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Paper short abstract:

Drawing on research in Kenya and the UK, this paper examines the relationship between processes of care and surveillance and notions of motherhood and mothering in contexts of forced migration. It argues that perceptions of reproductive potential shape how displaced women can and do migrate.

Paper long abstract:

Pregnant refugee and asylum-seeking women are subject to maternal care and immigration controls, two divergent forms of surveillance and management. Research on forced migrants frequently emphasises the violent exclusion of refugees by the state, yet reproduction presents a potential zone of inclusion, where women and their infants are rendered deserving of protection on the basis of motherhood, rather than persecution. This paper draws on ethnographic research with displaced women in Kenya and the UK to examine the ways in which women's claims to asylum and the exceptional zones of inclusion are grounded in a reproductive politics that values and defines women by their reproductive potential. Pregnancy and motherhood may be a source of vulnerability, but can this vulnerability be mobilized in ways that enable women to navigate hostile and obscure border regimes? Rather than assuming pregnancy is an exclusively positive or negative experience, this paper illuminates women's complex and highly stratified experiences of reproduction. In doing so it explores how practices of surveillance and care rely on the selective deployment of often conflicting ideas of motherhood as identity and mothering as practice, and how the perceived potential for reproduction shapes women's opportunities for migration.