Queering deportability: The racial and gendered politics of lesbian anti-deportation activism

This article explores how deportability structures the experiences of lesbian refugees and asylum seekers in the United Kingdom. The first part of the article considers the racial and gendered processes through which the UK asylum system transforms lesbian migrants into detainable and deportable subjects. Part two then examines lesbian migrant protests that are emerging to contest the United Kingdom’s participation in the global deportation regime. The final part of the article discusses how deportation has become absorbed into the cycle of lesbian migration and asylum. The article concludes by calling for a feminist, queer, and anti-racist understanding of the processes through which lesbian migrant deportability is produced and experienced in 21st century Britain.

Bleeding Women in Sacred Spaces: Negotiating Theological Belonging in the ‘Pathway’ to Priesthood

This article focuses on the theological journeying of women ordinands in the Church of England, who have had to negotiate their belonging in the ‘pathway’ to Priesthood in ordination training. Attention is given to the extent to which the personhood of women is enabled to truly flourish in a theological education system that is dominated by men and predominantly patriarchal and Western theologising. It suggests that a gendered politics of belonging has been used and maintained through the socio-religious construct of ‘shame’ in order to maintain the boundaries of belonging within the formation process, and therefore calls for an en-gendered ‘pathway to the priesthood’. This is exemplified in a re-reading of the bleeding woman who dares to challenge the hegemonies of patriarchy and purity by touching the cloak of Christ in Luke 8:40-48. This research is part of an ongoing project with Common Awards at Durham University that explores barriers to belonging in theological education for those in training for ordination. It has therefore received ethical approval for interviews and participant observations.

Ladies Aid as Labor History

In the Arabic-speaking mahjar (diaspora), the plight of the working poor was the focus of women’s philanthropy. Scholarship on welfare relief in the interwar Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian diaspora currently situates it within a gendered politics of benevolence. This article reconsiders that frame and argues for a class-centered reassessment of “ladies aid” politics exploring the intersections of women’s relief with proletarian mutual aid strategies. Founded in 1917, the Syrian Ladies Aid Society (SLAS) of Boston provided food, shelter, education, and employment to Syrian workers. SLAS volunteers understood their efforts as mitigating the precarities imposed on Syrian workers by the global capitalist labor system. Theirs was both a women’s organization and a proletarian movement led by Syrian women. Drawing from SLAS records and the Syrian American press, the article centers Syrian American women within processes of working-class formation and concludes that labor history of the interwar mahjar requires focus on spaces of social reproduction beyond the factory floor.