Trapped in (In)visibility: Contested Intercorporeality in Undocumented migrants’ Lives

ABSTRACT

The paper draws attention to contexts in which livelihood and residence opportunities to migrants without formal status are meagre, specifically Nordic countries where policies towards undocumented persons have notably tightened. In such conditions, invisibility becomes a key characteristic of life. The paper introduces a broad conception of visibility that identifies different ways of seeing and being (un)seen, as part of embodied agency that turns intercorporeal at the presence of other people. Drawing from existing Nordic scholarship that we read through Helmuth Plessner’s philosophical anthropology, we argue that in situations where personhood becomes challenged by forced (in)visibility, undocumented migrants are compelled to build and maintain a façade between their experienced self and social self. This allows them to manage to be seen yet not exposed, but often with dire consequences to their well-being and agency as persons.

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the special issue editors and especially Banu Gökarıksel who invited us to take part, and the Geopolitics editor Polly Pallister-Wilkins. We are also grateful to the peer reviewers who provided constructive critique that helped us improve the paper. The research has been funded by the Academy of Finland (grants SA339833, SA347374).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. With this focus we do not intend to overlook meagre life opportunities in places with more established undocumented migrant populations. We acknowledge that in countries such as Egypt, Malaysia, and Iran, where precarious migrant populations are largely mixed in the urban fabric with other (racialised) low-income inhabitants, and in the US where undocumented Latinx migrants form an intrinsic part of the country’s economic structure as well as familial life, people may live under constant threat of being identified as undocumented and respectively carry the fear of deportation with them (e.g. Becerra 2016; Chauvin and Garcés‐mascareñas 2014; Gonzales and Chavez 2012). Yet we see that, regarding (in)visibility, there is a difference between more or less formalised societies that host small or large migrant populations.

2. While recognising that ‘sensorial encounters’ include auditory, olfactory, and haptic elements (Shaker, Van Lanen, and Van Hoven 2021), in this article we focus solely on visuality.

3. Many of Plessner’s works remain available only in German, including Conditio Humana and Anthropologie der Sinne that we draw from through other scholars. They are included in the collection of his texts published in 1983 with title Gesammelte Schiften..

4. We first searched for studies using the following search terms applied to title, keywords, abstract, or body of text: (embodi*) AND (visib*) AND (undocum*) OR (irreg*) OR (paperles*) AND (swed*) OR (norw*) OR (finl*) OR (denm*) OR (icel*). The search terms were given in the form understood by Scopus and Google Scholar databases and the searches were reiterated until the results became saturated. Upon a closer examination, most of the studies included in the first pool of search results lacked focus on the Nordic countries, or employed one or several of the search terms in different meaning of the word or only in passing. We also excluded unpublished sources such as BA and MA theses. We then selected for further scrutiny those studies that fulfilled all our search criteria and dealt with one of the Nordic countries. After assessing the content of 28 remaining studies, we were left with the following eight studies that reported empirical results on undocumented migrants’ embodied experiences of (in)visibility in the Nordic context: Khosravi’s (2010), Holgersson (2011), Sigvardsdotter (2013), Wahlström Smith’s (2018), Sager’s (2018), Bendixsen (2020), Gadd’s (2022), and Nikunen and Valtonen (2022). While this is an evolving research field, to our knowledge this body of literature is as comprehensive as possible at the time of writing.

5. In an extreme case, this may add to the development of life-threatening conditions, like in the case of Pervasive Refusal Syndrome that migrant children and youth in Sweden, and elsewhere, have suffered from (Hacking 2010; Ngo and Hodes 2020; Otasowie, Paraiso, and Bates 2021). The condition of being paperless has been identified as a major cause leading to the Pervasive Refusal Syndrome, which may build during a lengthened uncertainty about life prospects, exacerbated by untreated traumas of previous intolerable life (Bodegård 2005; Khosravi 2010).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Academy of Finland [339833,347374].