New Visions of a Feminist Social Justice from the Experiences of the Carceral Archipelago

In this paper I explore the futures of social justice from the experiences of women and girls detained as refugees in the carceral archipelago of the Asia-Pacific. Building on feminist theorization including Black Feminist, anti-colonial and Indigenous scholarship, the paper presents the narratives and creative work of refugee women and girls as integral to formulating social justice from the lived experience of marginalized and minoritized populations. Forms of story-telling figure prominently to foreground the hidden histories and untold stories of women and girl refugees. In such story-telling all creative forms of expression, visual, textual, filmic, performance and others accumulate to retell colonial histories of oppression and also imagine alternative futures of social justice. The carceral archipelago, includes remote sites where states move populations to sites external to their own territories, thereby also removing responsibility for harms through remote carceral systems. One state to practice such externalization of borders is Australia with its off-shore refugee detention centres on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea and the impoverished island state of Nauru. The synergies between radical feminist, trans and queer theorists provide critical theorization of the lived experiences of excluded and minoritized populations through the historical epochs of colonialism and capitalism, (hooks 2014, Davis 1972, 2019, Federici 1999, Wynter 1995, Fraser 2017, Hill Collins 2019). Importantly, many of these theorists and others develop detailed insights and empirical detail of the marginalization and exploitation specific to migrant and refugee women and girls that is the focus of this paper.