Australian Politics and Policy - Senior, 2019a

Australian Politics and Policy
The focus on ‘Australian’ also reflects current political power and the legacies
of colonisation. Colonisation has significant gender and sexuality dimensions,
including the disruption of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander gender roles and
norms, colonial laws regulating sexuality, sexual violence and servitude, and the
gendered impacts of child removal – together with concerted resistance. The legal
and cultural power structures on which the Australian state was founded continue
to exist, meaning that Australian politics is not culturally or linguistically neutral
but distinctively British – a situation that is variously endured, contested and
accommodated by people from other backgrounds.
A body of scholarship and activism is now concerned with Indigenous and
decolonising perspectives on feminism, which call on participants to reflect on
their own situatedness within systems of power. These perspectives identify and
challenge the unearned privileges of whiteness, rather than reproducing a
presumed neutral or universal conception of womanhood, which, in reality, has
been derived from white women’s experiences and viewpoints. 11 They also
highlight problems in the feminist critique of the public/private divide, in that
this divide is shown to obscure the existence of racialised women who are denied
access to the liberal private sphere – a denial played out in contemporary politics
through the removal of children from Black and Indigenous mothers. Building on
this understanding, Indigenous and decolonising perspectives on feminism engage
in bringing to light the violence upon which the liberal social-sexual contract is
based and creating new modes of politics and governance with care at the centre.
In terms of research practices, the development of feminist research ethics
also requires attention to the social position of the knowledge producer and the
potential for relationships and care between the people involved, and exploring
alternative modes of knowledge beyond the abstract and individualised. 12 Feminist
research also includes epistemological shifts towards valuing the knowledge of
racialised women, including art, storytelling, music and dance, approaching this
knowledge through dialogue to create new ways of speaking about and engaging in
the political.
Political participation
Gender is an issue because feminists and their allies have made it so. The reason
they have done so is that gender inequality and gender norms have enormous
impacts on individuals and communities, including on people’s power and rights,
practical circumstances (employment, income, education), safety and access to
decision making. 13 The same is true of sexual and gender diversity. Without lesbian
11 Moreton-Robinson 2000; Motta and Seppälä 2016.
12 Ackerly and True 2008.
13 Australian Human Rights Commission 2018; Celis et al. 2013.
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