In the wake of the hostile environment

Migration, reproduction and the Windrush scandal

Bibliographic Data

ID4367195
AuthorsIrene Gedalof (0000-0002-1220-9982, independent scholar, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume23
Issue4
Pages539-555
Publication date2022-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueFeminist Theory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1464-7001 • E-ISSN: 1741-2773
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/14647001211046701
OpenAlexW4206146176
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited16

This article examines the place of reproduction in the UK migration policy popularly known as 'the hostile environment', introduced in 2012 by the Conservative-Lib Dem Coalition government, and the 'Windrush scandal' that followed. In order to think through how the reproductive sphere comes in to play in this policy and its consequences, I draw on theoretical insights from the work of Christina Sharpe and Saidiya Hartman, both of whom invite us to reflect on the ways in which the afterlife of enslavement and empire continues to impinge on the status of Black subjects, and the ways in which our notions of the maternal, reproduction, kinship and belonging are entangled in this process. I begin by examining the place of the reproductive sphere in the hostile environment policy itself, before moving on to discuss the Windrush scandal and the ways in which it can be seen as an attack on the reproductive needs of its victims. I then consider these findings further through an engagement with the work of Sharpe and Hartman, arguing that the scandal reveals ways in which we continue to live 'in the wake' of racialised understandings of the reproductive that mean that some people are refused the possibilities of attachment and affiliation, so that, in Hartman's words, theirs is 'the perilous condition of existing in a world in which you have no investment'. In the final section, I respond to Sharpe's call for white people to 'rend the fabric of the kinship narrative' that produces these exclusionary terms of belonging and permits the repetition of such brutalities as the hostile environment

Afterlife · Epistemology · Kinship · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Public sphere · Racism · Reproduction · Sociology · White supremacy · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Homelessness and Social Issues · Law · Migration, Health and Trauma · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Philosophy

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