Anna Szorenyi

The images speak for themselves? Reading refugee coffee‐table books

The practice of collecting photographs of refugees in ‘coffee‐table books’ is a practice of framing and thus inflecting the meanings of those images. The ‘refugee coffee‐table books’ discussed here each approach their topic with a particular style and emphasis. Nonetheless, while some individual images offer productive readings which challenge stereotypes of refugees, the format of the collections and the accompanying written text work to produce spectacle rather than empathy in that they implicitly propagate a world view divided along imperialist lines, in which the audience is expected to occupy the position of privileged viewing agent while refugees are positioned as viewed objects.The practice of collecting photographs of refugees in ‘coffee‐table books’ is a practice of framing and thus inflecting the meanings of those images. The ‘refugee coffee‐table books’ discussed here each approach their topic with a particular style and emphasis. Nonetheless, while some individual images offer productive readings which challenge stereotypes of refugees, the format of the collections and the accompanying written text work to produce spectacle rather than empathy in that they implicitly propagate a world view divided along imperialist lines, in which the audience is expected to occupy the position of privileged viewing agent while refugees are positioned as viewed objects.

Distanced suffering: photographed suffering and the construction of white in/vulnerability

There has been much debate about the ethics and effectiveness of the circulation of photographs of suffering. An analysis of commentaries and reviews of such photographs shows that the genre interpellates a particular spectator, for whom the “distance” of suffering is viewed from a comfortable centre. This mode of spectatorship is identifiable as “white” in its claim to unmarked privilege. The photographs threaten to destabilise this unmarked privilege in potentially productive ways, but the reproduction of colonial viewing relations means that whiteness remains centred. The paper concludes by attempting to destabilise the centre by bringing the discussion of the relation between suffering and sovereignty closer to “home”.

The face of suffering in Afghanistan: identity, authenticity and technology in the search for the representative refugee

Australia’s recent Migration Legislation Amendment (Identification and Authentication) Act, 2004 allows the collection of personal identifiers, including fingerprints and handprints, photographs, audio and video recordings, signatures, iris scans, and passports or other travel documents, from applicants for protection visas. Similar data, other than audio and video recordings, may be collected from applicants for temporary safe haven visas.3 Division 13AA of the amended Act allows the use of force in collecting such personal identifiers from those in immigration detention. As the title of the act suggests, authenticating the identity of asylum seekers has been given crucial importance in the project of protecting the nation’s borders. Within this process of identification, objective bodily facts are seen to carry more evidentiary weight than the content of the asylum seekers’ words. 4 The result is intrinsically objectifying.

Gender Gap in Academia: Perceptions of Female Computer Science Academics

Despite increased attention from Universities and Industry, the low representation of female students in Computer Science undergraduate degrees remains a major issue. Recognising this issue, leading tech companies have established strong and committed diversity initiatives but have only reached up to 17\% female representation in their tech departments. The causes of the reduced attraction and retention of female students are varied and have been widely studied, advancing the understanding of why female students do not take up or leave Computer Science. However, few analyses look at the perceptions of the females that have stayed in the field. In this paper, we explore the viewpoints of female academics and postgraduate students in Computer Science with various undergraduate backgrounds and pathways into academia. Our analysis of their interviews shows the influence of family, exposure, culture, sexism and gendered thought on their perceptions of the field, and of themselves and their peers. We identify that perceptions of identity conflict and a lack of belonging to the discipline persist even for these high-performing professionals.

Broadening participation not border protection: how universities can support women in computer science

ABSTRACT Computer science, like technology in general, is seen as a masculine field and the under-representation of women an intransigent problem. In this paper, we argue that the cultural belief in Australia that computer science is a domain for men results in many girls and women being chased away from that field as part of a border protection campaign by some males – secondary school teachers, boys and men playing games online and young men on campus at university. We draw on American feminist philosopher, Iris Marion Young’s analysis of the ‘five faces’ of oppression to suggest strategies whereby Australian universities could support women in computer science and educate men about respectful behaviour and gender equity.

