Resistance, reclamation and repair: the Parragirls feminist archive and reparative media practices in the wake of institutional harm and media damage

Abstract

This paper engages with the creative strategies and media interventions of the Parragirls—a lose collective of women subject to punitive confinement and abuse as children in out-of-home “care” at the former Parramatta Girls Home—as a feminist archive of collective resistance, reclamation, and repair in the wake of institutional harm and media damage. We consider the Parragirls feminist archive in the context of a larger project analysing the role of media, journalism, and media activism in the ground-breaking Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2013–17) (RCIRCSA). Drawing on Couldry’s theorisation of “media as practice,” we foreground the ways Parragirls have responded to media injustice and media damage. We analyse a range of Parragirls practices and interventions which, taken together, complicate one of key media narratives which emerged during the RCIRCSA public hearings about abuses at Parramatta Girls, namely that “providing evidence, while traumatic can be beneficial and worthwhile.” Our paper thus contributes to critical scholarship on news values as racialised, classed, and gendered hierarchies of attention, and to feminist media scholarship that highlights resistant and transformative alternative visions for media practice. We ask: how might we imagine, or work towards a more reparative media?.