Mama’s Maybe? Hierarchies of Migrant Kin-Making from Lebanon to Sudan

Across the world, migrant workers are being targeted for their kin-making practices and ordered to curb their lives into narrow zones of labor. I argue that this order informs a racializing and gendering violence on migrant women in the Middle East, who are denied genealogical life. Based on multisited ethnographic research with Sudanese and Ethiopian migrant women and men who make kin and organize politically in challenge to the Lebanese state’s criminalization of their reproduction and mobility, I present an argument in three stages. First, through conversations with migrant women who fled from domestic employment and/or from the Lebanese immigration authorities, and often became separated from their children as a consequence, I argue that the state criminalizes female mobility through the category of the “fugitive woman” (harabeh). Second, I argue that the state’s ban on migrants’ reproduction underscores, and reasserts, hierarchies of kin-making between migrant men and women. Third, I trace the material consequences of these hierarchies back to Sudan, where women’s mobility and labor have been policed since colonial rule. The article contributes to two lines of feminist scholarship. First, it expands Black feminist theory by placing Hortense Spillers’s insight on Black kin making in conversation with a South-South context of racial capitalism and, second, it advances Evelyn Nakano Glenn’s intersectional approach to social reproduction theory by foregrounding the racializing violence of restrictive state policies. The research presented is indebted to ongoing feminist and migrant-rights activist efforts in the Middle East.