Failing 'Abyan', 'Golestan' and 'the Estonian Mother': Refugee Women, Reproductive Coercion and the Australian State
Catherine Kevin and Karen Agutter
ABSTRACT
In September and October 2015, the story of detained Somali refugee 'Abyan' unfolded in the Australian media. A victim of rape on Nauru and seeking an abortion that could not be obtained on the island nation, Abyan was escorted to Sydney where she was to attend an abortion clinic. She was ultimately returned to Nauru without having had an abortion.This paper situates Abyan's story alongside other stories from Nauru and in a longer history of reproductive coercion in Australian Immigration Department accommodation since the Second World War.
This article examines continuities and discontinuities in the relationships between the Australian state and refugee women living in government determined accommodation in two distinct periods 60 years apart: 1947-1953 and 2013-2017. We argue that reproductive coercion has been an instrument of biopower in the lives of refugee women in both periods. In the immediate post-Second World War period, refugee women experienced reproductive coercion but their labour as child-bearers, mothers and workers was valued by the Australian state for its short-and long-term effects.The more recent period has seen refugee women in offshore detention cast as femina sacer, subject to extreme reproductive coercion, bereft of political belonging and politically meaningful only insofar as they convey a warning to those who would travel to Australia by boat to seek asylum.1
After the Second World War, in a transformative shift away from the highly restrictive British-orientated immigration policy, Australia actively recruited large numbers of non-English-speaking migrants from Europe, including 170,000 who came from the refugee camps of war-torn Europe between 1947 and 1953. The overall aim of immigration policy in this period was to contribute to increasing Australia's small population2 by two per cent per annum, with one per cent of this increase coming from immigration. The key drivers of this shift were the perceived need for both a larger population, primarily for reasons of future defence, and the growth of the national economy. Mass immigration was achieved with the passage of European Displaced Persons (DPs) and other European refugees, independent self-funded or sponsored migrants and - finally - negotiated assisted passage migrants. Within a decade of the first DP arrivals, migration had added over one million people to the population of Australia. This history has been well documented and new arrivals have generally been considered an important part of Australia's post-War recovery and subsequent prosperity.3
By 1985, over four million immigrants had settled in Australia since the Second World War, the government had finally shed the dogma of'white Australia', adopted an official policy of multiculturalism and continued to increase the diversity of its population by welcoming migrants and refugees from around the world, including people from Asia, the Middle East, Africa and South America.4 However, by the end of the '1980s immigration policy had 'became a matter of division and controversy'.5 A series of events through the 1980s and 1990s, including economic recession, a Government enquiry into immigration policy (The FitzGerald Report) and the widely circulated comments of public and political figures such as historian Geoffrey Blainey and leader of the political party One Nation, Pauline Hanson, all contributed to a growing discourse of alarm about migrant arrivals.
As a consequence, the Migration Reform Act (1992) was passed by a Labor government, resulting in the adoption of a policy of mandatory detention for anyone arriving without a visa, and to make this possible detention centres were established across the nation. Despite these measures, the number of boat arrivals increased, thereby putting pressure on existing centres and adding to public division. By late 2001, during an 11 -year period of Liberal-National Party coalition government and in the wake of 9/11, a series of incidents including theTampa affair6 led to what the government referred to as the'Pacific Solution'. This set of laws and policies included the Border Protection Act (2001) and the Migration Amendment Act (2001) and resulted in the establishment of off-shore detention centres, specifically those on Nauru and Manus Island, as part of a reassertion of strong borders and white nationhood. At the time of writing, the Manus Island Detention Centre (now officially closed) is occupied by a group of men who have been abandoned by the Australian state after it withdrew from the Centre in response to a Papua New Guinean court finding that it was unlawful. Meanwhile, the Detention Centre on Nauru continues to hold men, women and children who, when their claims are processed and they are found to be refugees, are released into'the community'on the island.7
Theoretical Context
