Your Cart

• Log in

• Related Products
• Parent
  • • International Journal of Diversity in Organizations, Communities and Nations
• Associated
  • • A Study on Coping Strategies Employed by Successful Women in Malaysia
  • • Reality from Rhetoric
  • • Multicultural Education
  • • The Diversity in the University
  • • Dancing between Integration and Exclusion
  • • Rethinking the Diversity Paradigm
  • • Reflexive Modernisation, Existential Anxiety and Sense of Identity
  • • Designing for Learner and Learning Diversity
  • • The Exploration of Greek Pupils’ Representations about their Immigrant Peers
  • • Diversity Reconsidered
  • More →

From Mail Order Bride to Terrorist Strategy: How Portrayals of Indonesian Australian Marriages Affect Identity and Belonging

By Monika Swasti Winarnita Doxey.

Published by The Diversity Collection

This paper is based on current ongoing ethnographic PhD research looking at transnational families residing mainly in Australia, where one spouse is Indonesian and the other Australian. Their highly mobile transnational engagement potentially complicates boundaries of national identity belonging within the social site of the family and their local communities. A key exploration is their expression of identity within contested sites of diversity: ethnicity/race, religion, gender roles and nationalism. The paper describes narratives of the families’ negotiation of their ‘well-being’ in the face of orientalist and religious stereotypes as well as regional political uncertainty within and between neighbouring Indonesia and Australia. Depictions in popular mass media of the Australian accused terrorist Jack Thomas with a ‘mail order bride’ marriage situation to an Indonesian woman with presumed Indonesian terrorist cell links, is a prime example of the heightened fear that affects the Indonesian-Australian family. Thus, a degree of insecurity and ambivalence to their subjectivity has also been central in the families’ expression of home, identity and belonging in both countries.

International Journal of Diversity in Organizations, Communities and Nations, Volume 7, Issue 4, pp.209-216. Article: Print (Spiral Bound). Article: Electronic (PDF File; 513.872KB).

Monika Swasti Winarnita Doxey

PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia