Family, Intimacy & Migration
Lecturer: Dr Joe Turner
24 January 2022
Lectures:
1. Asylum in Britain and the Legacies of Colonialism
3. Family, Intimacy & Migration
4. Modern Migration Theory: The Macroeconomics of Sweden's Refugee Reception
5. ‘Global Britain’ and the coloniality of British citizenship
This session questions the idea that love is without borders. It explores how dominant structures of family and intimacy are in fact central to contemporary border regimes. In imperial states like Britain, who gets to be a ‘family’, or more precisely, accorded the social and political status that comes from being recognised as ‘real’ family is deeply racialised and bound up with colonial power.
European and bourgeois constructs of family were pillars of white supremacy under formal empire and bound to projects of dispossession and exploitation. These forces continue to shape how certain ideals of family are networked throughout British immigration law, which limit mobility and settlement.
Whilst patriarchal and heteronormative definitions of family are used to exclude people moving to Britain, often from former British colonies, appeals to ‘protect’ so called genuine families and ‘family values’ are increasingly used by the state to justify violent border practices.
Reading
- Lugones, M. (2007) ‘Heterosexualism and the colonial / modern gender system,’ Hypatia 22 (1): pp.186-209.
- Peterson, V. S. (2020) ‘Family matters in racial logics: Tracing intimacies, inequalities, and ideologies,’ Review of International Studies, 46(2), pp.177–196
- Wemyss, G., Yuval-Davis, N. and Cassidy, Kathryn 2018. ‘Beauty and the Beast’: everyday bordering and sham marriage discourse. Political Geography. 66, pp. 151-160
- Turner, J. (2020) Bordering intimacy: Postcolonial governance and the policing of family (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Open access with Manchester Open Hive.
- Mongia, R. (2018) Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State. (Durham: Duke University Press). An alternative symposium discussing the book - plus a link to the introduction - can be found here.)
Resources
- A Report on ‘Deportability and Families’ by Dr Melanie Griffiths Dr Candice Morgan-Glendinning.
- The Joint Council on the Welfare of Immigrants campaign ‘Keeping Families Together’.
- Leighan Renaud discussing Matrifocality and Caribbean Families on the Surviving Society Podcast.
- Gail Lewis and Hortense Spillers in conversation discussing Gender and Race.
- Gargi Bhattacharyya, Sita Balani, Nadine El-Enany and Luke de Noronha discussing their book Empire’s Endgame and the concept of the ‘state patriarch’.
Questions for discussion
- What kind of relationships do imagine when you hear the word ‘family’?
- How have restrictive concepts of family been used to exclude people from the UK?
- Can you think of other areas of social control where appeals to family are used to justify authoritarian or violent state practices (for example, policing, welfare policy etc)?
- How do we resist these practices? Do we also need to reimagine the connections and intimate relations of family and kinship?