Philament

A Journal of Arts, Literature and Culture

Originally published in the typeset edition of Volume 14: Sense and Sensation. View original PDF.

Features

The Racial Fault-Lines of Postcolonizing Sensation: Vivian Alvarez Solon and the Modality of the Quasi-Prior

Elaine Laforteza

Preface

In July 2001, Vivian Alvarez‐Solon, a Filipina‐Australian, was deported from Australia and sent to the Philippines by the Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs (DIMIA). Despite Alvarez‐Solon having an Australian passport and therefore, Australian citizenship, DIMIA did not process her as legitimate citizen. According to the Filipino advocacy group, Solidarity Philippines Australia Network (SPAN): “This not only brings up questions about DIMIA’s deportation and detention processes, but also about how citizenship is valued”.1

SPAN hits at the heart of what was at stake in Alvares‐Solon’s deportation by asking how citizenship is valued, not only within DIMIA, but within the Australian nation DIMIA represents. I extend this query by asking: does the value of Alvarez‐Solon’s citizenship have anything to do with her racial/ethnic heritage? This paper considers these questions using various theoretical conceptualisations of sense and sensation and postcolonizing racialised processes. In this context, this paper examines how citizenship is valued in terms of what types of bodies make “sense” as normative Australian citizens and residents.

In engaging with conceptualisations of “sense”, I demonstrate how identities are constrained into totalising roles that supposedly make “sense” within a specific social order. However, I also track how “sense” is also about “sensation” and the ways “sensation” pushes the body to (dis)embody the possibility of being something “other” to what one is, thus showing the impossibility of constraining identity into rigid categories. Consequently, these processes of sensation expose the body’s investment in power. In Foucauldian terms, the body is the “field on which the play of powers, knowledges, and resistances is worked out”.2 However, the body is not simply power’s playground. It does not wait for power, knowledges and resistances to work on it. The body is the site of subjectivity which simultaneously creates the world and is constituted by it. Nick Crossley notes: “the human body does not simply exist ‘in itself’. It exists ‘for itself’ too; as a focus of its own projects, concerns and contemplations”.3 While this is an argument that has formed much of philosophical debate, what I seek to return to and analyse is how this familiar argument comes to bear on the racial fault‐lines that totalise identity, while simultaneously reconceptualising this totality according to shifting racialised negotiations and intercorporeal sensations. As Sara Ahmed encourages for a close and careful reading of all familiar narratives, I seek to do the same and hope to unpack the ongoing familiarity of racialised and bodily discursive structures.4

In connecting processes of sensation with race, I draw on Indigenous‐Australian theoretical approaches, post‐colonial feminist literature and critiques of Orientalism and whiteness to substantiate this analysis. Drawing on these diverse, yet interrelated theoretical approaches is helpful in unpacking how sense/sensation composes the parameters of racialised identity within Australian. This is done through drawing out how Alvarez‐Solon is constituted through the fault‐lines of racialised and gendered subject constitution that are de/re/formed through the fluidity of sensation and what constitutes (non)sense. Theories about sense/sensation illustrate how bodies move; conforming to and/or resisting normative categorisations. Connecting these theories with racial and geopolitical concepts of whiteness and Orientalism show what norms and presuppositions bodies carry with them and reconceptualise. Therefore, drawing on these theories enables me to unpack how specific bodies move (through the processes of sense/sensation) and what they themselves move (racialising presuppositions and norms). Using these theoretical and political approaches thus calls attention to how Alvarez‐Solon moved within and (re)conceptualised the bounds of racial identity within Australia.

However, Alvarez‐Solon was not the only person that was wrongfully detained by DIMIA. The detention of Cornelia Rau, a German citizen and permanent resident of Australia, is another high‐profile case that demonstrated how people could be maltreated by DIMIA processes.

While both Rau and Alvarez‐Solon were positioned as “outsiders” to the normative Australian subject/nation, they were still received differently. This paper argues that the postcolonizing operations of Orientalist whiteness within Australia (in)form the reception of Rau and Alvarez‐Solon. These systems of postcolonizing Orientalist whiteness comprise the normative bounds of what makes “sense” within Australia.

Introduction

In a conversation with colonial historian, Dr. Sue Stanton, a Kungarakan ‐ Gurindji woman, Stanton noted that she did not feel Australian even though she is a First Australian with a passport that verifies her legal status as an Australian citizen. She felt trapped by the colonialist categorisation of “Australia” and the Indigenous dispossession that term and the nation that bears it continues to sanction and legalise.5 This feeling of being something other to what your passport defines you as posits a complex matrix of sense/non‐sense. It is non‐sense in the respect that one should “logically” feel what one is legally ratified as. However, this connects with sense because feeling as an other and being recognised as other is a consequence of the postcolonizing foundations which structure Australia.

By sense, I refer to whether something fits a specific code of conduct and norm, for example, “this makes sense”. In this case, “sense” becomes a term used to denote the limits of a specific socio‐cultural comfort zone. Raj Thiruvengadam specifies that sense refers to the “meaning and orientation of something or to the physical experience of our bodies to the world”.6 Sense “makes” sense because it makes (and unmakes) the means through which people negotiate their subject positions with one another and with themselves. This implies that this negotiation is bodily, and therefore the formation of relationships is founded on inter and intra‐corporeal convergences, frictions and movements. Bodily becoming shapes the “meaning and orientation”7 that form subjectivity. This intra and inter‐subjective relationship intimates that “sense” is (in)formed by the perceptual practices that shape relationships. Sense, in this case, links with perception to form the perceptual comfort zones that form the basis for people’s norms.

Brian Massumi specifies that perception is what enables “analytically ordered, predictably reproducible, possible action”.8 Yet, sense is also about sensation; what can be sensed and not thought. Here, sensation seems to be divorced from the thought processes deployed by perception. However, perception is not “pure” thought but also refers to sense. There is the potential to resignify the “analytically ordered and predictably reproducible”.9 Massumi gestures towards this potential by his use of the word “possible”. It is the potential of the possible that reveals and challenges the limits of perception. This potential is sensation, “the direct registering of potential”. 10 Therefore, sensation operates beyond the boundaries of perception, pushing for the potential and actualising its presence. Using Stelarc’s work, Massumi analyses this relationship between sensation and perception. Massumi writes:

Sensation is an extremity of perception. It is the immanent link at which perception is eclipsed by a sheerness of experience…Sensation is a state in which action, perception, and thought are so intensely, performatively mixed that their in‐mixing falls out of itself. Sensation is fallout from perception.11

Here, Massumi illustrates how sensation, action and perception exist in a symbiotic relationship (in)formed by and (in)forming the fault‐lines of subject constitution. It is these fault‐lines that show the immediacy of abstraction, the “never present in position, only ever in passing”.12 This sense of passing demonstrates the indeterminacy of bodies, their consistent (non)belonging in ever‐shifting contexts of time and space.

Stanton shows this indeterminacy through her (dis)placement within postcolonizing Australia. In Aileen Moreton‐Robinson’s words, postcolonizing denotes “the active, the current and the continuing nature of the colonizing relationship that positions [Indigenous people] as belonging but not belonging”.13 It is the immediacy of abstraction, that feeling of always being in “passing”, which foregrounds postcolonizing relations. This deployment of negative abstraction14 “implicates all Australians, [but] white European colonisation is the point of reference that foregrounds Australia’s postcolonizing society and culture”.15 Here, whiteness and Orientalism intersect to deploy hierarchical social structures predicated on postcolonizing norms. Moreton‐Robinson’s use of the plural (postcolonizing, not post‐colonial) to mark white Orientalist trajectories of power demonstrates that these relations influence how Australia perceives itself and its “others”. Consequently, how can Stanton feel “Australian” if Australia processes her as “other” to dominant Australian cultures and politics? In Australia, a nation that privileges a dominant Anglo identity, Indigenous sovereignty becomes an embodied disembodiment, a being that is felt, but not dominantly perceived as representing the legitimate character of Australian society and culture.

