Naked protest: the maternal politics of citizenship and revolt

Abstract

This article explores immigrant protest, citizenship and their relationship, through an account of a ‘naked protest’ by a group of mothers, refused asylum seekers and ‘illegal immigrants’ at Yarl's Wood immigration removal centre in England and ends with an account of the use of the ‘naked curse’ in a protest by an indigenous group of mothers against global oil corporations in the Niger Delta. Woven together from activist materials, news reports, interviews, documentaries and historical data, I recount and mobilise these protests to think about ‘the scaling of bodies’ (Marion-Young 1990) and citizenship under neoliberalism, and the routes through which motherhood is mobilised as a site of political agency and resistance to processes of disenfranchisement. I argue that these maternal protests challenge the ‘catastrophic functionalism’ of Agamben-inspired accounts of ‘bare life’, and offer an alternative lens through which to perceive the ethical and political claims made by abject populations (Papadopoulos et al. 2008, p. 198). In thinking through and with these naked protests, this article reframes the sexual politics of citizenship and brings questions of maternity and natality to bear on citizenship studies.

Keywords:

• bare life
• asylum
• birth
• resistance
• gender
• detention

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the women who gave up time to be interviewed, especially ‘Jane’ and Rose McCarthy (Cities for Sanctuary). Thanks to Bruce Bennett, Katarzyna Marciniak, Alison Mountz, the anonymous reviewers and the journal editors for their critical and engaged feedback on drafts of this article. I also gratefully acknowledge the support of a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship and an Economic and Social Research Council Small Grant (RES-000-22-3928-A: Making asylum seekers legible and visible).

Notes

1. Iris Marion Young (1990) introduces the notion of ‘scaling’ to trouble universalist discourses of equality and justice. I am developing her work here as a means of theorising the ways in which citizenship is increasingly ‘scaled’ along classed, gendered and ethnic lines. In my forthcoming book, Revolting Subjects (Zed) I engage with these ideas in depth.

2. An extensive body of research about detained and refused asylum seekers in the UK has been undertaken and collated by activist, charitable and humanitarian organisations. This body of research, particularly as it pertains to the detention of mothers and children, has been an important source of background research for this article.

3. According to Turner and Brownhill (2004) the protestors were mothers and grandmothers whose age ranged from 30 to 90.

4. See G. Ugo Nwojeki's (2007) report on the history of the NNPC.