Unmaking Home, Undoing Mothers: Asylum, Gender and Domopolitics in England

Abstract

When in the care of the Home Office, women undergo various forms of structural violence. While scholarly literature has highlighted challenges related to overly harming interviewing practices, detention, and domestic and sexual abuse, the gendered dimension of inadequate asylum housing provision has remained overlooked. To address this gap, in this article I explore how racialised asylum-seeking mothers are affected by enforced and confined housing, drawing on in-depth interviews with 11 mothers seeking asylum and residing in the West Midlands (England, UK). I discuss how both the materiality of asylum accommodation, and the unhomely feelings it engenders, negatively affect mothering practices and emotion work, making asylum-seeking women not only dysfunctional carers within a neoliberal understanding of motherhood but, more generally, undesirable guests not belonging to the national home. I specifically focus on how the state of neglect of asylum housing, their lack of family-friendly design (including home sharing), and frequent forced mobility are experienced as undermining children’s safety and well-being. As a result, mothers have to constantly (re)craft a protective and supportive environment for their children under very hostile circumstances, which heavily impact on their mental health. By bridging the concepts of ‘domopolitics’ and ‘unhoming’, I argue that the institutionally engineered removal of feelings of security, control, and belonging surrounding asylum domestic structures is a highly gendered process in a contemporary politics of home.