Astounding
Posted on | February 14, 2006 |
So according to Danna Vale, Australian women are aborting our country’s identity away. It must be true, because her population predictions rest on a quote from an imam in the The Daily Telegraph. These comments are some indication of the paranoia that Liberal Party politicians seem happy to vocalise. They are nothing less than embarrassing. Am I supposed to accept that this person is qualified to govern the country on my behalf, let alone make decisions which affect my health? Then again, I find it hard to understand why her comments are being described as racist. Muslims are not a ‘race’. Muslims practice a religion, it is called Islam. It has many variations. Whatever Vale meant by her outburst, the wilful confusion of religion and demography is symptomatic of her party’s ongoing tendency to make religious belief a part of politics. Whatever happened to that founding principle, ’separation of church and state’, I wonder? Anyway, what I find particularly sad about her position is that on this occasion it is a woman suggesting to other women that the decisions they make about their bodies and their lives should take matters of ideology - indeed, national treachery - into account. That’s real progress.
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February 14th, 2006 @ 8:47 am
Well, incorrect as this slippage is (’muslims’ are not a race, as you say), it is also revealing. The implied duty of women to breed more ‘real’ Australians is a trope of whiteness, yes? And whiteness is both an ideal and an absence of the undesirable other that is structured by gender politics and the idea of ethnicity as much as the politics of race per se - so at other moments of media panic, middle class white women aren’t breeding enough, but the underprivileged, who might also be just as ‘technically’ white as muslims are not another race, are breeding too much…
February 14th, 2006 @ 11:46 am
I suspect that it’s racist because it’s an attempt to racialise a cultural domain in order to demonise it. So, in other words, I don’t know if it’s an attempt to ‘religoise” race so much as it is an attempt to racialise a gendered political debate in order to exert control over it. This is such a consistent strategy with the Howard government that one is strongly tempted to regard it as consciously fascistic.
February 15th, 2006 @ 4:19 pm
What Nick said. Phantasmic chains of meaning are the very basis of racialisation, and taking such obvious slippages or conflations at their technical word, as if they can somehow say what they mean, or exist in the same universe as the “technical definition” of “religion” when they are in fact the very way racism operates, is a rather quixotic enterprise, I must say. Affect and rhetoric, indeed.
If a white person, confronted with black people settling in their largely white neighbourhood, said, “we’ve got to stop this repsectable place being contaminated by voodoo witchdoctors and crack babies”, do we resort to puzzled, technical definitions of voodoo as a religion, or context-free ideas about discrimination against drug-users? No. Otherwise it’s a bit like saying “but wait, you’re not part of the canine species” when someone complains to you about being called “a fucking bitch”. If racism was simply limited to discrete acts of discrimination based on a literal congruence with 19th Century scientific theories of race, the whole “cultural politics of race” thing would have been exhausted quite a while ago, and we could all uh, “go home”.
The most obvious point: the strictly genealogical aspects of jewry notwithstanding, if Danna Vale had said, “unless we breed more, Australia will be overrun by Jews!”, I somehow doubt you’d be saying stuff like “I find it hard to understand why her comments are being described as racist. Jews are not a ‘race’. Jews practice a religion, it is called Judaism”…
February 15th, 2006 @ 4:31 pm
Um, I meant “mean what they say” in the first para. Or did I? Confused.
February 15th, 2006 @ 5:34 pm
Well actually I think I would say that Jebni, but yeah, ok.
February 25th, 2006 @ 1:58 am
The claim “Islam is not a race” is strictly speaking true, but it’s only come into currency as a claim made in right wing op/eds where it’s often said that to attack a “religion” is not “racist”, and therefore acceptable, and indeed vital as the freedoms of the West are under attack, there is a clash of civilisations and terrorists all around and within blah blah blah. The Danish cartoon furore resonates in this context. Islam is not a race, but how many Australian Muslims have blue eyes and blonde hair, like the archetypical “Shire” resident? The eauation is most blatant in Sydney where “Muslim” is a metonymy for “Leb” - or the other way round, but same difference, as one might say.