**Figs. 2.8 and 2.9** *The overlapping connections between the oppression and exploitation of working-class women and children are evident in this 'laundry line' displayed as part of GW's Mother's Day activities. It speaks of conditions caused by a lack of accessible, affordable, high-quality childcare, including children's un- or underpaid labour caring for other children; stress and insufficient resources for families to survive and thrive; the redirection of resources away from childcare and other social services toward warfare; and a denial of childcare as a collective responsibility and a concurrent devaluing of women's role in caring for children. (Photographs by Britt Permien)*

for a deepened conception of the reproductive labour of both workingclass women and children and the unexplored possibilities of working politically with children, especially when taking up issues directly relevant to children's lives. In progressing forward, we can continue to learn from such grassroots struggles and build a movement to acknowledge childcare as a collective responsibility and contribute to more just ways of being, living and caring.

#### NOTE

1 This photo essay is based on ideas developed in Rachel Rosen, Suzanne Baustad and Merryn Edwards, 'The Crisis of Social Reproduction under Global Capitalism: Working Class Women and Children in the Struggle for Universal Childcare,' in *Caring for Children: Social Movements and Public Policy in Canada*, ed. Rachel Langford, Susan Prentice and Patrizia Albanese (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2017).

# 3 When the rights of children prevail over the rights of their caretakers

*A case study in the community homes of Bogotá, Colombia1*

Susana Borda Carulla

### Introduction

Children's and women's lives are deeply entwined and interdependent. As Rosen and Newberry suggest in this volume: 'Women and children are linked through species-being, a labour relation that anchors socially necessary labour.' Women take the greatest responsibility for children's care both in formal and informal settings, and in many societies bearing and raising children is seen as an essential component of womanhood.2

Despite their interdependency, children's and women's issues are two dissociated chapters of international law and policy, particularly since the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child by the UN General Assembly in 1989. Not only are children's and women's issues addressed separately, but a clear hierarchy has been established by international organisations through promoting the idea that protecting children's rights is a lever for the social and thus the economic development of a nation.3 As UNICEF put it in its 1995 report on the *State of the World's Children*: 'It is UNICEF's belief that the time has now come to put the needs and the rights of children at the very centre of development strategy. (...) The world will not solve its major problems until it learns to do a better job of protecting and investing in the physical, mental and emotional development of its children.'4 The idea of prioritising children's issues is an 'active concept'5 in the sense that it is a true motor of social change in contemporary societies.

What are the social consequences, for children and for women, of putting children first?

In this chapter, I will combine a study of the legal corpus which regulates the Colombian government's childcare programme (community homes, operated by female caretakers known as community mothers*)* with an ethnographic study of its implementation in an underprivileged neighbourhood on the southern periphery of Bogotá. I will expose the enduring tensions between the Colombian government – which advocates the dominance of children's rights over the rights of others – and the community mothers – whose labour rights are systematically violated by the state, prompting them to take action. Shedding light on how these tensions came to be will lead me to argue that if women's rights are not protected, there is a strong chance that the rights of the children they care for will not be protected either.

I will first discuss the history of the community homes programme: the legal situation and the ideological stance of the two social actors involved in the dispute (the Colombian state and the community mothers). I will then go on to analyse scenarios from daily life in the community homes, where community mothers break programme regulations. This will allow me to discuss the negative consequences of dissociating, in public policy terms, the rights of children from those of women.

# State policy: 'children first'

The community homes are social childcare centres co-managed by the Colombian state and communities. They have been in operation since the 1980s in vulnerable neighbourhoods of large Colombian cities. Under this scheme, to become a community mother, a woman can offer to provide childcare services in her own home, to approximately 15 children aged from birth to six. The state provides resources to support the operation costs of the community homes, which are managed by associations comprising parents of the children and the community mothers from around twenty community homes. Programme implementation is the responsibility of the ICBF (*Instituto Colombiano de Bienestar Familiar* – Colombian Institute for the Wellbeing of Families), the public body responsible for child protection.

Since its inception in 1986, this childcare programme has grown exponentially and remained, until recently, the Colombian state's main child protection initiative. González and Durán estimate that in 2011, the programme involved 77,377 community mothers caring for 1,219,098 children, aged from birth to six, in 70,825 community homes based within the country's most vulnerable populations, both in urban and densely populated rural zones.6 According to the same authors, in 2011 the programme covered 13 per cent of the total Colombian population aged from birth to six. In the context of Latin America, this is exceptional coverage for a public childcare programme.

#### Responding to a national crisis

Until 1979, the concept of child protection in Colombian legislation covered only judiciary protection and nutritional care.7 It was the state's obligation to ensure that each Colombian child had a recognised father, even if he/she was born outside of marriage, and to ensure that all children received sufficient nutrition. In 1979, the notion of child protection was redefined within Colombian domestic law8 as 'integral protection': 9 this included the right to a name and a nationality, education, nutrition, special care for disabled children, as well as the right to medical assistance, culture, leisure, family and home. In the same year, the provision of pre-school education and nutrition for all children also became an obligation for the state.

Enforcing the new child protection laws proved particularly challenging as Colombia was going through a profound social crisis. Between 1970 and 1980, the annual population growth rate was around 3 per cent. Internal migration rapidly transformed a rural country into an urban one: in only two generations, the urban population grew from 40 per cent to 74 per cent of the country's total.10 As cities grew, the gap between the poor and the rich became more pronounced, leading to the development of segregated, concentrated zones of poverty, uncontrolled by the state. In this context, enforcing the new child protection laws also meant expanding provision to these new, rapidly growing and often very poor urban populations.

