Representations of Gendered Mobility and the Tragic Border Regime in the Mediterranean

Abstract

The current media hype covering (undocumented) mobility to Europe produces powerful images. Global media, politicians, scientists, artists and activists take part in the production of the tragic border regime in the Mediterranean (Lampedusa) and the negotiation of the limits of European hospitality. In a first step, the article envisages the social imagination and its signifying processes staging mobile people as threat, victim or hero/liberator. These figures are related to discourses of security as well as to humanitarian or critical perspectives and are part of the political economy of the migration industry. As these figures are gendered, the representation of mobile women is addressed in a second step. Women are hardly depicted as a social threat or as political heroes/liberators. On the contrary, the entanglement of signifying processes of the social imagination brings forth the figure of mobile women as traumatized victim and/or as caring mother.

Notes

1. La Repubblica, 15 April 2015, foto Igor Petyx), <http://palermo.repubblica.it/cronaca/2015/04/15/foto/emergenza_sbarchi_due_navi_cariche_di_migranti_al_porto_di_palermo-111998895/1/?ref=HREC1-11#1> (accessed 2 April 2016).

2. I prefer the term mobility to migration. Migration has largely been seen as a unilinear movement from a sending to a host country and has been framed by rather mechanical concepts such as push-and-pull factors that are to confirm the theoretical model of the homo oeconomicus. Today’s transnational mobilities question such concepts. I hardly follow the juridical distinction between migrants and refugees/asylum seekers as well as they establish a hierarchy of mobilities and ultimately produce ‘illegality’—the term ‘economic migrant’ is even used in a denigrating way by populist discourse.

3. L. Wolfe, ‘The missing women of the Mediterranean refugee crisis’, WMC’s Women Under Siege, 2015 <http://www.womenundersiegeproject.org/blog/entry/missing-women-of-the-mediterranean-refugee-crisis> (accessed 2 May 2016).

4. Such a view corresponds to the separation of the private and the public sphere in political thought. Political thought is based on that division and the invisibility of care. For a brilliant and concise overview, see A. Loretoni , Amplificare lo sguardo. Genere e teoria politica [Amplifying Views: Gender and Political Theory], Donzelli editore, Roma, 2014, pp. 54–58.

5. Gian Carlo Blangiardo, Gender and Migration in Southern and Eastern Mediterranean and Sub-Saharan African Countries, Research Reports—Gender and Migration Series Demographic and Economic Module, 2012, CARIM-RR 2012/01, p. 5 <http://cadmus.eui.eu/bitstream/handle/1814/20834/CARIM_RR_2012_01.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y> (accessed 2 February 2016, emphasis mine).

6. See F. Bettio, A. Simonazzi and P. Villa, ‘Change in care regimes and female migration: the “care drain” in the Mediterranean’, Journal of European Social Policy, 16(3), 2006, pp. 271–285, doi: 10.1177/0958928706065598; M. Ambrosini, ‘Irregular but tolerated: unauthorized immigration, elderly care recipients, and invisible welfare’, Migration Studies, 3(2), 2014, pp. 199–216, doi: 10.1093/migration/mnu042.

7. C. Gilligan and C. Marley, ‘Migration and divisions: thoughts on (anti-)narrativity in visual representation of mobile people’, Forum Qualitative Social Research, 11(2), 2010 (art. 32), p. 2.

8. M. Foucault, Sicherheit, Territorium, Bevölkerung, Geschichte der Gouvernementalität I. Vorlesungen am Collège de France 1977–1978, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 2006 (published in English as Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2007).

9. C. Castoriadis, ‘The Greek Polis and the creation of democracy’, in The Castoriadis Reader, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 1997, p. 284.

10. Between 2000 and 2014 more than 30,000 people have been left to die at European borders: The Migrants Files <http://www.themigrantsfiles.com> (accessed 20 January 2016). Between 1 January and 29 October 2015 at least 3,329 died in the Mediterranean: IOM <https://www.iom.int/news/mediterranean-update-migrant-deaths-rise-3329-2015> (accessed 20 January 2016). We should not forget that freedom of movement within the space of Schengen goes hand in hand with the increasing surveillance of European external borders and a restrictive visa system for non-European citizens. The Schengen system is however increasingly challenged not least after Germany’s decision to allow the entry of asylum-seekers and Syrian refugees in 2015.

