2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

The treatment of refugees and asylum seekers in modern Australian history has been profoundly shaped by discourses and practices of gender. While this can be seen in the use of masculinist language to propel discourses of 'border protection', it can also be seen coalescing differently in the interventions which individual women have made and in the ‘management’ of refugee women and children.

In this panel, three papers will focus on the stories of three different Australian women who responded in a series of public and private ways to displaced peoples, asylum seekers and child refugees. A fourth will examine the relationship between single mothers, their children and Department of Immigration social workers, and seeks to historicise gender in relation to assimilation and forms of resistance. By focusing on the relationships between a series of women and different groups of child refugees, these papers will offer a critical engagement with understandings of the connections between women and children. How, they will together ask, can notions of the feminine be historicised through these particular situations.

What does it mean for humanitarian work to be undertaken by women in the early twentieth century? What was specific about the contributions Australia’s only female Minister for Immigration made to refugee policy? How do photos of refugees look when captured by a woman photographer? Through this focus on microhistories, broader histories of gendered ideas of human relationality, population management, and individual, communal and governmental responses to refugees, will be opened up for consideration and more nuanced understanding.