Abstract
This article examines the relationship between state violence in the form of practices aimed to humiliate and acts of resistance to these practices. Focusing on the experiences of women and girls in the Parramatta Female Factory (1804–1848), Parramatta Girls’ Training School and Hay Institution for Girls (1950–1974), we suggest that the practices used to govern women and girls can be read as attempts at humiliation—to degrade and denounce an individual’s entire subjectivity as being unworthy. We argue that while shame can be the basis for reintegration, humiliation leads to other responses, including at an individual level, reclaiming one’s status as being of worth, and at the level of social action through movements that reclaim group status and invert the direction of who has morally transgressed.
Highlights
This article examines how practices intended to humiliate have been used as instruments of state violence to govern women and girls in Australia
The impetus for this article was a key finding of the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (RCIRCSA 2014d: 294)1 that the most common barrier to the disclosure of sexual abuse by children in institutions was ‘shame and embarrassment’
It is possible to conclude from the work of Golding (2018), as well as reports of alleged sexual abuse by a superintendent of Mount Penang Training School for Boys, that sexual abuse of boys occurred in state institutions
Summary
The Girls’ Training School was established in Parramatta in a location that incorporated the old Female Factory, highlighting historical continuities between the two institutions This period is marked by important differences, with theories regarding the importance of adolescence as a critical stage of development, providing a ‘scientific’ rationale for authorities to intervene, control and police the behaviour of women and girls. The humiliating practices, during both periods, attempted to force the women and girls into a status and social role of unworthy and bad women, as evident in the practices of organising their lives through enforced routine and in those acts intended at punishing the girls We can conceptualise these practices as attempting to invoke an internalised state of feeling one has transgressed, associated with shame, and as acts of humiliation intended to degrade the entire person at whom the acts are directed. The section discusses how these dynamics were evidenced in the acts of resistance by the women and girls across the two historical periods
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