Pregnant crossings : a political economy of care on Europe's external borders

Abstract

A recurring feature of the dominant representation of the migration crisis along Europe’s southern border in the Mediterranean and in the Balkans is that of the harrowing portrayal of women and small children captured on their migration journey. These images are meant to epitomize human suffering and victimhood, and to invoke in their viewers strong feelings of empathy, which, however, somehow have a distancing and silencing effect. These images do not matter as such for the persons and their individual stories that they document, but rather for the abstract emotional narratives they capture. Over-represented, yet silenced, women entering the European Union (EU) today through its external borders represent, we argue, the powerful gendering of migration which operates in densely crossed borderlands.