The community homes programme was born in response to this critical situation. During the 1970s, in the poor neighbourhoods of the large Colombian cities where the state was absent, there existed a multiplicity of autonomous community childcare initiatives. UNICEF showed interest in them and in 1977 began supporting the Colombian state, technically and financially, to identify, analyse and support the individual initiatives. The study produced positive results, leading to recognition of the use of autonomous community childcare initiatives as a model of intervention.11

The social crisis of the 1980s went hand in hand with a profound political crisis in Colombia. After 20 years of generalised political violence (1945–65), the country found itself in the midst of an internal armed conflict involving left-wing guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries and the military. Drug trafficking was at its peak and the first extradition agreements signed between the Colombian government and the United States provoked a number of terrorist attacks in public spaces. The legitimacy of the state was called into question by a large part of the Colombian population.12

In 1985, at the very peak of the political crisis, President Virgilio Barco from the Liberal Party was elected. Social policy as a means of pursuing peace and reconciliation occupied a central place in his political agenda, with community homes playing a key role in the strategy. By 1988 – only two years after the pilot programme was launched – the government had created 100,000 community homes*,* mainly in the poorest parts of the country, to accommodate 1.5 million children aged from two to six. After only five years of operation, the programme covered 83 per cent of Colombian children living in poverty.13 For the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, the community homes were a 'model of social development' at this time.14

#### Child protection as the key to national integration

In testimony published in 1995, Jaime Benítez Tobón, one of the main ideologists behind the programme and a key figure in Barco's government, describes the place of the community homes within Barco's political agenda as follows:

One of the keys towards the national integration we longed for was the child. Children would guide the general interest and would be the centre, the articulation of actions, the supra-value that would assemble citizens, providing them with common interests and objectives. Children would trigger the discovery of values of solidarity that would arise around them: friendship, neighbourly relations, work, joint effort, the interest in the common good. (...) In that manner, the State would act directly in favour of its citizens, (...) starting from the child; improving the life conditions of Colombian children would help to improve the Colombian State; by acting on the children, we would achieve the wellbeing of families and, at the same time, family integration; and family integration would necessarily provoke national integration, which would necessarily result in the well-being of the State and the reality of the Nation.15

For the Barco government, child protection was the starting point, the rationale and the motor of a national integration movement. Barco's political desire was to articulate around child protection several processes: community-building within groups of forced migrants, who often had no shared cultural heritage; fruitful dialogue between the state and civil society that would progressively repair the legitimacy of the state; child protection education for the poorest populations; and modernisation of public institutions. In a society devastated by structural violence affecting family cohesion and the legitimacy of public institutions, child protection would be a vehicle for constructing a new national identity. Child protection was erected as a pillar of moral value, which could be shared by all across social and political divides.

#### The birth of the predominance principle

Interestingly, a few years later, 'children first' transitioned from a political ideal to a juridical principle and was enshrined in the Constitution. In 1991, following the surrender of arms by certain guerrilla groups followed by their reintegration into civil life, a plebiscite called for the rewriting of the Colombian political constitution. Jaime Benítez Tobón was elected as a member of the Constitutional Assembly. He was the author of Article 44 of the 1991 Constitution, which states, among other things, that 'children's rights prevail over the rights of others'. This idea is often referred to as the 'predominance principle'.

Juridical principles are not only basic rights but also rules of procedure and hermeneutical statements.16 The 'predominance principle' thus has a particularly powerful juridical status: it is 1) a specific norm that contains obligations; 2) a general norm, applicable in many cases and in all domains of law; and 3) a norm that helps juridical operators take decisions in extreme cases. Through the drafting of the 'predominance principle', Benítez Tobón transformed the ideological basis of the community homes – child protection as a moral super-value – into the cardinal rule of the entire Colombian child protection system.17

As previously mentioned, the idea of the predominance of the rights of children over the rights of others is not uncommon in international children's rights advocacy. Nevertheless, from a human rights perspective, it is deeply problematic because it runs counter to human rights ideals. As Nigel Cantwell points out, children's rights are part of the human rights system, within which all rights are universal, interdependent and deeply linked to each other.18 States are thus expected to protect and promote all human rights and fundamental liberties on an equal basis.

# The community mothers' ongoing struggle for their labour rights

As Linda Gordon points out, 'The child-centred imperative has sometimes pitted children's "interests" against those of parents, especially mothers'.19 This was certainly the case in Colombia: I will now argue that the Colombian predominance principle has had extremely negative effects on the community mothers' well-being: it has legitimised an open violation of their labour rights.

#### The legal situation

An exceptional administrative contract, the 'contribution contract' (*contrato de aportes*), links the community mothers to the ICBF. The contribution contract was created in 1979 specifically to ensure the operation of community homes: the law stipulates that the contract cannot be established and enforced by any other Colombian public institution.20 Only the ICBF, because of the 'special nature of its service' – i.e. child protection – can enact this type of contract.21

The contribution contract stipulates that the ICBF should provide each association of community homes with the resources necessary for their operation. The community mothers themselves are defined in the contract as volunteers and, as such, are not employed by the state or the association. Through their association, the community mothers receive financial aid to support the operation of their community homes; a monthly 'grant' (less than the national minimum wage) to cover daily food provisions and some educational material for the children, plus funds to cover the public service expenses incurred by the community home. The community mothers may also benefit from financial contributions from the parents of the children they care for (up to 37.5 per cent of the minimum wage), of which 34 per cent must be invested in activities for the children. However, there is no obligation on parents to pay this contribution and a child cannot be removed from the community home if the parents do not pay. The community mothers thus face permanent financial insecurity and, despite recent legal changes (discussed below), they do not benefit from basic labour rights (e.g. social security or a retirement pension).

