Pregnant silence: (en)gendering Ireland's asylum space

Abstract

In the wake of a new ruling on non-EU immigration into Ireland, Lentin makes a theoretical intervention by positing the gendering of Ireland's new migratory spaces via the bodies of asylum-seeking mothers. Employing David Theo Goldberg's concept of the ‘racial state’ and the two traditions of thinking about racial states, naturalism and historicism, she examines the gendered character of racial subjection and the rule of racial subjects in relation to the position of migrant mothers as the reproducers of future generations of Irish citizens. Second, Lentin explores the role of social research in investigating migrant populations. Social researchers and their subjects may have a role in interrupting the order of Irish late modernity, which keeps constructing new classificatory schemata--such as ‘nationals’ versus ‘non-nationals’--that are about the insistence on epistemological order in the face of disorder. She argues that migrant mothers and their ‘Irish-born’ children act to subvert traditional understandings of citizenship and ‘the nation’, dragging Irish modernity kicking and screaming into the chaos of the postmodern. Similarly, reflexive social research may give researchers an opportunity to destabilize ordered sociological narratives about the Other.