South Sudanese Women’s Movement in Australia - Keely Fitzsimmons
Abstract
The subject for my project will be the South Sudanese women’s movement in Australia. The South Sudanese community make up the largest ethnic minority of a refugee background in Australia, however, various forces continue to disrupt the South Sudanese Australian community. As disruptions intensified with the breakdown of Sudan People’s Liberation Movement and media and political attacks towards the community, South Sudanese women began to organize. Recreational groups like the White Nile South Sudanese Women’s Group have been formed to help South Sudanese women of various dialects and ethnic backgrounds remain connected to their cultures and build relationships with other South Sudanese women experiencing similar struggles. Additionally, local South Sudanese women refugees like Temar John, Alex Nyok, and Martha Kek have organized conferences for South Sudanese women to discuss issues of employment, physical and mental health, and family relationships and founded a South Sudanese Women’s Network in Victoria. South Sudanese female leaders in Australia, like member of Parliament, Ayor Makur Chuot, and Anyier Yuol have also promoted modelling and the fashion industry as ways to strengthen the leadership skills and self-confidence of South Sudanese girls and women.
This social movement interests me because it relates coalition building, networking, refusal, “otherness,” and negotiation to Third World feminism. I am interested in examining experiences of refugees in Australia because of the country’s history of oppression towards indigenous Australians. Another element of this topic that interests me is the creative aspect of this movement as modelling, film, basket weaving, and bead making have all been ways to empower and connect South Sudanese Australian women. This effort aims to address issues of employment, physical and mental health, family relationships, financial stresses, self-confidence, and discrimination faced by South Sudanese migrant women. This social movement has collaborated with social movements of South Sudanese refugees across the world such as the South Sudanese Women’s Empowerment Network as well as local organizations like the South Sudanese Community Association in Victoria INC. Some local groups also offer membership to all women of African descent. I anticipate doing a collage or video clip for my creative component.
Analysis
The South Sudanese women’s movement in Australia is a form of resistance as it challenges the “othered” identity of African refugee women within Australian society. The movement itself allows South Sudanese Australian women to renegotiate how they are perceived in the Australian media, public, and government. Australia and South Sudan have contrasting cultures and societal norms, which has, in part divided the two groups socially and culturally. A more powerful force of division, however, has been from the media and anti-immigration politics. The stigma that South Sudanese people are violent criminals originates largely from the media’s disproportionate focus on South Sudanese crime as well as systemic racism and the public’s associations of the violent history of Sudan with the South Sudanese people. Moreover, pitfalls of Australian multiculturalism have enabled labels of backward “Third World Women” to persist in Australia. All of these factors have contributed to an othering and exclusion of South Sudanese Australian women, which has intensified issues of mental health, unemployment, family breakdown, and social isolation. The spotlighted organizations in my project each challenge the negative stigma of the South Sudanese Australian community by raising visibility of South Sudanese Australian women and allowing them to form coalitions with each other. New Change group, which is a film production group of young South Sudanese Australian women, combined spoken word poetry, traditional dance, costume, and music, with film to artfully confront the exclusion of their community from the Australian identity. They showcase elements of cultural tradition while directly calling attention to the falsehoods surrounding the “Apex Gang” narratives in the media. By asserting the ambiguity of the Apex Gang and renaming the South Sudanese as a “loving community,” they help redefine and negotiate the identity of South Sudanese Australians as dynamic individuals who have been wronged by media misrepresentation. The traditional South Sudanese images in their music video also defies Australia’s current form of multiculturalism that demands all migrants act in line with the “Australian way of life.” South Sudanese refugees have been widely criticized by the right-wing in Australia for their failures to assimilate to Australian culture. The work of New Change along with Twich Women’s Sewing Collective, White Nile Women’s Group, and Miss Sahara all demonstrate how South Sudanese Australian women do not have to sacrifice their South Sudanese identity or culture to be Australian. The work of Twich Women’s Sewing Collective and the White Nile Women’s Group have provided South Sudanese Australian women to showcase their cultural traditions and skills in a way that appeals to the broad Australian community. Dually, it helps the refugee women overcome language barriers and provides them with education and employment opportunities that gives the women more agency and credibility to negotiate. In addition, it allows the women involved in the group to network with each other and other Australian women. This act of intercommunity networking combats the othering of South Sudanese Australian women and destabilizes static notions of the South Sudanese refugee woman. The work of the Miss Sahara beauty pageant also provides networking opportunities and opportunities for coalition building between African Australian women. The structure of the Miss Sahara beauty pageant provides African Australian women a space to tell the stories of their struggles and build solidarity within each other.
