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Sex on the move: Gender, subjectivity and differential inclusion

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Abstract

Heterosexuality and patriarchal social arrangements built within immigration regulations signal the undiminished urgency of feminist engagement to rethink migration through the perspective of sexuality and gender. At the same time, feminist analysis of contemporary migration remains bound to the analytical framework centred on control, and approaches borders and immigration regulations primarily in terms of exclusion. Yet, the contemporary transformations of state borders, labour relations and citizenship question the currency and adequacy of the exclusion-based interpretative model. This article brings together feminist and queer migration studies with literature on the transformation of borders, sovereignty and citizenship as developed in critical political theory with the aim of broadening the interpretative scope and political relevance of feminist and queer migration scholarship. The stakes are both theoretical and political in that such a reading allows for a more nuanced account of the changing forms of governing as well as of emerging political subjectivity.

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Notes

  1. The examination exempted citizens of the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan and Switzerland. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11842116/

  2. Interestingly, when enforced and regulated by the state, some situations and solutions commonly viewed as being deviant are permitted and even encouraged. At the peak time of nation-state building in the colonies, recruitment of prostitutes was crucial in maintaining the (hetero)sexual and racial social order, and in disciplining male sexuality and increasing productivity. For example, in the mid-nineteenth century administrators of one of the British Empire's leading penal settlements on the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal recruited female sex workers with similar racial/ethnic backgrounds to the male prisoners (Hindu, Sikh and Muslim) and introduced family immigration schemes in order to counter sex between men, encourage heterosexual marriages, and maintain a high level of palm oil production (Weston, 2008). Similarly, during the same period, the Indian government introduced a female quota on ships carrying indentured labourers in the conviction that a greater female presence would stabilize the gender relations and increase the economic productivity of indentured male workers (Levine, 2007, p. 148).

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Acknowledgements

The writing of this article was enabled by the British Academy/Association of Commonwealth Universities Grant for International Collaboration and also by the Visiting Fellowship scheme at the Centre for Cultural Research of the University of Western Sydney. I am grateful to the paper reviewers, my co-editor, Bridget Anderson and the Subjectivity editorial board, for their helpful comments on previous drafts of this article. I also thank the participants of the Social Anthropology Seminars at the University of Manchester (where I presented an earlier version of this article) for their generous comments.

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Andrijasevic, R. Sex on the move: Gender, subjectivity and differential inclusion. Subjectivity 29, 389–406 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2009.27

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