Healthcare systems in many southern African countries have historically failed to meet public demands, leading to a system stratified along class, gender and racial lines. The poor, often bearing the brunt of mass unemployment, not only rely on a failing system, but resort to parallel systems. Building on theoretical and political standpoints that emerge as feminist scholars interrogate and engage with the body, this chapter explores notions of reproductive violence and stratified access to reproductive health. It argues that southern African countries domesticate international policies governing reproductive health in a way that perpetuates reproductive violence, defined here as the institutional or structural, physical, and emotional violence that women suffer in attempting to access pregnancy termination services. Through domestication, the international policies emerge as ‘soft law’, not binding on governments. The way poor migrant and South African women are lured by illegal adverts to put themselves at risk of maternal death or longstanding reproductive health complications – in a country celebrated for its progressive constitutional position on termination – opens space for conceptual and empirical interrogations. The chapter argues that illegal services illuminate the realities of institutional reproductive violence that stem from limited and inaccessible public healthcare services. It further exposes the realities of transnational care evident in the huge influx of regional migrants to South Africa in search of reproductive justice. It concludes with a discussion calling for decolonised and reformed healthcare systems that speak to contextual specificities and necessities in southern Africa.

In this chapter, three feminist and Science and Technology Scholars discuss the idea of biological politics within the South Asian context. The concepts of biopower and biopolitics emerged within a western frame of Foucauldian theorisations on the technologies of power. As the introduction to this volume suggests, Charles Darwin and Thomas Malthus have played important roles in navigating our conversations regarding bodies and populations in colonial and post-independent India. Yet, the chapter cautions against any easy deployment of biopolitics as a universal theory of how the entanglements of biology and politics play out in the South Asian context. All three scholars have been part of an ongoing project on thinking about biological politics in a South Asian context. The chapter highlights the key issues that emerge, and the many elisions and erasures in the complex histories of science in South Asia. Recent work challenges us to think beyond enlightenment logics in postcolonial contexts. Rather, during colonial and postcolonial times, the colonies have always resisted the imposition of western science resulting not in a pure or universal science but rather complex and hybrid sciences in the postcolony. We explore these tensions and, in particular, the new formations of reproductive labour that are emerging in South Asia.

This chapter considers the evolution of the mindset behind the strategic bombing campaign of the Second World War. Drawing on Baldwin’s famous 1932 dictum ‘the bomber will always get through’, it considers the evolution of political recognition that ‘… no power on earth … can protect [citizens] from being bombed …’ and traces this back to the experiences of First World War Zeppelin and Gotha bombing raids on London. In responding to them, the British government expressed aversion to reprisals against German towns and cities, but did retaliate surreptitiously. Early air power theorists (and fiction and cinema) envisaged wars dominated by strategic bombing of cities, factories and populations, rather than trench warfare. The relative merits of strategic bombing (of civilians and cities) and ‘traditional’ warfare (against armies and navies) dominated UK strategic debate between the wars, and influenced the evolution of Royal Air Force doctrine, but the Second World War provided the strategic impetus to develop technology to realise these capabilities. By 1943 the UK and USA had refined the ability to wield the destructive power of bombing foreshadowed during the Spanish Civil and Sino-Japanese wars in the 1930s.

This chapter deals with the heterogenous modes of confinement that migrants are subjected to – what I call the ‘confinement continuum’ – and shows that these are justified in the name of the ‘confine to protect’ principle. Building on research conducted in different sites in Europe, it looks at hybrid spaces and mechanisms of confinement enforced through polymorphic and flexible infrastructures often designated for other purposes (ferries, barracks, hotels). The chapter mobilises an abolitionist approach for analysing forms of confinement beyond detention and the biopolitical technologies that choke and disrupt migrants’ lives.

Chapter 4 focuses on the final component of the habitus triad: habits. The central premise of the chapter is that examining habits provides insights into individuated and community belonging, migratory emplacement, transnational cultural capital flows and attachment to and/or detachment from France. It sheds light on the broader ideological implications of everyday habits, particularly eating, drinking and healthcare, revealing hidden hegemonies and gendered/sexualised discrimination. Evolving dining habits and an embodiment of cosmopolitanism are demonstrated through participants’ openness to London’s multicultural cuisines. Similarly, their frequenting of English restaurants functions as a strategic emplacement method and an agentive means of performing belonging. A circular intercultural exchange is also discussed, with migratory flows leading to the adoption of British culinary habits in France just as London-French residents’ palates and cooking practices adapt to ‘host’ tastes – within limits. For, in accordance with the limitations of habitus transformation, their home-dining rituals remain fundamentally embedded in French culture, which again implicitly interconnects the migrants through a shared praxial repertoire, while disconnecting them from (perceived) postmigration customs. Drinking habits also set the migrants apart. They apprehend local drinking practices as excessive and vulgar, particularly regarding women. This gendered disparagement and culturally distinctive restraint marginalises them within the diasporic social space, while re-enacting local histories. The final section is dedicated to participants’ therapeutic habits, which are revealed to be increasingly demedicalised in London, where they enjoy the more human, less technical approach to healthcare and are critical of the chronic patriarchal hegemonies and endemic overmedicalisation experienced in France.

South Africa’s growing presence in the global bioeconomy for reproductive material and services has attracted recent attention, both in media and in academis. At least in the pre-covid context, egg provision in South Africa was propelling a multi-million-rand market in IVF and drawing reproductive travellers from numerous countries, including the UK, Germany and Australia. This chapter explores the local histories, regulatory conditions, and the political economy of access to assisted reproductive technologies as they intersect with racial imaginaries in the making of South Africa as a ‘repro-hub’. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research on IVF and egg provision in South Africa, it situates white egg providers as subjects of scarcity, whose subjectivity emerges alongside the market framing of their seemingly scarce biogenetic material and historical racial imaginaries of respectable whiteness. This reflects that whiteness operates paradoxically as both global, on the one hand, and scarce and particular on the other.

