As presenter (and organizer) of this roundtable, my contribution will trace how the legal and/or humanitarian “inscription” (Horton, 2020) of ‘vulnerability’ enables or restricts young Syrian women in different ways in their migration trajectories to and within the EU. With a focus on Athens, Greece, I trace how young female migrants resist, embrace and/or perform vulnerability when navigating intersecting forms of control imposed on them by the EU’s migration and asylum system, and kin-related legal, social and cultural structures. If recognized and inscribed by state, humanitarian or medical authorities as ‘vulnerable’, young migrant women in Greece can receive access to specific benefits (such as housing or mobility out of detention camps/across borders). But that same ‘vulnerabilization’ of their bodies can also result in new forms of control. Hence, I ask: How are young Syrian migrant women in Athens vulnerabilized and hierarchized by different medical, legal, kin and/or bureaucratic authorities, and what role does race, class, gender, age and legal status (in their intersection) play in this process? How do Syrian migrant women embrace and perform vulnerabilities within and against such regimes of control? And, how might they turn their vulnerabilization into forms of political resistance? My ethnographic data from fieldwork conducted during several, non-consecutive months among the Syrian migrant population in Athens from 2017-2023 highlights that Syrian migrant women engage in different performances of vulnerability, often embracing – at least discursively - the inscription of their bodies as ‘vulnerable’ and in need of protection. For example, young migrant women in their attempts to access housing, mobility, or asylum, accentuate their deserving and vulnerable positioning in encounters with humanitarian and/or state authorities. Similarly, they might mobilize partriarchal kin language that casts them as dependent on male relatives, when negotiating and legitimating their presence among male smugglers and migrants. Most importantly, young migrant women tend to remain unregistered in Greece, as this vulnerable irregularized status can, in fact, offer more opportunities to move across borders than the regular state-sanctioned asylum procedure. I argue that, despite its claim to neutrality, progress and modernity, the EU framework on vulnerability, migration and asylum risks reinforcing and trapping migrant women in gendered, generational and racialized vulnerabilities.

Presenter and Chair My contribution to the discussion on 'Forced Displacement, Gender and Vulnerability: SWANA Migrants in Europe' focuses on the health-related aspect embedded in the migration regime in Italy. I suggest looking at various actors and their 'performance of vulnerabilities' before and during the asylum claim process, highlighting their contribution to the (re)production of a gendered, classed and racialised migrant subject. Drawing on feminist critiques on vulnerability that reveal the silencing of women's political subjectivity and envision spaces of resistance (Butler, Gambetti, and Sabsay, 2016), I discuss how female migrants, as subjects who 'give and need care', render themselves visible and/or invisible within the vulnerability framework revealing some of the pitfalls in the production of (medical and institutional) truth (Fassin & d'Haullin, 2005). The cases presented are ethnographic material from the ongoing multisited fieldwork (2020-2024) in a free clinic and within the national reception system services in Rome, Italy. By presenting women's experiences, I trace how female migrants negotiate their health status and care responsibilities when medical documentation is requested for their international protection claim. With the idea of contributing to the roundtable discussion, I will ask How does the to-be-identified 'vulnerable' female subject engage in dialogic production of a 'health discourse' which combines medical knowledge and health expertise from previous experience (camps in the EU and the Middle East, country of origin, country of transit)? How is this translated into the performance of vulnerabilities? How do health workers and NGO actors contribute to vulnerability production, mobilisation, and/or performance? Which forms of ambivalence emerge when the administrative categorisation of 'vulnerable' transgresses emancipatory and humanitarian discourses on women? Drawing on ethnographic material, I contribute to the regional focus on SWANA Migrants in Europe, discussing the experience of Kurdish and Syrian women in Italy.

As presenter, my contribution is entitled "Inscribing vulnerability? Migrant women’s encounters with the German state". I will focus on women with care responsibilities who have settled in Germany since the so-called European ‘refugee crisis’ and have encountered the German state in manifold forms. Often, the relationship between the migrant mother and her children becomes central in these encounters and a site of bordering processes. Migrant women with care responsibilities experience vulnerabilization as a form of gendered racialization that intersects with their legal precarity in Germany. In this roundtable, I will centre on the experience of women from the SWANA region who have settled in Germany since the so-called European ‘refugee crisis’. Data that I will present has been collected over the course of sixteen months of ethnographic research in Berlin between 2017 and 2020. Women from various countries from the SWANA region shared their experiences as newcomers, asylum seekers, refugees, and migrants with me. I am interested to delve into the analysis of the inscriptions of legal statuses on bodies that engage in mothering practices. I will suggest that vulnerabilization in the form of legal precarity produces somatic responses, an incorporation of discourses of deservingness, and a sense of heightened visibility and exposure to (state) control. Ultimately, women experienced that the inscription of their legal status and the resulting vulnerability to various forms of state interference affected the relationship with their children. At the same time, the children’s experiences of legal precarity bounced back at the mothers in a ‘continuous feedback loop’ (Horton 2009). Apart from shedding light on women’s experiences of vulnerabilization vis-à-vis the German asylum and migration regimes, this presentation will engage with women’s responses to exclusion and discrimination at the hands of bureaucrats and social workers. I employ Henrik Vigh’s concept of ‘social navigation’ (2009) to account for the different strategies and tactics women applied to respond to their vulnerabilization.

