Paper short abstract:

Many asylum-seeking women in the UK are separated from their children, or mired in a legal limbo that precludes them from experiencing motherhood. This paper considers how older asylum seekers transcend state oppression to enact motherwork and shape social infrastructures familiar to them.

Paper long abstract:

What does mothering look like when women are prevented from inhabiting the same spatiotemporal realities as their children or grandchildren? For asylum-seeking women who have been denied the opportunity to become mothers after decades of being trapped in bureaucratic encounters with the state, how do they engage in maternal practices that challenge the heteropatriarchal view of the nuclear family unit? My paper addresses these questions by offering reflections from long-term ethnographic fieldwork with asylum-seeking women across the UK. Some of these women are in their 50s or 60s — an age group that often slips through the gaps in migration scholarship — and were separated from their children / grandchildren during the process of forced displacement, or unable to pursue motherhood for a variety of reasons including complex trauma partly attributable to their liminal immigration statuses. I lean on the intersectional perspectives embodied in the concept of motherwork (Hill-Collins 1994, 2000) to understand how maternal responsibilities may be carried out by these women in the physical absence of children, often in unexpected ways that defy state constraints. Motherwork by older women in the asylum process also presents an alternative approach to hegemonic ideals of parenting that centre on individualism and financial self-reliance (Dow 2019). I discuss how motherwork within and in spite of absence and invisibility can be deeply meaningful for women disenfranchised by the asylum process, as it offers them reciprocal power as agents of care and change within the social infrastructure(s) set up to support them.