Decolonizing Australia’s Body Politics: Contesting the Coloniality of Violence of Child Removal

In this article, I develop a critique of the continual historic and contemporary use of child removal to systematically pathologize and criminalize Black, Indigenous, and poor-white motherhood. I demonstrate how the technologies and rationalities put to work as part of the reproduction of the modern state wound the body politic in ways that disarticulate the conditions of possibility of the political subjectivity of the subaltern. I develop my critique as a re-reading of contemporary child removal in Australia through a decolonizing feminist perspective. Accordingly, I begin by demonstrating how the biopolitical attempt to produce the raced and gendered subject as a non-subject denied rights and rationality is co-constitutive of the foundations and continuing reproduction of settler-colonial societies, including that of the Australian state and polity, in the neoliberal period. However, I do not stop at this point, for this is to re-inscribe the subaltern in the logics of denial of subjectivity of coloniality. Thus, in the second part of the article, emerging from activist scholarship with the Family Inclusion Strategy Hunter, Hunter Valley, NSW Australia—an organization comprised of families who have or are experiencing child removal, practitioners working in the out-of-home care and child protection sectors, and critical scholars that are united in their commitment to foreground the voices, knowledges, and perspectives of birth families in the practices, policies, and politics of child removal—I offer a critique through praxis of these dehumanizing state practices. I focus on three areas: Decolonizing Monologues of Intervention through Dialogues of Connection; Co-construction of Knowledges for Transformation; and Encounters across Borders: Embodying and Embedding Critical Reflexivity. My engagement foregrounds how these active processes of subjectivity of racialized subaltern mothers and families, and their allies, offer emergent possibilities for a decolonizing politics which seeks not recognition within the “state” of things as they are but a radical disruption of the terms of the conversation as they have and continue to structure Australia’s state and polity. This praxical analysis and reflection contributes and extends our conceptualization of the feminization of resistance by bringing to the center of our analytic and political attention the decolonizing epistemological and methodological aspects of this reinvention of emancipatory politics.