CAPAS RESEARCH PROJECT - Jyhene Kebsi The Biopolitics of Gendered Undocumented Immigration: A Transnational Feminist Reading of Paperless Immigrants' Apocalyptic Experiences of Abandonment
My project centralizes the literary and cinematic representations of Northern governments' blatant “letting die” approach to Arab undocumented migrants and asylum seekers. My exploration of illiterature and illcinema offers a biopolitical, transnational feminist analysis of the exclusion and erasure of displaced people and forced immigrants from the Euro-Americo-Australian national space. The exclusion of undesirables’ unwanted bodies occurs through their “vulnerabilization” (Tyszler 1), both en route to “host” countries and, if they make it, after arrival in Southern Europe, North America, and Australia.
My project sheds light on the apocalyptic conditions in which asylum seekers travel and in which they are confined in detention centers/prisons. I show that the severe trauma these border-crossers experience is driven by intersectional gendered, racialized, classed, spatial, and geopolitical adverse forces. I explain that the regulatory power that aims to discipline and deter forced immigrants creates a hierarchy of mobility that annihilates asylum seekers’ human right to movement in this supposedly “global village.” This annihilation accounts largely for the apocalyptic experiences that Arab refugees undergo both during their deadly sea crossings and later on in the “processing” centers in which they are incarcerated. Through my discussion of a number of apocalyptic literary and cinematic narratives and scenes that present the liminal space between life and death, I emphasize the devaluation of asylum seekers’ lives and the devalorization of their families’ suffering when they die, drown, or disappear.