Gail Lewis

Introduction: Contemporary political contexts, changing terrains and revisited discourses

The introduction to this ERS Special Issue sets out the broad frame through which the six articles can be coherently viewed. It does so by suggesting that, more recently, different governments’ attempts to manage the tensions surrounding asylum, labour needs and multicultural citizenship have increasingly involved a ‘redrawing’ or ‘refixing’ of immigration and multicultural political and policy approaches. This ‘redrawing’ process places a traditional stress on policing national borders and excavates older discourses of assimilationism through an emphasis on cultural integration, social cohesion and a notion of a core national identity. This process is apparent in wider European and Australian contexts and can be particularly seen in the current British governments legislative interventions on asylum and migrant labour. The introduction sets out the specificity of the British context and outlines how each of the subsequent articles speaks to the labile political and policy landscapes of migration and belonging.

Welcome to the margins: Diversity, tolerance and policies of exclusion

This article explores some of the ways in which UK Government policies inscribe tensions between tolerance of cultural difference, on the one hand, and an attempt to instil a regime of normalizing discipline, on the other. It argues that these tensions are expressed in the ambiguity of the figure of ‘the immigrant woman’, who simultaneously embodies the possibility of assimilation into and destabilization of the nation and the national. This is because this figure has come to occupy a significant place both in the struggles over the meaning of cultural plurality and as the subject around whom the characterization of the nation as tolerant and modern is invested.

Unsafe Travel: Experiencing Intersectionality and Feminist Displacements

Taking as its starting point the success of the concept of intersectionality in generating feminist inquiry in Europe, this article explores the disavowal and displacement of race that have accompanied intersectionality as it has traveled across the Atlantic. In a context in which race continues to be a structuring principle in European societies, the article explores some implications for feminist practice. It argues that such disavowal and displacement has several effects: it serves to ghettoize race as meaning-making and a site of knowledge production, it silences and subordinates those identified with the genesis of intersectionality as an analytic, and it occludes whiteness as a racialized and racializing category. Working within a psychodynamics-of-organization and black feminist frame, it argues that this has profound implications for interactions among feminists racialized as white and of color as they encounter each other in spaces of feminist infrastructure.

Celebrating intersectionality? debates on a multi-faceted concept in gender studies: themes from a conference

This short article explores some of the enduring preoccupations, possibilities and dilemmas that continue to engage feminists in varying locations in Europe. It raises questions of the ethics of feminist practice when key concepts and theoretical approaches travel across locations and are taken up in these different contexts to address specific intersectional constellations.

Imaginaries of Europe Technologies of Gender, Economies of Power

This article explores some of the ways in which ideas about and attempts to construct a European identity and sense of belonging inscribe an imaginary of Europe that is exclusionary and elitist. It suggests that the symbolic figure of ‘the immigrant woman’ is a container category that simultaneously signifies the non-European and tests and destabilizes claims to Europes essential characteristics. It also argues that traces of this imaginary of Europe can be found in feminist scholarship on global care chains and that the spatial category of ‘the domestic’ is the invisible seam that ties this scholarship to the hegemonic imaginary of Europe.

Situated Voices: ???Black Women's Experience??? and Social Work

The article uses a discourse analytic approach to explore some of the ways in which black women social workers invoke the category ‘experience’ as a means by which to mediate their structural and discursive location in social services departments. The article draws on current feminist theoretical debates about ‘experience’ and the ‘multivocality’ of black women as they construct dialogic spaces with diverse interlocutors. In so doing an argument is made for an understanding of ‘black womens experience’ as constituted rather than descriptive.

Journeying Toward the Nation(al): Cultural Difference at the Crossroads of Old and New Globalisations

The superimposition of new migratory flows linked to post‐Cold War global realignments upon older migratory flows marked by the global alignments of colonialism have profoundly marked contemporary Britain. Alongside policies and practices of security aimed especially at Muslims, struggles over the meaning of the plurality of cultural forms signalled by ‘multiculturalism’ have assumed a central place in government, media and popular discourse as the provenance and scope of Britishness and citizenship are debated in attempts to foster social cohesion. Against this context, and with specific reference to the British Caribbean population, this article explores the shifting subject positions and subjectivities that are constituted in the crucible of cultural difference and multiple forms of border crossing, and the anxieties these produce as they expose the instabilities inherent in the constitution of nation and national belonging.

Where might I find you? Objects and internal space for the father

This article explores the relationship between objects and their role in the recovering of the (my) father. Its distinguishing features include use of lived experience gleaned from memory in combination with cultural and post-Kleinian theory in an exploration of the internal space constituted by oedipal dynamics and domestic space inscribed as ‘multiracial’. Its mode is free associative, mirroring the act of remembering. It offers a distinctive contribution to the psychosocial, diaspora and memory literatures in its attempt to chart the simultaneous expansion of internal space and shrinking of ‘racial’ space that made room for a complicated, yet uncertain, psychic recognition of my father.

Citizenship: Pushing the Boundaries

This issue on women and citizenship appears at a moment when questions of citizenship are at the forefront of diverse political agenda. The contributions bring together global perspectives with considerations of issues of citizenship in particular regional and national contexts. ‘Citizenship’ highlights the complexity of the relationships between individuals and the ‘nation-state’; the construction of collectivities within, between and across states and nations; and categories of belonging and the forces of globalization.

Not by criticality alone

Let me start by saying I have a problem. It is a problem that is emotional, intellectual, relational and materialises in the varieties of practice that shape and are shaped by the terrains, legacies and cultures I inhabit. It is the problem of how to contribute to the work of laying bare for examination and eradication the patterns and processes which give life to and sustain the toxicity of racism, misogyny, homophobia, class hatred and disablism, whilst simultaneously remaining open to those who are ‘not me’ and their vulnerabilities. Perhaps unexpectedly – or not – Robyn Wiegman’s engagement with the issue of the reparative reminded me of this enduring problem. And the starting point for that was her use of time. In using the question of time and temporality to frame her intervention into debates about the reparative move in queer feminist scholarship, Robyn Wiegman proposes an angle of vision that extends the foray into Kleinian theoretical practice first proposed by Eve Sedgwick. For example, her title – ‘The Times We’re In’ – could be taken as her way of reiterating the importance of the ‘here-and-now’ that is so sacrosanct to many Kleinian psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists. Moving more deeply into the Kleinian theoretical archive raises two further and interrelated themes that are trailed in this article. On the one hand, there is the tension between the time of the neoliberal subject as a subject of triumphalism, in which interconnection and dependency is denigrated and the enduring dynamic between separateness/difference, dependency/autonomy is disavowed. On the other hand, is a conception of subjectivity that can recognise and accept difference without resorting to conceiving the human population as comprising a series of incommensurable and discrete constituencies. This links directly to the second theme raised by a deeper engagement with Kleinian theory. This concerns how the psychic constellation of love, hate and knowledge emerging from Wilfred Bion’s development of Kleinian theory might be brought to bear on analyses of queer feminist (and other) modes of feminist critical scholarship. Whilst the echo of this psychic constellation is evident (if muted) in Robyn Wiegman’s article, the echo of here-and-now thinking may or may not be intended but is suggested by her concern to establish the character of the ‘times we’re in’ and the implications for