Existential Displacement: Health Care and Embodied Un/Belonging of Irregular Migrants in Norway

Abstract

Drawing on fieldwork and interviews in Oslo and Bergen, Norway, this article discusses irregular migrants’ experiences of existential displacement and the tactics they use to try to re-establish a sense of emplacement and belonging. More specifically, it argues that irregular migrants’ experiences of embodied unbelonging are a consequence of a violent form of governmentality that includes specific laws, healthcare structures, and migration management rationalities. The article makes this argument by tracing how these experiences translate into embodied effects that feature prominently in migrants’ narratives of suffering while living in a country that purports to provide welfare services to all. The narratives of their state of being-in-the-world are ways through which migrants both experience and express the violence and deprivation they face. I argue that these narratives are instances of structures of feeling (Williams 1973), which are shaped by modes of governmentality. The article shows that irregular migrants’ coping strategies centrally involve faith, religious communities and friends. Irregular migrants draw on these relationships to get by, access healthcare, and to resist the (health) effects of social deprivation and political violence. These relationships allow irregular migrants to find meaningful ways of being-in-the-world and rebuilding, to some extent, a sense of entitlement and belonging.

“Imagine, 7 Years Without a Future”: A Qualitative Study of Rejected Asylum Seekers' Life Conditions in Norway

“…A body politics that continues to wound individuals may serve to reproduce and reinforce the notion of illegitimacy among those who represent the “legitimate population” (Lemke et al, 2011 ). Thus, it also serves to strengthen the notion of not belonging and of undeserving of the same rights as other human beings, in relation both to asylum seekers who have arrived and to those yet to come (Larchanché, 2012 ; Bendixsen, 2020 ). This may extend to a discussion of whether undocumented migrants/rejected asylum seekers are morally deserving of resources such as education and health care (Larchanché, 2012 ); unveiling the idea of a moral right to distinguish between lives that are to be preserved and enhanced and lives that are not worth preserving (Bendixsen, 2020 ).…”

Embodied Belonging: In/exclusion, Health Care, and Well-Being in a World in Motion

“…Lacking citizenship and residence rights, unauthorized migrants are often reduced to the status of “bare life” (Agamben 1998 ), with significant consequences for their well-being. The condition of illegality as a legal-political condition (Bendixsen 2020 ) often exacerbates migrants’ structural and embodied vulnerability to ill health and suffering and jeopardizes their access to adequate health care. It also exposes them to a state of precarity, and to an impermanent and unstable state of vulnerability (Brenman, this issue).…”

“…The persistence of this Othering gaze upon their bodies renders them beings that Anwen Tormey describes, citing Fanon ( 1990 ), as “sealed into crushing objecthood” (Tormey 2007 : 81–82). Synnøve Bendixsen ( 2020 ) further shows how irregular migrants experiencing stigmatization and social exclusion in Norway, also within contexts of health care, develop a sense of embodied non-belonging that significantly impacts their well-being. Only with the help of friendships and trustful relationships with members of their religious communities do they manage to counter this highly harmful situation and rebuild a comforting sense of belonging.…”