In order to explore the continuities and discontinuities in the two periods we examine, we deploy two conceptualisations of biopower. In the first instance we draw on Foucault's description of biopower as a means of controlling populations in the interest of preserving the state by taking a direct interest in individual lives and intervening through institutional mechanisms,This is most effective when disciplinary power is internalised by individuals through these institutional mechanisms so that in caring for the self, one is enacting a technique of governance in the interest of state agendas for the population.8 The post-Second World War migrant Holding Centre was one such institution where assimilationist techniques could be adopted and internalised as forms of care, particularly for women constructed as the primary caretakers of the health of the family. Given the privileged site of the nuclear family in government policies in this period, refugee women who did not reproduce or mother In the context of the nuclear family were vulnerable to an extension of disciplinary biopower. This could take the form of reproductive coercion within the site of the Holding Centre.9
In the second instance, we turn to feminist interventions into Giorgio Agamben's descriptions of biopower, specifically his conception of homo sacer, a term that denotes bare life - he who is exiled from political belonging, exposed to persistent structural violence and the risk of a meaningless death.10 Feminist theorists have pointed to a misplaced gender neutrality in Agamben's account of bare life. Geraldine Pratt argues that there are real limitations to generalising across the racialised and gendered forms of abandonment that produce homo sacer, and Heather Latimer asserts, 'the reproductive body is a blank spot in Agamben's definition of bare life'.11
In a 2009 article Kristen Phillips examined the emerging idea of femina sacer - the bare life of women - to determine what constitutes its different gendered status in the context of Australian immigration policies. Not surprisingly, the reproductive body is at the heart of this difference and so her examination attends to the'blank spot'that Latimer highlights. In order to offer a description of femina sacer Phillips begins by returning to Agamben's account of the classical world where he signals a distinction between 'the mere life that exists in the private sphere and the politicised life of the citizen'. She writes
In the classical world ... the notion of'women and children'is central to defining the difference between mere life and the life of the citizen. Bare life, mere life, is life prior to citizenship, life within the private sphere ... If, in the thinking of the modern west, women are theoretically equally entitled with men to citizenship, the discourse about war is one place in which 'women and children'are again consigned to the realm of mere life, excluded from the sphere of politics.12
Phillips develops this analysis of discourses of conflict with the notion of womenandchildren.This gendered category describes the innocent passive victims of war, deserving of pity, whose need for protection has justified invasions (think Afghanistan), Its purchase enables the separation of refugees whose status is generated by war into womenandchildren on the one hand and then
those who can more or less be thought of as 'terrorists': dangerous, 'politicised'and able to be exposed to death. We should note that the positioning of'womenand-children' as innocent life does not necessarily mean that they will be protected from death ... their deaths are thought of as regrettable (though forgettable) 'collateral damage' in a way that disconnects them from the men whose deaths are necessary ... But women as bare life are reproducing bodies, and this means that a different significance is attributed to their racial otherness.13
We seek to pursue the effects on refugee women of this status as femina sacer: both'collateral damage'and harbouring an intensified racial otherness in the reproductive body. We test these concepts against our two settings - times and places - in which refugee women have been caught up in the nation building projects of white Australia. We argue that the current Australian Government constructs the women on Nauru as femina sacer, a state of affairs that can be demonstrated by official responses to their suffering as sexualised and reproductive bodies. We contend that in the post-Second World War period refugee women like the Estonian Mother (discussed below) were incorporated into the Australian population in ways determined by the desires of the state. These desires, for economic and reproductive labour in the context of the discipline of assimilation that attempted some measure of de-racialisation (thus reducing the extent to which their racial otherness was intensified through reproduction), protected them from being treated as 'collateral damage'. By contrast, women currently living in offshore detention are governed in a way that exposes them to the extreme violence of the full status of femina sacer.
In both times and settings reproductive coercion has been deployed as an instrument of biopower.This term, usually used in the context of intimate partner violence, has been elaborated by Patricia Hayes as a form of violence that can also be perpetrated by states. She writes that reproductive coercion describes'a range of coercive tactics used by intimate partners and others to control a woman's reproductive decisions'but that this is only one end of a continuum of coercion that can be imposed on women, Drawing on Sneha Barot, Hayes identifies at the other end of the continuum 'policies, legislations and incentives used by governments'to deprive women of their reproductive autonomy.14 It is this aspect of the definition that we wish to mobilise for our analysis here. Indeed, as we have outlined elsewhere, these histories of reproductive coercion experienced by refugee women are part of the longer histor...
