Talkin’ Up To The White Woman: Feminist Reflections

‘TALKIN’ UP TO THE WHITE WOMAN’

Feminist reflections from listening to Aileen Moreton-Robinson at the Adelaide Context Writers Festival 2021

Words by Ngoc Lan Tran

It’s surreal. Aileen Moreton-Robinson does not make a lot of public appearances; yet, she went to Adelaide for the Context Writers Festival. On the opening night, the festival curator, Dominic Guerrera, shared a touching excerpt from their email exchange with Moreton-Robinson, personally noting the influence of her work on the public and her power that can unapologetically shake up the “sleepy, complacent” Adelaide, a place where white privilege still thrives and remains largely unseen, unchallenged. All on Kaurna land.

Guerrera is talking about Moreton-Robinson’s ground-breaking work, first published in 2000 called Talkin’ Up to the White Woman. This work has given voice to Indigenous feminism, stirring up the historically uninterrogated hegemony of whiteness, its privilege in Australian feminism and its effect on indigenous and non-indigenous women. Moreton-Robinson challenges the position of the academic university as the site of knowledge production that has reduced indigenous women to the Native ‘other’ under the lens of anthropology, while the racial identity of white people and white women is left unexamined. She resists the homogenising nature of “feminism” that has conflated the patriarchal oppression into a “common denominator” shared amongst all women, from which she enquires into the aftermath of “feminism” disregarding indigenous women’s years of trauma from colonial slavery and systemic racism.

This is a sentiment shared by not only MoretonRobison, but also many many other women of colour. The anthology This Bridge Called My Back,

published in 1983, features many thoughts and writings on intersectional feminism as a response to the racism of white feminists. For women of colour, sexism never exists on its own; sexism is always converging with other forms of systemic oppression based on race, class, sexuality, and so on. Solidarity on sisterhood alone would not and could not solve racism and class oppression and homophobia.

Having read both texts, I see Talkin’ Up to the White Woman as the necessary sequel to the collectivised anthology of radical feminist voices as seen through This Bridge Called My Back. Moreton-Robinson’s work is disruptive and subversive, a razor-sharp critique of whiteness and white feminism that has been lacking severely in the academe. She makes visible the invisible white privilege normalised in feminist and other discourses while questioning the sincerity of inviting indigenous women into feminist movements while white privilege remains unchallenged.

Beyond that, Moreton-Robinson discusses the Indigenous women’s standpoint, influenced by the collective of specific herstories, subjectivities, epistemologies, and cultures. Her connection to nature, her land, her spirituality, and her knowledge all reveal her collective resistance that is “grounded in a different history from those who deploy the subject position middle-class white women.” For her, the indigenous women’s perspective is becoming ever more significant in today’s day and age, where capitalism and neoliberalism rage rampant, destroying the planet and poisoning our spiritual connections with Mother Earth. Not only through the book, but at a festival tucked in a nook of the Adelaide City Library, Moreton-Robinson discussed the connection between racism, the climate crisis, the problems of capitalism, and the global pandemic we have at hand. She pays respect to the indigenous knowledge of nature and is a call to mobilise their stories from our non-human relatives on earth into our public domains of systemic issues. Talkin’ Up to the White Woman may be a challenge to white feminism on black land, but her work is bigger than all of us. At heart, it is clear that Aileen MoretonRobison is an eco-feminist; and she possesses the unquestionable power to awaken an intellectual community on a massive global scale that, but also resonates personally, to stirring the intersectional eco-feminist in me.

Talkin’ Up to the White Woman is startlingly mesmerising. Moreton-Robinson’s book still has me thinking about the underlying hypocrisy of the feminist movement and my initial reluctance to its ideals and practices as a woman of colour. I critically reflect upon my own engagement with my racial identity, considering the subjectivity of the Asian feminist, and question the lack of conflict between Asian women and feminism. What is it about “feminism” that has made me feel like I do not belong; that maybe I was invited to this crusade of women’s rights but never that I was born into it? This is a testament to how inclusive Moreton-Robinson’s work is. Although the book refers mostly to the subjectivity of indigenous women, there is still enough space for contemplating the nuances and complexity of being a feminist woman of colour.

Moreton-Robinson’s book and her talk have been the guides to my feminist revelation. Her work inspires me to look into my spiritual genealogical herstory and my connection to my land. MoretonRobinson helps me unveil my cultural subjectivity which had been made invisible by myself through a combination of naïvete, complacency, and generations of colonial erasure. But now that I can see it, I see it everywhere: in my mother’s labour and my grandmother’s worship, in the Vietnamese women who still have to live with the aftermath of the war, the very same women who pray for their ancestors and their children. Our quiet resistance is deep-seated. Our struggle is a herstorical continuum. Our efforts are a co-evolution with nature. As long as our spirits are bound to earth, our feminisms will exist and persist, a testament to be witnessed.