Mamá, Activista Lesbiana y Refugiada: Racializing Humanitarian Resettlements and Refugee Solidarities for Asylum-seeking Activists in Spain

Keywords: Migrant activism, Racism, Asylum, Solidarities, Humanitarian, Displacement, Queer Migration
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 77

Abstract

Refugee solidarities are generally framed in opposition to the coloniality of Europe’s asylum regime. In contrast, Fiorenza Picozza (2021) argues that presuming that solidarity actors are rarely perpetrators of racial violence diverts attention away from critical analysis into the roles that liberal actors may play in the production of whiteness in Europe’s refugee solidarities. In the context of the Spanish Red Cross (“SRC”) – which acts as a significant advocate in refugee solidarities and subcontracted state-partner in the provision of emergency housing and care services – the boundaries between liberal ‘refugee solidarity’ and neoliberal control of refugee’s subjectivities are blurred and under-researched. This paper addresses these gaps by exploring how the SRC reinforces whiteness throughout activist spaces in conjunction with their potential to act as perpetrators of racialized administrative violence. By drawing on the narratives of two lesbian asylum-seeking activist mothers who were granted humanitarian family housing by the SRC, I unpack the ways in which racial tensions in refugee humanitarian solidarities are exacerbated by the SRC’s proximity to border policing and child protection services. My analysis of racism and racial violence is divided into two sections – first, through ethnographic vignettes exploring the mothers’ struggles for acceptance as independent human rights activists, and secondly through an exploration into the racialized surveillance and hidden forms of displacement experienced by asylum-seekers living in the SRC’s humanitarian housing program. Through it all, queer anti-racist concepts are also used by these refugee activists to help them politically organize and challenge their imposed subjectivities.