Agonism and Intersectionality: Indigenous Women, Violence and Feminist Collective Identity

Abstract

Relations between Indigenous women and the Australian women’s movement have never been easy. For some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women the white women’s movement has seemed irrelevant to the real struggles in Aboriginal women’s lives, which have tended to be more politically aligned with Indigenous struggles more broadly. Many Aboriginal women have viewed white feminists as insensitive to their own role in Australia’s colonial history and the implications of this for contemporary intercultural relations. In response to such criticism, many white feminists have struggled with the challenge of effective cross cultural engagement and collaboration.

This chapter brings an intersectional analysis to bear in an effort to understand these challenges, developing a framing of agonistic processes of collective identity as a way of thinking about the potentially productive role of conflict in social movements. Through an examination of Indigenous and non-Indigenous responses to a particular policy framework, the chapter suggests that feminist interventions focussing on the negative, racist impacts of the policy have tended to neglect the gendered dimensions of the underlying problem. As a result these arguments risk neglecting (some) women’s lived experiences.

Citation

Maddison, S. and Partridge, E. (2014), "Agonism and Intersectionality: Indigenous Women, Violence and Feminist Collective Identity", Intersectionality and Social Change (Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change, Vol. 37), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 27-52. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0163-786X20140000037000