Watson demonstrates that to constitute the current Australian nation‐state, its citizens must efface Indigenous sovereignty. In light of this, Stanton’s sense of being in Australia while being effaced of her Australianness speaks of the ongoing terra nullius Watson attacks and the current postcolonizing conditionality of the Australian nation‐state that Moreton‐Robinson articulates.

Watson concisely hits at this by asking: “What legitimises your entry?”16 In entering a nation stolen from its Indigenous inhabitants and is constantly produced as a developed nation erased of accountable sin, this question becomes one that not only demands what legitimises entry, but what legitimises someone’s stay in this country? For non‐white migrants, what legitimises their stay in a country that holds whiteness as a passport to incontestable citizenship?17

Here, I have drawn, and will continue to engage with the experiences and theoretical approaches of Indigenous‐Australians to illustrate the basis of race relations in Australia. I use this focus because it is important to situate Indigenous sovereignty and politics as the point from which any kind of race‐relations within Australia should be discussed and analysed from. By this, I do not mean to conflate one kind of experience with another. Historically, Indigenous‐Australians and non‐white migrants to Australia have been placed (and place themselves) in asymmetrical relations of power with one another.18 For instance, Alvarez‐Solon does not represent the postcolonizing relations that foreground the constitution of Indigenous (non)belonging within Australia. However, how DIMIA processed Solon as an illegal “other” shows that a postcolonizing condition predicated on Anglo‐whiteness frames all relationships within the corpus of the Australian nation. While this operates in different degrees, the postcolonizing conditionality of being Australian ensures that there are limits/conditions mapped out in terms of legitimating one’s entry and continual habitation within this nation.

In this context, what sensations are evoked by non‐white and non‐indigenous bodies living in a “white zone”.19 While Alvarez‐Solon’s case cannot possibly speak of the myriad of different and complex ways in which non‐white and non‐indigenous people come to be/belong/not belong to dominant strands of Australian society and culture, Alvarez‐Solon’s deportation is an example of an act that does not “make” sense because she was an Australian citizen, but also touches on sensational abstraction. In this context, Alvarez‐Solon makes sense within Australia in terms of a “transitional immediacy”.20 She is perceived as immediately present, but in such a way that counts as “other” and therefore as not firmly being of a nation which is shaped by and constitutes whiteness and Orientalism.21

White “mind” and the non‐white “body”

In implicating white Orientalism as forming the Australian sense of self, I refer to the ways in which legitimate citizenship is (in)formed by Cartesian ideology. Within this structure, whiteness and Orientalism intersect in terms of a mind/body opposition. Elizabeth Grosz defines this relationship by stating: “Body is …distinct from and other than the privileged term. It is what the mind must expel in order to retain its ‘integrity’”.22 This opposition rests on privilege wherein the body becomes subordinated to the supposed prowess of the mind. I engage with Grosz’s critique of the division between body and mind to highlight how whiteness is positioned in similar terms. Orientalist whiteness encapsulates this privilege of the western “mind”. In contradistinction, non‐whiteness becomes the shadow‐beast of whiteness, brought “down” to the animality and banality of the body.

The Australian media’s dissection of Alvarez‐Solon’s case gives evidence of this Cartesian logic framed by white Orientalism. For instance, Jacqueline Hewitt, writer for The Age draws on her own experiences to situate how “Oriental” people are responded to in terms of Orientalist whiteness. Hewitt outlines that her ‘Oriental’ appearance counts as racially suspect, so much so that she is racially profiled by customs officials in Australian international airports and continually asked to reveal the contents of her luggage despite claiming she has nothing to declare.23 Hewitt uses instances such as this to critique the ways in which Alvarez‐Solon’s own “Oriental” appearance and heritage brings about her deportation. Both cases demonstrate how a non‐white “Oriental” is judged according to how far they veer away from the normative ‘white’ Australian. Hewitt specifies that during her encounters with customs, she is “regularly spoken to as if I am both deaf and dumb by customs officials because I look oriental. It’s always a wonderful welcome back for people like me”.24 In this case, Hewitt’s “welcome back” is really a demand to justify one’s presence and existence within the “white zone”, thus demonstrating how non‐whiteness has to demonstrate its worthiness for inclusion within a “white” nation. Here, non‐white “Orientals” continually count as the unworthy “body” that cannot be processed as “worthy enough” to the “western” mind. Although Hewitt does not specify that all these customs officials were white individuals, she does point out that a “Caucasian” aesthetic drove the responses she and Alvarez‐Solon faced.

While Hewitt’s report critiqued the racist undertones which precipitated Alvarez‐Solon’s deportation, the fact that race was the point from which Alvarez‐Solon was addressed demonstrates how her body was perpetually presented as a racialised space. Therefore, it was Alvarez‐Solon’s racialised body which was the point through which Alvarez‐Solon was negotiated with. Hewitt also points out how she uses the trope of Alvarez‐Solon’s racialised body to critique racism. In doing so, she also illustrates how the use of Alvarez‐Solon’s body becomes the means through which others respond to her in racialised ways.

How Alvarez‐Solon was responded to in terms of her body and what Orientalist fantasies this evoked to the western “mind” demonstrates how whiteness and Orientalism are predicated on this mind/body schism wherein the mind is equated to western whiteness and the progress it supposedly animates. This does not mean that the body and mind are separate. In Plato’s terms, “the body is a betrayal of the mind”.25 With this logic, the body of non‐whiteness, or non‐whiteness as body, has a close relationship to the mind, or the mind as western whiteness. But, this relationship is founded on unequal relations of power wherein the mind remains the central authority. After all, it is the mind that is affected by the body’s supposed betrayal. Conversely, whatever happens to the body is unaccounted. The relationship is one‐sided wherein blame is placed on the body. This connection between body/non‐whiteness/non‐western/Oriental and mind/whiteness/western is one of judgement. Here, the “mind”/whiteness/west acts as the purveyor of reason and subjectivity.

Even when the bodies of a white individual and non‐white individual are compared, named and visibilised, the white body remains the one that cannot be blamed for any wrongdoing as it is the body that can adjudicate and “rationalise” situations. This can be evidenced through the ways in which then Immigration Minister, Amanda Vanstone negotiated Alvarez‐Solon’s case. For example, in the radio program, ‘The World Today’ (ABC), Vanstone was interviewed for a segment titled: “Immigration Dept handled Solon case catastrophically”. 26 It was aired on 6 October 2005. Here, Vanstone said:

Well look, there have been calls for me to step aside from, actually, March 1996. It’s been a pretty consistent effort. (sound of laughter) I’m thinking of trying to buy the copyright on Elton Johnʹs song Iʹm Still Standing, but I donʹt want to tempt fate. So Iʹll just play it to myself quietly at night.27

In this statement, Vanstone positions her own body in contradistinction to Alvarez‐Solon’s body. However, Alvarez‐Solon is not recognised simply as a body, but as body that can be left out of the discussion. Here, Vanstone positions her own bodily presence and the ways she contends with her difficulties as the main point of focus. The mind of the white body thus becomes the means through which the white body supersedes both the debilitating betrayal of her own body (in Vanstone’s case, this betrayal occurs through the vulnerable position her body is in; barely “standing” as she intimates), and the inferior status of non‐whiteness. This status is subordinated to the point that Alvarez‐Solon’s physical and political incapacity to move is positioned as secondary to the supposedly greater tragedy of Vanstone’s hardships encountered through the loss of order. As earlier observed,

