Today’s discussion of the ideas of spatialised justice and
racialised space brought to mind a recent case which I think Razack’s ideas speak
to.
This link is gives a brief overview of the story of an
asylum seeker. In Australia’s offshore detention facilities, she was raped and
became pregnant. She lobbied the government for access to an abortion, but this
was ultimately denied.
This scenario is perhaps different in that the spaces the
subjects of this case (the asylum seeker and her rapist) occupy different spaces
from the subjects in George’s case, and are not set behind the backdrop of
colonial history. However for me, Razack’s ideas are still useful in thinking
about the state’s response to the asylum seeker’s requests for help.
As an asylum seeker, the societies of both Australia and
Nauru accord little value to her body and experience. Discourse around people
seeking asylum speaks to perceptions of deceitfulness, opportunism and incompatibility
of values. They are deemed not respectable, to the extent where they have to be
removed and detained outside of state borders. To me, Razack’s idea of
spatialised justice would assert that because of this (lack of) accordance of
value to the bodies of asylum seekers, they are perceived as undeserving of
full personhood or full access to justice. I think the government’s response to
this case definitely speaks to this idea; there has been no investigation into
her rape from Nauru or Australia, and the Australian government has not been
active in giving her access to an abortion. Because as an asylum seeker she
occupies racialised space, the state sees no reason to treat her as a full
person, allowing her rapist to violate her spaces with impunity.
The story that you mention here made me think of another that Buzzfeed Canada covered recently on the horrendous treatment of Syrian Refugees in Germany. As you mentioned, these women occupy a racialized space and this has left them without full personhood, and apparently not worthy of justice or safety. In this Buzzfeed article, the author mentions that there are laws in place in Germany that give protection for women who are victims of domestic violence, but similarly to this case in Australia, these laws are not equally applied.
ReplyDeleteThis may be off topic, but recently I have been reading the comments on facebook posts about Trudeau wanting to give asylum to many Syrian refugees, and the uproar that this has caused. One argument that I have notice multiple times is people complaining that "we should take care of our own homeless before we take care of refugees." What occurs to me though, is the intersectionality of this argument. If our government was not offering asylum to a mass amount of refugees, would we care about our homeless population? Unfortunately, I don't believe we would.
Here is the link to the BuzzFeed article, it's a very interesting read:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/jinamoore/when-youre-a-refugee-and-your-husband-beats-you-youre-basica#.jxmNz6oBXX