A Conversation with Seyla Benhabib and Judith Resnik
- A Conversation with Seyla Benhabib and Judith Resnik
Thank you both for taking the time to talk with me about your important, new collected volume, Migrations and Mobilities: Citizenship, Borders, and Gender (2009).1 As the title suggests, the volume is concerned primarily with movement, with contemporary migrations and mobility beyond or within national borders. In its focus on gender, Migrations and Mobilities pays particular attention to the status of migrant female workers, invisible caregivers, family units, the rights of children, and women’s second-class citizen status in various regions of the world.
What was the impetus behind this collected work?
The immediate occasion for it was the conference “Citizenship, Borders, and Gender” that Judith and I organized at Yale in May 2003. But the main issue was that the gender question was not at the center of the growing field of migration and citizenship studies.
There is a lovely, feminist story to the genesis and production of the conference and then to the book as well. A group of us at Yale formed a collective called the Women’s Faculty Forum (WFF). This forum came together because in 2000, Yale was organizing to celebrate its three hundredth birthday without a formal way of marking one of the transformations of the past century for Yale University—that it too had new citizens, which is to say, women had become eligible to function in all roles within the university. Of course, women had been at Yale—as workers—since its inception, but in the twentieth century, women become participants as students throughout the university as well as faculty and senior administrators. [End Page 271]
With the support of the university, the WFF organized a conference as part of the many events to celebrating Yale’s three hundred years. Our event, held in 2001, was called “Gender Matters,” and a monograph of that name appeared soon thereafter. The WFF has continued to work on scholarship and university practices, considered from the standpoint of gender equity and gender discrimination. In 2003, with support from the WFF and several other segments of Yale, Seyla and I convened a conference that aspired to have the many academic sites of concerns around citizenship come together, to meet each other under a framework marked by gender. We sought to engender the citizenship conversations around us.
The work has an international scope and includes contributions from leading political scientists, law professors, historians, and sociologists, among others. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of this volume, do you hope to reach a larger audience than a scholarly one? Do you think that the work could effect national or international change within the areas of politics, law, or human rights?
Well, it depends on how one measures change. Do we want the conversation to change in all those areas so that people, whether they’re thinking politics or theory or policy in different venues, will be engaging these questions? Yes.
Yes, particularly as the discussion about immigration and crossing borders continues intensely in this country. Immigration policy has become part of the larger debate about national security. The Department of Immigration has been swallowed by Homeland Security, and it doesn’t seem as if that’s going to be changing any time soon. However, this situation creates profound distortions and injustices by criminalizing immigration, rather than viewing it as part of the human condition in the twentieth-first century to which we must seek a humane and just answer. Hopefully the volume will stimulate some new kinds of thinking about these issues. As to the audience, I do hope that the work gets picked up by some circles that are interested in thinking critically about how to move away from the national security paradigms we inherited from the previous Bush administration.
In one of the opening essays in the volume, “The Stateless as the Citizen’s Other,” Linda Kerber provides some deeply troubling statistics. According to recent estimates by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, there are currently 20.8 million individuals—refugees, [End Page 272] asylum seekers, displaced persons, and stateless...
