Postnational acts of citizenship: how an anti-border politics is shaping feminist spaces of service provision in Toronto, Canada

ABSTRACT

Postnationalism has seen a modest resurgence in recent years as both a theory of citizenship and as a set of claims frequently articulated by anti-border movements. Yet the implications of postnationalism for feminist politics remain relatively under-theorized. Using interviews with feminist advocates in Toronto, Canada, this research examines how postnational challenges to state power are being mobilized in spaces of service provision addressing gender-based violence. I show how, for some advocates, a postnational politics deeply informed their critiques of state borders and restrictive immigration controls as fundamental sources of gendered and racialized violence. However, postnational approaches were also limited in offering few concrete alternatives to state protection from domestic or interpersonal violence, particularly for women with precarious immigration status. Significantly, it was through advocates’ everyday practices of service provision that they blueprinted an alternative feminist ethics of solidarity. I argue that these practices constitute postnational acts of citizenship, in so far as they attempt – albeit imperfectly – to de-border institutional spaces from within.

KEYWORDS:

• Postnationalism
• citizenship
• violence against women
• immigration
• illegality

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the research participants who so graciously shared their insights and knowledge with me. I also gratefully acknowledge comments from the editors and anonymous reviewers, as well as from Anna C. Korteweg, Patricia Landolt, Judith Taylor, Tanya Basok, Hae Yeon Choo, Emine Fidan Elcioglu, and Paulina García-Del Moral. With sincere thanks to the workshop participants at Carleton University and the University of Toronto who also provided generative feedback on this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Salina Abji is a postdoctoral fellow at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, where she is conducting SSHRC-funded research on immigration detention. She completed her PhD in Sociology at the University of Toronto in June 2017.

Notes

1 In making this argument, I am cognizant of the important work of feminist abolitionist and anti-state organizing against gendered and racialized violence, including substantial efforts by Incite! and other grass-roots activists to support survivors outside of the “non-profit industrial complex” (2007; see also Davis 2012; Walia 2013).

2 In line with postnational scholars, I draw a sharp analytical distinction between postnational and transnational approaches with respect to the nation-state. However, that is not to suggest that transnational approaches have not provided important critiques of the nation-state.

3 To be clear, not all challenges to state borders are postnational in their framing. I use the term “anti-border” as synonymous with a postnational politics, in contrast to statist or humanitarian approaches that may seek to reform how borders are enacted (such as by limiting deportation for vulnerable groups), but stop short of challenging the sovereign right of states to enforce borders altogether (see also Bosniak 2001).

4 These acts of citizenship differ analytically from normative claims for inclusion that reinforce the centrality of the state as the arbiter of rights and membership (see, for example, Chauvin and Garcés-Mascareñas 2012).

5 This research is part of a larger project that included four years of ethnographic fieldwork among migrant rights movements in Toronto, which combined participant observation at public protests and community events with active participation supporting grass-roots organizing around the rights of women with precarious immigration status (Abji 2017).

6 That is not to say that advocates who see themselves as enablers are not implicated in reproducing state power. Rather, as Landolt, Villegas, and Villegas (2012) and others have argued, the discretionary power wielded by both enablers and gatekeepers produce a dynamic “patchwork of access” that at the macro-level is an essential feature of how precarity functions.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.