Making Way for Ghosts and Mothers: Storied Socialities, Sexual Violence, and the Figure of the Furtive Migrant

This essay takes on ghosts as an explicit analytic lever to examine the storied archive of one racial and racialized mother. It defines ghosts as conglomerating and attached energies whose nodes of human connection rely on the lived experience of violence, violation, and volatility. Through three narrated encounters, the essay uses social and affective memory and autoethnographic matter as food for critical thought, building on philosophy, postcolonial, feminist, and queer criticism, in order to address the hauntology of the necropartriarchal and necropolitical against the backdrop of late liberal globalization and its enduring injustices. In writing at the limit of the unspeakable and the unknown, this essay mimes the violence of the archive. However, this essay does more than recount the violence deposited in the fragment of this archive. It tells the story of ghosts to retrieve what remains dormant in critical feminist theorizations of violence against women. Using a cross-genre form, a secret collection of memories that includes elements of hauntology, this essay exposes some of the cracks and fissures in feminist theorizing on sexual violence, migration, and the figure of the other mother.