During this radio broadcast, Alvarez Solon Young was still in the Philippines, dependent on using a wheelchair to move around. She was still waiting to be flown back to Australia, see her children, and return home to her friends and family. Vanstone’s appropriation of Elton John’s song Iʹm Still Standing is a callous message when put in conjunction to Alvarez Solon’s…difficulty in moving without the use of a wheelchair and her inability to move across nations to return home. 28

Here, whiteness fits the traditional role that perception is supposed to embody: the ordered predictability that Massumi indicates. H. R. Schiffman states: “perceptions are associated with the organization and integration of sensory attributes…Moreover, there is a growing trend to view many of the ‘perceptual’ processes as part of…cognition”.29 In this context, perception is in charge of ordering sensation, of being the cognitive part of sensation.30 Vanstone self‐soothes through Elton John’s song to (re)order and (re)organise the chaos Vanstone finds herself in, and which she herself helped constitute. In Schiffman’s terms, this cognitive maintenance of sensation involves judgement, therefore, perception’s role is to judge the indeterminacy that sensation evokes. However, Schiffman, like Massumi, indicates the potential abstraction within perception. Schiffman does this by stating that a definitive sensation‐perception divide should be avoided. He encourages an “integrated approach”,31 as Massumi argues that “sensation is the mode in which potential is present in the perceiving body”.32 The perceiving body is enmeshed with sensation, and this intermixing is filled with the potential.33 While whiteness acts as the point of perceptual order and non‐whiteness is perceived as sensational abstraction (being displaced as well as displacing whiteness), this does not indicate that the mind is the property of whiteness and non‐whiteness only exists as body. What I point out is how whiteness comes to operate in terms of a divide between the “managerial” role of perception and the “managed” sensation. This is a divide that is fashioned by and constitutes Cartesian logic.

Grosz attests that this logic frames the body as “nonhistorical”, “naturalist” and “inert”, but not devoid of gender specificity.34 Grosz writes: “Most relevant here is the correlation and association of the mind/body opposition with the opposition between male and female, where man and mind and woman and body, become representationally aligned”.35 Here, Grosz does not extend this analysis with a deeper examination of racialised bodies. Therefore, engaging with post‐colonial feminist literature is helpful in examining the convergence between race and gender.

Trinh T. Minh‐ha, Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, to name a few, point towards how gendered divisions are (in)formed by race. Using feminist spaces, events and solidarities as their focus, these scholars and activists demonstrate that such spaces pivot around whiteness as the normative speaking and subject position. While they acknowledge that it is common to define the Orient in terms of patriarchal notions of femininity, they also point out that such gendered specification does not mean that only men are perpetrators of Orientalist whiteness.

In discussing the ways in which white women are located in racism, Moraga and Anzaldúa write, “Racism affects all of our lives, but it is only white women who can ‘afford’ to remain oblivious to these effects. The rest of us have had it breathing or bleeding down our necks”.36 Affording to remain oblivious to racism points to the economies of racialised/ethnic/gendered privileges of white womanhood that enable white women to have more power (than “non‐white” women) to keep one’s body intact, preserve one’s life and belong to dominant social orders. Minh‐ha shows how whiteness comprises the normative bounds of how people belong within specific spaces that are supposed to be for all women. In this context, the “natural” and “normalised” female in question is a white one.

For instance, Minh‐ha specifies that although non‐white women are invited to speak at feminist academic forums, these forums circulate on whiteness as the normative “speaking” position.37 Conversely, non‐whites are defined by their perceived differences to a normative white order.38 Moreover, Moraga and Anzaldúa challenge white feminists “to be accountable for their racism”.39 Here, Moraga and Anzaldúa point towards the centralised authority of whiteness in normative feminist circles, wherein women’s rights are naturalised as white women’s rights. Their challenge to white feminists speaks about the need to go beyond the reductive confines of white feminist privilege. White feminist activists and academics such as Fiona Nicoll40 and Tanja Dreher41 strive to do this through work which critiques the normalised position of whiteness and their own “white” subjectivities. Their call to bring white privilege into question is a way to speak and listen beyond the debilitating hegemony of whiteness in constituting daily life. Such work demonstrates how gender and race constitute the parameters of identity, wherein the gendered and racialised embodiment of national (non)belonging must be acknowledged as an issue that affects all people, not simply those who are outside the scope of normalised “white” identity.

What the aforementioned demonstrate is how whiteness operates as the invisibilised norm which enables whiteness to remain unnamed and unaccountable for their bodily re/im/positions within the social order. In this case, white women are not feminised in a way that racialises their femininity. The Australian media and public depicted Rau and Alvarez‐Solon as veering off‐course from what constitutes a normative Australian. Yet, the depictions of both women also took a different focus. For instance, the first Ministerial press releases referred to Rau as “‘a woman,’ ‘this woman,’ and “the woman’”.42 In contradistinction, reports on Alvarez‐Solon always included her race as a significant part of how one should assess her. While Rau is unnamed, what is further unaccounted for is Rau’s race thus demonstrating how race becomes the point through which both are differently assessed. In Rau’s case, her whiteness can position her simply as “woman”, not a raced woman. Richard Dyer accounts for this invisibility of whiteness, wherein whiteness itself become synonymous with humanity, or being human, so much so that “white people are just people”.43 Therefore, to point out another (or an “other:) “kind” of person, it becomes necessary to define them in terms of their “non‐whiteness”.

In this context, what does it mean for a non‐white woman to breach the comfort zones of a white patriarchal/matriarchal “mind”? What sensations are engendered by this clash of non‐white “body” and white “mind”, especially when the “mind” is made transparent as body through its interactions with the “other”? One of the fundamental consequences of this intercorporeal rubbing is the creation of racial fault‐lines. These are lines which are (de)formed by the intimate sensations shared and snatched away by bodily interactions etched tenuously on shifting racialised grounds. Using his own subject position as an example, Joseph Pugliese draws on these fault‐lines as the threshold of (im)possibility and racialised abstraction, naming this as being constituted in and through the “modality of the quasi‐prior”. In his words, this modality ensures that:

…even as I am positioned within a particular frame, a series of other identities dislocate me and situate me outside its parameters. Coexisting, at one and the same time, these other identities are nourished and performed…at the very threshold of the racial fault‐lines it constructs and patrols.44

Modality of the quasi‐prior and Alvarez‐Solon’s illegality

Through poetry, Pugliese further illustrates how non‐white bodies invariably come before the fact of the subject, and track the “disenfranchisements that fracture the possibility of coherence” 45 thus inducing an affective opening of bodies/identities into resignification. In his words:

An elliptical space opens . . . It is punctuated by three points of suspension: a body in excess of itself an identity not of my making a passage of violence from one to the other.46

Here, Pugliese indicates the discursive positionalities evoked through and by the modality of the quasi‐prior. These positionalities constitute Alvarez‐Solon’s body by making her in “excess” to herself, containing her within Orientalist narratives that define Filipinos as nonsensical westerners and therefore as other to an Occidental social order. Further, these positionalities place and displace Alvarez‐Solon within a violent exchange of “excess” and containment that reduce her as a disenfranchised body marked by the aggressive positionings of Orientalist logic framed through and by whiteness.

Although citizenship was at the crux of Alvarez‐Solon’s deportation, DIMIA officials did not bother to check Alvarez‐Solon’s passport and/or citizenship certificate.47 In this case, her body and supposedly illiterate speech came before her lived experience and legal documentation. Her non‐white physical appearance and falteringly spoken English contradicted the normative assumption of a legitimate Australian citizen. Here, a predisposition is fostered through the evocation of Orientalist stereotypes: “it situates and establishes the cultural intelligibility of a subject’s identity quasi‐prior to the arrival of the subject”.48 In this context, Alvarez‐Solon’s body comes before her. Her body declares herself as a specific social subject; her body calls white Orientalist tropes into being.