Saving virgins, saving the USA: heteronormative masculinities and the securitisation of trafficking discourse in mainstream narrative film

Sex trafficking has become a high-profile, celebrity endorsed issue, attracting much international attention. Accompanying this has been a proliferation of films, including full-length feature films, which address the topic and have done much to influence public perception of the issue. This paper analyses two of these films which were made for the mainstream US market: Trade and Taken. Both films present a conservative and heteronormative perspective revolving around middle-aged North American law enforcement officers rescuing innocent young girls. Hence, these films participate in the general securitisation of trafficking discourse in which the US has been a leader. In spite of their ostensible concern about the exploitation of women, these films present trafficking mostly as an occasion for the redemption and rehabilitation of the beleaguered white American male, appropriating the problem of trafficking in the service of a US-led neo-imperialism bolstered by masculinism and xenophobia, and implicitly problematising womens independence and justifying the control of their movements and sexuality.

Rethinking the boundaries: towards a Butlerian ethics of vulnerability in sex trafficking debates

Feminist debates on sex trafficking have become entrenched and polarised, with abolitionists producing images of helpless abused victims, while sex worker advocates work hard to achieve some recognition of the agency of migrant sex workers. This article explores constructions of embodiment, subjectivity and agency in the debate, showing how abolitionist views, in spite of their efforts to challenge liberal pro-sex perspectives, rely on a familiar vision of the body as a singular, bounded and sovereign entity whose borders must be secured against invasion. The result is a vision in which victimisation is taken to epistemically compromise the subjectivities of sex workers, forcing them and their advocates to argue for recognition of their agency according to familiar liberal models of consent in order to be able to enter the debate. Drawing on the recent work of Judith Butler on consent and vulnerability, this article argues that what is needed is a rethinking of bodily ontology so that the vulnerability of sex workers is not opposed to their agency, but rather seen as an inevitable aspect of embodied sociality, constituting a call to ethical engagement and a recognition of the inequitable global distributions of precarity that produce sex trafficking as part of contemporary geopolitics. From this perspective, the alignment between radical feminist efforts to secure women’s bodily borders and global efforts to secure national borders no longer appears as coincidence.

Giving an Account of Myself: Trans-Generational Holocaust Guilt in the Company of Bernhard Schlink and Judith Butler

The author expresses his opinions and views on the inter-generational guilt and responsibility residing in her family, as his grandfather was a Holocaust collaborator. Guilt About the Past by Bernhard Schlink and Giving an Account of Oneself by Judith Butler are the two main topics of discussion of the article.

Congealed By Law: Terrorism, Torture and the Possibilities of Critique

The pictures on the cover of this special edition of the Australian Feminist Law Journal work as a metaphor for the themes of the issue, and the themes of this article. The pictures, which were unearthed in the British National Archives in Kew in 2003,1 show suffragette Evelyn Manesta, who, according to the police “wanted” poster, had been convicted for ‘damaging, with a hammer, pictures in the Manchester Art Gallery’.2 The photograph on the back of this journal shows the identification photograph circulated by police. This image of a ‘dangerous’ subversive, captured by the technologies of the state, encapsulates our central theme here: the ways the ‘terrorist’ is produced, and discursively and physically ‘captured’, by the law. The image on the front cover, however, articulates a kind of resistance to this process of capture, and in doing so references our second theme: that of the possibilities of critique in the face of such structures of law and sovereignty. Manesta had consistently refused to stand still for the police photograph. She and her colleagues, in fact, had been so intractable that a concealed photographer had been installed in the prison yard in order to try to take identification photographs of them during their exercise.

Facing Vulnerability: Reading Refugee Child Photographs Through an Ethics of Proximity

Szorenyi discusses the ethics of photographs of ‘distant suffering’, particularly of refugees and asylum seekers. Pointing out that existing research tends to uncritically accept the humanitarian framing of suffering as ‘distant’, she explores the parallels between this and earlier colonial structures of representation. In response, she argues for reconceptualising photography through an ethics based on proximity rather than distance. Offering case studies of the famous photographs of Alan Kurdi, and a photograph by French-Moroccan photographer Yto Barrada, she draws on the works of Butler and Levinas to show how these images can, paradoxically by seeming to silently ‘speak’ or ‘scream’, bring the viewer to a felt sense of encounter with the unavoidable vulnerability that accompanies proximity to others, and hence to an ethics of responsibility.