‘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,
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