By Quah Ee Ling

Featuring stories of early settler and contemporary Asian migrant women in Asia-Pacific region, Fire Dragon Feminism discusses Asian migrant women’s encounters with coloniality and racial capitalism at their workplace and in their everyday life. Centring anti-colonial, anti-racist feminist philosophies and strategies, this open access book introduces 'fire dragon feminism' - a migrant feminist strand that aims to blow flames at colonial, racial capitalist and neoliberal structures and build solidarities for more just and sustainable futures. Based on in-depth interviews with 40 Asian migrant employees in Australian universities, the book examines how Asian migrant women are implicated and complicit in white race-making projects while being subjected to racialisation and marginalisation simultaneously. Fire Dragon Feminism presents a historicised and sociological discussion of the contradictions, trade-offs, complicities and refusals in the Asian migrant women’s tales of migration, coloniality and racial capitalism. The author ends the book with a celebration of anti-colonial, anti-racist grassroots feminist activisms.

London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025. 

By DIANE BELL

Synopsis-Here I revisit three contentious issues: intraracial rape, feminist theorising around race and gender, and the problematics of cross-cultural collaboration (see Bell & Nelson, 1989). I begin by examining the modes of analysis of abuse of Aboriginal women as revealed in recent reports, and offer comparative case material from North America. With particular reference to the shifting bases of my relationship to Topsy Napurrula Nelson, I trace a personal, partial, and hidden history of an idea, that is, a more empowering feminist future may be envisaged by grounding our theorising on questions of gender, race and violence in the possibility of relationality. I suggest that the propensity to engage in social construct boundary maintenance is obscuring the fact that it is women who are being brutalised. With reference to the handling of violence against women by the courts and by “communities,” I argue cross-cultural collaborations and enunciation of women’s law can empower women. Forging a sustainable vision of a meaningful future in the current crisis requires that the needs of woman be addressed; that in pursuit of the politics of difference we not lose sight of questions of power; that the politics of law, the nation state, the academy, and Aboriginal liberation struggles that shape the “master narratives,” are interrogated from within and from “elsewhere.”

Pergamon Press, 1999, 28p.