#### The social movements

As a social group, the community mothers soon realised that the contribution contract was not to their benefit. In 1988 – only two years after the inauguration of the community homes – they began to take action, seeking recognition of their labour rights. AMCOLOMBIA, the Colombian Association of Community Mothers and Fathers for a Better Colombia, was established in 1991. Created under the initiative of a group of community mothers from Bogotá who called upon their colleagues from all over the country to unite in the face of their shared challenges, AMCOLOMBIA has two missions: to defend the collective interests of the community mothers and demand protection of their rights by the Colombian State; and to influence public policy concerning childhood and families. Many NGOs focused on women's rights advocacy also support the cause of the community mothers*.* Currently, AMCOLOMBIA encompasses 20 municipal and regional associations of community mothers.

During the 1990s, other community mothers' organisations were created across the country, operating at the local, regional and national levels. Among the most powerful are SINTRACIHOBI (National Syndicate of Workers for the Protection of Childhood in the Community Homes), ADDHIP (Association for the Defence of the Rights of the Sons of the People), and USTRABIN (Union of Workers of the Community Homes). In the last decade of the twentieth century, these groups regularly organised demonstrations, public assemblies and occupations of public space, and held negotiations with the ICBF. All of these organisations fought for the same causes: 1) the effective inclusion of the community mothers and of their nuclear families in the national social security system; 2) the right for community mothers to have pensions; 3) community mothers' access to professional training in early childhood care; 4) designation of the status of public servant, and not volunteer, for community mothers; and 5) a minimum wage for those working as community mothers.

#### The judicial quagmire

During the 1990s, the community mothers brought their case to the Constitutional Court three times.22 Each time, the court ruled on an Action of Tutela (*Acción de Tutela*)23 raised by a community mother on labour rights grounds, following the shutdown of her community home for reasons she deemed unfair. Each time, the court concluded that there was an absence of any labour relationship between the community mother and the state, or between the community mother and their association. For the Court, there was no legal basis on which to rule in favour of the community mother.

That being said, the three judgements of the Constitutional Court during the 1990s created strong disagreement among the Supreme Court judges. In 1998, three judges published their objections to the court's original judgement, coming out on the side of the community mother*s.*24 They argued that the court had only conducted a formal analysis of the situation and omitted to take into account a number of social realities: 1) the existence of a relationship of subordination and dependence of the community mothers vis-à-vis the ICBF; 2) the existence of obligations for the community mothers defined by the ICBF; and 3) the fact that the community mothers' pay was inferior to the minimum legal wage. The judges argued that, had these elements been taken into consideration by the court, the conclusion would have been that 'what's at stake is the work of an important number of Colombian women, who are clearly discriminated in comparison to other employees, and whose only income, which allows only for minimum subsistence, is compromised'.25

The United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, ratified by Colombia in 1969, also pronounced itself twice in favour of the community mothers' labour rights. Among its recommendations, the committee asked the Colombian state to 'improve the training of the "community mothers" and regularize their work situation, treating them for all purposes as workers in the employ of a third party'.26

Slowly but surely, under the pressure of social movements, women's rights advocacy organisations, and the international community, community mothers' social rights have evolved. In 1990, they were included in the social security system; in 2008, they acquired the right to earn a pension and their allowance was raised to 70 per cent of the legal minimum wage. Finally, in 2012, the community mothers' labour rights were fully recognised: confronted with a new Action of Tutela brought by a community mother following the shutdown of her community home, the court ordered the ICBF to install a process allowing the community mothers to progressively, but rapidly, earn the equivalent of a minimum wage.27 The judgement demanded that all community mothers who work full time must earn, throughout the year 2013, a minimum wage: by 2014, a work contract subject to domestic labour law had to be established between each community mother and the ICBF.

However, to date, implementation of this judgement is far from being realised. Community mothers still do not earn a minimum wage, nor do they have a proper work contract. Indeed, the fiscal impact of the court's judgement is such that it endangers the very existence of the ICBF. The Colombian president has recently rejected a new bill covering implementation of the law, thus blocking its submission to Congress. According to the president, the bill jeopardises children's rights because its implementation would inevitably result in the dissolution of the public institution entrusted with their protection. On these grounds, the president argues, the bill is unconstitutional.

#### Breaking programme regulations

Policies that put women's labour into the service of the state in the name of children's well-being, and mobilise it through spuriously gendered altruism, are a common liberal strategy (see Llobet and Milanich; Rosen and Newberry, this volume). I will now go on to discuss ethnographic data showcasing daily interactions between community mothers and the children they care for, in order to highlight the contradictions and tensions produced on the ground by such policy. I will argue that the predominance principle does not achieve the purpose of ensuring children's well-being and the protection of their rights, but rather exacerbates the problem by creating a legislative framework for violating women's rights.

Ethnographic data was generated between 2011 and 2013 in Ciudad Bolívar, a southern suburb of Bogotá. Ciudad Bolívar is one of the poorest areas of the city: its population has been growing steadily since the 1980s due to the regular arrival of rural migrants, among whom many are internally displaced persons fleeing the armed conflict in their hometowns.28 Ciudad Bolívar was one of the areas chosen by the Colombian state for piloting the community homes programme in 1986 because it was judged a true 'governance challenge' by Latin American leaders at the time.29 Compared to other areas where the programme was implemented, in Ciudad Bolívar community homes developed rapidly and intensively.30 Not coincidentally, Ciudad Bolívar is also the birthplace of the community mothers' social movement.31

The scenes described in the following pages all have one thing in common: they showcase community mothers breaking programme regulations. As a result, the children they care for are not fed as they ought to be; children's care is often delegated to non-qualified persons32 (most often, minors); and much of the community mothers*'* energy is diverted from childcare tasks to the challenges of running a family enterprise.

