In search of recognition: Gender and staff–detainee relations in a British immigration removal centre

Abstract

In this article we draw on research conducted in a British immigration removal centre (IRC) to explore the affective nature of detention. We consider staff and detainee testimonies of their everyday interactions within the IRC as bids for recognition of social status in an institution characterized by uncertainty and diversity. In their accounts, men and women draw on gendered identities to make sense of others and themselves. Responses to status subordination in the IRC played out across a range of emotional responses, mediated and framed by gender. While these responses emerged in everyday interactions, the frustrations of life in an IRC, we argue, speak to much wider struggles over the status of immigrants in the UK, the confused and contested purpose of IRCs and the widening of detention as a strategy of migration control; in short, to matters of living under conditions of mass mobility.

In comparative perspective: The effects of incarceration abroad on penal subjectivity among prisoners in Lithuania

“…Yet, for some, considerations of privacy versus autonomy were not as important as a general sense of familiar personal identity when back in Lithuania. In line with findings from studies of foreign nationals in UK prisons and detention centres ( Bosworth, 2011 ; Bosworth and Slade, 2014 ; Kaufman, 2014 ), Lithuanians in prison abroad often felt that their status as non-citizens stigmatized them and created insecurities they simply did not feel back in Lithuania. Furthermore, for many the diversity of prisoners in Western prisons, highlighted by scholars of the criminology of mobility, created problems of integration, belonging and mutual recognition and respect.…”

Gender, Vulnerability and Everyday Resistance in Immigration Detention: Women’s Experiences of Confinement in a Portuguese Detention Facility

“…Firsthand accounts reveal that gender also matters in detention, where it shapes the perceptions and expectations of detainees and staff alike Bosworth and Slade 2014;Esposito, Ornelas, Scirocchi et al 2020). Both groups draw on gendered and sexualised (as well as racialised) identities, stereotypes and norms to make sense of their own and others' experience, to interact with each other, and to cope with and navigate detention's uncertain and volatile environments.…”

The deprivation of certitude, legitimacy and hope: Foreign national prisoners and the pains of imprisonment

“…6. Such pronouncements did little to endear this Home Office employee to prison staff, who, as Bosworth and Kaufman have both observed, find it difficult to reconcile the 'decency agenda' with border control (Bosworth, 2011;Bosworth and Slade, 2014;Kaufman, 2013).…”