Filipino settlement is not recent. In 1892, there were Filipinos who worked as pearl divers in the north‐coast of Australia.49 Since then, Filipinos continued to migrate to Australia, however numbers dwindled during the duration of the White Australia Policy. With the Policy’s legal dissolution in 1973, Filipino migration increased, “making the Filipino community one of the fastest growing immigrant populations in Australia”.50 However, despite the illegality of this Policy, a cultural lag remained. This ensured that while Filipinos were allowed to live and work in (and for) Australia, they were perceived as social, cultural and racial others, a response (in)formed by how white Australians had treated other Asian citizens (such as the Chinese).51 However, the stereotypes and prejudices which were formed about Filipinos composed a specifically gendered reference, especially in response to Filipino women.

More Filipinas have made their home in Australia than their male counterparts due in part to many “arriving as sponsored spouses or fiancées”.52 This partnership was sometimes couched in Orientalist terms, fetishised as an illicit relation that degenerated the “white race”, if the Filipina’s husband was white. Here, Filipinas are consistently presented as women who “victimise” their defenceless white husbands. This narrative of victimhood continues even when the husband murders his Filipina wife. Chris Cunneen and Julie Stubbs specify:

One of the ironies in relation to the initiatives taken by the [Filipino] women to leave their partners was that in media coverage of the events, and/or in court hearings concerning the homicide [of these women], their actions were painted as licentiousness and immorality. They were represented as the (morally) abusive partner because they had left the relationship, and the [white] men were represented as the victims.53

This depiction of the “wily Oriental” is paired with other Orientalist presuppositions that package the “Oriental” woman as passive and ready for western guidance and intervention. In the case of Filipinas, this perception takes the form of the Filipina “mail‐order bride”, a specific Oriental commodity that is an accessible, available and willing sexual and romantic partner for white, western men. While this demonstrates the power white, western men have in attaining “passive” and “available” Filipinas, this power is inflected with the possibility of danger. To go beyond the “white‐zone”, or in other words, to go beyond the colour‐line by becoming intimate with a “non‐white” other threatens the bodily integrity of whiteness itself. In this context, both white men and Filipinas become racially suspect, but it is the Filipina who becomes the more naturalised subject of culpability, as naturally guilty of disorder and disordering. In work which analyses how Filipinas are discursively packaged in the Australian media, Nicki Saroca shows how Filipinas are contradictorily positioned. For instance, Filipinas are presented as passive, and therefore packaged as an “ideal” partner. Yet, this depiction is constituted along with a contrasting view of Filipinas as devious, self‐serving harridans out to get the money of white men.54 It seems apparent that the supposedly natural deviousness of Filipinas is the reason why media coverage positions Filipinas as naturally abusing their white husbands. However, Saroca also intimates that “passivity” also positions Filipinas as naturally at fault.

Saroca cites an interview with a Filipina named Belinda who specifies that in disputes with her white husband, her neighbours always take the side of her partner.55 She notes that support and solidarity do not issue forth from her neighbours, or other neighbours of Filipinas because their neighbours would accuse them of not speaking English well.56 She claims that because she is Filipina, she has not been given the chance to make herself known to her neighbours.57 Here, the onus rests on Filipinas to work towards inclusion and compassion, while her neighbours do not have to reciprocate the work and understanding involved in facilitating relationships. Furthermore, it is on the neighbours’ terms, not on Belinda’s terms that these relationships can be established and maintained. Therefore, if Belinda cannot connect with her neighbours, it is because she has not been active enough in combating her own “Oriental” “passivity. Her “passivity” in not speaking the same language as well as her neighbours becomes the means through which Filipinas supposedly deserve violence and isolation. In this context, by not fitting in, Filipinas deserve to be shut out, either by depicting them as other, through sanctioning their murder by portraying the white murderer as the true victim, or by deportation. In other words, not only are Filipinas the abusers, but they deserve to be abused.

Conversely, white men are not positioned as deserving abuse. Instead, they are normatively packaged as being “bedevilled” by the Filipina, wherein the “ordered” “rationality” of the white mind becomes negatively influenced through dalliances with “non‐whiteness”.58 White men, in this contest, are manipulated against their will, whereas Filipinas supposedly deserve any violence they encounter. In equating whiteness with the supposed rationality of the mind, whiteness becomes rationality, even when it is guilty of breaking white law59 and endangering the life of another person. The white “mind” thus trumps the life of the non‐white “body”.

However, the body of DIMIA, as a specific Australian institution, is also at stake within the modality of the quasi‐prior.60 It was how DIMIA imagined Alvarez‐Solon’s life which packaged how she was processed. Another influential factor was in what DIMIA perceived their role to be in shaping the racial fault‐lines upon which Alvarez‐Solon’s deportation was grounded. Here, sensation and the perceiving bodies (of both DIMIA and Alvarez‐Solon) provoke the potential to rework and re‐affirm a perceptual order that frames citizenship. I quote the following excerpt from the Sydney Morning Herald at length to elucidate the facts of Alvarez‐Solon’s case:

She arrived at Lismore Base Hospital dirty, drunk and screaming in pain. She was put into the psychiatric wing for a couple of days before being sent to Sydney for emergency spinal surgery. By late April she was back in Lismore recuperating at St Vincent’s Private Hospital...In those two months the department did not carry out any effective sleuthing. It made only two attempts ‐ the last in early June ‐ to talk to Brian Lucas, the one man in Lismore who appeared to know her. Her hospital admission notes record information from Lucas: ‘Says she is on a pension. Brian claims she has a brother in Brisbane who is a chemist and an ex‐husband who is a bank manager. He has custody of child? Ten years old’. Roughly right ‐ but never investigated by Immigration. Nor did it ask the NSW or Queensland police about this woman. No inquiries were made with the passport office…Centrelink…and the Electoral Commission. Officials questioned by Senate committees have

admitted they didn’t even look for her in the phone book. They were hardly trying.61

Why were they hardly trying? Former DIMIA officer, Frederika Steen observes that Immigration officials find it hard to adapt to the rapid pace of change to the asylum and refugee policy, in terms of training officers in charge of fulfilling its regulations. Further, she suggests: “there has also been an erosion of standards of professionalism in how we treat clients.62 I argue that this failure involves everything that Steen mentions, but it also engages with a complex investment in white Orientalism that frames Australia as a postcolonizing nation. With this investment, Alvarez‐Solon’s hazy behaviour was not deemed as ambiguous by Immigration officials. Rather, Alvarez‐Solon’s actions were defined in roles that other Filipinas within Australia had been known by: the dangerous female, or a female who represents an illicit past. Two roles that fit this stereotype are the mail‐order bride and the sex‐trafficked woman. These roles have been accorded to many Filipinas regardless of whether they actually are mail‐order brides or sex‐trafficked women.63 The conditions of Alvarez‐Solon being at Lismore Base Hospital in the first place also demonstrated the typical characteristics of a sex‐trafficked situation. Alvarez‐Solon was suspected of being bashed, she was vague about her life in Australia and who any of her contacts were. However, no‐one checked whether this had anything to do with Alvarez‐Solon’s mental condition or whether her vagueness had been precipitated by the incident which had warranted her admission into hospital. Furthermore, there was no substantive investigation as to how long she had been in Australia and how she entered.

