In search of legal stability: predicaments of asylum-seeking mothers in Berlin

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article analyses how legal precarity overlaps with different forms of gendered racialization and impacts on migrant women’s mothering practices. It traces how migrant mothers’ encounters with, and categorizations by, the asylum regime have direct and indirect repercussions on the relationships with their children. The article presents the legal trajectories of two migrant women in Germany centring on three different aspects of motherhood that define these women’s experiences of legal precarity. First, it describes mothering as a form of gendered and racialized hyper-visibility in the public sphere. Second, mothering practices are analysed in a bureaucratic context in which a mother’s legal inscription as an asylum seeker with an unresolved national background denies access to proper certification for the children. Third, the article engages with the dimension of interdependence showing how legal precarity creates a feedback loop of fear between mothers and children.