Oceanic Corpo-Graphies, Refugee Bodies and the Making and Unmaking of Waters

Dados Bibliográficos

ID3946076
AutoresPerera (0000-0002-0507-9905, autor correspondente), Suvendrini Perera
Ano2013
Volume103
Fascículo1
Páginas58-79
Data de publicação2013-03-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoFeminist Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0141-7789 • E-ISSN: 1466-4380
EditoraSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1057/fr.2012.26
OpenAlexW1997501338
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas19
Referências citadas12

This essay considers the challenges that the gendered and raced transnational subaltern refugee subject poses to the order of 'the liberal state' and 'the liberal subject', and argues that the latter are bound up in complex ways with entrenched understandings of the ocean as elementally distinct from land. This distinction, constituted by the freedom of the sea-going individualist liberal subject, invariably raced as white and gendered as male, to range across the waves in search of new worlds to conquer, is one that is continually reproduced both in popular culture's contemporary sea romances, and in the spatial and legal demarcations of the nation and its limits. In the diverse forms of traffic flowing from south to north, the historical oceanic mobility of this unfettered liberal subject (always shadowed and weighted down by its invisible freight of non-white bodies) now meets the transversal movements of the contemporary transnational subaltern as complex subject. Through the narratives of two refugees to Australia, the article traces the possibilities of an embodied refugee poetics for inscribing new geographies across the global borderlands

Aesthetics · Feminism · Individualism · Literature · Poetics · Political science · Politics · Refugee · Sociology · State (computer science) · Subaltern · Subject (documents) · White (mutation) · Gender Studies · Law · Migration and Labor Dynamics · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Sex work and related issues