Description
This paper explores the interconnections between discourses on migrant masculinities, coloniality and racialisation in the context of the UK detention estate. I consider how bordering and the carceral state intertwine through a nexus of racialised policing and immigration enforcement to enact processes of illegalisation on migratised bodies. Within this I explore the construction of the ‘Foreign National Offender’ (FNO) – or criminalised non-citizen – in the political imaginary and how this construction is imbricated with processes of racialisation and histories/presents of coloniality. I argue that the construction of the masculinised ‘FNO’ as a phantasmic figure of fear is a central mechanism through which the securitisation of bordering is legitimised. I consider the specific and differential discourses on racialisation used within the ‘FNO’ label and the malleable ways in which it becomes attached to specific bodies. Through tracing the affective, discursive and material imbrications of bordering with carcerality, I argue that border resistance has to centre anti-carceral abolitionist visions within.
