ABSTRACT
The feminist Barrie Thorne adapted the idea to ‘borderwork’ in gender relations, where she found that contact between girls and boys can also go either way, reducing a sense of gender difference or reinforcing it. Borderwork in the Tampa crisis was as complex as the border concerned was made to seem simple, and was fed by crises at many different levels. Australian citizens and politicians alike need to learn lessons about borderwork, and the value of permeable boundaries and fuzzy categories. In the wake of the Tampa affair, there were many signs of a reaction against the detention policies. It is easy to minimise the importance of these compared with the high profile of the policies themselves. They can be dismissed as the unrealistic sentimentality of a few middle-class ‘bleeding hearts’, politically irrelevant to any mainstream definition of Australia. But people’s attitudes were challenged by the bureaucratic brutality, which made them feel uncomfortable.
