Faces sailing by: ‘Junk theory’ and racialized bodies in the Sutherland Shire

This article explores how the arts-for-social change company, Big hART, responded to the Cronulla riots in Western Sydney, Australia. The riots were instigated on 4 December 2005 following an altercation between three Anglo-Australian lifeguards and a group of men identified as being of Lebanese background. Big hART’s creative response, ‘Junk Theory’, involved the collaboration of youth from diverse cultural groups in the Sutherland Shire and resulted in a moving-media installation that projected digital stories onto the sails of a junk boat. With its message, ‘It’s harder to hurt someone when you know their story’, the work raises important questions regarding diversity, social cohesion and the corporeal force of community-based art. My critique of this work is the starting point for my interest in the material - and often subtle - ways that racialized bodies come to be produced through multiculturalism discourse. I want to add to the contemporary scholarship account of a tension between theoretical/political multiculturalism and its everyday engagements, by utilizing Judith Butler’s theory of performativity to examine the multicultural body in both public and creative space. The article uses performativity to consider how it is that certain bodies came to be seen as beyond the limits of not only the Cronulla beach, but humanness itself. It then considers how the same theory makes way for slippages, which, if harnessed, may be used to deconstruct the racialized body in everyday art forms.