Search

This article theorizes the state as central to the construction of racism in the Republic of Ireland, which, since the 1990s economic boom, has become an in-migration destination. State racism culminated in the 2004 Citizenship Referendum, in which, at a majority of four to one, the Irish electorate voted for the removal of birth-right citizenship to children of migrants. Based on Goldberg's theory of the racial state, which, in constructing homogeneity, obscures existing heterogeneities, and on Foucault's theory of biopolitics, leading to the state supposedly caring for the population through a series of technologies aiming to regulate and manage racial diversities, the article examines recent developments in Ireland's immigration and asylum policies. The debates around the Citizenship Referendum are theorized as constructing what Balibar terms 'crisis racism', blaming migrants for the problems of the system. Keywords: Ireland; racial state; biopolitics: citizenship referendum; migration; integration.

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2006.07.004 Byline: Ronit Lentin Abstract: This article explores a specific form of state sanctioned violence enacted towards survivors of Transnistria, Ukraine, using testimonies of women survivors of Transnistria. The article theorises the woman survivor of genocide as femina sacra -- the equivalent of Agamben's [Agamben, Giorgio (1995) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, Ca: Stanford University Press.] homo sacer, she who can be killed without charge of homicide but who cannot be sacrificed, and who is always at the mercy of sovereign power. The article then examines the politics of memory in relation to political violence and the concept of postmemory, as developed by Marianne Hirsch [Hirsch, Marianne (1997) Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.], denoting a 'vicarious past' or 'received history', and the link between feminism and 'cultural memory'. It concludes by teasing out a series of interrelated questions about the role gender plays in the interaction of genocide, gender and memory. Author Affiliation: Ethnic and Racial Studies, Department of Sociology, University of Dublin, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2004.10.002 Byline: Ronit Lentin Abstract: This article has two aims. Positing Ireland as a 'racial state,' it positions migrant women, who have been represented as conniving to subvert Ireland's citizenship and nationality norms, as carrying the burden of representations of strangerhood, theorised after Zygmunt Bauman and Walter Benjamin as both flAcentsneur, or stroller, and stranger proper. My second aim is to consider the collusion by feminist researchers in such representations through our power to name, categorise, and constitute migrants as 'other,' and thus as the unproblematised objects of our orientalising gaze. Like city strollers, finding themselves among strangers and being strangers to them, social researchers often take strangers as 'surfaces,' seeing and knowing them episodically. However, this article is neither a feminist j'accuse nor a prescriptive solution to the 'problem' of researching migrant women. In this article, I do not assume 'migrant women' as a homogenising monolithic category. Rather than attempting to make their experiences visible through unreflexive conventional ethnographies, this article seeks to reproblematise representation and experience as feminist methodological tools used here to position the migrant-woman-stranger within a gendered critique of the racial state. Author Affiliation: Ethnic and Racial Studies, Department of Sociology, University of Dublin, Trinity College

The spirit of modern Israel is essentially masculine because it adopts Hebrew, the language of the Biblical male God. It ignores Yiddish, the East European Jewish language, due to its feminine underpinnings. The masculinization of Israel has led to a stigmatization of the Holocaust and its survivors, as they survived a Nazi onslaught rather than an armed struggle. The peripheral entity of women in Israel seems to be an outcome of the Jewish religion.