[csaa-forum] UTS seminar: 'Gender, violence and protection'

[Tanja Dreher]

*Articulate seminar #5: Gender, Violence and Protection*

Date: Thursday 5 June

Venue: Large Training Room, Level 6, Building 10, UTS.
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.

TIME: 4.00 -- 6.00

Entry is free and there is no need to RSVP

*'Subjugation by Protection: Indigenous Women and the Contemporary 
Australian State' *

Nicole Watson, Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning, UTS

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 Northern Territory 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 ////Bringing Them Home//.

BIO: Nicole Watson is a member of the Birri-Gubba People and the 
Yugambeh language group. Nicole has a bachelor of laws from the 
University of Queensland, 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 Australia, the United States of 
America and New Zealand. Nicole was admitted as a solicitor of the 
Supreme Court of Queensland in 1999. She has worked for Legal Aid 
Queensland, the National Native Title Tribunal and the Queensland 
Environmental Protection Agency. Nicole is also a former editor of the 
////Indigenous Law Bulletin//. Nicole's area of research is the legal 
recognition of Indigenous relationships with land.

*'Stop!: the undirected scripts of sexual morality'*

Judy Lattas, Director of the Interdisciplinary Women's Studies, Gender 
and Sexuality program, Macquarie University

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.

BIO: Dr Judy Lattas is Director of the Interdisciplinary Women's 
Studies, Gender and Sexuality program at Macquarie University. She has 
been teaching in women's studies and gender at Macquarie 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 Australia, publishing on Pauline 
Hanson, on gun activism, on secessionist micronations and on the 
Cronulla riots.



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