Leila Whitley

This essay critically assesses the use of Agamben’s theory within border and migration studies. What I am interested in tracing is the ways that, through reference to Agamben, particular dynamics of bordering are foregrounded, while others recede. In particular, I argue that because Agamben foregrounds legal structures in his scholarship, and does not articulate a theory of racism or work from a history of racism, that reliance on his scholarship has the effect of displacing discussions of race/racism in the field. This displacement repeats the erasure or disappearance of race/racism in the world.

In this article we discuss the sexual harassment that occurs within academic institutions between academic staff and postgraduate students. Our interest is in analysing the ways that sexism and sexual harassment are enabled and sustained in the university environment. In particular, we are interested in interrogating the power that occurs in these relationships, and how the nature of this relation makes it difficult for students to name and refuse the harassment that occurs. We argue that sexism conceals itself through its continual movement, and that sexual harassment is perpetuated within universities through tactics that relocate the problem away from the individual and the institution. In this way, sexual harassment disappears: the problem never appears as a problem of sexual harassment. Instead, it appears as a number of other shifting problems, which include the problem of the women who complain, and the harm caused to academic reputations. The slipperiness of sexism means it comes to be re-circulated through social and institutional structures that keep sexual harassers in place, because sexism and sexual harassment appear always out of reach. Mechanisms within the institution set up to address sexual harassment work not only to distance the institution from responsibility for the harassment, but also to hide the harassment even in the moment when women and male allies are insistently working to try to make it appear.

Arizona's SB1070, or the “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighbourhoods Act,” is a piece of US immigration legislation passed in 2010, making it one of the first state-level immigration bills in the US in recent years. The cornerstone of SB1070 is the requirement that police officers verify a person’s immigration status should they develop a “reasonable suspicion” in the course of a traffic-stop or other law-enforcement action that the person may not hold legal status. Through this provision, the bill legitimates “suspicion” as a valid motive for detaining an individual and checking their documentation and also raises the question of what it means to “look illegal.” In this article I argue that not only does Arizona’s SB1070 draw on racist ideas of national belonging, but that the practices of immigration policing it relies upon point toward the question of the location and function of the border. What does the consolidation and intensification of migration policing throughout the interior of national space do, both to conceptions of that space and to the border? And what does a racialised and racist immigration policing practice, in which policing can be triggered anywhere and at any time by the ways that a body is coded as belonging or not belonging, do to an understanding of the border and its locations? Placed in the wider context of US immigration policy, I argue that SB1070 necessitates a non-territorial theory of the border that understands borders as existing in relation to the bodies they police and control. I argue that SB1070 places the border not in a geographic space, but directly on the human body. In this way, what SB1070 legalises is the treatment of the body as a border.

Paper given at the NWSA conference in Montreal. Using a decolonial feminist approach to explore the politics of bodies in European bordering practices, in this paper I look at the sexual assaults that took place in Cologne, Germany on December 31, 2015.