TY - JOUR
T1 - Reproduction and the Expanding Border
T2 - Pregnant Migrants as a ‘Problem’ in the 2014 Immigration Act
AU - Lonergan, Gwyneth
N1 - Funding information: This research was funded in whole, or in part, by the Wellcome Trust, Grant number 209915/Z/17/Z. For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.
PY - 2024/2/1
Y1 - 2024/2/1
N2 - This article explores the construction of the UK National Health Service as a ‘bordering scape’, and the depiction of pregnant migrants as an especial problem, in policy documents and Parliamentary debates around the 2014 Immigration Act. Migrant women’s reproductive practices have long been an object of state anxiety, and a target of state intervention. However, this has been largely overlooked in recent scholarship on the proliferation and multiplication of internal bordering processes. This article addresses this gap and contributes to conceptualisations of bordering processes as situated and intersectional, arguing that discourses and anxieties around the reproduction of the nation-state play an important role in informing the construction of the proliferating internal border. These discourses and anxieties, which are heavily gendered and racialised, interact with the specificities of individual bordering sites in shaping both bordering processes, and the production of different individuals and groups within these processes.
AB - This article explores the construction of the UK National Health Service as a ‘bordering scape’, and the depiction of pregnant migrants as an especial problem, in policy documents and Parliamentary debates around the 2014 Immigration Act. Migrant women’s reproductive practices have long been an object of state anxiety, and a target of state intervention. However, this has been largely overlooked in recent scholarship on the proliferation and multiplication of internal bordering processes. This article addresses this gap and contributes to conceptualisations of bordering processes as situated and intersectional, arguing that discourses and anxieties around the reproduction of the nation-state play an important role in informing the construction of the proliferating internal border. These discourses and anxieties, which are heavily gendered and racialised, interact with the specificities of individual bordering sites in shaping both bordering processes, and the production of different individuals and groups within these processes.
KW - bordering
KW - citizenship
KW - gender
KW - migration
KW - reproduction
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85152275276&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1177/00380385231157987
DO - 10.1177/00380385231157987
M3 - Article
SN - 0038-0385
VL - 58
SP - 140
EP - 157
JO - Sociology
JF - Sociology
IS - 1
ER -