In actuality, Alvarez‐Solon was born in Cebu, Philippines in 1962. In 1984, she married Robert Young, an Anglo‐Australian man, and went to live with him in Australia. In 1986, Alvarez‐Solon became an Australian citizen and lived there until she was deported in 2001. During her time in Australia, she had one child with Young, divorced and had a child with another man, Graham Cook.64 This is not the history of illegal trafficking. Rather, this shows the life of a Filipina who had legally entered and remained in Australia, bore Australian children and had a long history of family and friendly relations within the country. Yet, within the modality of the quasi‐prior, Alvarez‐Solon was positioned as a sex‐slave as this role fitted into Orientalist discourses which position Filipinas within Australia as mail‐order brides or women within the sex‐trafficking industry. 65 This positionality prompted “an undated, unsigned handwritten note [to be] placed in the Alvarez file [which] said: ‘Smuggled into Australia as a sex slave. Wants to return to the Philippines’”.66 According to Comrie, this “erroneous assumption … appears to have influenced the way in which her case was handled”.67

Here, the elliptical space of suspension contextualised by the modality of the quasi‐prior is quashed. What occurs is the replacement of the elliptical space of ambiguity for a definitive full stop. Alvarez‐Solon was construed as a sex‐trafficked prostitute, stripped of any other identity. This eliminated the elliptical space which would hold her identity in question and warrant further investigation. However, at the same time, the elliptical space of suspension continued to haunt the subject constitution of Alvarez‐Solon. How DIMIA negotiated the presence of Alvarez‐Solon within Australia demonstrates this by constituting Alvarez‐Solon in terms of an identity that is (re)made in relation to (white) identities.

In comparison to Rau, Alvarez‐Solon was packaged as the person who should be deported, even though both Rau and Alvarez‐Solon were positioned as illegal migrants to Australia. However, Cornelia Rau, was also wrongfully detained. Her detention eventuated after she discharged herself from Manly Hospital in NSW (she was admitted as a patient suffering schizophrenia).68 She was found in North Queensland, behaving in a way that concerned locals, spurning them to call the police. When approached by the police, Rau claimed she was a German tourist and did not give them her correct name. Based on this, Rau was identified as a “German tourist who had overstayed her visa, before her identity and status were confirmed”.69 Consequently, she was sent to Brisbane Women’s Correctional Centre, as there were no immigration detention centres in Queensland. During the six‐month period she was incarcerated, a Brisbane based compliance officer visited Rau three times. This did not allow much time for a substantial assessment of Rau’s case, despite suspicions that Rau was an Australian national of German heritage and despite the fact that Rau (under all the names she provided) was not found in any German national ID system.70 Because these suspicions and the failure to identify Rau (and all the names she provided) in Germany were not followed up, Rau was moved to the Baxter immigration centre in South Australia.71

As can be evidenced, both Rau and Alvarez‐Solon’s cases showed DIMIA as “not sufficiently finely tuned, flexible or responsive to allow for effective management and analysis of the more difficult cases”.72 However, while both were processed as “outsiders” to the Australian nation and therefore as legal citizens of other countries, only Alvarez‐Solon was deported. Like Alvarez‐Solon, Rau was placed in segregation and condemned as a criminal, but not to the point where she had to be removed from the corpus of the Australian nation. Furthermore, when Rau’s status as a permanent resident was confirmed, she was released immediately.73

Conversely, when Alvarez‐Solon was recognised as an Australian citizen, reparations and rehabilitation processes to make up for her deportation and subsequent abandonment by the Australian government took years to eventuate. SPAN states that in August 2003, DIMIA officials were aware that they had wrongfully deported an Australian citizen.74 However, Alvarez‐Solon was only resettled in 2006. The Sydney Morning Herald suggests that the delay occurred because: “The idea ‐ perhaps instinct is the better word ‐ was to keep the Alvarez scandal very quiet ‐ for ever if possible”.75 In other words, DIMIA had to save face by effacing the facts of Alvarez‐Solon’s citizenship. Saving face brings the body of DIMIA to the forefront of this case. Their bodily being and reputation, both as a governmental body and as individual bodies with varying subject positions, were open to public scrutiny and personal accountability. Further, the corpus of the Australian nation is also at stake. It was the “face” of Australia which needed to be saved.

Here, the body (as embodied by a symbolic and physical face/s of the Australian nation and government) becomes the point of focus. For instance, the use of the word “instinct” to define DIMIA’s actions shows the immediacy of their bodily response. Here, sensation shapes the way DIMIA handled this case. Gilles Deleuze specifies:

Sensation is what determines instinct at a particular moment, just as instinct is the passage from one sensation to another, the search for the ‘best’ sensation (not the most agreeable sensation, but the one that fills the flesh at a particular moment of its descent, contraction, dilation).76

DIMIA’s instinctual response was to efface in order to save face. Yet, Alvarez‐Solon’s right to return to Australia was not the only thing effaced. It was also DIMIA’s bodily complicity that was denied. This effacement thus worked to remove bodily sensation and fallibility from DIMIA’s reponse. DIMIA as the operative force of the Australian government’s mind was emphasised to turn attention away from the bodily instincts that misrecognised Alvarez‐Solon as a sex‐trafficked woman, non‐Australian and criminal.

Health and Recovery

The discourse of health which (in)forms this effacement begs the question of recovery. But, recovery in terms of what and for who? As previously discussed in terms of “saving face”, I argue that recovery operates at this level and through a number of other levels which include: the recovery of Alvarez‐Solon, the reputation of DIMIA and of Australia as a “white” nation. In terms of Alvarez‐Solon’s recovery, her health was not confirmed as being well enough to be deported. According to the Sydney Morning Herald:

It was touch and go whether she would ever walk again…The department was impatient. Its records show a local officer, Troy Sanders, seizing on a comment by doctors at St Vincent’s: ‘Her rehabilitation is not progressing as well as it should be, they believe this may be because recovery could mean returning to the Philippines.77

Seizing the possibility of deporting Alvarez‐Solon for her “recovery” also worked to recover DIMIA’s control over the narrative of Immigration law and governmental action. Deportation to the Philippines ensured that Alvarez‐Solon’s case could be assessed outside of Australia’s jurisdiction, and therefore, could be classified as a case that DIMIA did not have to be concerned with. In this case, it was not simply who could be allowed to stay and who could be permitted to leave that was in focus, but also who could be let go. At stake is the recovery of a subject position that can control what to be concerned about and therefore control the sensations provoked by bodily negotiations. Here, the recovery of DIMIA’s position as a legitimate acting body of knowledge (not just as a fallible body with faulty or no knowledge) is of central concern.

Further, the recovery of Australia as a “white” nation is at issue. This does not mean that Australia necessarily needs to ensure that the nation is populated only with white citizens. Rather, this means that Australia needs to ensure that they adhere to what whiteness implies: developed, rational and accurate. Under this logic of whiteness, mistakes cannot be made. In this context, the “white” nation cannot be made accountable for mistakes. This can be evidenced when Alvarez‐Solon was finally resettled in 2006, with then Immigration Minister, Amanda Vanstone blaming Alvarez for delaying her return to Australia.78

However, DIMIA did own up to their mistakes. It was admitted that Rau and Alvarez‐Solon were wrongfully judged. Yet, when this judgement was re‐dressed, actions followed different patterns of behaviour. Rau’s European whiteness enabled her to function as a more naturalised and normal Australia citizen. Therefore, despite both Rau and Alvarez‐Solon being diagnosed as unhealthy (Rau is diagnosed with schizophrenia and Alvarez‐Solon as physically crippled and spent time in a psychiatric institution), Rau was processed as the healthier, safer person in terms of the “health” and safety of the Australian nation, as argued earlier in terms of Rau remaining in the country. In this case, Alvarez‐Solon’s non‐whiteness posed a threat to the white(ned) nation.