#### Feeding the children

Making sure that children are properly fed is a key dimension of the community homes programme. Children who attend community homes are given a snack upon arrival in the morning, then lunch at noon, and another snack in the afternoon. These meals are supposed to cover between 65 per cent and 70 per cent of the calorie input recommended for the age group. Menus are prepared each week by nutritionists at the local office of the ICBF and the community mothers are expected to adhere to them. Every month, the ICBF transfers to the associations the money needed to buy the ingredients for meal preparation.

In the context of the poor communities involved, the provision of food in the community homes is a vital component of their offer. According to the community mothers interviewed, many parents whose children benefit from the programme rely almost entirely on community homes for provision of their child's daily nutrition. For unemployed young mothers, their key motivation for sending their children to the childcare centre is that the children will be well fed. For a family of three or four living on only one minimum wage, having their child fed is of significant importance.

Claudia, a young community mother, discovered after only one year of being involved in the programme that within her association the prescribed menus were not respected by the other community mothers, who used the associated funds for other purposes:

*I struggle so that they* [the other community mothers from the association] *give me my groceries, because they have to give me what's written there, what Bienestar* [the ICBF] *writes on the menus. They give us money to do what's written you understand? But I'm often told that we don't have enough. (...) I struggle because I see there is so much corruption with the money for the children's food. (...) I often fight with them* [the other community mothers from the association] *because of the food. I have a child under my care who eats only the cheese I give him, I know it's the only one he'll eat during the week because I give it to him, because his mother has other things to do or maybe has no money, ( ...) so I tell myself that if I have the possibility of giving the child a yoghurt,*  *then I should give it to him. And I struggle for my yoghurt! If it's written that you have to give them pasta and cheese, well then give me the cheese: if you have the money to buy the cheese, why don't you give it to me? They* [the other community mothers] *are not used to these kind of remarks, if they don't have the cheese they don't stress (...).

Claudia is implying that some of the community mothers in her association are keeping for themselves a part of the funds intended to buy food for the children. Thus, Claudia cannot always buy all the products required for the ICBF menu, and so the children she cares for are not fed as they ought to be. Unlike most other community mothers, Claudia does not rely on the food she buys for the children in order to feed her own family; her husband has relatively good employment, and as a couple, they reside at her in-laws' family home.

Numerous examples of corruption in the use of public funds intended to buy food for the children were revealed during field work. The ICBF is well aware of this, and supervises closely the beneficiary children's nutritional status: each month, the community mothers must submit the weight curves of the children they care for and special utensils for measuring the exact quantity of food that must be given to each child are provided. When officials pay their surprise visits to the community homes for programme evaluation purposes, adherence to menus is a major component of their assessment.

#### Choosing an assistant

Caring for the children during the day is not the only activity expected of community mothers engaged in the programme. Systematic observation conducted in five community homes revealed that the community mothers spent most of their work time away from the children under their care. A certain number of obligations require them to regularly leave the direct supervision of the children: cooking three meals each day for the children, attending the numerous compulsory training sessions offered by the ICBF and attending to administrative tasks linked to the operation of the community home. Leaving the children without supervision is a big risk for any community mother. The law is clear that temporary abandonment of the children or even lack of attention are sufficient reasons to close a community home.33 Engaging an assistant to run the community home is thus a necessity for most community mothers.

Accordingly, since 1989, the law states that in order to run her community home, each community mother must have the help of an assistant, who can be the mother or another relative of a child she cares for.34 According to the law, the assistant should help the community mother in carrying out activities with the children, but should not be regarded as a substitute. Indeed, delegation of the children's care to a third person is a justifiable cause for immediate closure of a community home.35 No money is transferred to the association in order to pay these assistants and, per a law passed in 2011 to regulate food rations within the community home,36 no ration is allocated to the assistant (the community mother's ration is included in the count).

Counting on the children's parents to assist them, as the law suggests, is unrealistic, since most of them work full-time and far from their homes. Under these conditions, meeting these legal requirements seems like an impossible task. How do the community mothers deal with this legal quagmire? Many community mothers, like Carolina,37 rely on their own daughters:

*I have three daughters: one is 17, the other is 15 and the other is 11 years old. They are my right hand. In the evening, they help me out a lot. (...) For example, today it was Leidy – they alternate.

Having teenage daughters is certainly an advantage. But sometimes, even small children have to contribute to running the community home:

**Susana (ethnographer):** *So, someone helps you out with all these children?* **María (community mother):** *Mmm...no, not always.*

**Susana:** *Not always? So sometimes, yes?*

**María:** *Well when I really need it I look for someone to help me out, because to tell you the truth, I like to work alone.*

**Susana:** *In spite of everything you have to do?*

**María:** *Yes, in spite of that, I try to handle everything myself.*

**Susana:** *And when you need someone, what do you do?*

**María:** *Well we help each other out, among family members or with the daughters of other community mothers. Actually, only recently did I start to work alone, because my children used to help me out a lot, even when they were little.*

**Susana:** *How did they help you?*

**María:** *Well by playing with them...also my daughter, when she was eight, had to stay alone with them one time. It was a risk, but I really didn't have a choice because the lady who told me she'd come finally didn't show up, and I left convinced that she would come later! (...) Another time, it was the same story with my son – he was seven or eight: I had to go to training and the lady didn't show up, so he prepared the milk for the children himself!*

When the family network is missing, there are always alternative solutions. In these very poor neighbourhoods, it is not difficult to find a vulnerable person who agrees to help the community mother on a regular basis, in exchange for food only. I observed two examples of this approach. On one occasion, a young woman with a mental disability was helping one community mother on a regular basis; she was fed at noon but received no financial compensation. In another instance, the three daughters (15, 11, and 9 years old) of an internally displaced woman who had just arrived in the neighbourhood were helping out the community mother: 'I pity them,' she said. 'Their mother left to do some ironing and earn some money, so I take them in: they help me out with the children and I give them food in exchange.'

Although delegating the care of the children to a minor is, according to the law, a cause for immediate closure of a community home,38 this practice is very common, certainly because it is difficult for the ICBF to detect it, and it thus is of less risk to the community mothers.

#### Small family enterprises

As Llobet and Milanich (this volume) point out, the position and the social status of 'mother' can be used strategically by women living in constrained circumstances. This is undoubtedly the case in the community homes, where women mobilise their good reputation within the community and the rich social networks created across the associations to set up and run small, often successful, family enterprises from their home.

María runs a tailoring business, specialising in repairing clothes and in producing cheap covers for the mattresses where the children take their naps. She sells them by the hundred to counterparts in her association, as well as those across other associations in the neighbourhood.

Ana also runs a tailoring business. With the help of her daughters and two mothers of children she cares for, she makes uniforms for children in the programme. She sells them in large quantities to other community mothers in the neighbourhood, who in turn rent them out to parents for 'graduation day'– when six-year-olds leave the community homes to go to school. Ana's sister Camila, who is also a community mother in the same association, creates personalised diplomas for each child, which parents enthusiastically purchase. Needless to say, the graduation day is the community mothers' invention.

Carolina's husband is retired. He bought a bus and set up a small group-transport enterprise. His wife likes to promote the fact that she is the only community mother in the association who often takes her children out for 'educational excursions'. Her husband takes care of the transport, and parents are willing to pay for excursions promoted by the ICBF.

Marta's daughter, who is 16 years old, takes full advantage of her mother's community home to offer her own childcare services. According to regulations, among the 14 children who can be cared for in any given community home only two can be under two years of age. In the neighbourhood, the childcare offer for children under two is therefore more limited than it is for children between two and six, and young mothers often struggle to find a place for babies within the community homes. Marta's daughter, who still lives with her parents, offers childcare services to children under two, in parallel to her mother's community home.39

The ICBF is conscious of this reality as well; in 1996, a law was issued indicating that offering childcare services for financial compensation is cause for immediate closure of the community home. Nevertheless, this too seems to be a law that is readily circumvented.

#### Conclusion: The paradox of the predominance principle

Through this case study I have shown how, on a daily basis, community mothers utilise both individual and collective strategies in order to make their daily childcare activities financially sustainable. These strategies involve breaking programme regulations regarding the children's nutrition, their supervision and their early education. I have also shown that the driving force behind these strategies are the social injustices faced by the community mothers, namely the flagrant, longrunning violation of their labour rights by the Colombian state for almost 30 years.

I can now come back to the question raised in the introduction: What are the social consequences, for children and for women, of putting children first? This case study demonstrates that if women's rights are violated, children's rights will most probably be violated as well. The predominance principle enshrined in Article 44 of the Colombian Constitution intends to give absolute priority to the protection of children's rights but paradoxically, by legitimating the subordination of the women's labour rights to those of the children, the children's own well-being is negatively affected, and they are neither being fed nor cared for as they ought to be from a children's rights perspective.

This is yet another example of 'what is wrong with putting children first', as Linda Gordon would put it.40 Achieving social justice for both women and children requires working beyond liberal, individualist understandings of rights, towards a recognition of children's and women's social interdependency.

#### NOTES

# 4 Thinking through childhood and maternal studies

# *A feminist encounter*

Rachel Thomson and Lisa Baraitser

# Conceptualising 'child' and 'mother'

Our starting point for this paper is the relation between two fields of study – 'childhood' and 'maternal' studies. Although it might have been simpler to start with the relation between the terms 'child' and 'mother', or 'childhood' and 'motherhood', we want to focus on the collective efforts that have been made, to make sense of these terms. Neither 'child' nor 'mother' are static, ahistorical concepts, and the ongoing investigation of what it might mean to be a child and a mother, as particular, embodied, and socially and historically constrained experiences, has its own genealogy. Our approach is to put childhood studies and maternal studies into dialogue to see what each can learn from the other.

We should say from the outset that we do not think that if you add together the insights from these fields, an overall picture of mother–child relations emerges. In fact, part of our argument is that mother and child remain opaque to one another, two adjacent positions of experience that simply cannot 'know' one another. This incommensurability inflects the ways that maternal and childhood studies also remain opaque to one another. However, this does not mean that we cannot think about the relations between the fields, perhaps precisely at the point where occlusions in their capacities to inter-relate become manifest. In fact, we want to ask whether one field can be thought about without the other at all. What is the child for maternal studies, the mother for childhood studies, and how do these concepts anchor each field through processes of engagement and othering?

