Borders of emptiness: gender, migration and belonging

Abstract

This article argues that we need to consider the question of ‘who belongs’ in terms of individuals' construction as market actors, workers and migrants as well as citizens. Using Hegel's theory of civil society, and Charles Mills' critique of the social contract, it argues for the significance of the process of self-government and the construction of a ‘hard inside’ for understanding migration and its relationship to embodiment, labour and belonging. This approach can take us beyond the distributional framework of the territorial state, and the assumption of stable membership, to interrogate the boundary-setting aspects of the political and the meanings of interdependence and vulnerability.

Keywords::

• borders
• good migrant
• migration
• gender
• employment
• subjectivity

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Bridget Anderson for the invitations to give the papers that form the basis of this article, to Julia O'Connell Davidson for helping me to think about migration, to the University of Leicester for the study leave that enabled me to write this paper, and to the anonymous reviewers for Citizenship Studies for their insightful comments on an earlier draft.

Notes

^1. Hegel rejects the idea that sexual differences are natural, but he considers monogamy and the separation of spheres to be rational and normatively right and an expression of male superiority over the female.