Being a ‘wog’ in Melbourne – young people's self-fashioning through discourses of racism

The Greek community in Melbourne, Australia, is large and has a long history in the city. It is diverse and associated with a range of cultural, social and political structures. It has strong transnational links and in many ways exemplifies ‘diasporic’ in contradistinction to ‘migrant’. This paper focuses on young people from this community, particularly those who attend schools established to promote Greek language and cultural maintenance. In this paper, we examine such students’ explorations of their cultural identifications, most specifically how they adopt the term ‘wog’. This term is complex and its place in Australian discourse has shifted over time. Tracking these shifts and considering them as a context for these young people's use of the term allows us to consider the processes involved in their self-fashioning. We argue that their uptake of ‘wog’ involves the deployment of irony, given their awareness of its strong association with racism. We are also interested in the potential for women's experience to be silenced through the common association between ‘wog’ and protest masculinities. We argue that these students’ use of the term illustrates self-fashioning that provides insights into the complexities that surround cultural identification at the micro level, including schooling, but also in the broader context of globalisation.

Copyright 2009 Taylor & Francis