Interdisciplinary childhood studies can be understood as a 'compensatory' project, working against the notion of the child as a developing subject, on the way to adulthood, or as an always-already vulnerable subject attached to adult figures. What founds the field is an attempt to move away from both development and attachment, and understand the child autonomously, yet as relationally defined by generational positions and practices.1 Approaching the child as a discrete yet situated subject has been called 'conceptual autonomy' by Barrie Thorne, and is partly underpinned in the field of childhood studies by a shift in focus away from dependency on the figure of the mother.2 Maternal studies has had a similar struggle. The question for maternal studies has revolved around how we conceptualise the maternal subject as a subject position that is not synonymous with 'woman', nor the subject who puts her needs and desires aside for the sake of the always-more-vulnerable child. In order for the child or mother to emerge as the main focus of each field, it appears that both must 'bracket' the other, even when empirically children can be mothers, and mothers, children. The question then is what it means when these two fields that have been bound up in the struggle for their own conceptual autonomy come together. Put another way, what is the anxiety about getting together, and in what ways does this getting together make 'feminist' trouble?

This brings us to our second consideration: the function of 'feminism' as a third term in the dialogue between childhood and maternal studies. The dialogue we wish to engage inevitably takes in histories of feminist thought, as the study of childhood and maternity is entangled with both terms. Indeed, one strand of second-wave feminism showed how 'woman', 'mother' and 'child' have been written into one another, through the social and political analysis of the potential reproductive capacity of women's bodies, and through forms of regulation of both children and women which reiterate and displace this connection. Feminist legal work in the 1990s on the Victorian period, for instance, elucidated how late-nineteenth-century legislation produced the very categories of womanhood, motherhood and childhood that eclipsed and fixed classed ideals of dependency and interdependency.3 Further feminist work revealed both the relations between the regulation of motherhood and childhood, and how such forms play a crucial role in securing class privilege and empire.4 Here feminist and post-colonial scholars have examined how women, children and racialised or enslaved others are also inextricably linked in a colonial imaginary of 'primitivism', revealing how these subject positions are mutually associated with 'pre-maturity' in relation to the masculine, autonomous, white, self-sufficient adult subject, who does not bear or care for children. If one impulse of feminism in thinking through maternal–child relations was to turn to history, then another was to pay attention to differences in geopolitical location and social position, and the aftermath of empire.

More recently feminism and queer studies have begun to appreciate time as productive of patterns of social belonging which have particular implications for childhood and maternal studies.5 Elizabeth Freeman, for instance, shows how the narratives of linear timelines – such as birth, development, maturation, reproduction, the accumulation of wealth, its passing on to dependents, and death – come to function as a temporal 'norm', rendering lives that do not unfold along these lines as 'deviant' and 'immature'. Lee Edelman has famously argued that the figure of the Child (and we would say, by association, the mother) plays a crucial role in suturing the social and national imaginary, such that the future of the nation and of the social bond is figured through heterosexual reproduction that subsumes all other forms of futurity. The child, in this temporal narrative, is the figure for the 'yet-to-come' and so occupies the temporality of anticipation, rather than temporalities that may be specific to childhood, such as those of immediacy or the situated present. Alongside this, we have seen analyses of maternal temporalities that depart from classical accounts of 'women's time', which has been described as both cyclical and bound up with the monumental time of the regeneration of the species.6 A focus on the temporalities of waiting, duration and interruption has emerged, one that elucidates how care work in the global north continues to be the domain of women,7 a situation that brings with it complex negotiations of time (see also Rosen and Newberry, this volume).8 Scholars have therefore sought to uncouple both motherhood and childhood from the normativity of 'development' and have proposed both mother and child as figures that are 'for the future' without needing to be used as figures for 'futurity' per se.9

Finally, in feminist theory, the relationality of the terms 'woman', 'mother' and 'child' has emerged as a central preoccupation, implicit in much early radical feminism that identified a reproductive capacity as the 'grounds' of oppression.10 What is striking is the way 'mother' and 'child' as categories of analysis have been both pushed and pulled in and out of focus in this feminist work. At certain points the child gets pushed to the margins of feminism so as to make room for the agentic, autonomous notion of 'woman'. And the 'mother' becomes equally suspect for feminism, with intensive debates on that term reaching their height in the 1980s and subsiding into an uncomfortable agreement that a 'strategic essentialism'11 may be the best way of dealing with the troubling issues of reproductive bodies, dependent others, the ethics of care and the messy borders between self and other, biology and sociality. Yet motherhood was always a central issue for feminism12 and, as Angela McRobbie elucidates, women raised on a diet of liberal feminism in the period after feminism's second wave find that equality is attainable only so long as they are child free.13 Nevertheless, the work of granting mother and child conceptual autonomy is ongoing. For example, Claudia Castañeda observes how the figure of the unfinished and mutable child is central to much contemporary social theory that privileges 'becoming', while also occupying a space within psychoanalytically informed feminist theories where adult subjectivity incorporates the child within.14 She notices that just as the child appears to emerge as an ontological category that is not dependent for its coherence on a relation with another, the child is drawn on to bolster accounts of decentred or unfolding subjectivities.15 The adult–child relation therefore continues to challenge our capacity to fashion theories that are relational whilst also allowing subjects conceptual autonomy. In Castañeda's terms, it pushes us to articulate a politics in which 'mother' or 'child' can remain privileged terms, without producing an abstract Other (whether Mother or Child) through which this privilege is secured.

In a similar way, the deconstruction of the autonomous, rightsbearing subject has been central to feminist care ethics, and by extension to maternal studies. The philosopher Christine Battersby has suggested that feminist philosophy could do well to start from the question of what would have to change in order to take seriously the notion that a 'person' could, at least potentially, become two. 'Could we retain a notion of selfidentity,' she asks, 'if we did not privilege that which is self-contained and self-directed?'16 The potentiality to become two, in other words, could be a starting point for understanding identity, along with a conception of the self as always already relational, embodied and fleshy. This view theorises relationships with dependent others as constitutive of the self, such that inequalities and power-dependencies are basic and fundamental.

