Forced Childlessness and Ruptured Personhood: The Politics of Motherhood for Central African Refugee Women Resettled in Australia

Abstract

This article explores the phenomenon of forced childlessness as a result of state interventions for child protection, with a focus on the ways in which such practices impact subjective experiences of motherhood. I draw on the case of an intervention by the child protection system in Australia, in which an African woman experienced the forced removal of her children after being resettled as a refugee. I analyze this experience not as the result of parental deficiency, but as the outcome of a disciplining imperative implied in the operations of the child welfare system and through which resettled refugees are governed as either "deserving" or "undeserving" of civic belonging. In the case study, the intervention of forced child removal results in an experience of what I term "ruptured" personhood: whereby intersections and contestations of motherhood as, concurrently, a social role, legal category, and affective experience, produce a situation in which a woman lives a paradoxical state of existence that she herself describes as being "dead." The case study compels a broader problematization of refugee resettlement and motherhood as domains in which contemporary forms of biopolitics are constituted and played out