As a presenter, my engagement with the questions raised by this roundtable is informed by four weeks (summer, 2023) of ethnographic fieldwork with queer undocumented migrants from the SWANA region in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. In this context, migrants whose asylum application has been rejected are excluded from access to migrant welfare services and cast out as abject deportable subjects, legally deprived of what Arendt called "the right to have rights" (1951). In the absence of this state support, and access to “rights”, refugee NGO services remain the only available resource for survival, including access to housing, food, and cash assistance. Yet, these refugee NGOs utilize disciplinary assessments to determine queer migrants' vulnerability and perceived deservingness to grant them access to resources. These assessments require SWANA queer migrants to perform European norms of “gayness”, such as coming-out narratives and overt expressions of masculinity and femininity. While the literature on queer migrant “illegality” focuses on a "radically open-ended politics of migrant presence" (De Genova, 2010) to assert an autonomous queer migrant publicly staging dissatisfaction with the migration management regime, I shift the focus to the everyday ways in which “illegalized” queer migrants respond to their vulnerabilization by refugee NGOs. I contend that even queer migrants, cast outside of the state purview through “illegalization”, are subjected to technologies of vulnerabilization, performed and reproduced by aid workers in their "well-intentioned" attempt to relieve migrant suffering. Queer “illegalized” migrants do not passively accept these vulnerabilization but rather deploy various tactics to overpass this border set by aid workers. These tactics cut across racialized, sexed and gendered hierarchies, drawing from post-colonial imaginaries of Blackness, femininity and masculinity, further reifying Dutch hetero-colonial amnesia. In line with Butler et al. (2016), queer migrants reclaim vulnerability as a space to enact political resistance. While not “grandiose”, such as the public protests that De Genova traces (2010), queer migrants tactics operate at the level of the everyday, engendering political self-determination against the backdrop of state inscribed abjection.

As a presenter, I come to the questions raised by the roundtable through my 4-months (2022-2024) ethnographic engagement with SWANA queer migrants in Athens, Greece. Here, a striking paradox unfolds: While Greek law, under the Asylum Code (4939/2022), fails to designate Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Expression, and Sexual Characteristics (SOGIESC) based asylum seekers as “vulnerable”, the concept of “vulnerability” remains a prized asset for LGBTQ+ refugee NGOs and international aid organizations in Greece. This currency, sought after for securing vital funding primarily from Western European nations, exposes a dissonance wherein queer migrants are excluded from legal protections yet are commodified within aid structures. Amidst this dichotomy, queer migrants find themselves vying to assert their “deservingness” of NGO assistance, performing what Koçak (2020) aptly terms the “parody” of deservingness. This distortion of vulnerability not only fractures solidarity but also perpetuates animosity among queer migrants. Many struggle to engage with the conceptualization of NGO vulnerability discourse, which remains victimizing, largely untranslatable in Arabic, and unable to speak to their lived realities. This disconnect prompts a critical interrogation: Who speaks the language of vulnerability? Certainly, some SWANA queer refugees adeptly maneuver through NGO spaces through what I term “presence labor”–a concerted effort involving frequent visits to NGO centers, participation in their events, and even undertaking reproductive unpaid chores like cleaning. These individuals, fluent in English and well-versed in LGBTQ+ discourse, leverage vulnerability to access vital resources. Yet, for others, Daghet, pressure, emerges as a more dynamic analytical framework, generatively refusing the “vulnerability” regime. Daghet embodies a continuous physical force exerted upon or against the queer migrant body by various oppressive necro-political structures – be it disengaged NGO aid workers, bureaucratic hurdles at the asylum office, the perilous streets serving as both sites of violence and ‘empowerment’ for queer migrant sex workers, or the precariousness of financial stability. It also engenders the possibility of political agency (Bulter et al., 2016): When pressure reaches its peak, it explodes, manifesting as various forms of resistance, including protests, riots, or, as observed with one of my interlocutors, tantrums. By reframing oppressions as accumulative pressures, Daghet unsettles binaries of vulnerability and resistance, urging a reconceptualization of survival and flourishing within a framework that accommodates both. Reimagining vulnerability as Daghet, by queer migrants unversed in conventional vulnerability discourse, invites us to transcend the confines of progressive queer politics and to rethink traditional paradigms of assistance and resistance.