In person icon Regulating the Family, Racializing the Family? (part 1 of 2)

Abstract

How are migrants, non-nationals, racialized and Othered individuals affected by and engage with family politics and policies? The relationship between “the state” and “the family” has been at the heart of many different studies (Bourdieu 1996, Bonizzoni 2018; Bonjour and de Hart 2013, 2020; Gillies 2012, Horsti and Pellander 2015; Odasso 2021; Plummer 2010; Schrover 2009; Strasser et al. 2009; Van Walsum 2008). Research has made clear that norms and ideas about what constitutes a ‘proper’ family are closely related to discourses on normalcy and national belonging. The aim of this panel is to move the discussion on the relationship between “the state” and “the family” forward, by investigating how gender, race and class intersect when it comes to governing and administering families and what this implies for understanding the power relationships at play. It is specifically the intersectional dimension that we aim to address. Recent scholarship has underlined the role family norms play both in migration governance (Welfens & Bonjour, 2021) and social welfare (Bütow et al., 2014; Weber, 2015). Exploring the ways in which states deal with families, parents and children is insightful, because it is through families that nation-states reproduce themselves “physically and culturally” (Moret et al., 2019, p. 7; Yuval‐Davis, 1997). We may thus ask: how is the population governed and administered through the family (Donzelot and Hurley 1997)? And what power relationships and exclusion mechanisms become visible in these processes (Foucault, 1983; Welfens & Bonjour, 2021)? The panel consists of two parts: In this first panel we explore the mechanisms – both historical and contemporary – of racialization and othering in Europe, in definitions of ‘the family’, ‘marriage’, ‘mother’ and ‘child’. Who and what counts as a family, and who is considered to belong on the basis of those definitions? In this panel, we aim for a fruitful discussion of differences and similarities between the European contexts studied in the five papers, and between these strands of literature. The papers address topics ranging from the politics of forced adoption and child placement, to (dis)continuities of history and colonialism in the governance of intimacies, to present-day FGM-safeguarding policies.

Title	Details
Standards of Transnational Marriages and Coloniality	View Paper Details
The racialized reproductive politics of forced adoptions as child welfare in Denmark	View Paper Details
Children as “future citizens” Child placement processes in Switzerland between 1960 and 1980	View Paper Details