“Mothering practices in times of legal precarity: activism, care, and resistance in displacement”

ABSTRACT

This introduction studies the experiences of racialized migrant women by focusing on three analytical dimensions: mothering, including care work and reproduction; legal precarity caused by the encounter with migration and border regimes; and gendered racialization. It argues that by applying the lens of motherhood to the study of migration and forced displacement, different perspectives and insights emerge on women's decision-making processes and strategies. These perspectives emphasize how the overlap of migration experiences, legal precarity, and gendered racialization within global asylum and border regimes reconfigure women’s relations with their children, kin ties, sense of personhood, intimacies, and belonging. Ultimately, this introduction suggests that the study of the triangular interconnection of motherhood, legal precarity and gendered racialization sheds light on various scales and spheres: from perspectives on emotional and psychological challenges to everyday realities, from the intimate to the public sphere, including both larger structural processes and individualized experiences.

KEYWORDS:

• Motherhood
• forced displacement
• gendered racialization
• legal precarity
• belonging
• resistance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 We would like to thank the participants in the online workshop “Mothering Practices in Times of Legal Precarity” (2020) which was supported by the Max-Planck-Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, Germany. We are thankful to Professor Dr Dr h.c. Steven Vertovec’s guidance and support and we owe deep gratitude to Professor Dr Bridget Anderson and Professor Dr Vanessa Grotti for their invaluable feedback to the workshop papers. Professor Dr Umut Erel, Professor Dr Pamela Feldmann-Savelsberg, Dr Elisa Lanari and Dr Inka Stock read earlier versions of this introduction and gave very insightful comments. We are deeply indebted to all of them for the time, energy and thought they invested in this project. We would also like to thank Dr Maayan Ravid for her thorough reading of the article. Finally, we would like to thank ERS managing editor Amanda Eastell-Bleakley for her immense support in the editing and publication process of this Special Issue.

2 The articles in this Special Issue center on empirical data that documents the experiences of migrants who self-identify as women. Contributors are aware that this does not imply that these experiences also speak to or represent those of people who identify as trans or non-binary, and that this has to be taken into consideration when theorizing gendered experiences of legal precarity.

3 The contributions to this Special Issue deal with women who have child-caring responsibilities. All the women at the center of analysis are related to the children they care for: they either birthed them or, in the case of Balakian’s article, are consanguinely related. Contributors are aware that there are a variety of mothering experiences that are not based on and develop around blood relations.

4 Despite our focus on forced movement, we acknowledge that forms of displacement are not reducible to enforced mobility (see Cabot and Ramsay 2021).