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Summary
Santana de Andrade, G. (2026). Vulnerable intimacies: racialised affect, sexual violence, and the politics of survival in forced migration. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 52(9), 2408–2428.
Abstract
This article explores how racialised and gendered intimacies are negotiated, constrained, and exploited in contexts of forced migration. Drawing on long-term ethnography conducted in Jordan, Turkey, and France, I investigate how institutions and intermediaries mobilise affective economies—such as compassion, suspicion, gratitude, and moral deservingness—to regulate access to care, status, and rights. Situating these dynamics within colonial continuities of racialised bordering, I examine how state and non-state actors deploy intimacy as both a mechanism of control and a site of (re)subjectivation. Through in-depth interviews and observations of everyday practices within NGOs, aid structures, and informal aid groups, this article traces how gendered and racialised assumptions about vulnerability and legitimacy shape migrants’ experiences of inclusion and exclusion. By foregrounding the voices forced migrants, it reveals how racialisation and affect operate not only through institutional discourses but also within precarious intimate economies. These interactions reproduce structural violence while simultaneously generating ambivalent forms of agency and resistance. Bridging migration studies, feminist theory, and postcolonial studies, this article calls for a rethinking of migration governance through the lens of embodied, emotional, and historically situated practices of control. The findings challenge dominant discourses of victimhood and protection, proposing instead a relational and intersectional approach.
