ABSTRACT
Having acknowledged the ‘diffi culties of dealing with difference’ (Ang 1995, 59) in Chapter 1, including the methodological and epistemological dilemmas such a research focus raises, in this chapter we address the ethics of naming and acquiring knowledge about ‘the other’ much more overtly than in the rest of this book. In particular, we examine our own positionality as white Australian feminist academics, drawing on the lens of critical whiteness studies and more specifi cally on the work of Australian Indigenous feminist scholars.1 These scholars contend that the dispossession of Indigenous people from their land has afforded white women, and white feminist women, power; power that is largely omniscient and invisible across white Australia (Behrendt 2005; Huggins 2002; Moreton-Robinson 2000a, b). One way in which white feminists have deployed this power has been via research, as they have ‘interviewed, questioned, observed, followed, interpreted, analyzed and written about’ Indigenous people (Fredericks 2008, 114). Here we address the criticisms Indigenous scholars have raised about such research and outline our own attempt to undertake research about gender, Indigeneity, and rurality. Central to the latter has been a collaboration with Bebe Ramzan, an Indigenous Australian woman living in the remote Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands (APY Lands) bordering South Australia (see Figure 2.1). Bebe provides the opportunity for us to listen to her experiences and perceptions of being an Indigenous woman living in rural Australia. We use the verb ‘listening’ deliberately as it is consistent with our aim to ‘converse’ with Bebe and privilege her authority and knowledge as the subject rather than object of research (Watson and Huntington 2008). Consequently, unlike other chapters in this book, which are structured upon analyses between rural scholarship, social theories, and narrative to provide a context for annunciating and examining intersections between gender and rurality, this chapter draws on Bebe’s experiences of the rural to shape and structure predominant themes.