11. C. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, Polity, Cambridge, MA, 1987.

12. See H. Friese, ‘Spaces of hospitality’, in A. Benjamin and D. Vardoulakis (eds), Politics of Place, special issue of Angelaki. Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 9(2), 2004, pp. 67–79; H. Friese, ‘The limits of hospitality. Political philosophy, undocumented migration and the local arena’, in H. Friese and S. Mezzadra (eds), special issue of European Journal for Social Theory, 13(3), 2010, pp. 323–341; H. Friese, Grenzen der Gastfreundschaft. Die Bootsflüchtlinge von Lampedusa und die europäische Frage [The Limits of Hospitality. Lampedusa, Refugees and Europe], transcript, Bielefeld, 2014.

13. Y. Citton (ed.), L’économie de l’attention. Nouvel horizon du capitalisme?, La Découverte, Paris, 2014. (published in English as The Ecology of Attention, polity, Cambridge, 2016).

14. ‘Refugee crisis: following the tragic journey of Aylan Kurdi’s family from Syria to Kos. The death of Aylan al-Kurdi en route to the holiday island has made it a symbol of refugee misery’, The Independent, Saturday 5 September 2015 23:13 BST <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/refugee-crisis-following-the-tragic-journey-of-aylan-kurdis-family-from-syria-to-kos-10488358.html> (accessed 10 November 2015). Contemporary art—I’m referring to the rather disgusting fake of Ai Weiwei on the shores of Lesbos—is in line with this, it displays tragic misery, it seeks to transmit authenticity while it rests within the simulacrum of repetition.

15. For an elaboration of this relation, see J. Schaffer, Ambivalenzen der Sichtbarkeit. Über die visuellen Strukturen der Anerkennung [Ambivalences of Visibility. On the Visual Structures of Recognition], transcript, Bielefeld, 2008. See of course the seminal work of A. Honneth, Kampf um Anerkennung. Zur moralischen Grammatik sozialer Konflikte [The Struggle for Recognition. The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts], Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1994; and J. Butler, Excitable Speech. A Politics of the Performative, Routledge, New York, 1997.

16. L. Boltanski, Distant Suffering. Morality, Media and Politics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999.

17. Ibid., p. 33.

18. For a historical account of the development from humanitarian rights to human rights, see B. Cabanes, The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918–1924, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2014, pp. 300–313.

19. Chouliaraki looks at the ‘institutional, political and technological’ changes of communication and the modes by which humanitarian organizations represent distant suffering. Whereas once the appeal was to pietà and altruism, the ‘ethics of pietà’ has been substituted by an ‘ethics of irony’, ‘individualistic moral’ and ‘often narcissistic’ subjectivity and emotion. At the same time, ‘the encounter with vulnerability’ is part of its branding and the logic of the market. L. Chouliaraki, Lo spettatore ironico. La solidarietà nell’epoca del post-umanitarismo [The Ironic Spectator. Solidarity in the Era of Post-Humanitarism] (a cura di Pierluigi Musarò), Mimesis, Udine, 2014, pp. 24, 26.

20. Ibid., pp. 82–83.

21. It is not intended to engage the ‘“anti-trafficking” or “anti-anti-trafficking” position that at present limits most feminist debates on sex trafficking’. F. Laviosa (ed.), Visions of Struggle in Women’s Filmmaking in the Mediterranean, Palgrave, New York, 2010, p. xxx. For a global and policy-oriented overview, see L. Shelley, Human Trafficking: A Global Perspective, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010; L. Shelley, Human Smuggling and Trafficking into Europe. A Comparative Perspective, Migration Policy Institute, 2014 <http://www.migrationpolicy.org/research/human-smuggling-and-trafficking-europe-comparative-perspective> (accessed 2 April 2016); see A. Gallagher, ‘Human rights and the new UN protocols on trafficking and migrant smuggling: a preliminary analysis’, Human Rights Quarterly, 23, 2001, pp. 975‒1004.

22. Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri, ‘Dichiarazione dello stato di emergenza umanitaria nel territorio del Nord Africa per consentire un efficace contrasto all'eccezionale afflusso di cittadini extracomunitari nel territorio nazionale’, Gazzetta Ufficiale, 83, 11 April 2011 <http://www.protezionecivile.gov.it/jcms/it/view_prov.wp?toptab=2&contentId=LEG24032#top-content> (accessed 17 April 2016). Following suggestions of the Head of the Civil Protection and the Commissioner for the ‘emergency of immigration’, in January 2012, €300 million has been allocated to cope with the ‘humanitarian emergency due to the exceptional influx of Northern Africans to Italy’. ‘€101 m. are designated to fulfil the accords with Tunisia which have been stipulated in April 2011, €197,4 m. for necessary measures to cope with the emergency and finally €8 m. for allowance of police forces and the fire department which assure the public order.’ Lettera43, ‘Immigrazione, il governo ha stanziato 300 milioni. Fondi per l'emergenza umanitaria legata ai flussi dal Nord Africa’, Martedì, 10 January 2012 <http://www.lettera43.it/attualita/35997/immigrazione-il-governo-ha-stanziato-300-milioni.htm> (accessed 17 April 2016).

23. As the Italian Revenue Agency started to recover taxes for locals, in 2015 the major opted for yet another extension of the moratorium to, ‘help, sustain and compensate the economic damage incurred in 2011’ <https://www.facebook.com/GiusiNicoliniSindacoDiLampedusaELinosa/posts/710054335774656> (accessed 9 January 2015).

24. For an account of the (local) migration industry and clientelistic networks, see H. Friese, ‘Border economies. Lampedusa and the nascent migration industry’, in A. Mountz and L. Briskman (eds), Shima: The International Journal of Research Into Island Cultures, special issue on ‘Detention Islands’, 6(2), 2012, pp. 66–84. In late 2014, Italy was shaken by the scandal Mafia Capitale. A network of politicians and businessmen influenced public tenders covering services for migrants and Roma. The web of corrupt city hall officials, neo-fascist militants and mobsters included Salvatore Buzzi, who was jailed for murder in 1984. He was alleged to have been the ‘entrepreneurial right hand’ of Massimo Carminati, the top mobster and a former member of the NAR neo-fascist terrorist group. ‘His organisation is claimed to have bribed officials to win contracts, including for the management of migrant holding facilities and Roma camps. Evidence submitted by police in support of their application for warrants includes a wiretapped phone conversation in which one speaker is claimed to be 59-year-old Buzzi. “Do you know how much you earn from immigrants?” the speaker asks. “Drug trafficking earns less.” More than 100 other people have been formally placed under investigation, including Gianni Alemanno, the mayor of Rome from 2008 to 2013 and a former member of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI)’. J. Hooper, and R. Scammell, ‘Rome’s 29 June co-operative alleged to be base of mafia- style gang’, The Guardian, 7 December 2014 <http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/07/june-29-co-operative-italy-rome> (accessed 15 May 2015, emphasis mine). Connected to investigations regarding Mafia Capitale, relations between politicians and migration entrepreneurs in Sicily came under critical scrutiny. The largest camp in Europe for asylum seekers is the CARA in Mineo/Sicily. The mayor of Mineo, Anna Aloisio, member of the Ncd (Nuovo Centro Destra/New Centre-Right), the party of the minister of the interior Angelino Alfano, is head of the Consorzio calatino terra di accoglienza which runs the centre. A member of the consortium, the cooperative La Cascina which won a public tender worth €100 million, has been accused of corruption by investigators of Mafia Capitale because he had bribed the member of the commission with €10,000/month. Additionally, the undersecretary Giuseppe Castiglione (Ncd), Angelino Alfano’s right-hand man, had nominated Luca Odevaine, an associate of the abovementioned Salvatore Buzzi as consultant to the centre and as a member of the National Roundtable on Immigration. Odevaine confessed that he was ‘compensated’ by La Cascina: ‘They gave me €10,000/month as… let’s call it this way, “contribution”.’ La Repubblica, 3 December 2014 <http://palermo.repubblica.it/cronaca/2015/03/12/news/cara_di_min..._illegittima_otto_indagati_tra_cui_un_sottosegretario-109315938/> (accessed 15 March 2015).

