big Think: Your Behaviour Creates Your Gender https://youtu.be/Bo7o2LYATDc?si=2n9KTMjxx27JDz2z
Callaghan, L. (2024, October 24) Seeing Colours: Blak recognises Blakhttps://substack.com/@lilyinteractive/p-150650812
Callaghan, L. (2024, October 13). Triple Album Review: UTS Hate Crime Edition!. https://lilyinteractive.com/2024/10/13/triple-album-review-uts-hate-crime-edition/
Callaghan, L. (2024, November 11) Mrs Redacted https://lilyinteractive.com/2024/11/11/mrs-redacted/
Caputi, J. (2016). Mother Earth meets the Anthropocene in P. Godfrey & D. Torres (eds), Systemic Crises of Global Climate Change: Intersections of race, class and gender (pp. 20-33). London & New York, Routledge.
Charbonneau, S., Thomas, R., Janzen, C., Carriere, J., et al. (2014) Storying the Untold. Lavell-Harvard, D.M. and Anderson, K. Indigenous Motherhood and Street Sex Work . in D. Memee Lavell-Harvard & Kim Anderson (Eds.) Mothers of the Nation. Indigenous Mothering as Global Resistance, Reclaiming and Recovery (1st ed., pp. 163-178). Demeter Press.
Crear, P. (2008, April 17) Theresa May says she deeply regrets Britains legacy of anti-gay laws.https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/17/theresa-may-deeply-regrets-britain-legacy-anti-gay-laws-commonwealth-nations-urged-overhaul-legislation?share=email
Cunneen, C. (2018). Indigenous People, Resistance, and Racialised Criminality. In M. Bhatia, S. Poynting, & W. Tufail (Eds.), Media, Crime and Racism (pp. 277-299). Cham: Springer International Publishing.
Dias, A. (2017, March 2). Tiwi Islands Sistagirls prepare to wow Sydney Mardi Gras, want to show Indigenous LGBTIQ culture.https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-02/tiwi-islands-sistagirls-prepare-to-wow-sydney-mardi-gras/8314132
Farrell, A. (2017). Archiving the Aboriginal Rainbow: Building an Aboriginal LGBTIQ Portal. Australasian Journal of Information Systems (21), pp. 1-14. https://doi.org/10.3127/ajis.v21i0.1589
Gaard, G. (2015) Ecofeminism and climate change. Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 49, pp. 20-33. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2015.02.004
Moreton-Robinson, A. (2020). 20th anniversary preface. Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism. Queensland: University of Queensland Press.
Puar, J. (2017). Foreword. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (pp. ix-xvi). Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Sequira, R. (2022). Show and Tell: Life History and Hijra Activism in India., Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society, 47(2), 451-474.
Siliezar, J. (2020, October 16). How the West became WEIRD. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/09/joseph-henrich-explores-weird-societies/Weeden, C (2002). Key Issues in Postcolonial Feminism: A Western Perspective. Gender Forum: An Internet Journal For Gender Studies, 1(2002), 43-54.
- This is because at least we know what we are facing and the violence to expect; police have the balls to hate us with their chests at the very least and to not leave us wondering who, how and when we can trust what is being said and done – unlike White Feminist Saviours and their Crocodile tears. ↩︎
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