This system of a whiteness that believes it is under threat by “non‐whiteness” is emphasised through the paranoia‐inducing climate encouraged by the former Howard government’s negotiations with refugees from “non‐white”, non‐western countries, such as Afghanistan and Iraq.79 This is the socio‐political framework in which Alvarez‐Solon’s deportation occurred. These negotiations have led to the patrolling of the nation’s borders in order to keep out and annihilate those who threaten the supposed sanctity of these borders and what they supposedly represent (e.g. Christianity, Democracy, civilisation). The frantic apprehension towards those who cross these borders (and the assumption that there are vast numbers of people who want to and are always going to cross through illegal means) manifested itself in the removal of Alvarez‐Solon (a non‐white individual) from the corpus of the (white) nation. This removal is enforced to ensure the “health” of the nation, to keep it pristine amidst the sickness of non‐whiteness, or in other words, the sickness that is non‐whiteness.

Both Rau and Alvarez‐Solon suffered from mental health issues. However, Rau’s mental health warrants more attention that is careful/caring. For instance, there is a discrepancy in focus within the Palmer report, which investigates the Rau case. Although, former Australian Federal Police commissioner, Mick Palmer has widened his inquiry regarding Rau’s detention, his investigations regarding Alvarez‐Solon will remain private and will arguably not be as exhaustive as possible.80 According to an editorial in The Age: “Mr Palmer does not have the power to subpoena witnesses and the people who do speak to him do not have legal protection. This necessarily limits Mr Palmerʹs effectiveness”.81 Moreover, the report fundamentally looks at Rau’s case, which positions Rau’s situation as worth investigating. Here, I do not mean to suggest that investigations should not proceed in regards to Rau’s case, and to any wrongful immigration detention and deportation cases, of which 201 cases are suspected.82 Rather, I point towards the differences in focus allotted to these cases. In this context, whiteness continues to warrant deeper consideration.

Conversely, Alvarez‐Solon becomes considered in terms of Orientalist ideologies informed by postcolonizing whiteness and the context of Australia’s response to refugees and asylum seekers. Alvarez‐Solon thus becomes bodily excess, something the “mind” of a “white”, “western” nation like Australia can only accommodate as a “betrayal” of itself. I argue that these limits chain Australia within a restrictive understanding of itself (as simply white and western) and ensure that white Australian relations with “non‐white” citizens are inflected with asymmetrical relations of power that shape the rights to be and become.

These rights are simultaneously (dis)embodied. The fact that Pugliese terms this quasi‐prior state as modality invokes this fluid movement that involves resignification. Modality as “an avenue of acquiring sensation” demonstrates this fluidity.83

Modality: The Main Avenue of Sensation

Although Alvarez‐Solon was handled as expendable “excess”, she was also responded to in different ways. These points of difference engage with the instinct “to keep the Alvarez scandal very quiet”84 in terms of making Alvarez‐Solon’s situation and the Australian government’s accountability heard. Here, while individual sensations and feelings establish rigid subject positions, they can also resignify. Pugliese’s use of the word “modality” emphasises this focus on feeling by iterating that modality can be defined as a main avenue of sensation. In this respect, the modality of the quasi‐prior can be recognised as a movement that occurs through the funnel of feeling/sensation. For this section, I track the sensations deployed in Alvarez‐Solon’s case to explore how the modality of the quasi‐prior invests in processes of feeling.

Massumi specifies: “sensation is never simple. It is always doubled by the feeling of having a feeling. It is self‐referential”.85 While Massumi makes clear that this does not equate to self‐reflexivity, this focus on the self demonstrates that sensation is registered and felt at the point of the self. How Alvarez‐Solon was responded to thus referred to a specific person, organisation and nation’s framework of “self”. As already argued, this “self‐hood” of the Australian nation is (in)formed by postcolonizing white Orientalism. However, as “sensation is the…agent of bodily deformations”,86 this self‐referential focus also refers to a self/selves that goes beyond the limits of postcolonizing white Orientalism. In terms of what Deleuze conceptualises as “deformation”, the self enables the deformation of naturalised hierarchies. These trajectories of deformation perforate racial fault‐lines, showing the potential for movement within and between form; to make form (or the form of a reductive social order) deformed.

This can be evidenced in how Alvarez‐Solon’s lawyer, George Newhouse negotiated Alvarez‐Solon’s case. As a visibly white Australian citizen, Newhouse used his Jewish heritage to justify his empathic connection with Alvarez‐Solon. In his words: “as a member of the Jewish community, [I know] the full horror of the words ‘illegal deportation’ and ‘racial discrimination’”.87 Newhouse points towards the differences within “whiteness”, its various ethnicities, histories and politics. Further, he gestures towards the specific histories of violence that continue to exert their power. To the protestors gathered for the rally held for World Refugee Day in Sydney in the year 2005, Newhouse states:

If Vivian had an English, American or Irish accent and if she had been involved in a car accident and was found by the side of the road…what would have happened to her?...She would have been treated in hospital, healed of her wounds, her identity uncovered and her children, her Australian friends and relatives told where she was. But this didn’t happen to Vivian…Why? Because she wasn’t white and she spoke with an accent. That’s all it seems to take for someone to be locked up and deported these days.88

Here, while Newhouse represents Alvarez‐Solon, he does so in a way that bears witness to whiteness as privilege, as deploying Orientalist sensations and reaffirming a postcolonizing conditionality. This differs to how Vanstone represents Alvarez‐Solon. Vanstone remarks that Alvarez‐Solon “was clearly in need of help and who through, I think it’s fair to say, no fault of her own ended up in an immigration detention facility and clearly didnʹt have the capacity to explain to people who she was. And that is a tragic situation”.89 While this demonstrates the acknowledgement of Alvarez‐Solon’s predicament, Vanstone’s articulation of “tragedy” acts as a euphemism for accusing Alvarez‐Solon for not having the capacity to articulate herself, to be more than a body devoid of language. What becomes tragic here is the fact that important questions were not asked (and would Vanstone have listened?): Did Vanstone have the capacity to understand Alvarez‐Solon? Did Alvarez‐Solon have the capacity to be heard? The blame is placed on Alvarez‐Solon’s incapacity to engage with the western, white mind and remain “mute”, silenced by her own non‐white incapacity. This is despite the fact that prior to her deportation, “DIMIA officers conducted a formal interview with Ms Solon…She said she was an Australian citizen at that time, that she wanted to remain in Australia and that she wanted to apply for a visa”.90

Harking back to Plato’s conceptualisation of the body’s betrayal of the mind, this situation demonstrates that Vanstone recognises Alvarez‐Solon as betraying herself and therefore betrays the “mind’s” language used to assess her stay in Australia.

Conclusion

Deleuze notes that Valéry argues: “sensation is that which is transmitted directly, and avoids the detour and boredom of conveying a story”.91 Sensation’s immediacy makes story (or form) obsolete. However, sensation is what makes the story. It is what shapes how subject positions are felt, negotiated and resignified. In this case, I refer to “story” as the ways in which people make sense of their lives, the narratives that compose the minutiae of the everyday. While bodily sensation does not necessarily stem from these narratives, it is bodily sensation that gives shape to them. It is these sensations that breathe life into living, gives feeling to what cannot be explained by language alone.

The feelings of solidarity espoused by Philippine‐Australian advocacy groups, such as SPAN, demonstrates that the form of the dominant “story” narrated by people like Vanstone can be (re)formed and (de)formed. They point towards not simply what brought Alvarez‐Solon back, but what sent her away. SPAN have created an online database wherein information about Alvarez‐Solon’s case can be accessed. Moreover, initiatives to write to government officials are encouraged and press releases were written to inform the public of Alvarez‐Solon and the unchecked inefficiency DIMIA had. This feeling of solidarity shared among members of the Filipino‐Australian community is also self‐referential. The diasporic community acts in their self‐interest in order to highlight their legitimacy in Australia. This is not to state that this act is necessarily negatively selfish, rather it points towards the fact that sensation, as self‐referential, occurs by the self, for the self and for other selves.