These features of maternity can be applied as much to childhood as to motherhood. We can think of 'the child' as potentially multiple, interdependent, a 'fleshy continuity' emergent at the intersection of self and other, shifting the rights-based, autonomous, agentic child-subject closer towards the emergent co-dependency of subjectivity per se, a subjectivity that is shared with the messy co-dependence of the mother. As Thorne argued, if we reconfigure notions of self in terms of relationality, even while acknowledging hierarchies of difference, then this changes the ways we understand the social matrix as constituted through relations, and this in turn changes the ways in which we theorise both mothers and children.17 Perhaps what is now important is that we acknowledge that both analytic categories of mother and child can do the work of destabilising theories of agentic subjectivity, rather than each field trying to claim this work as unique, whilst simultaneously being at the expense of the other.

### Fields and journeys through them

There is a now well-worn story about how the 'new' childhood studies emerged in the late 1980s. This included a move by sociology and anthropology to intervene in a field dominated by psychology, and the desire to extend the practices of social construction to reveal the child as agentic, specific and rights-bearing – a move linked in policy terms to the UNCRC (1989).18 In retrospect we can admire this as an effective instance of field-building that could be compared to the more precarious history of 'women's studies', which, through mainstreaming, largely dissolved as a distinct academic field of research, being replaced by gender studies in many parts of the globe. Childhood studies has involved a timely embrace of interdisciplinarity, whilst retaining several crucial components: a power base within the social sciences; clear links to policy and practice via the articulation of children's rights within education and social work training; and methodological innovation, as researchers have sought to realise the promise to articulate children's standpoints. Twenty years on there are specialist journals, international research centres and thriving degree and postgraduate programmes that attest to the resilience of the project and its responsiveness to developments within and beyond the academy. What is important, perhaps, in giving this account is that childhood studies emerged at a specific theoretical juncture, when researchers had become frustrated with the resources available to them. This sense that something is not quite right in the way a concept or experience is being articulated or understood is perhaps the most valuable affect of them all. However, we might ask why it is that childhood studies may need the mother or the maternal in order to enrich its thinking. Can it do its work of studying childhood without reference to the mother at all?

Maternal studies, on the other hand, is a more diffuse field. There are no departments of 'maternal studies' worldwide, no degree programmes that take that name in the UK, and just a handful of dedicated journals and informal, largely unfunded networks, that attempt to address motherhood as distinct from studies of parenting and the family.19 Whilst it has become an intensely interdisciplinary domain, maternal studies retains the affect of embarrassment within the academy, through its continued desire to study and understand parenting 'in the feminine'. In insisting on gendering the field, maternal studies in effect feminises it in a way that may no longer be tenable elsewhere. Although 'maternal studies' might well include the role of men in engendering and rearing children, and of queer and trans mothering practices, in its attempt to honour the ongoing reality that it is women who perform the majority of childrearing and domestic labour maternal studies brings with it anxieties and unease. This includes concern over whether this deliberate focus on the mother returns us to 'maternalist' sensibilities, essentialist debates, 'difference' feminism and its failures to embrace multiple differences beyond the gender binary; to bodies, even if they are now spread across multiple material, affective, and subjective sites.

Perhaps what remains most difficult about maternal studies is the assertion that the 'quality' of relations still matters. By refusing to attend to what is specific about the relationship between women and children, we leave the space between them open to oppressive discourses of intensive parenting, or discourses of blame, ridicule and the depoliticising of motherhood. Yet to work in this space entails dealing with discomfort, or revulsion, or even the unbearable. There is an element of the mother– child relation that we want to push away from, even when that pushing is also self-destructive. It is interesting, therefore, to see a return, through maternal studies, to psychoanalytic theories drawn from the work of Donald Winnicott, Wilfred Bion and Bracha Ettinger, theories of interconnectivity, or of what Ettinger has termed 'transsubjectivity', that put the child back without naturalising this relation.20 Conceptual autonomy as a project, we would argue, therefore becomes simply impossible. In this sense maternal studies refuses *not* to deal with the unfinished and unfinishable business of feminism.

During initial discussions that led to this paper, we explored the question of what maternal studies could learn from childhood studies and vice versa. For maternal studies we discussed how a focus on the diverse, concrete present, which has been a focus of childhood studies, could help identify what it means to mother at particular historical junctures; how an engagement with the ways in which the category is mediated by material culture could enhance similar interests in motherhood and material culture; and how an attentiveness to futurity that has characterised childhood studies could be used to help think through the kinds of futuricity embedded in motherhood as a state of being. For childhood studies we identified that it could take from maternal studies a politics of inter-subjectivity or inter-connectedness that does not end in a collapse of one set of needs in the face of the other, and a focus on the non-linear temporal realities of inter-generation. As we came to write, we realised that these were the lessons *we* had learned; that is, they reflected the ways in which we had hit particular impasses in thinking. They involved a desire to understand the mother and the child more relationally even when the desire was also to shore up the boundary between the two.

