Incompatible with life: Embodied borders, migrant fertility, and the UK’s ‘hostile environment’

2020 ◽  
pp. 239965442096811
Author(s):  
Kate Coddington
Keyword(s):  
Asylum Seeker ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
Perceived Threat ◽  
Political Strategy ◽  
Undocumented Migrants ◽  
Hostile Environment ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Migrant Fertility

In this piece, I consider the uncomfortable and intimate intersection of bodies and borders through an autoethnographic account of encountering UK migration controls while losing a pregnancy. While this encounter was not representative of the disproportionate targeting of refused asylum seeker and undocumented migrants by these policies, I argue that migrant fertility has become a key lens through which the embodiment of the border is made material, and that the post-2012 deployment of a UK-wide set of policies generating a “Hostile Environment” for migrants demonstrates how the UK is embracing discomfort as a political strategy to deter migrants. Migrant fertility becomes perceived as an anticipatory threat to the body politic that must be continually pre-empted by the state. The restrictive policies of the UK’s hostile environment have exacerbated the perceived threat of fertile migrants, and that the threat posed by these migrants has become both racialized and medicalized, with multi-scalar, material consequences for migrants.

The Road to Brexit

2020 ◽  
pp. 41-62
Author(s):  
Andrew Ryder
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Road

The chapter follows the course of events and debate during the referendum and initial negotiations and legislative attempts in Westminster to enable Brexit. The chapter gives an overview of the speech acts and associated stratagems to facilitate or to frustrate Brexit. It includes a number of vignettes presenting some key or insightful moments in the referendum campaign. A key focus of the chapter is analysis of the Leave and Remain campaigns (Vote Leave, Leave.EU and Stronger In) and what became known respectively as ‘projects hate and fear’. The chapter concludes with an inquest into the state of British democracy and how fundamental weaknesses in the body politic enabled Brexit, among which is the emergence of ’post-truth’ politics and the influence of the tabloid media.

scholarly journals Redrawing the border through the ‘Right to Rent’: Exclusion, discrimination and hostility in the English housing market

2020 ◽  
pp. 026101831989704 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim Mckee ◽  
Sharon Leahy ◽  
Trudi Tokarczyk ◽  
Joe Crawford
Keyword(s):  
Racial Profiling ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Criminal Prosecution ◽  
Undocumented Migrants ◽  
Hostile Environment ◽  
Home Office ◽  
Illegal Migrants ◽  
Guidance Documents ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Right

The UK Immigration Act 2016 is central to the Conservative Government’s drive to create a more hostile environment for potential migrants and current ‘illegal’ migrants residing in the UK. The Right to Rent provisions of the Act, which require private landlords in England to conduct mandatory immigration document checks on prospective tenants, or face sizeable fines and criminal prosecution, have been highlighted as a key facet of the legislation. Drawing on qualitative interviews with key experts and analysis of Home Office guidance documents, we argue the Right to Rent has turned the private rental market into a border-check, with landlords responsibilised to perform ‘everyday bordering’ on behalf of the State. This creates a potentially discriminatory environment for all migrants, as well as for British citizens who lack documentation and/or may be subject to racial profiling. It may also be forcing vulnerable, undocumented migrants into even more precarious housing situations.

Corporate Life in the University of Paris, 1249–1418, and the Ending of Schism

1989 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 511-523
Author(s):  
Osmund Lewry Op
Keyword(s):  
Common Law ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
John Henry Newman ◽  
Christian Church ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
University Of Paris ◽  
The University ◽  
The Church

As many had done long before, John Henry Newman, in his sermon of 1842 on ‘The Christian Church an imperial power’, drew his model of the corporate life of the Church from the state: ‘We know what is meant by a kingdom. It means a body politic, bound together by common law, ruled by one head, holding intercourse part with part, acting together’. This description, little changed, could have applied as well to the university community of Newman's Oxford, and it is not implausible that an experience of fellowship there, strained and divided as it sometimes was, could have provided an unconscious model for his understanding of the ecclesial community. Even if it did not become explicit in Newman's thought, the analogy of head and members was present to the thinking of university men at Paris with regard to their own corporate life in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, particularly when relations were strained and division of the body threatened. Whatever the origins of conciliarist theory, then, in the reflections of canonists and theologians, there was an experience of ecclesial community in the corporate life of medieval Paris that could have given living content to speculation about the Church in the most influential intellectual centre of Christendom. The shaping of that experience deserves some attention as a matrix for conciliarist thought.

The Glorious Excess of Peace in Marsilius of Padua's Defensor Pacis

Theoria ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 66 (159) ◽  
pp. 23-51
Author(s):  
Richard A. Lee Jr.
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
Legitimate Authority ◽  
Marsilius Of Padua ◽  
The Right

In Defensor Pacis Marsilius of Padua grounds the legitimacy of the kingdom, or the state (civitas), on the peace that rule provides the citizens. Looking at Aristotle’s claim that the civitas strives to be like an animal in which all parts in the right proportion for the sake of health, Marsilius argues that ‘the parts of the kingdom or state will be well disposed for the sake of peace [tranquilitas].’ Marsilius goes on to define peace as the agreeable ‘belonging together’ of all members of the kingdom or the state. In this way, Marsilius moves away from a theological ground of the legitimacy of the state towards one that is entirely secular. However, the ground is an unstable one in that it acknowledges the fact that the ‘members’ of the body politic are characterised by difference. As such, the ground of legitimate authority will be characterised as much by force as by peace or by the relation of force to peace.

