Open AccessDissertation
Law and Rights in the Lives of Undocumented Migrant Women in the UK
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TLDR
In this article, the authors investigate how undocumented migrant women perceive and learn about their rights while being confined to the private sphere and explore the role that rights and the law play in their lives.Abstract:
The British state has introduced increasingly restrictive immigration legislation in recent years, as part of an effort to create a hostile environment for undocumented migrants. For instance, the 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts further criminalise working without papers, renting property, and driving as an undocumented migrant, in addition to restricting access to health care. Restrictive legislation has not, however, managed to deal with irregular migration, but increases breaches of immigration law. Instead of lowering net immigration, these new restrictions simply limit access to rights, and create vulnerability among undocumented migrants, which is experienced differently by men and women. Women without official immigration status mostly work and live in the domestic sphere, which can offer protection from the state. However, undocumented migrant women often experience domestic violence and work in exploitative settings, which are difficult to challenge, due to the fear of deportation and lack of access to support networks located in the public sphere. The question arises how undocumented migrant women perceive and learn about their rights while being confined to the private sphere. As little is known about the lives of undocumented migrant women in the UK, this thesis explores the role that rights and the law play in their lives. I draw on interview data, participant observation in migrants’ rights organisations, and sample applications to regularise immigration status based on human rights law, in order to investigate how undocumented migrant women perceive and relate to the law, how it structures their everyday lives, and the mechanisms they develop for survival. I analyse how the few existing rights that undocumented migrant women can claim are stratified and thus difficult to access. To claim rights, the women need free legal representation, which they find in community migrant support organisations that play a crucial role in actualising rights.read more
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Journal Article
Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy
Le droit à l’inclusion: Droit et identitité dans les récits de vie des personnes handicapées aux États-Unit (translation of: Rights of Inclusion: law and identity in the life stories of Americans with disabilities)
David M. Engel,Frank W Munger +1 more
TL;DR: Engel and Munger as mentioned in this paper conducted interviews with intended beneficiaries of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to understand how rights and identity affect one another over time and how that interaction ultimately determines the success of laws such as the ADA.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color
TL;DR: This paper explored the race and gender dimensions of violence against women of color and found that the experiences of women of colour are often the product of intersecting patterns of racism and sexism, and how these experiences tend not to be represented within the discourse of either feminism or antiracism.
Book ChapterDOI
Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics
TL;DR: The authors argues that Black women are sometimes excluded from feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse because both are predicated on a discrete set of experiences that often does not accurately reflect the interaction of race and gender.
Journal ArticleDOI
Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective
BookDOI
Bodies that matter : on the discursive limits of sex
TL;DR: In this article, the Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary are discussed, as well as the Assumption of Sex, in the context of critical queering, passing and arguing with the real.
Book
Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present the logic of sovereignty and the paradox of sovereignty in the form of the human sacer and the notion of potentiality and potentiality-and-law.