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oceanic corpo-graphies, refugee bodies and the making and unmaking of waters

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Feminist Review

Abstract

This essay considers the challenges that the gendered and raced transnational subaltern refugee subject poses to the order of ‘the liberal state’ and ‘the liberal subject’, and argues that the latter are bound up in complex ways with entrenched understandings of the ocean as elementally distinct from land. This distinction, constituted by the freedom of the sea-going individualist liberal subject, invariably raced as white and gendered as male, to range across the waves in search of new worlds to conquer, is one that is continually reproduced both in popular culture's contemporary sea romances, and in the spatial and legal demarcations of the nation and its limits. In the diverse forms of traffic flowing from south to north, the historical oceanic mobility of this unfettered liberal subject (always shadowed and weighted down by its invisible freight of non-white bodies) now meets the transversal movements of the contemporary transnational subaltern as complex subject. Through the narratives of two refugees to Australia, the article traces the possibilities of an embodied refugee poetics for inscribing new geographies across the global borderlands.

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Notes

  1. See Elahi, H. (2010) Interviewed by Hena Ashraf, 17 May, www.altmuslim.com/a/a/n/3720, last accessed 15 January 2012.

  2. McNair, J.D. (n.d) The Tale of Two Islands: Wet Feet/Dry feet, Black Feet/White Feet, www.faculty.mdc.edu/jmcnair/EDG2701%20All%20Classes/Wet%20feet%20Dry%20Feet.htm, last accessed 30 January 2012.

  3. Cole, D. (2012) ‘Guantánamo: ten years and counting’ The Nation, 10 January, www.thenation.com/article/165443/guantanamo-ten-years-and-counting?rel=emailNation, last accessed 20 January 2012.

  4. Faulkner, J. (2003) ‘A certain maritime incident—the aftermath’ Sydney Morning Herald OnLine 23 July, www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/07/23/1058853131600.html, last accessed 1 May 2012.

  5. Kevin, T. (2011) ‘Four lost SIEVs’ Australian Policy on Line, October 2011, http://sievx.com/articles/challenging/2011/20111021TonyKevinAPO.pdf, last accessed 30 October 2011.

  6. ‘No to People Smuggling’, www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MP5vsTJvaE, last accessed 1 June 2012.

  7. Faulkner, J. (2003) ‘A certain maritime incident—the aftermath’ Sydney Morning Herald OnLine 23 July, www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/07/23/1058853131600.html, last accessed 1 May 2012.

  8. Basry, A. and Davis, M.D. (2004) ‘I am still in the Water with the Dying of SIEV X’, www.AxisofLogic.com, last accessed 20 December 2004.

  9. Ibid.

  10. Ibid.

  11. Kearney, S. (2009) ‘ ‘We’d rather die than go ashore here’: Sri Lankan asylum-seekers’ Australian, 28 October, www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/wed-rather-die-than-go-ashore-here-sri-lankan-asylum-seekers/story-e6frg6so-1225791914062, last accessed 30 October.

  12. Taylor, P. (2011) ‘Immigration department rejects Brindha’ The Australian 3 January, www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/immigration-department-rejects-brindha/story-e6frg6nf-1225980642868, last accessed 15 January.

  13. Guest, D. (2012) ‘Talk of betrayal in two-year asylum saga’ The Australian 5 January, www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/immigration/talk-of-betrayal-in-two-year-asylum-saga/story-fn9hm1gu-1226236842438, last accessed 5 January.

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Perera, S. oceanic corpo-graphies, refugee bodies and the making and unmaking of waters. Fem Rev 103, 58–79 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2012.26

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