Paper short abstract:

This paper explores gendered voluntarism in humanitarian aid. Using examples from a predominantly female volunteer group supporting people seeking asylum in Melbourne, it considers the potential of "domestic arts" as a form of "imaginative politics" against the Australian state's deterrence policy.

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers gendered socialities and materialities of voluntarism in humanitarian aid provision. Examples are drawn from 16 months' doctoral fieldwork with a predominantly female volunteer organisation supporting people seeking asylum in Melbourne. Gendered material practices invoking the "domestic arts" and the home or "private sphere" include delivering furniture, sewing blankets and curtains, providing linen and children's clothes, cultivating plants for gardens, and fundraising activities such as bake sales and garage sales that draw on tropes of domestic harmony. Such practices of domestic arts involve material processes of re-enchantment to rid secondhand objects of the shame and stigma with which people seeking asylum associate them; and new forms of sociality among a caring community of women. The paper makes two main points: that the invisible labour such volunteering entails inadvertently reproduces the unacknowledged quality of traditionally feminised care work in the private sphere of the home; and that gendered domestic arts have the effect of "domesticating" people seeking asylum into the national space, making the stranger familiar. This is undertaken in a hostile national climate where people seeking asylum are positioned by the state as a foreign threat. I ask whether gendered dimensions of volunteering could here be a means to counter a masculinised, militarised state response. In doing so I engage with Liisa Malkki's (2015) argument that the domestic arts are not merely trivial and ineffectual, but can do powerful symbolic work as a form of "imaginative politics" that may effect social and political change.