ABSTRACT
Introduction Britain is becoming increasingly ethnically ‘superdiverse’ (Vertovec 2007) and in 2008, almost a quarter of children born in the UKwere born to migrant mothers, rising in London to over half of all children (4Children 2011). However, we know little about the women who bring up this future generation of citizens. This article examines the mothering work of a group of Kurdish migrant women in London as exemplary of the enactment of citizenship as cultural and caring subjects, suggesting that this approach opens up new insights for citizenship studies, gender studies and migration studies. This article explores how migrant mothers’ orientation towards engendering a Kurdish cultural identity in their children challenges nationally bounded notions of citizenship in their home countries and in Britain, and brings into being new political subjectivities and actors. Despite the profusion of the gender neutral language of parenting, mothers continue to be charged with the bulk of child-rearing tasks (Gillies 2007, Ellison et al. 2009, Thomson et al. 2011); that is why this article focuses on mothering work. This is not to suggest that mothers’ cultural work exists in isolation or that it overrides other social influences on children. The notion of ‘mothering practices’ (cf. Morgan 2011) foregrounds the diversity of ways in which women mother. In the process, they embody, negotiate and challenge culturally specific ‘institutions of motherhood’ (Rich 1976). Migration research often views mothers as transmitting traditional, ethnically specific values and cultural resources to their children (Ganga 2007). Moreover, researchers and policy-makers often investigate the extent to which migrant mothers’ cultural orientation helps or hinders their children’s integration
*Email: umut.erel@open.ac.uk
REPRODUCING CITIZENS: FAMILY, STATE AND CIVIL SOCIETY
into the country of residence, in particular for Kurdish Middle Eastern women who are conceived in public discourses and policy through Orientalist knowledge paradigms (Kraler 2010).
