AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

This paper is a philosophical examination of two narratives devised to invite social change (‘storyworks’; Archibald 2008). The first recounts key episodes of the life of Helen Vai’i Gorogo, a Doura woman from Papua New Guinea who experienced forced marriage and domestic violence before achieving community leadership. The second retraces Bhanu Bhatia and her sister-in-law’s shared exile from India to Australia. According to an interpretation derived from liberal feminism, both narratives depict how gender, kinship, and neoliberalism can conspire to reinforce patriarchal structures that exclude girls and women from the networks of social power. However, drawing on works published by Archibald (2008), Simpson (2017), Moreton-Robinson (2000, 2015), Shiva and Mies (2014), and Sreekumar (2022), we deploy autoethnographic and Indigenous epistemologies that challenge the reductionism of the liberal-feminist interpretation. The paper critiques liberal (non-Indigenous) feminism for (i) its inability to account for the moral and emotional creativity of the protagonists and (ii) its own historical complicity with colonialism. In centring philosophical examination on lived experiences, the paper highlights storywork as a transformative philosophical methodology for reimagining justice and belonging in the struggle experienced by Indigenous and non-Western women.