Chapter 3 turns to the habituation component of the habitus triad. Conceptualised as an internalised embodiment of the external field, habituation is concerned with the subjective, pre-reflexive dimension of habitus. The chapter considers the effect of habituation on participants’ initial mobility and its continued influence over their emplacement and identity post-migration. Gradual habituation to the local field emerges as a powerful factor in settlement and one that undermines the rationalised reasoning typically drawn on in migration narratives. Moreover, early encounters with the Other through travel, heritage or media in the premigration field are deemed to plant the mobility seed and foster an unconscious ‘migrancy habitus’. Another key element of habituation developed is the unthinking sense of postmigration security as an embedding factor. Here, the relationship between security and freedom is foregrounded, as is hierarchised comparison between Paris and London ‘securiscapes’. Through the prism of security, the chapter demonstrates the circular interplay between feeling safe and feeling ‘at home’, both of which are conducive to a habituated sense of belonging and long-term settlement. The chapter also explores the transformative creep of habituation to the diasporic field and its potentially disruptive impact, demonstrating how participants’ internal subjectivities are gradually, imperceptibly and potentially disconcertingly modified by their external surroundings. Finally, it establishes humour as the ultimate hurdle to habituated integration. It argues that spontaneous, culturally inflected humour strengthens ties between London-French migrants but excludes them from full belonging to the ‘host’ culture, due to a lack of affinity with pre-reflexive, shared comedic codes.

The Epilogue re-addresses questions raised in the initial ethnography but from a post-EU-referendum perspective. Returning to the original sites of research and (re)engaging with existing and new participants, it asks whether their sense of belonging, identity and future mobility projects have been affected by the UK’s decision to leave the European Union. It continues to draw on Bourdieusian theory, particularly hysteresis and symbolic violence concepts, to ascertain if and how participants’ migrancy habitus has been disrupted by ‘Brexit’. With an emphasis on the affective experience of the EU-membership referendum and emulating the structure of the book, the Epilogue covers three timeframes. It first ‘looks back’, examining memories of June 2016 and participants’ initial reaction to the referendum. It then ‘looks in’, seeking insights into their emotional response at the time of writing in 2019. It finally ‘looks beyond’ to explore their longer-term plans. From sentiments of loss, sorrow and anger typical of grieving to a sense of dis-embedding, or ‘inverse hysteresis’, caused by the sudden change to their status, the migrants describe intense feelings of helplessness, outsiderness and un-belonging. The chapter argues that, consistent with the symbolic violence paradigm, participants are keen to dismiss post-2016 xenophobic aggressions as unimportant or partly self-inflicted. A recurrent process of denial is consequently ascertained, resulting in apathy and resignation in the face of Brexit’s disquieting impact and the ironically named ‘Settlement Scheme’. Ultimately, however, the migrants convey a profound sense of sadness that the land which had once wooed them was now rejecting them.

This chapter analyses asylum seekers’ unpaid labour in refugee camps, which is disguised as ‘voluntary’ activities, and it draws attention to mechanisms of subtle coercion that underpin these activities, since refugees are encouraged to work for free in the name of their own good. Drawing on feminist political economy literature and feminist political theory on unpaid labour, the chapter argues that refugees are increasingly asked to actively participate in their own governmentality, and more precisely in their own confinement – what I refer to as ‘participatory confinement’. It shows how in refugee humanitarianism, the invitation to participate in one’s own governmentality is characterised by sharp asymmetries between asylum seekers and humanitarian actors.

This chapter is based on a unique and new set of data, which explores tensions within Indian feminist discourses on reproductive technologies, rights and justice. It builds on in depth interviews with Dalit feminists on reproductive technologies, in particular, commercial surrogacy and egg donation, to argue that these voices challenge hegemonic discourses of reproductive technologies through an insistence on the wider socio-economic context of women’s lives. Inspired by African American feminists and the Sister Song collective, the chapter conceptualise these conflicting perspectives as reproductive rights versus reproductive justice and points to the complex dynamics between caste, class, patriarchy and neo-liberalism in the contemporary Indian setting.

This initial chapter takes Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence as its theoretical starting point and considers French migrants’ uneasy relationship with the homeland. Based on respondents’ retrospective accounts of a lack of equality and opportunity in the French social space, together with their premigration imaginings and aspirations, it considers the powerful role of affective, social and ideological forces in cross-Channel mobility. The chapter is sub-divided into three sections which investigate microaggressions as articulations of symbolic violence in the fields of education, employment and the wider French social space. The chapter argues that France’s purportedly egalitarian education system functions for some as a means of perpetuating inequalities and reproducing restricted habitus trajectories. For them, migration is an escape route. London is perceived as a meritocratic place where qualifications and social capital do not dictate professional pathways and progression. The chapter demonstrates how French migrants of colour are able to free themselves from workplace discrimination, climb the employment ladder, and simultaneously embody Frenchness and Blackness in ways unimaginable in France. It also explores the intersectional dimensions of the migrant experience, examining how everyday sexism, together with normalised misogynistic and homophobic microaggressions in France serve as tacit migration drivers. The chapter argues that although these non-economic, non-lifestyle premigration factors are often neglected, it is through such negative experiences in the originary field that London comes to be apprehended as an optimistic, open-minded, cosmopolitan alternative, where difference can be celebrated and the self reinvented.