#LetThemStay#BringThemHere: Embodied politics, asylum seeking, and performativities of protest opposing Australia’s Operation Sovereign Borders

Abstract

The body is the object of border protection. Yet the body remains largely outside reigning notions of the political in debates on bordering practices and challenges to it. Exploring what bodies do in their performativity as they negotiate and resist the securitisation of forced migration can open up new ways of understanding the disruptive potential of the body. In this paper, I draw on Judith Butler’s seminal work on contingency and norms of existence, along with her musings on forms of assembly, and recent feminist scholarship on social movements, to think through what the #LetThemStay and #BringThemHere protests in Australia might signal as advocates for those seeking asylum put their bodies on the line to disrupt the federal government’s border protection policy – Operation Sovereign Borders. While people seeking asylum themselves are at the bodily forefront of opposition and resistance – their bodies and bodily tactics negotiating border enforcement technologies – it is the bodily performativities of advocates for those seeking asylum that are the focus of this paper. The paper describes the way linguistic and bodily performativity coalesce in these performativities of protest as advocates embody the sociality being asserted. By making explicit the embodied politics at play in these forms of assembly, I explore the transformative potential of the body in its myriad capacities adding to long-standing feminist calls for a ‘corporeal geopolitics’ in political geography, one that centres the already existing politics of bodies.

Bodies and persons: The politics of embodied encounters in asylum seeking

“…As our discussion in the second section shows, embodiment can accentuate, for example, in situations of refugee status determination, detention, paperlessness, and border crossing, but manifest itself differently in each of these instances. In alignment with recent calls for attention to the body as a site and target of the politics of asylum and refuge (Clark, 2017;Hodge, 2018;Smith et al, 2016), we propose that the refugee body is the prime arena for the politicization of (forced) migration and the encounters it entails. This is so, we argue, because the body is at once the locus and the vehicle of political subjectivity -what Plessner calls 'personhood' and Agamben the indeterminate 'form-of-life'.…”

“…In public space 'these actions are grounded fully in being present, and in being here', with refugees claiming to be seen and encountered as part of the society as opposed to being contained in asylum centers at the fringes of communities (Johnson, 2016: 79;also Ataç, 2016;Darling, 2016;Mountz, 2018). Gill et al (2014: 375), too, accentuate the significance of embodied co-presence between refugees and the people acting with them: 'what was important for this activist group was physical, bodily presence in the same place, on the buses, with the detainees and deportees' (see also Hodge, 2018;Sziarto and Leitner, 2010). Overall, we see that through public presence refugees, perhaps non-intentionally, come to disclose the destituent potential of their embodiment.…”

“…Seeking to understand this political dynamic, a scholarship has recently turned to the body, embodied knowledge and corporeal existence as its key dimensions. Calling for further attention on the body in the context of asylum and refuge, we follow Smith et al (2016), Mountz (2018) and Hodge (2018), who point out that embodiment itself remains undertheorized, especially when it comes to the interplay between refugee agency and state-based migration regimes. Critical of approaches that separate the intimate and emotional from the governed spaces and scales of the geopolitical, a number of feminist scholars have sought to address the intertwinement of territorial bordering practices, the migrants' intimate (geo)political tactics and emotions, and the matter-of-factness of the human bodily being (e.g.…”

‘A Baby Is a Baby’: The Asha Protests and the Sociology of Affective Post-Nationalism

“…But you felt like you couldn't put your body in the line to try and stop it. (Interview, August 2018) Embodying the performance of the protest (see also Hodge, 2019;Juris, 2015) as a collective informed the perception of shared experience in solidarity with the noncitizen. Furthermore, in contrast to the remote offshore locations within which people seeking asylum are routinely held in Australia, the proximity and presence of Asha as the suffering 'other' disrupted the often distancing character of discourses surrounding the suffering of displaced people (Szorenyi, 2018) and made this physical embodiment possible.…”

Dangerous Arms and Everyday Activism: A Dialogue Between Two Researchers with Lived Experience of Self-Harm

“…The process of creating this dialogue has achieved such future focus by transforming individual to social, and bringing critical awareness to our activist status. While it remains to be seen where we might progress from here, the concept of embodied solidarity (Hodge, 2018; Shilling & Mellor, 1998) might be suggested for uniting felt experiences of being (for the) “other” in the academy—a resource to be embraced for action and agency.…”