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<p class="MsoNormal"><b>Articulate seminar #5: Gender, Violence and
Protection</b><br>
</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Date: Thursday 5 June<br>
<br>
Venue: Large Training Room, Level 6, Building 10, UTS.
<br>
Walking from Central Station along Broadway (heading west), turn right
after the UTS Tower Building on Jones Street. You will find Building 10
on your left.
<br>
<br>
TIME: 4.00 – 6.00
<br>
<br>
Entry is free and there is no need to RSVP
<br>
<br>
</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b>'Subjugation by Protection: Indigenous Women
and the Contemporary Australian
State' </b><br>
</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Nicole Watson, Jumbunna Indigenous House of
Learning, UTS<br>
</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">On 22 June 2007 the Prime Minister and the
Minister for Families, Community
Services and Indigenous Affairs, Mal Brough, convened an urgent news
conference. They declared that the abuse of Indigenous children in the <st1:state
w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Northern Territory</st1:place></st1:state>
was a
‘national emergency’, necessitating the quarantining of welfare
payments,
compulsory acquisition of Indigenous townships and medical checks of
all
Indigenous children. This paper will argue that the surveillance of
Indigenous
families, and in particular, Indigenous mothers, has been a constant
feature of
Australian history. From the 1900s Indigenous women were subject to
intense
surveillance as a result of protectionist legislation, culminating in
the
notorious policies of Indigenous child removal. Reports such as
/Bringing Them
Home /have illuminated the tragic consequences of the oppressive
regulation of
Indigenous family life. This paper will attempt to answer the question
why such
authoritarian measures have maintained their political currency, in
spite of
the revelations of <span class="moz-txt-tag"><i>/</i></span><i>Bringing
Them Home<span class="moz-txt-tag">/</span></i>.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">BIO: Nicole Watson is a member of the Birri-Gubba
People and the
Yugambeh language group. Nicole has a bachelor of laws from the <st1:place
w:st="on"><st1:placetype w:st="on">University</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename
w:st="on">Queensland</st1:placename></st1:place>, a master of laws
from the
Queensland University of Technology and is currently enrolled in the
PhD
program at the ANU. The topic of Nicole's thesis is a comparative
analysis of
the privatisation of Indigenous lands in <st1:country-region w:st="on">Australia</st1:country-region>,
the <st1:country-region w:st="on">United States of America</st1:country-region>
and <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">New Zealand</st1:place></st1:country-region>.
Nicole was admitted as a solicitor of the Supreme Court of Queensland
in 1999.
She has worked for Legal Aid <st1:state w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Queensland</st1:place></st1:state>,
the National Native Title Tribunal and the Queensland Environmental
Protection
Agency. Nicole is also a former editor of the <span class="moz-txt-tag"><i>/</i></span><i>Indigenous
Law Bulletin<span class="moz-txt-tag">/</span></i>. Nicole's area of
research is the legal recognition of Indigenous relationships
with land. <br>
<br>
<b>'Stop!: the undirected scripts of sexual morality'</b><br>
</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Judy Lattas, Director of the Interdisciplinary
Women’s Studies, Gender
and Sexuality program, Macquarie University<br>
</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">This paper is an ethnographic study of adolescent
participants in a
forum theatre project hosted by some inner-city Sydney schools in 2007.
Forum
theatre is one of the performance modes introduced by Augusto Boal in
his
experimental Theatre of the Oppressed. Designed in the 1960s to promote
‘dialogue’ over ‘monologue,’ and real-life solutions over the
preoccupations of
artistry and theme, forum theatre encourages an audience of the
oppressed –
people invited to watch a performance of their own likely experience of
suffering on the basis of class, race, sexuality and so on - to move
from a
position of spectator to one of ‘spect-actor.’ Moments of high tension
are
introduced in a tragi-comic script that goes badly for a central
character
(with whom audience members are expected to identify). Participants
from the
floor may interrupt the scene on stage (crying ‘Stop!’) and take the
place of
this character, improvising new lines and new approaches in a bid to
turn the
plot around. The script that I developed for the forum theatre project
in 2007
takes up the idea of sexual morality, in its contemporary call upon the
(warring) loyalties of gender, race and religion. At least two points
of stress
were introduced into the script. The first was the presence on stage of
a young
woman in beach wear. This was designed to provoke sexual tension, with
both the
sensual appeal and the vulnerability of the exposed young woman
heightened by
the starkly inappropriate classroom setting. The second was a moment of
aggressive confrontation directed toward the ‘central character.’ This
is a
young male ‘of Middle Eastern appearance.’ He is in the company of a
friend –
also of Middle Eastern appearance – as they try to engage the attention
of the
young woman sunbaking. The ‘aggressor’ is another young ‘Aussie’ who
steps in
to ‘defend’ her friend, the first woman, making racist accusations (in
this
script, however, there is more than one ‘central character’ and more
than one
‘aggressor’). The threat of violent confrontation was designed to
provoke
anxious memories of racial targeting and a defensive response in the
audience
(as one subject to a local ‘moral panic’ - around the Sydney ‘ethnic
gang rape’
cases, the Cronulla race riots and the Lakemba mosque Sheik’s speech in
which
uncovered women were likened to ‘uncovered meat’). Central to the scene
of
racial harassment is the accusation that Muslim men have a particularly
primitive
and predatory sexuality. In the injustice and sting of this insult –
and in the
presence of the ‘uncovered’ woman - a highly charged debate is set to
emerge
over sexual morality (and/or modesty); its place in the lives of
Muslims and
Christians, women and men. The complication of this script on a Theatre
of the
Oppressed model, of course, is that it offers the possibility of at
least two
positions of oppressed subject (one the subject of sexual harassment,
the other
of racial harassment) with which to empathise or identify. In this
complication; in the ambivalences, speech drop-outs and double-takes
which can
be observed in all ethnographic texts; and in the difference between
staging
the event in schools around Bankstown (with its high visibility of new
Muslim
migrants), and schools in the Sutherland Shire (with its high
visibility of old
Anglo residents), an analysis is made possible of the fraught question
of
sexual morality in a contemporary, multicultural society.<br>
<br>
BIO: Dr Judy Lattas is Director of the Interdisciplinary Women’s
Studies,
Gender and Sexuality program at <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placename
w:st="on">Macquarie</st1:placename> <st1:placetype w:st="on">University</st1:placetype></st1:place>.
She has been
teaching in women’s studies and gender at <st1:place w:st="on">Macquarie</st1:place>
since 1989. In 1998 she was awarded her PhD for a thesis entitled
“Politics in
Labour”, a deconstructivist reading of Hannah Arendt on the
philosophical
conditions of totalitarianism. In her research she is interested most
recently
in the popular right in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place
w:st="on">Australia</st1:place></st1:country-region>,
publishing on Pauline Hanson, on gun activism, on secessionist
micronations and
on the Cronulla riots.</p>
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