Paper short abstract:

Taking an intersectional feminist view and drawing on the experiences and biographical narratives of three women from Eritrea, who after having lived with precarious status in Israel found their way to the UK, I explore women's reproductive and mothering practices against global migration regimes.

Paper long abstract:

Women from Eritrea, seeking asylum, negotiate multiple, often interlocking, racist and patriarchal structures of power and oppression, influencing, disrupting and restricting their autonomy, reproductive freedoms and mothering practices. As part of long-term, multi-sited ethnographic research in both Israel and the UK, this paper zooms in on the biographical narratives and lived experiences of three women from Eritrea, who after having lived with precarious status in Israel, creatively migrated to the UK. Taking an academic-activist intersectional feminist approach, I explore their reproductive and mothering practices 'against' global migration regimes. The women go through extensive length to secure safety for their (unborn) children and themselves. I follow the women from their everyday struggles for survival in Israel, where they live with precarious status, in poor housing and with limited access to health and welfare access, legal precariousness toward employment; and a segregated education system for their children. I look at their onwards search for opportunities and alternatives for themselves and their children in the UK, finding themselves in a different hostile environment. The paper sets out how structural violence and intersectional oppression inherent in both asylum regimes and bordering policies and practices influence decision making around secondary migration, family separation and mothering across borders. By focussing on creative migration, fighting male and state violence, taking on alternative identities, pregnancy and birth in detention, and prolonged separation from children, I discuss ways in which these women experience and resist restrictive migration regimes, patriarchal policies, and institutional racism in Israel and in the UK.