Historically, processes of mothering have been closely linked with notions of sovereignty and nationhood. Motherhood has been framed as a patriotic act or a national obligation to ensure the continuation of the nation, contributing to processes of the delineation of the borders of the state. Maternal politics have also been entrenched in narratives surrounding who does not “belong” within this border, through the securitisation of reproduction and the propagation of the notion of "health tourism" which is manifested on the body of the “non-citizen” pregnant woman. This violent delineation has been disrupted, however, in protests across the globe, which have been a potent force in the promotion of human rights. These mothers’ protests constitute a particularly powerful form of resistance—the transnational resistance of motherhood.
PATRIOTIC MOTHERHOOD
Feminist scholar Cynthia Enloe describes the process of “patriotic mothering,” in which the production of offspring has been perceived to be a national obligation in order to support war efforts. Enloe describes the justification behind this archaic narrative—if political leaders require young soldiers for military service, then it is beneficial to frame “maternal duty as a public duty,” as they are raising the future generations of leaders and soldiers of the nation.
This exploitation of maternal politics serves to maintain national identity and ensure the continued population of the nation. Women, and mothers in particular, have been framed as symbols of the nation, and violence may be justified in order to protect the “women back home”. Feminist scholar Sikita Banjeree recognises this correlation between motherhood and nationalism when she highlights that “motherland or nation as a woman to be protected by brave citizen warriors is a common metaphor of nationalisms”. This notion of the “motherland” requiring protection highlights this inextricable link between motherhood and nationalism, in which mothering constitutes a symbolic nationalist activity. By nature, this relies on a heteronormative and exclusionary framework for national acceptance.
“SECURITISATION OF REPRODUCTION”
Thus, in conjunction with motherhood as a symbol of the nation, it is also used to define the limits of the nation. In her text, Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain, Imogen Tyler explores the processes of population control which took place throughout the 20th century. Governments increasingly attempted to “denaturalise” specific populations, demarcating the limits of the state and citizenship to exclude certain populations. One of the processes through which this has been achieved is the “securitisation of reproduction,” which Tyler summarises:
Migrant women represent a specific threat to nativist ideologies. The figure of the “reproductive migrant” who threatens to populate “our country” with “foreign children” incites nativism and proliferates fears about both a loss of ancestry and the future of the nation-state itself. [p108]
This idea that migrant mothers pose a potential threat to the state is reflected in a document published by the British Home Office in 2007. The report describes the risks of “health tourism,” involving “small scale but very deliberate abuse of the NHS,” which “…primarily involved heavily pregnant women arriving the UK with an intention of using NHS maternity services”. In subsequent “handling guidelines” retrieved by Tyler under the Freedom of Information Act, the Home Office expanded on this:
In the case of a female passenger where the Immigration Officer has suspicions from her appearance that she may be pregnant, the passenger will be asked if she is expecting a child and what her plans are for the birth. If the passenger claims not to be pregnant then the Immigration Officer may refer her to the port medical inspector, who will then examine the passenger and determine the approximate gestation of the pregnancy, if any. If the gestation of the pregnancy suggests that the passenger will be giving birth within the previously claimed period of stay […] then she may be refused leave to enter.
This notion of pregnant women “smuggling” their children across the border and constituting a threat to the state demonstrate further how motherhood and citizenship are inextricably linked. While, on the one hand, motherhood is an act which is constitutive of nationhood and citizenship, it simultaneously has been framed as an external threat from which the state needs protecting. The state of being pregnant can be sufficient to legitimise a refusal of entry into the UK, exemplifying a paradox in which reproduction is simultaneously the backbone of the state, and a threat to it.
MOTHERS IN RESISTANCE
Citizenship battles take place on the landscape of the bodies of mothers and pregnant women, but, across borders, mothers are resisting the use of their bodies as terrain. These protests against a range of acts of state violence have emerged in China, Turkey, India, the UK, Argentina, Canada, and Mexico, constituting a powerful, transnational form of resistance against the use of mothers’ bodies as objects of state power.
Yarl’s Wood Protests
In April 2008, in Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre in England, officers attempted to deport a Burundian mother and her British-born baby. In the chapter, “Naked Protest: Maternal Politics and the Feminist Commons," Tyler describes how fellow mothers in the centre staged a protest, in which some were forcibly restrained and put in solitary confinement. The following day, the Yarl’s Wood mothers staged a second protest, in which they removed their clothes. One of the protestors, 22-year-old Mercy Guobatia, stated, “I took my clothes off because they treat us like animals. We are claiming asylum, we're not animals. They treat us as if we've done something terrible." Guobatia described the illness faced by her daughters since arriving at Yarl’s Wood due to the overcrowded conditions of the centre, which enables viruses to spread rapidly. The use of the visual taboo of the pregnant, naked body garnered significant national and international media attention, exposing the inhumane conditions to which these mothers and their children were subject. In protesting against the British state’s violent policies towards asylum seekers, the mother’s resisted the use of their bodies as a demarcation line of citizenship. As Tyler describes, this invocation of motherhood served to “introduce a vital tension that…destabilises Eurocentric and masculinist understandings of sovereignty”.
Mothers of Plaza de Mayo
On 30 April 1977, a group of mothers met in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires to protest the forced disappearances of their children by the Argentinian government. Since that day, they have met every Thursday to continue calling for justice for the around 30,000 disappearances that occurred between 1976 and 1983. On 19 April 2021, they completed their 2,246th protest (online due to COVID-19 restrictions). 86-year-old Taty Almeida, whose son Alejandro disappeared in 1975, describes the continued relevance of these protests in the era of alternative facts, arguing that the current government wants to “erase the memory” of those years. Alongside the Mothers, the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo (“the Abuelas”) emerged to track down the children of women who were abducted by the dictatorship while pregnant.
The invocation of the maternal roles as symbols of resistance has garnered the Mothers and the Abuelas global media attention, with the Guardian asserting that “the mothers’ white headscarves became a symbol of courage and the relentless battle for justice”. As of 2016, more than 1,000 of the dictatorship’s murderers have been tried, and 700 have been sentenced. As with the Yarl’s Wood mothers, these maternal protests distort conventional notions of patriotic motherhood, refusing to bow down to state oppression. Enloe wrote, “When women define good mothering in a way that subverts sons’ compliance… governments quake”—the persistent determination of these mothers and grandmothers continues to shake Argentinian soil.
As Foucault famously asserted, “Where there is power, there is resistance”. When mothers’ bodies are used as a battleground for the powerful to enact chauvinistic, exclusive, and violent policies, they will resist.
This article was written as part of the Human Rights Pulse Writer’s Workshop programme.
Iona works for a social justice organisation aimed at improving social mobility by teaching key employability skills in schools across London. Iona is an MSc graduate in Human Rights at the London School of Economics, where she focused her studies on postcolonial critiques of human rights, and the contention between citizenship law and human rights law.