Sulla’s Phthiriasis and the Republican Body Politic

Mnemosyne ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (6) ◽  
pp. 949-971
Author(s):  
Brian Walters
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body

AbstractIt has long been suspected that Roman moralizing and the slander of political enemies lay behind the story of Sulla’s horrific death by vermin. This study traces the evocative logic of Sulla’s affliction to a constellation of Roman attitudes about corruption, self-mastery, and the body politic. It also argues that Sulla’s own rhetoric about the health of the state played a formative role in shaping narratives about his gruesome end.

The lives of subjects

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annabel S. Brett
Keyword(s):  
Common Good ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter discusses the relationship of the state to its subjects as necessarily physically embodied beings. The primary way in which the commonwealth commands its subjects is through the medium of its law. The law is for the common good and obliges the community as a whole, and thus the ontological status of the law—as distinct from any particular command of a superior to an individual—is intimately tied to that of the body politic. The question, then, concerning the relationship of the state to the natural body of the individual can be framed in terms of the extent of the obligation of the civil law.

From Sovereignty to the State The Tragicomic Clemency of Massinger’s The Bondman

2019 ◽  
pp. 143-174
Author(s):  
Bernadette Meyler
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
Political Orientation ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
Rule Based ◽  
Charles I ◽  
King Charles I

Philip Massinger’s 1623 play The Bondman appealed to a number of very different audiences, from King Charles I, to republicans resisting Charles II’s return to England, to spectators after the Restoration. This chapter argues that the play proved so versatile because it placed priority on the preservation of the state over any particular form of sovereignty. This political orientation derives in part from The Bondman’s debt to Senecan stoicism. Stoicism shapes the play’s approach to mercy as well. Rather than relying on a sovereign pardon, the play emphasizes a kind of rule based on equity as well as a variety of clemency derived from Lucius Annaeus Seneca’s De Clementia. Clemency as presented by the play entails preservation of the body politic through enlargement of the sovereign’s compass of concern.

Out of touch, out of tune: the social-political construction of atmospheric walls during the COVID-19 pandemic first wave

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kandida Purnell
Keyword(s):  
Constitutive Relation ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Uk

This article contributes to knowledge on the co-constitutive relation between emotions and bodies by describing the mechanisms enabling the social-political construction of ‘atmospheric walls’ (Ahmed, 2014) during the COVID-19 pandemic first wave of spring-summer 2020. Using auto- and digital ethnographies this article underlines gendered, raced and classed angles of arrival into the spring-summer ‘first wave’ and describes the social-political implications of individual bodies and parts of the body politic losing touch through the pandemic. In particular, this article highlights three mechanisms – angles of arrival, discord and losing touch – leading to the containment of grief within parts of the UK body politic, which, through the COVID-19 pandemic first wave worked to build up atmospheric walls segregating parts of the body politic and allow the continued circulation of some bodies while facilitating the continued circulation, use and using up of others.

Body Fascism in Britain: Building the Blackshirt in the Inter-War Period

2011 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
JULIE GOTTLIEB
Keyword(s):  
Physical Fitness ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
National Context ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
Public Display ◽  
Graphic Art ◽  
Political Religion

AbstractIn recent years scholars have devoted a great deal of attention and theorisation to the body in history, looking both at bodies as metaphors and as sites of intervention. These studies have tended to focus on the analysis of bodies in a national context, acting for and acted upon by the state, and similarly the ever-expanding study of masculinity continues to try to define hegemonic masculinities. But what if we direct our gaze to marginal bodies, in this case Blackshirt bodies who act against the state, and a political movement that commits assault on the body politic? This article examines the centrality of the body and distinctive gender codes in the self-representation, the performance and practice, and the culture of Britain's failed fascist movement during the 1930s. The term ‘body fascism’ has taken on different and much diluted meaning in the present day, but in the British Union of Fascists’ construction of the Blackshirted body, in the movement's emphasis on the embodiment of their political religion through sport, physical fitness and public display of offensive and defensive violence, and in their distinctive and racialised bodily aesthetic illustrated in their visual and graphic art production we come to understand Britain's fascist movement as a product of modernity and as one potent expression of the convergence between populist politics and body fixation.

scholarly journals ‘As a woman…’; ‘As a Muslim…’: Subjects, positions and counter-terrorism powers in the United Kingdom

2017 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-267 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lee Jarvis ◽  
Michael Lister
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
Counter Terrorism ◽  
Focus Group Research ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
People’S Attitudes ◽  
The One ◽  
Time Specific ◽  
The Uk

This article presents findings from original focus group research on the importance of identity claims within public understandings of counter-terrorism across the UK. Following a review of existing literature on the terrorism/counter-terrorism/identity nexus, the article introduces four prominent subject positions inhabited within public articulations of counter-terrorism powers: the ‘Muslim’, the ‘target’, the ‘woman’ and the ‘unaffected’. Positions such as these, we argue, both enable and inhibit particular normative, political and anecdotal claims about counter-terrorism frameworks and their impact upon the body politic. This, we suggest, is demonstrative of the co-constitutive role between counter-terrorism and identity claims. Thus, on the one hand, counter-terrorism initiatives work to position individuals socially, politically and culturally: (re)producing various religious, ethnic and other identities. Yet, at the same time, specific subject positions are integral to the articulation of people’s attitudes toward developments in counter-terrorism. The article concludes by thinking through some of the implications of this, including for resistance toward securitising moves and for citizenship more generally.

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