Gender and the politics of maternalisms

Kinship-based imaginaries, responsibility and care in Australian refugee advocacy

Dados Bibliográficos

ID2361202
AutoresMaila Stivens (0000-0003-2594-7877, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia, autor correspondente)
Ano2023
Volume43
Fascículo4
Páginas461-475
Data de publicação2023-12-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoCritique of Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0308-275X • E-ISSN: 1460-3721
EditoraSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0308275x231216258
OpenAlexW4389450771
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas2
Referências citadas30

Feminist scholarship has often been profoundly ambivalent about maternalist political mobilisations, seeing them as posing dangers of essentialising motherhood and of colluding with male-centred social orders, conservative politics and top-down state projects. This article looks at the complex and fluid politics of protest groups adopting familial kinship maternalist identities to militate politically for refugees and people seeking asylum, with particular reference to the Australian Grandmothers for Refugees organisation (G4R). A regular purple presence at demonstrations and on social media, the group's 2000 members' activities include vigils at ministerial and parliamentary members' offices and detention centres, webinars, letter campaigns, petitions and parliamentary submissions. The G4R grandmothers' role in the protests against the Australian asylum regime is part of a wider pattern of female predominance in contemporary organisations involved in such support and activism both locally and globally. The Grandmothers also exemplify the often-overlooked political energy of older women. The discussion explores questions about politicised kinship positionings, maternalist framings and mobilisations, and the cosmopolitan hospitality they offer. I am especially interested in how invocations of kinship-based location operate within these organisations, assuming 'familial' responsibility for and care of 'Others' within and beyond state and nation. Kinship tropes and imaginaries, while on occasion exclusionary and contradictory, arguably work to achieve a linking of political, 'enraged' affect with solidarity with the oppressed, enacting a transformative ethics in the public through effective political mobilisations of fictive kinship, responsibility, kindness, empathy and care

Kinship · Political science · Politics · Refugee · Sociology · Solidarity · Gender Studies · Irish and British Studies · Law · Migration, Health and Trauma · Migration, Refugees, and Integration