A Chat About Aboriginal Feminism, Political Activism And Getting Facebook-Banned With Celeste Liddle

Celeste Liddle is worn out when she sits down for our interview – and who can blame her? The constantly busy Arrernte feminist, unionist, writer, social commentator and agitator has just finished her keynote address to a packed audience at the Queen Victoria Women’s Centre for International Women’s Day.

But the second we began talking after her address wraps up, her weariness was gone. “I think that the unionist side of me sees completely that it’s a day of struggle,” she says leaning forward in her chair, eyes bright. “It’s a day of highlighting that struggle and protesting and being staunch.”

Liddle explains that the day, originally called International Working Women’s Day, has origins as a protest for exploited garment workers. “International Women’s Day is about the fundamental struggle for women’s rights. You don’t get much further down the social rungs than women who worked to produce women’s clothing 100 odd years ago in factories,” she quips.

“So International Women’s Day is very much about taking a stand, it’s about pushing for change. It’s about trying to make a better world for women in all sorts of situations.”

–

Social Media’s Sidelining Of Aboriginal Voices

Liddle is an incredibly hard-working social commentator. She started her blog, Rantings of an Aboriginal Feminist, in 2012, and since then she’s been fairly busy, writing for likes of Fairfax’s Daily Life and the Guardian. “I started it as an anti-media space because I very much interpret the media as preferencing the voices of the most privileged in society,” she explains.

She never expected the blog to take off, except perhaps among other “Aboriginal lefty feminists”. In her keynote address, she cracks: “The title of it was a complete joke: me owning the angry black woman trope in my own little section of the anti-media in the hope that I’d scare off those who usually hung around the traditional media: privileged white dudes.”

I ask if she feels any pressure as one of few Aboriginal women in Australia with a platform to speak out. “There is, there is. There’s a lot of pressure and one of the biggest things I advocate is that I am an insanely left-wing Indigenous feminist voice, and that’s important, but so is having Indigenous conservative voices, right-wing voices. We’ve got to have a lot more women’s voices.

“People will put the pressure on to say, ‘What do Aboriginal women think of that?’ and I’m just sort of: ‘Well, this is how I interpret it and I am an Aboriginal woman, but I don’t expect other Aboriginal women to agree with me’.”

Indeed, Liddle has had a spotlight in the media over a polarising issue: constitutional recognition versus treaty. Liddle is critical of the Recognise campaign, and of plans for constitutional recognition, because she believes it will block the way for Aboriginal people to negotiate sovereignty and treaty rights.

“On one hand you’ve got radicals like me who are pushing for one thing, and then you’ve got more moderate voices who are pushing for another thing. But they’re denied that voice.”

She leans back in her chair, thinking. “I think that Australia needs to engage a lot more in our discussions because that’s what’s being continually sidelined, over and over again.”

Liddle has a lot to say about being sidelined in the media. In her speech she described how her Facebook page, with over 12,500 followers, was shut down four times in a row when trolls reported a video she had posted (a trailer for the ABC’s 8MMM) because it featured topless desert women painted up for ceremony and engaging in traditional dance. This was deemed “indecent” and in violation of Facebook’s “no-nudity” clause.

Then, when Liddle published a transcript of her International Women’s Day keynote, which included a still photo of the 8MMM video, she was locked out of Facebook again – a cruel irony.

Still, Liddle can see the power of her social media platform. “Social media is incredibly important to Indigenous people,” she explains. “It allows us to actually connect over the vast distances and share information. It’s very important to the feminist movement as well. Feminists grabbed and ran with social media because it was a space that white dudes did not own.”

This makes us both chuckle. “Without social media nowadays, the likes of me probably wouldn’t have a voice.”

My 24hr ban from @facebook for posting “nudity” (aka Aboriginal women engaged in traditional ceremony) is still in effect. I’m rather amused

— Celeste Liddle (@Utopiana) March 10, 2016

–

The Problem With ‘Equality’

As a prominent Aboriginal feminist, Liddle has also become something of a poster-woman for intersectional thought. In her speech, she jokes that the first time someone labelled her as “intersectional”, she had to look it up.

“It’s fascinating,” she says, “because I don’t mean to be intersectional but purely because of the place I occupy in society I am. I don’t know any other way to be.”

We talk about her appearance at the 2015 All About Women festival where, on a panel called ‘How To Be A Feminist’, she advocated for liberation over equality in feminism.

“I often see – and many feminists, many Indigenous activists have highlighted this before me – that the idea of equality is an idea of assimilation,” Liddle explains in her characteristic steady way.

“When I think equality I think of things like equal access, equal space, and to have equal access or equal space means that you accept the systems of privilege as they currently exist. So to do that you’ve got to conform in certain ways, you’ve got to be a woman who operates in a very similar way that men do. Same with anything black: you’ve got to be a black person who will adequately assimilate into white. And that to me is not the way forward.”

The narrative of equality has some very personal connotations for Liddle. “I do think that the dialogues around equality are really just dialogues around assimilation and fitting in. And as someone who has had a lot of trouble fitting in her entire life, I’m not particularly interested in them.”

Liddle is a staunch feminist, but she also understands the need to unpack the movement and to self-correct when it gets off course. I ask her about her feelings on “choice feminism” and the movement among some women for individual empowerment.

She smiles dryly. “I think the minute we start looking at feminism from an individual empowerment perspective as opposed to a broader social movement, we start to take away the essence of what it is.

“As women we are bonded to all other women on this planet, and whilst our struggles might not be the same as women in China, or women in India, or women in the Middle East, or anywhere else in the world, there are similarities because of that gender perspective.

“That gendered oppression that affects us all in various ways is our bond. And when people talk about individual empowerment they actually erase that bond because they’re talking about how they manage to succeed within the system that still ends up putting other women on the back foot.”

–

Lifting Up Young Voices

Liddle is committed to using her platform to make space for other Aboriginal people – especially young Aboriginal voices – to speak out. “Our younger voices are politicised from a young age,” she says.

In her keynote speech she shared memories of protesting the opening of the new parliament building in Canberra in 1988, and the excitement of being allowed to chant: “Land rights now, bicentennial bullshit!”

“It doesn’t seem to matter how young our activists are, they tend to have a head around the issues and they need to be engaged. They need to not be wasted, in a way, because as a society we continually seem to think that middle-aged white men are an authority.

“An Aboriginal young person who has had to live the struggle their entire life is an authority. So we do need to centralise these voices and spread it around a little bit.”

Liddle is a powerful speaker and a deep thinker. Sitting listening to her talk about so many complex issues with so much clarity, I feel compelled to ask: “Do you ever consider moving into the political space beyond what you do now as a writer and unionist?”

She laughs, hard. “No, no,” she says, “I’m an agitator. I think that my role is more to push and to challenge.”

She thinks for a moment, then clarifies: “I don’t actually see politics as a healthy social justice place. I see it as a toxic environment and I think that what we’ve seen over and over again in politics is people with incredible ideals having to tow party lines and negotiate their way out of it. I don’t think I could compromise like that – I’m not that kind of person.”

–

Matilda Dixon-Smith is a freelance writer, editor and theatre-maker, and a card-carrying feminist. She also tweets intermittently and with very little skill from @mdixonsmith.

Feature image by Cecilia Winterfox.