Book Review: Joe Turner, <i>Bordering Intimacy: Postcolonial Governance and the Policing of Family</i>

Trafford, James

doi:10.1177/00380385211046498

Cited by 6 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 1 publication

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“…Australian culture enshrines assumptions about women and mothers/grandmothers in particular as 'naturally' nurturant and caring, with greater capacities for ethical behaviour embedded both in their status as 'women', and in their kin positionings (albeit mostly within a binary heterosexual normativity): these positionings, however, can allow older women activists to claim the symbolic power of grandmothers within political struggles, even if some might feel ambivalent about their personal position as grandmothers. This embedded kinning acts as a symbolic base for political action, both resisting the state policing of family within border politics (see Turner, 2020) and 'the intimacies of exclusion' produced by refugee family separation (Mountz, 2011). (Activists also feel that their age protects them in possible confrontations with the police.)…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gender and the politics of maternalisms: Kinship-based imaginaries, responsibility and care in Australian refugee advocacy

Stivens

2023

Critique of Anthropology

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Feminist scholarship has often been profoundly ambivalent about maternalist political mobilisations, seeing them as posing dangers of essentialising motherhood and of colluding with male-centred social orders, conservative politics and top-down state projects. This article looks at the complex and fluid politics of protest groups adopting familial kinship maternalist identities to militate politically for refugees and people seeking asylum, with particular reference to the Australian Grandmothers for Refugees organisation (G4R). A regular purple presence at demonstrations and on social media, the group’s 2000 members’ activities include vigils at ministerial and parliamentary members’ offices and detention centres, webinars, letter campaigns, petitions and parliamentary submissions. The G4R grandmothers’ role in the protests against the Australian asylum regime is part of a wider pattern of female predominance in contemporary organisations involved in such support and activism both locally and globally. The Grandmothers also exemplify the often-overlooked political energy of older women. The discussion explores questions about politicised kinship positionings, maternalist framings and mobilisations, and the cosmopolitan hospitality they offer. I am especially interested in how invocations of kinship-based location operate within these organisations, assuming ‘familial’ responsibility for and care of ‘Others’ within and beyond state and nation. Kinship tropes and imaginaries, while on occasion exclusionary and contradictory, arguably work to achieve a linking of political, ‘enraged’ affect with solidarity with the oppressed, enacting a transformative ethics in the public through effective political mobilisations of fictive kinship, responsibility, kindness, empathy and care.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gender and the politics of maternalisms: Kinship-based imaginaries, responsibility and care in Australian refugee advocacy

Stivens

2023

Critique of Anthropology

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“…This framing can be seen as creating a hierarchy of ethnic differences and acceptability. Racial hierarchies are rooted in colonialism (Fanon, 1991) and Turner (2020) has argued Eurocentric ideas continue to dominate and regulate normative ideas of 'family'. In this question we also see how Eastern European migrants can be represented as racialised Others.…”

Section: Questionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring Public Attitudes Towards Immigration: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Social Survey Questions

Biglin

Purdam

2023

Sociology

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Public attitudes towards immigration and immigrants, captured through social surveys, are widely reported in the media and used to inform political decision making. However, it is important to consider whether public attitudes are being accurately measured. This article uses critical discourse analysis and critical race and post-colonial theories to examine questions in leading social surveys. The article also draws upon interviews with survey managers and methodologists. In many high-quality surveys a ‘white’ identity is often framed as the norm alongside negative narratives of identity and difference. For example, in one survey question attitudes towards immigrants are asked about alongside attitudes towards alcohol and drug use. The objectivity of the framing and language of many survey questions needs to be reviewed. In the context of evidence of increased levels of racial discrimination, a new discourse is required to more objectively measure and understand public attitudes towards immigration and immigrants.

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“…102-103) catchphrase 'make kin, not babies'. Feminist and migration scholars (see, e.g., Stevens, 1999;Luibhéid, 2013;Chavez, 2017;Turner, 2020) have long studied how immigration policies serve the nationalist project to manage the 'body of the nation' by sanctioning reproduction by some and prohibiting it by others. While kinship is not limited to the biological reproduction of a species or blood kin, sometimes it is also about 'making babies'.…”

Section: Mother Body Border First Cut: Judith's Storymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Grammar of Belonging: Bodies, Borders and Kin in the Belarusian—Polish Border Crisis

Cielemęcka¹

2023

Feminist Review

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This article aims to be what Jasbir Puar referred to as ‘an unfolding archive’. It makes a critical intervention at a historical crisis point as it is unfolding. It sets out to examine the logic that writes the relations between bodies, borders and kin during the political crisis that transpired at the border of Belarus and Poland in 2021. I think of this logic in terms of a ‘grammar’, drawing on the idea articulated by Hortense J. Spillers, where ‘American grammar’ fleshes out the connection between slavery, kinship, nation-building and the processes of gendering. I examine the rubrics of the hegemonic national grammatics in contemporary Poland, which establishes who counts as kin and who belongs to the nation in the context of the border crisis. I offer the concept of ‘declining’ kinship to seek generative (im)possibilities to articulate affinities and solidarities running against the dominant system of reproductive nationalism.

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Book Review: Joe Turner, Bordering Intimacy: Postcolonial Governance and the Policing of Family

Cited by 6 publications

References 1 publication

Gender and the politics of maternalisms: Kinship-based imaginaries, responsibility and care in Australian refugee advocacy

Gender and the politics of maternalisms: Kinship-based imaginaries, responsibility and care in Australian refugee advocacy

Measuring Public Attitudes Towards Immigration: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Social Survey Questions

The Grammar of Belonging: Bodies, Borders and Kin in the Belarusian—Polish Border Crisis

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