Kristy Copeland, University of Washington
As with the deserving and undeserving poor of the 19th century, currently much attention is placed on limiting benefits to prevent would-be U.S. citizens from becoming dependent on the state. However, the continued exclusion of 11 million undocumented persons from any path to U.S. citizenship indicates an even broader framework behind these policy decisions. Further, the structural violence from a dramatic surge in detentions and deportations has sent millions of families into crisis. Emerging from these shadows are women from mixed-status families who are coming together to articulate the importance of centering immigration reform on women and families. These brave mothers and daughters are fighting for a path to citizenship for themselves and their families while simultaneously contesting through their words and practices the very form of individualist neoliberal citizenship in circulation. My work examines citizenship at this intersection where immigrant women’s bodies move from the invisibility of care work to the visibility of a rights battle in the public sphere. While some research attends to bordering and oppressive experiences of the undocumented body which produce the need for care, more work is needed in these new sites of coming out where people are rising up to call for care. Such new spaces create opportunities to explore the active and imagined geographies of citizenship and immigration policy more broadly.
Contact: kcopelan@uw.edu
Leave a Reply