Self-Il/legalisation and political subjecthood: Syrian migrant women in the EU

This paper analyses how kinship in its intersection with the law shapes female migrants’ gendered vulnerabilities, but also their political subjecthood. My ethnographic fieldwork in Athens from 2017–2020 with young adult Syrian women shows that female migrants prefer to remain undocumented in Greece, because so-called ‘illegal’ smuggling routes remain their best bet for reaching Central/Northern Europe. I read their strategies of ‘self-il/legalisation’ as ‘ambivalent’ yet ‘generative’ political acts. By selectively and simultaneously working with and against the EU’s border regime and kin-related legal and socio-cultural structures, acts of self-il/legalisation oppose the infantilisation of women as secondary to male citizens, and of non-citizens as outsider, non-political subjects. I argue that in doing so, female migrants enact an ambiguous political subjecthood that defies classic binaries of the personal/political, citizen/refugee, law/culture and legal/illegal, and also unmask the false claims to rationality, modernity and neutrality upheld in the EUs migration and asylum regime, exposing instead its racialised and heteropatriarchal foundations.