TY - JOUR

T1 - Naked protest

T2 - the maternal politics of citizenship and revolt

AU - Tyler, Imogen

PY - 2013

Y1 - 2013

N2 - Immigrant protests have the capacity to call regimes of citizenship into question in important ways. This paper explores immigrant protest, citizenship and their relationship, through an account of a ‘naked protest’ by a group of mothers, refused asylum seekers and ‘illegal immigrants’ at Yarl's Wood immigration removal centre in England and ends with an account of the use of the ‘naked curse’ in a protest by an indigenous group of mothers against global oil corporations in the Niger Delta. Woven together from activist materials, news reports, interviews, documentaries and historical data, I recount and mobilise these protests to think about `the scaling of bodies’ (Marion-Young 1990) through citizenship, and the routes through which motherhood is mobilised as a site of political agency and resistance to processes of disenfranchisement. I argue that the maternal protests of noncitizens and disenfranchised citizens challenges the ‘catastrophic functionalism’ of Agamben-inspired accounts of ‘bare life’, and offer an alternative lens through which to perceive the ethical and political claims made by abject populations (Papadopoulos et al. 2008, p.198). This paper draws on my earlier critical work on British citizenship as a postcolonial mode of governance (Tyler 2010) but extends this critique within the neo-colonial context of the present tense. Thinking through and with these naked protests, my intention is to trouble prevailing theoretical paradigms of citizenship. In particular, I develop the work of Hannah Arendt, and Ranjana Khanna, in order to impart the epistemic challenge to the sexual politics and Eurocentrism of ‘citizenship theory’ which is posed by these maternal revolts.

AB - Immigrant protests have the capacity to call regimes of citizenship into question in important ways. This paper explores immigrant protest, citizenship and their relationship, through an account of a ‘naked protest’ by a group of mothers, refused asylum seekers and ‘illegal immigrants’ at Yarl's Wood immigration removal centre in England and ends with an account of the use of the ‘naked curse’ in a protest by an indigenous group of mothers against global oil corporations in the Niger Delta. Woven together from activist materials, news reports, interviews, documentaries and historical data, I recount and mobilise these protests to think about `the scaling of bodies’ (Marion-Young 1990) through citizenship, and the routes through which motherhood is mobilised as a site of political agency and resistance to processes of disenfranchisement. I argue that the maternal protests of noncitizens and disenfranchised citizens challenges the ‘catastrophic functionalism’ of Agamben-inspired accounts of ‘bare life’, and offer an alternative lens through which to perceive the ethical and political claims made by abject populations (Papadopoulos et al. 2008, p.198). This paper draws on my earlier critical work on British citizenship as a postcolonial mode of governance (Tyler 2010) but extends this critique within the neo-colonial context of the present tense. Thinking through and with these naked protests, my intention is to trouble prevailing theoretical paradigms of citizenship. In particular, I develop the work of Hannah Arendt, and Ranjana Khanna, in order to impart the epistemic challenge to the sexual politics and Eurocentrism of ‘citizenship theory’ which is posed by these maternal revolts.

KW - bare life

KW - asylum

KW - birth

KW - resistance

KW - gender

KW - detention

U2 - 10.1080/13621025.2013.780742

DO - 10.1080/13621025.2013.780742

M3 - Journal article

VL - 17

SP - 211

EP - 226

JO - Citizenship Studies

JF - Citizenship Studies

SN - 1362-1025

IS - 2

ER -