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'In this essay we make use of one example of the security police file - the Queensland Police Special Branch file of the Australian socialist-feminist activist and English literature academic, Carol Ferrier - to explore just how security agencies tried to understand and record the life of a socialist-feminist in the 1970s and 1980s. That is, what did they make of this radically new form of politics and political subjectivity? In this article we position the secret police dossier as a form of political biography, and hence expand the forms and subject matter typically included within the genre. We argue that not only can the Special Branch file be read as a form of biography of Carole Ferrier, but also as an unwitting autobiographical text of the Special Branch.'
Notes
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Epigraph: The ideal point of penality today would be an indefinite discipline; an interrogation without end, an investigation that would be extended without limit to a meticulous and ever more analytical observation, a judgement that would at the same time be the constitution of a file that was never closed...
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish : The Birth of Prison 227
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Last amended 31 May 2012 15:16:14
349-367
Memoirs of Our Nervous Illness : The Queensland Police Special Branch Files of Carole Ferrier as Political Auto/Biography
Life Writing
Life Writing
Subjects:
- Queensland,
- ca. 1970
- ca. 1980
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