Rannie Ticktin

In this week’s readings, what I found to be most interesting was the contradiction in politics of compassion and care. What Ticktin means is that compassion and caring has been used to justify residency permits of asylum for immigrants in France, for example, on the basis of illness, violence or sexual orientation. She discusses this in detail regarding the work of nurses who decide who is sick enough to be recommended for papers, and how they use their individual estimates of compassion to pick those they deem deserving enough. Ticktin also discusses victims of violence against women, and how over time, they have started to be seen as morally legitimate bodies which need to be protected. However, both of these groups are under the current system granted papers as exceptions to very rigid laws and rules of immigration. Cases that are very unusual and moving are therefore more likely to be granted papers than others.

At the same time that this is happening, the French state has very strict rules and regulations regarding who is allowed papers. This system creates state violence against women, where immigrant women may not be able to leave or divorce their abusers for fear of being deported. The term ‘double violence’ has been used for women who are experiencing violence in relationships, but are also victimized by the state because their options are so limited. Like Ticktin states: “Yet while they condemn this double violence, the state and its conservative apparatus rally around a regime of care and protection, and its central subject; the morally legitimate suffering body, this time, in the guise of a victim of sexual violence.” (Ticktin, 2011; 132).

While I agree with Ticktin that this contradiction is very real, I think that this phenomenon is not necessarily limited to just immigrant women. For example, Western cultural norms, such as privacy of the home, foster conditions that hide violence against women and can in a way victimize them. They are therefore also facing this double violence. However, larger societal forces rarely get recognized in discourse around violence against women. The immigrant question may therefore be an example of this, but it hardly stands in sharp contrast to narratives of violence against women in general.

Also, at the end of the chapter on violence against women, Ticktin shows a photo of books that are about violence against women in Muslim countries and says that they are being Othered. This is entirely possible, but there are many books today written about violence against women in general. Did she look for books on this topic other than the ones right in front of her? I think the forces that Ticktin discusses are at play in immigration and violence against women, but they may not be as specific to that context as she alludes to in her book.

Are these politics of compassion and care part of US immigration laws?