Description
Over the past decade, particularly since the onset of the Syrian war, the images of suffering, embodied in a ‘voiceless’ and ‘helpless’ figure, has become a central trope in representations of refugees, asylum seekers, and irregular migrants. This paper examines the politics of these figurations and explores their role in our understanding, framing, and making of borders. By mapping the world-making power of figures, it investigates how the production, circulation, and persistent repetition of abject imagery of refugees construct a figure of empathy, and how this figure enables new border institutions, techniques, and technologies, while simultaneously concealing existing social and political power relations and inequalities. Using Australia’s border politics as a case study, the paper argues that figures are fluid positions on the multiple lines of border politics. The overreliance on and repetition of the abject figure enacts borders in exclusionary and repressive ways. By focusing on both the state and pro-refugee advocacy figurations, the paper demonstrates how certain figurations not only produce violent border structures through practices of ‘weaponised care’, but they also limit our ability to imagine counter-maps and alternative narratives that could challenge and transform these structures.