25. See <http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=catastrophe> (accessed 18 October 2015).

26. A. Mountz, Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2010, p. xv.

27. Border management and technologies of gouvernementalité are to detect and contrast strategies of border-crossings before they even occur and to fix mobile people. The production of knowledge thus becomes a remunerative resource and a product to place on the highly competitive market. Statistics, screening, mapping and visualization have a long tradition in techniques of surveillance and policing. It is not by chance that the ICMPD hosts an interactive map—its fancy name is i-map—entailing visualizations of movement, routes, ‘hubs’ and ‘flows’. ‘Implementing partners’ on irregular and mixed migration are ‘Europol, Frontex, Interpol, UNHCR and UNODC, Migration and Development: IFAD, IOM’. Main donors are the European Commission and co-funding states <https://www.imap-migration.org/> (accessed 10 March 2017) (emphasis mine).

28. Save the Children <http://images.savethechildren.it/f/download/bilancio/20/2011_bilancio.pdf> (accessed 10 March 2017). p. 25. In 2005, the first project Praesiduum I (Potenziamento dell’accoglienza rispetto ai flussi migratori) was financed by the EU ARGO programme and has been constantly renewed since then. The project is a joint collaboration between the International Organization for Migration, the Italian Red Cross and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on Lampedusa (since April 2008 it has also involved Save the Children, which is in charge of taking care of unaccompanied minors). The aim of the projects is to ‘improve reception’ and services for unaccompanied minors. In 2008, the Ministry of the Interior requested €395,935 from the European Commission (ARGO). In order to promote ‘an increase in communication between immigrants and the Ministry of Interior’, to streamline procedures for the identification of migrants, and to reduce ‘clashes between different ethnic groups and between immigrants’, the Ministry requested another €371,827 (ARGO). In 2011 the annual budget of Save the Children included €52,348 for the ‘emergency Lampedusa’ (Save the Children <http://images.savethechildren.it/f/download/bilancio/20/2011_bilancio.pdf> (accessed 10 March 2017) p. 38).

29. For an account of the ‘humanitarian industry’, see Mesnard, who delineates a ‘doubled typology: the first one corresponds to the specific visibility of victims and the second regards both the visibility of the NGO and their own victims and the relations to rival organisations’. P. Mesnard, Attualità della vittima. La reppresentazione umanitaria della sofferenza [Actuality of the Victim. The Humanitarian Representation of Suffering], ombre corte, Verona, 2004, p. 17.

30. For an account of international cooperation in the EuroMed region, see the contributions in F. Ippolito and S. Trevisanut, Migration in the Mediterranean: Mechanisms of International Cooperation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2015.

31. G. Simmel, ‘Exkurs über den Fremden’, [Excursus on the Stranger] in O. Rammstedt (ed.), Soziologie. Untersuchung über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main [1908] 1992, p. 760; published in English in K. Wolff (ed. and trans.), The Sociology of Georg Simmel, Free Press, New York, 1950, pp. 402–408.

32. Foucault, Sicherheit, Territorium, Bevölkerung, op. cit., p. 291.

33. F. Falk, ‘Invasion, infection, invisibility: an iconology of illegalized immigration’, in C. Bischoff, F. Falk and S. Kafehsy (eds), Images of Illegalized Immigration. Towards a Critical Iconology of Politics, transcript, Bielefeld, 2010, pp. 89, 90.

34. H. Arendt, On Revolution, Penguin, London, 1963, p. 75.

35. L. Chouliaraki, Lo spettatore ironico. La solidarietà nell’epoca del post-umanitarismo [The Ironic Spectator. Solidarity in the Age of Post-Humanitarism] (a cura di P. Musarò), Mimesis, Udine, 2014.

36. L. Boltanski, La souffrance à distance. Morale humanitaire, médias et politique, Métailié, Paris, 1993, p. 10 (published in English as Distant Suffering, op. cit.).

37. ‘Refugee struggle for freedom’ <http://refugeestruggle.org/en/solidarity/lampedusa-everywhere> (accessed 24 October 2015, emphasis mine).

38. M. Foucault, ‘Pouvoirs et stratégies’, [Powers and Strategies] in Dits et écrits, 1970–1975, Vol. II, D. Defert and F. Ewald (eds), Gallimard, Paris, 1994, p. 425.