A gendered perspective of the South Sudanese Australian movement as a whole reveals how refugees, especially refugees of color, become racialized others in their new countries. Media, political, and police tactics employed to exclude these groups compound upon the trauma experienced by refugees in their home countries and on their journeys to a place of refuge and further destabilize refugee families and individuals. This is especially harmful on the mothers who must bear the burden of their own traumas as well as their childrens’. Because of the nature of the conflict in Sudan and South Sudan, these mothers may have husbands or other male relatives who have died in war. A significant issue for South Sudanese mothers living in Australia is mental health. Financial pressures of having to care for family in the home country and in the host country are high as South Sudanese Australian women struggle to find work due to race-based discrimination, familail duties, and lack of qualifications. These financial pressures, combined with alarming rates of youth suicides and problems associated with youth crime, including over-policing, have all been felt by mothers. These stressful experiences, however, have been shared to some degree with many women in the South Sudanese Australian community. As a result, these women have found solidarity within each other, despite possible histories of hostility between ethnic communities in their home country. Lastly, these women have used intellectual and creative forms of activism to empower each other and raise consciousness about their experiences in ways that effectively maintain their important cultural backgrounds.
Summary
The South Sudanese women’s movement in Australia centers around coalition building and the renegotiation of how the South Sudanese community exists in Australian society. Several South Sudanese Australian women-led organizations have emerged across the country with goals to combat negative stereotypes of South Sudanese refugees, provide education and employment opportunities for South Sudanese Australian women, and strengthen the sense community for South Sudanese Australians while supporting social integration. Other goals of this social movement include helping women and mothers cope with mental health problems that have arisen from their resettlement experiences. Groups of this movement have unified women from different dialects, cultures, and ethnic communities of South Sudan. Many of these organizations, such as the New Change group, Twich Women’s Sewing Collective, White Nile Women’s Group, and Miss Sahara, have been successful by employing strategies of intersectional intellectual and creative activism. The work of these organizations range from music videos that call out the “white lies” spread about the South Sudanese Australian community in the “white news” to beauty pageants that promote building self-confidence and leadership skills in African Australian women. Remembering South Sudanese traditions and culture is a central piece of the movement and the work of these organizations. This is well demonstrated by the work of the White Nile Women’s Group and Twich Women’s Sewing Collective that were separately started by Rebecca Wuor and Abuk Bol. These organizations connect South Sudanese Australian women and provide them spaces to socialize, practice English, access refugee resources and facilities, and gain work experience while they employ traditional South Sudanese techniques of beading, weaving, and needle-work to create various clothing and household items. The items cater to African and Western styles, which attracts more Australian buyers and promotes positive visibility of the South Sudanese Australian community. The White Nile Women’s Group has also planned dance and song performances for the Zinda multicultural Festival in Bendigo, Victoria, Australia to further publicly uplift South Sudanese culture. The promotion of positive visibility for the South Sudanese Australian community is essential to the renegotiation of their societal positioning as the media, politicians, and public depict South Sudanese refugees as violent outcasts and criminals.
Sudanese refugees began resettling in Australia beginning in 1966 with the relaxation of the White Australia immigration policy. Civil wars, genocidal conflict, and famine have characterized Sudan since the country received independence from Great Britain in the 1950’s. These conditions, mostly arising from the racial and religious mismatch between the predominantly Arab-Muslim northern region of Sudan and the predominantly Christian southern region of Sudan- which became an independent South Sudan in 2011- have resulted in over two million fatalies for South Sudanese civilians and four million South Sudanese displaced within the past few decades. Since 2001, over 22,500 Sudanese refugees have resettled in Australia with the greatest numbers residing in Victoria, Australia. The majority of these refugees are under the age of thirty five and a significant portion of them have either lost or been separated from their family members. Today, the Sudanese population makes up about 0.1% of Australia’s total population and is the largest ethnic minority of a refugee background in the country.
Unfortunately, South Sudanese refugees in Australia remain vulnerable to new forms of trauma even after resettlement. According to a 2018 study, titled “South Sudan Diaspora Impacts Project,” the South Sudanese community endure the highest levels of discrimination of all migrant groups in Australia. The community has been vilified by the media as deviant and dangerous and singled out as a source of the rise in youth crime. The term “Apex Gang” has been used to define the South Sudanese Australian community and establish a common enemy in Australian media, politics, and public discourse despite the fact that Sudanese make up one percent of the criminal offender population in the country. Comments made by right-wing political leaders like Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton and former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull further the stigma surrounding an unsupported “African gangs crisis.” These negative perceptions have fueled over policing, police brutality, and racialized stopping and questioning practices targeted towards the South Sudanese community. These practices combined with hate crimes, racial abuse, job discrimination, language barriers, and bullying in school have compounded to limit the freedom of space for the South Sudanese in Australia and resulted in a social “Ghettoization” of the community. South Sudanese Australian women specifically struggle as they are less likely to work because they are often less educated and mothers are expected to care for the children often without the help of a spouse as millions of South Sudanese men have died in war. South Sudanese women are described as family-minded women, however, cultural, social, economic and political challenges in Australia have threatened the stability of families and correlated with increasing suicides and stress related deaths.
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