Suchergebnisse

In the United States as elsewhere, having no valid visa or residence permit has played a key role in the long-term civic precariousness of unauthorized transnational migrants. However, the distinct U.S. regime of illegality has allowed undocumented residents there to enjoy a range of citizenship rights contrasting with Western Europe's more repressive regimes. Indeed, illegal immigrants have integrated U.S. society, bureaucratic system, and labor market in ways that cannot entirely be grasped by opposing formal exclusion on the one hand, and informal incorporation or subjective legitimacy on the other. Though inferior, their concrete citizenship condition includes many formal elements, at the local and national levels. Such an advanced normalization of illegality has increased the institutionalization of unauthorized migrants' inferior status: never being completely 'non-citizens,' they have grown into a class of 'sub-citizens,' whose self-discipline, bureaucratic stability, and fiscal participation, have been encouraged by reasonable promises of amnesty. These promises were regularly reiterated but, since 1986 in the case of Mexicans, repeatedly postponed. In this context, 'illegality' has not come up as an absolute marker of illegitimacy, but rather as one more handicap within a continuum of probationary citizenship. However, as irregular migrants sometimes have to commit more infractions in order to reach the most formal of common civic attributes, the social meaning of the latter has proved ultimately undetermined, for their holders can be framed as 'more illegal' as much as 'more legal.'. Adapted from the source document.

Is the notion of intersectionality doomed to being part of the problem it describes? Intersectionality theory was not developed to merely point at intersections but to capture subject positions made invisible by dominant systems of normative representation. It shined the spotlight on processes that reduce disadvantaged population groups to the particular experience of the least oppressed among category members, making other members appear as if they were at the intersection with another group. Rather than dividing between complex and simple oppressions, intersectionality theory thus invites us to reject the intersectional metaphor and problematize every subject position as complex. Yet, abstract categories and asymmetrical constructions of complexity carry real-life challenges for the individuals and groups concerned. But how can these challenges be described in the language of intersectionality without reinforcing the asymmetry? The article examines this conundrum both in the social scientific sphere of analytic description and in the normative sphere of political strategizing. We first briefly trace the history of intersectionality theory as a critique of hierarchies of representativeness both in social movements and in antidiscrimination jurisprudence. Second, we examine the social scientific challenge of describing concrete situations in the language of intersectionality without attributing intersection to the groups affected by it. Finally, we return to politics by examining the limits of turning intersectionality, originally a critique of political domination, into a positive political program, in particular if the latter would take the form of a universalistic imperative for all emancipation movements to give the same priority to all issues all the time. Adapted from the source document.

Forged in the United States in the 1980s, the notion of intersectionality sought to provide an umbrella name for the strategic and identity dilemmas faced by categories of persons suffering from combined forms of domination. This article retraces the comparative genealogy of the notion in the United States and in France since the 1970s, and describes how its appropriation in social scientific inquiry allowed to reformulate what were normative problems specific to the politico-juridical sphere, into principles of empirical investigation. Increasingly used in France since the mid-2000s, the notion of intersectionality has led to the exploration of new objects and the development of new research agendas, especially within political science. Adapted from the source document.

Over the past decades, citizenship studies have explored in detail the various forms of social and civic integration achieved by otherwise illegal residents in contemporary immigration countries. While a great deal of analysis has tended to rest on a dichotomy between formal exclusion on the one hand and informal incorporation on the other, recent studies have begun questioning this dualistic model by examining the formal circuits of incorporation followed by unauthorized denizens at various geographical and institutional levels. Taking cues from this emerging line of research, this article makes three interconnected arguments. First, in contemporary liberal democracies, the rising tension between the illegal status of new immigrants and their limited but effective incorporation does not always pit formal law against informal practices, but is often located within law itself. Second, as a dynamic institutional nexus, "illegality" does not function as an absolute marker of illegitimacy, but rather as a handicap within a continuum of probationary citizenship. An incipient moral economy sees irregular migrants accumulating official and semiofficial proofs of presence, certificates of reliable conduct and other formal emblems of good citizenship, whether in the name of civic honor, in the hope of lesser deportability, or in view of future legalization. Third, such access to formal civic attributes is simultaneously being made increasingly difficult by the intensification of restrictions and controls from immigration, labor, and welfare authorities, thus confronting irregular migrants with the harsh dilemma of being framed as "more illegal" for the very documentary and economic features also assumed to improve their present and prospective civic deservingness. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractRecent programs to regularize undocumented migrants suggest the increasing role of employment as a requirement for foreigners to legally reside in Europe. Taking as illustrations the cases of Spain, France, Austria, Belgium and Germany, this article examines how regularization policies frame work. Employment provisions follow a civic‐performance frame that breaks with the criterion of vulnerability. While secure forms of employment paying standard wages are privileged, the crisis has made such jobs even less accessible to migrants seeking to regularize or maintain their status. Residence permits granted through legalization have become increasingly temporary and conditional, often involving repeated transitions in and out of illegality. A vicious circle of "disintegration" thus threatens to set in where employment precariousness becomes both the source and the consequence of legal precariousness.
Policy Implications


The article shows how employment provisions are tightly linked to policies of "earned legalization".

The article shows that employment can be part of a broader regularization policy emphasizing ties to the host country.

The article brings attention to potential conflicts between access requirements based on migrant vulnerability, and those based on migrant integration.

The article warns against the exclusionary workings of employment‐based regularization in times of economic downturn.

Fourth delivery of the bibliographic review on gender, this 2014 edition illustrates the plurality of land (labor, sexuality, art, law, citizenship, collective movements ...) and theoretical renewals (intersectionality, queer theories, care or sociology masculinities) that today are the wealth and dynamism of this field of studies. Simultaneously, this column provides an overview of issues and challenges dividing the contemporary feminism. Notwithstanding that the mobilizations of those who call themselves 'anti-genre' experiencing a resurgence, the feminist movement now seems splits and makes emerge radically different opinions on topics such as prostitution or pornography, demonstrating and the 'sex wars' of the American feminism of the 1980s are far from over. The different readings of this chronic illuminate these debates all by expanding the areas of sociological investigation. This demarche, founded on an apprehension of gender as a relationship of power, proves without doubt more than ever necessary. We hope that the different contributions of this column will demonstrate how a historicist approaches and materialistic studies on gender are part of the critical tradition of social sciences. Adapted from the source document.