Intra-Sectional Becoming: An Embodied Inquiry with Asylum-Seeking Young Women in UK

This arts-based inquiry asks how the United Kingdom's asylum practices shape embodied experiences of asylum-seeking young women. I worked with asylum-seeking young women aged 16 to 21 from the Global South (Global Majority) who live on the intersectional margins of gender, age and race. Rooted in Feminist New Materialism and guided by posthumanist thought, this inquiry holds an ethico-onto-epistemological commitment which is that doing, being and knowing are co-constituted. I resist binaries of subject/object, knower/known, theory/data and human/nonhuman. Moreover, neither I nor the inquiry pre-exist the field. Instead, we emerge through intra-actions between bodies, policies, emotions, materials and stories. In this orientation, art is positioned as onto-epistemological. Body-mapping, as an arts-based method, becomes an intra-vention which is a diffractive material practice that co-constitutes experiences instead of merely capturing them. Participants trace their lives onto life-sized outlines of their bodies, which I then read diffractively alongside historicity of UK asylum policy. Theories are read through each other as they "bubbled up" with maps avoiding hierarchies among them. Ahmed's stickiness of emotions, Butler's performativity and precarity and Barad's posthuman performativity are a few among others that intra-acted with the body-maps to show how bodies and policies reconfigured each other across time. The young women's narratives, drawings and affective expressions revealed asylum policy's governance as a force of control that constituted them as racialised, opportunist others and demanded performances of obedience that constrains their freedom. Yet their mapped bodies show resistance, opening possibilities for recognition and resilience. Agency here is emergent instead of being pre-possessed and unfolds through intra-activity. Embodiment surfaces as dynamic hence continually shapes and reshapes through exposure to the other, through governance and through material and affective entanglements. It was through these iterative intra-actions between policy, theory and body-mapped narratives that I came to see asylum-seeking bodies as always in states of becoming. This recognition led me to articulate my fluid conceptual contribution as an intra-sectional becoming. It is a way of highlighting asylum-seeking young women's lives as enduring, adaptive and continuously re(configuring) with historicity of the policy. These are lives that are not always reducible to fixed grids of intersectional marginalisation. To develop this contribution, I recognise the intellectual labour of foremothers such as Frances Beal, Deborah King and Patricia Hill Collins among others, whose accounts of double jeopardy, multiple jeopardy and the matrix of domination gave intersectionality its foundations as Kimberlé Crenshaw names it. Since then, debates have asked whether intersectionality is a concept, a theory or a tool for theorising identity, experience, or structures. Its openness and vagueness make it a successful theory because it is incomplete and adaptable. It is in this openness that I find the space for my move towards intra-sectionality. It is important to note that intra-sectionality is not built on the "ruins" of intersectionality. Creating such hierarchies is not the intension of my work, which itself challenges binaries. Instead, I propose intra-sectionality as a threshold, which once attached to assemblages of theory, body-maps and policy becomes a passage for meaning-making. In proposing this expansion, I carefully follow Nash's encouragement to extend intersectionality only by honouring its roots. I also pay attention to Puar's insistence on assemblage, which unsettles fixed tendencies of intersectionality and foregrounds material vitality of bodies, affects and structures. I am also mindful, as insisted by Ahmed, to not to overlook and misrepresent the essential labour of feminist genealogy when thinking with Feminist New Materialism. Intra-sectional becoming emerges in this dissertation as a re-imagining of intersectionality's analytical possibilities. It begins with relations of ongoing entanglements of policies, bodies, affects and histories through which identities and oppressions are continually produced and reconfigured. In short, intra-sectional becoming is a relational ontology of marginalisation where categories do not pre-exist but are continuously re-made through assemblages of bodies, policies and emotions. The body-maps in this inquiry acted as intra-ventions that unsettled fixity and made instability visible. They materialised asylum-seeking bodies in two specific ways. This includes enduring bodies which bear the sedimented weight of exclusions, controls and ongoing historicity of asylum governance and as dynamic bodies which are the bodies that remain in motion, adapting to shifting socio-political conditions to claim recognition and liveability.