39. A. Mangano, Gli africani salveranno l’Italia [The Africans Will Save Italy], BUR, Milano, 2010, p. 135 (emphasis mine).

40. B. Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2001, p. 21.

41. Ibid., pp. 15–41.

42. D. Giglioli, Critica della vittima [Critique of the Victim], nottetempo, Roma, 2014, p. 9.

43. Boltanski, La souffrance à distance, op. cit., p. 10.

44. Falk, op. cit., p. 86.

45. R. Vijeyarasa, Sex, Slavery and the Trafficked Woman: Myths and Misconceptions about Trafficking and Its Victims, Ashgate, Farnham, 2015, p. 38.

46. R. Bishop, C. V. Morgan and L. Erickson, ‘Public awareness of human trafficking in Europe: how concerned are European citizens?’, Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, 11 (2), 2013, p. 115, doi: 10.1080/15562948.2013.759047.

47. Ibid.

48. For a discussion of the sometimes rather moralistic ‘rescue industry’, the role of media and NGOs, see Vijeyarasa, op. cit., pp. 31–39. The ‘various categories analyzed … (feminist academics, governments NGOs and related groups involved in raids and rescue, the UN, inter-governmental organization, donors and the media) identify, promote and amplify the attention given to various “causes” assumed to link with human trafficking, the moral panic of governments towards sex work and the demands from abolitionists for the criminalization of prostitution endorse the idea that prostitution and the underlying problem of gender equality are to blame for trafficking’ (ibid., 39).

49. Images of the stranger as victim recall an inheritance situating the guest between friend and foe (hostis/hospes), on one hand. On the other hand, they recall the closeness of the stranger to the divine and sacrifice. In this context, yet another field of signification is opened, as the relationship between sacrifice and the scapegoat points towards the relations between the community, the divine gods, the stranger and the victim: hostia (sacrifice, sacrificial offering) signifies, ‘in contrast to victima’, a sacrifice that had to ‘calm the anger of the gods’, as Bahr notes, ‘hostia’ is an atonement and offering for their non-aggression. H.-D. Bahr, Die Sprache des Gastes: Eine Metaethik [The Language of the Guest. A Meta-Ethic], Reclam, Leipzig, 1994, pp. 27–28. Christian iconography takes up the relations between the stranger and the holy.

50. Focusing on Giovanni Bellini’s pietà and the photo of a Somali refugee arriving on Lampedusa, Fancesca Falk elaborates on the centrality of Christian iconography for the representation of migrants. Falk, op. cit., pp. 89–90.

51. S. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, Picador, New York, 2003, p. 56 <http://monoskop.org/images/a/a6/Sontag_Susan_2003_Regarding_the_Pain_of_Others.pdf> (accessed 30 December 2014).

52. Save the Children, Bilancio al 31 Dicembre 2011, p. 38 <http://images.savethechildren.it/f/download/bilancio/20/2011_bilancio.pdf> (accessed 4 October 2012).

53. ‘Terre des Hommes torna a Lampedusa per offrire un supporto psicologico e psicosociale ai minori migranti e alle famiglie con bambini’, 2013 <http://terredeshommes.it/comunicati/terre-des-hommes-torna-a-lampe...co-e-psicosociale-ai-minori-migranti-e-alle-famiglie-con-bambini/> (accessed 1 March 2014).

54. ‘C&A per i diritti die bambini migranti con Terre des Hommes’, 2013 <http://terredeshommes.it/aziende-case-history/ca-per-i-diritti-dei-bambini-migranti-con-terre-des-hommes/> (accessed 27 February 2014).

55. S. Kafehsy, ‘Images of victims in trafficking in women. The Euro 08 campaign against trafficking in women in Switzerland’, in Bischoff, Falk and Kafehsy (eds), Images of Illegalized Immigration, op. cit., p. 76.

56. Ibid.

57. R. Salecl, On Anxiety. Thinking in Action, Routledge, London, 2004, p. 15.

58. In this sense, public outcry after the events in Cologne on New Year’s Eve 2016 can be read as a reaction against the assault on the body of the nation, symbolized by the female body.

59. C. Castoriadis, quoted in J.-A. Mbembé, ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture, 15(1), 2003, p. 13.

60. Butler, op. cit.