Morality and Patriarchal White Sovereignty

This article offers a reading of three separate stories of gang rapes that have been prominent in the Australian media since 2000. The men involved – an Indigenous leader, young Sydney men identified as Muslim and several ostensibly un-raced professional footballers, have been positioned through different legal outcomes, media representations and through a prominently deployed discourse of morality. The article locates the gang rape stories in mutual inter-relationship with the expression of racism in Australia and the performance of 'patriarchal white sovereignty' by the Australian state in the 2000s in the global climate since 11 September 2001. It argues that the politics of race and whiteness, and the protocols for their speaking, have been central in the telling of the rape stories. These stories of gang rape have also created differently racialized positions for women including some remarkably respectful mainstream representations of the women raped by non-white men. The article concludes that these stories perform a gendered and raced moral justification for the racist and colonialist policies of the Australian state, both within national borders and beyond, that characterized the national government led by Prime Minister John Howard (1996–2007). Keywords: Australiafootballersgendermedia discoursemoralityracerapewhiteness Acknowledgements Research for this article was supported by a Discovery Project Grant from the Australian Research Council. Acknowledgement for assistance and collegiality is due to Olivia Rundle, Danni Nicholas-Sexton, Mary Heath, Tanja Dreher, Sharon Chalmers and Shakira Hussein. I am particularly indebted to Tanya Serisier who shared an unpublished version of her article. I am also indebted to the two anonymous IFjP readers and the journal's editors for their careful attention to the article. Notes See Moreton-Robinson for an account of second wave feminism's fraught negotiation of this terrain in relation to the rape of Indigenous women (2000: 111–25). The 'stolen generations' are those Indigenous people who, throughout the twentieth century until the 1970s, were removed from their families and communities by the State and sent to missions or to white families and generally prevented from speaking their languages, exercising their culture or having contact with their family (HREOC Citation1997). In September 2001 the NSW government legislated to create the offence of 'aggravated assault in company' with a maximum penalty of life imprisonment. In 2002 they legislated to increase the length of the standard non-parole period for sexual assault. The NSW government legislated in 2003 to prevent defendants accused of rape from cross-examining their alleged victims. Shakira Hussein Citation(2006) rejects the Pakistani men's claim of 'Islamophobic conspiracy' which she reads as an avoidance of responsibility. My claim refers to a reading of the racialized norms of the law, not to a conspiracy. Tegan Wagner's views on racial politics indicate a complex set of attitudes and behaviours. She rejects race as an explanation for rape (Wagner Citation2007) but defends the Cronulla riots (which she attended) and the suburb itself against what she sees as media misrepresentation (Sheehan Citation2006: 361–4).