Migrant mothers: performing kin work and belonging across private and public boundaries

Abstract

This article explores how migrant mothering kin work challenges private and public boundaries, giving rise to new conceptions and practices of citizenship. We highlight the potential of participatory theatre methods-specifically, forum theatre and Playback-for understanding the relationship between mothering, ethnic belonging and citizenship. We also assess the significance of migrant women's kin work within their families and communities for re-framing notions of citizenship (Erel et al, 2017a, 2018). Our analysis gives particular focus to two scenes developed as part of the participatory theatre project that took place with a group of ethnically and racially diverse mothers in East London. The first scene, entitled 'Where is my food?', draws attention to the mothers' kin work and reproductive labour operating at the boundaries of the public/private dichotomy, and also highlights gendered household dynamics. The second scene, entitled 'At the community centre', examines everyday encounters at the centre, and how 'cultural work', which is pivotal to the mothers' kin work, informs intergenerational relations. The article argues for a more embodied understanding of citizenship in order to broaden understanding of migrant mothers' kin work in making new citizens.

Participatory theatre for transformative social research

“…Our research challenges such pathologizing representations. The theoretical starting point for our work is that migrant mothers perform caring and cultural aspects of citizenship (Erel, 2011; Erel and Reynolds, 2014; Erel, Reynolds and Kaptani, forthcoming; Reynolds, Erel and Kaptani, forthcoming). Our conception of citizenship goes beyond a legalistic notion of formal rights and duties to include wider sociological meanings of participation and belonging, which challenge hegemonic racialized and gendered norms of ‘good citizenship’ (Lister, 2003).…”

‘When my children were born, I started to love Belgium’: Moroccan migrant mothers’ narratives of affective citizenship in the Belgian citizenisation context

“…Migrant mothers are believed to simply transmit their own heritage, capital and resources (Gedalof 2009) to their children, and in doing so, instil specific civil ideals and standards. As several feminist scholars have claimed, mothers are regarded as either 'proper' citizens when they bring forth 'capable', participating patriotic citizens, or an incarnation of failed integration when they transmit their own cultural values and norms and thereby reproduce 'difference' (Reynolds, Erel, and Kaptani 2018).…”

Race and parenting in the context of youth incarceration

“…Bauer (2018) has argued that the Caribbean mothers interviewed created their own distinct practices of what is considered to be a "good mother" in reaction to White Eurocentric values. For Reynolds, Erel, and Kaptani (2018), many migrant mothers, in particular those from the Caribbean now living in the UK, conceived of parenting as relying heavily on the use of extended families, friends and community members. Elsewhere Black feminists in the USA, such as Crenshaw (1989) and Collins (1990), have argued for a fundamental re-defining of what "good motherhood" means.…”