Relational Solidarity

Abstract

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of the gendered politics of the asylum movement in Malmö based on a fieldwork conducted between March 2017 and April 2018. Arguing against the categorization of migration solidarity either as vertical or horizontal, I propose relationality as an intervention that can strengthen perceptions and practices of solidarity in Europe today. Departing from their common concern on solidarity across differences, I bring together feminist theories and critical migration studies supported by critical race theory, queer theory and affect theory. I discuss relationality in regards to intersectional politics, social reproduction, welfare coalitions and sociality. Firstly, I explore relational solidarity in reference to intersectionality (Crenshaw 1991). I show how the asylum movement’s engagement with the concept disclosed how migration policies mainstreamed gender inequalities into the lives of migrants. Intersectionality further informed the changes and the continuities in the political voice of the asylum movement, which I explore through the notion of counterpoint (Said 1993). I discuss culturalization as a form of racism that the intersectionality framework did not necessarily help address, and explore alternative strategies of reorienting gender and sexuality in asylum politics. I suggest that situated intersectionality (Nira Yuval-Davis 2015, 2017) has the potential to facilitate a productive conversation between intersectionality and postcolonial/decolonial feminist approaches. Secondly, I discuss how practical solidarity manifested as reproductive labor shouldered by women and minorities, replicating the gendered and racialized patterns of reproductive labor in global capitalism in the scope of activism. I discuss how several activists named their solidarity after motherhood, becoming a target for right-wing attacks. I scrutinize how the expectation of reciprocity increased the exploitative risk of asking for political participation in exchange for practical solidarity. I argue that an ethics of care framework (Gilligan 1982) is insufficient to describe the circulation of social reproduction in migration activism, which can benefit from a labor perspective. Thirdly, I discuss the forms of relationality that distorted the citizen/noncitizen binary. I examine the ways in which asylum-seeking minors broadened their anti-deportation campaign into a welfare coalition through associating with other communities affected by neoliberal restructuring, building on their common marginalization (P. Rajaram 2018). I argue that the minors enacted the performative strategies of seriality (Young 1994), complementarity and catachresis (Spivak 1993) and the Swedish state figured as part of the transversal welfare coalition through protestors’ evocation of amnesty and state accountability. Fourthly, I scrutinize befriending as an act of solidarity that addressed the social isolation of newcomers and suggested social relations over state sovereignty as the facilitator of politics. Though friendship was a generative realm through which state-based definitions of political community were challenged, I suggest that these efforts also became subject to state intervention. I approach the political agency from the angle of sociality by shifting the focus from acting to feeling as a way of enacting political agency. I focus on the figure of the ungrateful migrant to catch the knowledge embedded in migrant complaint.