Cirrus@Austlit

'As an immigrant who came to this country from rural Punjab at the age of ten, I have never quite understood the need to feel Australian. I wince at the assimilationist rhetoric of this settler-colony. I am at home in my language – its untranslatability delights me – which gives weight to my being in the world. My mentor, the anthropologist Kalpana Ram, once recalled saying to the radical feminists at the University of Sydney in the 70s, ‘going home feels like taking off a tight shoe, it’s the only place where I can speak my own language, eat my own food.’ Ram’s words made me wonder, what would the abolition of the nuclear family mean for us women of colour? Those of us who find refuge only in those heterosexual spaces of reproduction. I have always been suspicious of liberal white feminism and its appropriation of the language of intersectionality, with its myriad challenges to the linear teleology of equality that posits a project with a culmination – a tidy ending.' (Introduction)