This is what Newhouse and SPAN push for: the recognition that the dominant and naturalised Australian self needs to re/de/form in order to resignify the postcolonizing foundations of the nation‐state. With this, the sensation of feeling good can infuse Watson’s question: “What legitimises your entry?”. 92 Instead of being on the threshold of deportation, this question can be met with a different kind of feeling. This is not to say that “bad” feelings and the histories of violence which constitute them should be discounted. Ahmed specifies: “Feeling better, whatever form it might take, is not about the overcoming of bad feeling…but of finding a different relationship to them”.93 It is these different relationships that sensation pushes for, pulsating at the edges and in between the fault‐lines of what we become and how we make and unmake our (non)belonging in our own homes.

Notes in the original: Pages 52–55.

Notes

  1. SPAN, “Vivian Alvarez Solon,” in Centre for Philippine Concerns –Australia, (2009a [accessed 27 January 2009]). Available from http://cpcabrisbane.org/CPCA/VivianAlvarezSolon.htm. Return

  2. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1994), 146. Return

  3. Nick Crossley, The Social Body: Habit, Identity and Desire (London: Sage Publications, 2001), 140. Return

  4. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 1. Return

  5. Sue Stanton, Roundtable discussion for the Gender, Violence and Protection Workshop, with author, (Sydney, 15 February 2008). Return

  6. Raj Thiruvengadam, “Book Review: Alphonso Lingis, Sensation: Intelligibility in Sensibility,” Human Studies 21.1 (1998), 113. Return

  7. Thiruvengadam, 113. Return

  8. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 97. Return

  9. Massumi, 97. Return

  10. Massumi, 97. Return

  11. Massumi, 97‐98. Return

  12. Massumi, 5. Return

  13. Aileen Moreton‐Robinson, “I Still Call Australia Home: Indigenous Belonging and Place in a White Postcolonizing Society,” in Uprootings, regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration, S. Ahmed, C. Castañeda, A.M. Fortier and M. Sheller, eds. (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 38. Return

  14. Not all abstraction is negative, but in this context, abstraction as a mode which displaces Indigenous sovereignty is negative. Return

  15. Elaine Laforteza, “What A Drag! Filipina/White Australian Relations in The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert,” in Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association Journal, 2:2, (2006 [accessed 20 January 2009]). Available from http://www.acrawsa.org.au/ejournalVol2no22006.htm. Return

  16. Irene Watson, “Aboriginal Laws and the Sovereignty of Terra Nullius,” in Borderlands e‐journal, 1:2, (2002 [accessed 15 January 2009]). Available from http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol1no2_2002/watson_laws.html. Return

  17. For more information about the ways in which Australia is constructed and constitutes itself as a “white” nation, see Aileen Moreton‐Robinson, “The possessive logic of patriarchal white sovereignty: The High Court and the Yorta Yorta Decision,” in Borderlands e‐journal, 3:2, (2004 [accessed 18 July 2009]). Available from http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol3no2_2004/moreton_possessive.htm. Also, see Suvendrini Perera, “Who will I become? The Multiple Formations of Australian Whiteness,” in Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, 1:1, (2005 [accessed 20 July 2009]). Available from http://www.acrawsa.org.au/ejournalVol1no12005.htm. For an analysis of the ways in which Australia is formed through white hegemony and the conflation of benevolence with whiteness, see Damien Riggs, “Benevolence and the Management of Stake: On Being ‘Good White People,’” in Philament, 4 (August 2004 [accessed 19 July 2009)]. Available from http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/publications/philament/issue4_Critique_Riggs.htm. Return

  18. See Moreton‐Robinson, 2003. Return

  19. I use the term “white zone” in the same way that Thandeka uses it to denote spaces and behaviours that comprise the comfort zones of white privilege and authority. See Thandeka, Learning to be White (New York: Continuum, 1999). Return

  20. Massumi, 5. Return

  21. For more information on this convergence of Orientalism and whiteness in an Australian context, see Laforteza 2006. Return

  22. Grosz, 3. Return

  23. Jacqueline Hewitt, “The Alvarez case: a warning for us all,” in The Age (14 May 2005 [accessed 29 July 2009]). Available from http://www.theage.com.au/news/Opinion/The‐Alvarez‐case‐a‐warning‐for‐us‐all/2005/05/13/1115843369031.html. Return

  24. Hewitt, 2005 Return

  25. Grosz, 5. Return

  26. Elaine Laforteza, “White Geo‐Politics of Neo‐Colonial Benevolence: The Australia‐ Philippine ‘Partnership’”, Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association Journal, 3:1, (2007 [accessed Return

  27. Amanda Vanstone, “Immigration Dept handled Solon case catastrophically’, The World Today (2005 [accessed 15 December 2006]). Available from http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2005/s1476140.htm Return

  28. Laforteza, 2007. Return

  29. July 2009]). Available from http://www.acrawsa.org.au/ejournalFiles/Volume%203,%20Number%201,%202007/ElaineLaforteza.pdf. Return

  30. H.R. Schiffman, Sensation and Perception: An Integrated Approach. 3rd Edition (Canada: John Wiley and Sons, 1990), 1.

  31. Schiffman defines sensation as: “certain immediate and direct qualitative experiences…and general sense‐receptor activity”. This quote can be found in Schiffman, 1. Return

  32. Schiffman, 1. Return

  33. Massumi, 75. Return

  34. For a more detailed account of the identity or difference between the terms “sensation” and “perception”, see Massumi, Chapters 2, 4 and 5. Return

  35. Grosz, 3 Return

  36. Grosz, 4. Return

  37. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, “And When You Leave, Take Your Pictures With You: Racism in the Women’s Movement,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Colour. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983), 62. Return

  38. Trinh T. Minh‐ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing, Post coloniality and Feminism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), 80‐116. Return

  39. Minh‐ha, 80‐116. Return

  40. Minh‐ha, 80‐116. Return

  41. Fiona Nicoll, “‘Are you calling me a racist?’ Teaching critical whiteness theory in indigenous sovereignty,’ in Borderlands e‐journal, 3:2, (2004 [accessed 17 July 2009]). Available from http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol3no2_2004/nicoll_teaching.htm. Return

  42. Tanja Dreher, “Eavesdropping with permission: the politics of listening for safer speaking spaces,” in Borderlands e‐journal, 8:1, (2009 [accessed 17 July 2009]). Available from http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol8no1_2009/dreher_eavesdropping.pdf. Return

  43. Susanne Gannon and Sue Saltmarsh, “Reading Cornelia Rau: At the Limits of Intelligibility,” in thirdspace, 6:1, (2006 [accessed 29 July 2009]). Available from http://www.thirdspace.ca/vol6/6_1_Gannon‐Saltmarsh.htm. Return

  44. Richard Dyer, White (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 2. Return

  45. Joseph Pugliese, “The Locus of the Non: the racial fault‐line of ‘of Middle‐Eastern appearance,’” in Borderlands e‐journal, 2:3, (2003 [accessed 15 January 2009]). Available from http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/issues/vol2no3.html. Return

  46. Pugliese, 2003. Return

  47. Pugliese, 2003. Return

  48. SPAN, 2009a. Return

  49. Pugliese, 2003. Return

  50. James Jupp, ed. “Australian Immigration Policies and Trends in Filipino Migration,” in The Australian People: An Encyclopedia of the Nation, Its People and Their Origins (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 350. Return

