Kinship in Times of Suspicious Citizenship

by Eda Pepi

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WGSS Community,

It was an honor to host the 2018-2019 Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies speaker series! In light of recent public emergencies in the United States—ranging from family separations and child detentions to the Muslim ban and the proposed legal erasure of transgender identity among many others—I organized the series under the rubric “Kinship in Times of Suspicious Citizenship.”

The goal was to foreground gender and kinship as analytics for understanding a range of topical issues about migration, citizenship, and social reproduction. I wanted, in particular, to highlight transnational perspectives in gender and kinship studies that show how these emergencies are neither unprecedented nor exceptional. Indeed, what we are witnessing today is ultimately a global movement in regulating citizenship by intervening into family life.

The following six speakers attended to these kinds of kinship interventions in relation to how intimacy is negotiated with and against political, juridical, economic, religious, symbolic, and migratory processes that regulate and normalize inequalities in membership, belonging, and citizenship.

Temporary Star Crossings: Reflections on Sectarianism and Intermarriage in Lebanon
Lara Deeb, Professor of Anthropology, Scripps College
On October 31st, 2018, Deeb used analytics of race and state racism to theorize the production of difference and the unequal distribution of citizenship in her study of inter-sectarian marriages in Lebanon.

“Natural Born Aliens”: Transnational American Adoptees and Citizenship
Eleana Kim, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine
Kim Park Nelson, Associate Professor of American Multicultural Studies, Minnesota State University, Moorhead.
On January 29th, 2019, Kim and Park Nelson traced the shifts in juridical discourse that categorize transnational Asian adoptees first in terms of relief as refugees and then as immigrants and even “illegal aliens.”

The Spectacle of Child Separation at the Border: A History
Laura Briggs, Professor and Chair of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Also on January 29th, 2019, Briggs contextualized the spectacle of family separations at the southern U.S. border within historical scripts of child separations during slavery and through Native American boarding schools.

Accumulating Family Values: A Comparative Perspective on Inheritance, Inequality, and Gender in the US
Sylvia Yanagisako, Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies and Professor of Anthropology, Stanford University
On February 27th, 2019, Yanagisako explained how the gendered inequalities produced by intergenerational transmission of wealth in the US and Italy become naturalized through biological understandings of kinship.

Trafficking Husbands: Malagasy women’s marriage migration to France
Jennifer Cole, Professor and Chair of Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago