Atmospheric Force – The Introduction and Infrastructure of FGM/C Laws in Australia

In the 1990s, Australia enacted laws criminalising female genital cutting across all jurisdictions, despite no evidence that the practices occurred locally. Framed as an urgent response to crisis, these laws emerged within a charged political atmosphere. Drawing on atmosphere theory, the article examines how law, affect, race and political temporality converged to construct FGM/C as a threat to the nation and asks after the legacies of such crisis-driven lawmaking. It argues that FGM laws emerged through a nationally anxious and racially saturated atmosphere, at a moment when the nation was grappling with its colonial past, non-white migration, multiculturalism and shifts in its geopolitical orientation. The article contends that these FGM laws now function as infrastructures of that atmosphere, sustaining the affective and racialised intensities they were ostensibly designed to resolve. In this sense, the law now operates not simply within atmosphere but as atmosphere itself.