  51. Debbie Jehodo, “Quality of life after migration to Australia: A comparative study of Vietnamese and Filipino immigrants,” in Deakin University Theses, (Deakin University, 2001 [accessed 27 January 2009]), 17. Available from http://acqol.deakin.edu.au/theses/Thisone.doc. Return

  52. For a comprehensive read of Chinese‐Australian history from the 1860s to the 1990s, see Shen Yuanfang, Dragon Seed in the Antipodes (Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 2001). Return

  53. SPAN, “Forum Tackles Violence Against Filipinas in Australia,” in Kasama, (2009b, accessed 27 January 2009]). Available from http://cpcabrisbane.org/Kasama/2000/V14n1/Feb18Forum.htm. Also, for more information, see James Jupp, ed. “Bride Migration,” in The Australian People: An Encyclopedia of the Nation, Its People and Their Origins (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 352. Return

  54. Chris Cunneen and Julie Stubbs, “Fantasy islands: desire, ‘race’ and violence,” in Male Trouble: Looking at Australian Masculinities. Stephen Tomsen and Mike Donaldson, eds. (Victoria: Pluto Press, 2003), 71‐72. Return

  55. Nicki Saroca, “Violence Against Filipino women in Australia: Theorising the relationship between the discursive and the nondiscursive”, in Expanding our horizons: Understanding the complexities of violence against women (February 2002 [accessed 29 July 2009]). Available from http://www.austdvclearinghouse.unsw.edu.au/Conference%20papers/Exp‐horiz/Saroca.pdf, 15. Return

  56. Belinda, (July 1999): 12, quoted in Nicki Saroca, “Violence Against Filipino women in Australia: Theorising the relationship between the discursive and the nondiscursive”, in Expanding our horizons: Understanding the complexities of violence against women (February 2002 [accessed 29 July 2009]). Available from http://www.austdvclearinghouse.unsw.edu.au/Conference%20papers/Exp‐horiz/Saroca.pdf. Return

  57. Belinda, 1999. Return

  58. Belinda, 1999. Return

  59. This fear of being “contaminated” by “non‐whiteness” has been discussed in narratives about “west” and “east” and “black” and “white” relations with one another. See Regis Stella, Imagining the other: the representation of the Papua New Guinean subject, (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press), 131. Return

  60. I engage with Maria Giannacopoulos’ articulation of white law as a specific framework of knowledge that imposes itself as the only authoritative organisation of social order. See Maria Giannacopoulos, “Mabo, Tampa and the Non‐Justiciability of Sovereignty,” in Our Patch, Suvendrini Perera, ed. (Perth: Network Books, 2007). Return

  61. I do not mean to state that DIMIA acts a homogenous body of thought and action. For instance, Natalie Catlin, a DIMIA official who had interviewed Solon before she was deported made the match between a missing person’s report showing Solon (named as Vivian Young) after the show Without A Trace which aired on 20 August 2001 on Australian TV. Solon was deported with the name Vivian Alvarez, not Vivian Young and therefore it can be conjectured that it was easy to make mistakes. However, if more thorough attempts had been made prior to Solon’s deportation, the harrowing mess that ensued would not have occurred. Catlin reported this to DIMIA, but attempts to resettle Solon and investigate this case further were feeble from then on. Return

  62. Sydney Morning Herald, “The lies that kept Vivian Alvarez hidden for years,” in Sydney Morning Herald (20 August 2005 [accessed 25 January 2009]). Available from http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/the‐lies‐that‐kept‐vivian‐alvarez‐hidden‐for‐years/2005/08/19/1124435144969.html. Return

  63. Frederika Steen, “September 7, 2005: National Day of Action for Vivian Solon,” in Kasama, (2009 [accessed 27 January 2009]). Available from http://cpcabrisbane.org/Kasama/2005/V19n3/NationalDayOfAction.htm. Return

  64. For more information on how Filipinas are recognised as mail‐order brides despite the facts of their lived experience, see Laforteza 2006. Return

  65. Sydney Morning Herald, 2005. Return

  66. Laforteza, 2006. Return

  67. Michelle. Grattan, “A victim, plenty of villains, and a lone hero,” in The Age (7 October 2005 [accessed 25 January 2009]). Available from http://www.theage.com.au/news/immigration/a‐victim‐plenty‐of‐villains‐and‐a‐lone‐hero/2005/10/06/1128562943654.html. Return

  68. Grattan, 2009. Return

  69. Parliament of Australia: Department of Parliamentary Services, Research Brief: The detention of Cornelia Rau: Legal issues, (31 March 2005 [accessed 20 July 2009]). Available from http://www.aph.gov.au/library/Pubs/RB/2004‐05/05rb14.pdf, 3. Return

  70. K. Biber and M. San Roque, “The trouble with pictures,” Law Text Culture 10.1 (2005): 6. Return

  71. Mick Palmer, Inquiry into the Cornelia Rau matter, (6 July 2005 [accessed 20 July 2009]). Available from http://www.immi.gov.au/media/publications/pdf/palmer‐report.pdf, 51‐53. Return

  72. Palmer, 52. Return

  73. Palmer, 53. Return

  74. Sydney Morning Herald, 2005. Return

  75. SPAN, “Australian Citizen Deported,” in Kasama, (2009c [accessed 27 January 2009]). Available from http://cpcabrisbane.org/Kasama/2005/V19n2/AustralianCitizenDeported.htm Return

  76. Sydney Morning Herald, 2005. Return

  77. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Daniel W. Smith, trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 29. Return

  78. Sydney Morning Herald, 2005. Return

  79. SPAN, 2009c. Return

  80. For a thorough account of how Australia has responded to refugees and asylum seekers, see: Peter Mares, Borderline: Australia’s treatment of refugees and asylum seekers (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2001). Return

  81. The Age, “The regrettable case of Vivian Alvarez Solon,” in The Age (14 May 2005 [accessed 27 January 2009]), Available from http://www.theage.com.au/news/Editorial/The‐regrettable‐case‐of‐Vivian‐Alvarez‐Solon/2005/05/13/1115843369186.html. Return

  82. The Age, 2005. Return

  83. The Age, 2005. Return

  84. Riley Child Development Center, “Terminology,” in Building Bright Futures for Children and Families, (2007, [accessed 28 January 2009]). Available from http://www.child‐dev.com/drupal/node/39. Return

  85. Sydney Morning Herald, 2005. Return

  86. Massumi, 13. Return

  87. Deleuze, 25. Return

  88. George Newhouse, “Protestors March for Refugee Rights,” in Kasama, (2005, [accessed 27 January 2009]). Available from http://cpcabrisbane.org/Kasama/2005/V19n2/GeorgeNewhouse.htm. Return

  89. Newhouse, 2005. Return

  90. The Age, 2005. Return

  91. Peter Garrett, “Parliament: Migration and Ombudsman Legislation Amendment Bill 2005”, in Peter Garrett, Minister for Environment, Heritage and the Arts (2005 [accessed 29 July 2009]), Available from http://www.petergarrett.com.au/118.aspx. Also according to the Sydney Morning Herald, 2005: “Immigration had no idea who she was, no idea how she came to the country, nothing to contradict her claim that she was an Australian citizen ‐ yet she would go.” This intimates that Solon had claimed she was an Australian citizen, but such claims fell on deaf ears. Return

  92. Deleuze, 25. Return

  93. Watson, 2002. Return

  94. Sara Ahmed, “The Politics of Bad Feeling,” in Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association Journal, 1:1. (2005 [accessed 15 January 2009]), Available from http://www.acrawsa.org.au/ACRAWSA1‐6.pdf. Return