Intimate borders: refugee im/mobility in Australia’s border security regime

© 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This article contends that the rhetoric and logics of intimacy in Australia’s border security regime are central to dividing desirable from undesirable mobility, by distinguishing ‘deserving’ from ‘undeserving’ refugees in a politics of differential compassion. Insofar as intimacy is tied to senses of closeness and identification as well as ideas of morality and love, it is deployed by anti-refugee and pro-refugee advocates to cultivate certain affects (antipathy or sympathy, feelings of distance or belonging) by appealing to notions of strangeness vs commonality, victims versus perpetrators, moral similitude versus moral incompatibility, and corresponding values versus incommensurable ones. Focusing on the discourse surrounding the Asia-Australian border security regime that incarcerates refugees arriving by boat in offshore ‘processing centres’, this article demonstrates that sensationalist and sentimentalist portrayals of refugees as sexual perpetrators or sexual victims in media, government and political discourse work in tandem with a politics of differential compassion, privileging some refugees over others. It also traces how intimacy can generate alternative bordering practices by mobilizing feminine moral authority in networks of care to generate meaningful and material relationships with refugees that sometimes serve as the ground for a more transformative solidarity.