# Thinking through relational entities

What might it look like, then, to think differently of the push and pull between the needs of the child and those of the mother? If we accept that conceptual autonomy is a fantasy that has structured both childhood and motherhood studies, we might be able to think about the push and pull in the practice of being and theorising mother and child. Pushing and pulling, in other words, happens for theorists as much as for all of us in our everyday lives. What happens if we stop trying to resolve it, but instead make the uncomfortable move of reconceptualising it as a form of 'weaning'? Instead of either pulling away or collapsing into one another theoretically, perhaps processes of separation between mothers and children leads to the establishment of relational entities and chains of mother and child, understood through small moments of substitution, mediation and scaffolding that can be traced across time and space.

Child and mother are constantly remade. Working historically and empirically, you begin to learn something about what this remaking looks like, its consequences and implications. In Rachel Thomson's research this involves working qualitatively and longitudinally with women who also become mothers, and moving with relational convoys over time, understanding biographies as dynamic and indexical and 'mother' and 'child' as co-existent, contested and emergent, yet profoundly patterned and governed. In Lisa Baraitser's work it involves working conceptually through the quotidian, everyday, overlooked and mundane scenes of motherhood, whether described anecdotally, or 'found' in the myriad of places that maternal stories emerge, mining the 'incidental' for its theoretical import, in order that theory is never anything other than an attempt to make sense of experience.

We would like, therefore, to use the second half of this chapter to examine a fragment of case material drawn from Rachel's study *Making Modern Mothers,* using 'weaning' as a way to conceptualise the push and pull between mother's and children's needs, and between motherhood and childhood studies. If, as we have been arguing, the fantasy of conceptual autonomy needs to be disrupted by a willingness to bracket mothers and children *together* (without collapsing one into the other), then we may learn something about the relation between mothers and children, and between maternal studies and childhood studies, by working through the case study together.

# David and Anastasia

The *Making Modern Mothers* study is an empirical research project that captures and characterises the experience of a diverse group of British women becoming mothers for the first time in 2005.21 The study is a collective endeavour involving four researchers: Rachel Thomson, Mary Jane Kehily, Sue Sharpe and Lucy Hadfield. Starting in 2005 with 60 participants, it narrowed from 2009 to focus on six, whom researchers followed from pregnancy into the second year of the children's life and most recently met with again in 2013 when the children were eight years old. The research uses a range of methods in order to capture aspects of the women's experiences, including interviews, photographs and observation. This includes a 'day in a life' experiment that involves participants allowing researchers to spend an 'ordinary' day with them, producing 'micro-ethnographies' composed of photographs and reflective field notes written by the researcher soon after the observation. The method enables researchers to include children within the project in a new way. This material has been curated on an interactive digital website through further collaboration with the filmmaker Susi Arnott and the photographer Crispin Hughes.

Rachel writes: The research began as a study of new motherhood. Children were not yet born. Over the study we witnessed the ways in which the arrival of a separate yet dependent being acted as an interruption and provocation to the lives of the women and those around them. A longitudinal extension of the original study forced us to refocus our attention when experiencing a 'day in the life' of the mothers – finding our gaze grasped by toddlers, intent on being part of the action, drawing us into communication and interactions around food and control. Further funding opportunities allowed us to focus explicitly on the children, at which point mothers seemed to fade into the background, operating as a kind of 'necessary context' for access and interpretation. The documents that we made together increasingly operated as memorialising opportunities for fast flowing family cultures – too mundane to be celebrated formally and yet part of a nexus of everyday practices that scaffold interdependent projects of selves.

From the outset we noticed the material culture of mothering – documenting the buggy and bag; the toys that had been passed down or along, and where it seemed right to start afresh. We were interested in how the objects gathered around a new baby were like a firmament, with each star representing a valued place or person who it was hoped would accompany the child as time passed. We noticed when particular objects 'failed' and were given away or simply gathered dust. Bedrooms became full and were emptied as new beginnings were initiated. The research itself was an important part of the 'firmament' surrounding the child and mother, travelling together, explicitly reminding both of earlier conversations, decisions, hopes. We periodically asked mothers to reflect on time passing using our own documentation as provocation. We extended these conversations to involve children who were asked to understand and consent to a process that had begun before they were born.

How we think about the child is then shaped by both theory and research design – where we draw the boundary of what is included in view. In this study we drew lines in gendered terms around mothers and grandmothers. Fathers could be included if invited in by mothers, but so could a friend, a sister, a neighbour. Child siblings were not included, though they inserted themselves insistently. Neighbourhoods and homes were the sites of interviews, and observations. Most recently school became part of what was seen and incorporated into view. Theoretically we were motivated by an existentialist interest in self-making and a materialist notion that such projects involve situated practice. We were suspicious of outcome-oriented developmentalism but excited by more open-ended notions of becoming.

We present here a fragment of fieldwork notes from a research encounter with David, aged eight, and his mother Anastasia, which captures the moment that they look at the multi-media document created through the research, showcasing David's bedroom and his account of his 'favourite things' (see 'Favourite things': http://modernmothers.org/favs/d/david.html). The fieldnote is followed by our reflections, capturing some of the productive tensions between childhood and maternal studies outlined earlier. To appreciate the discussion we encourage readers to first look at the multimedia document by following the link above. David is an only child, living with mum (Anastasia) and dad (Richie) in a flat in North London. Dad works shifts and mum has been developing a kitchen-table business since his birth in 2005, making and selling things on eBay. Sue, the researcher, has become friends with the family since first interviewing Anastasia in 2005 when she was eight months pregnant; each research visit is an opportunity to 'catch up'.

*4.45pm: The meal is on the table, and I eat with them. Anastasia has put out some nice warmed Greek bread and salad and hummus, and the boys dive into the bread. It's pasta and meatballs for Anastasia and me, and pasta and frankfurter sausages for the boys. The boys have eaten so much bread that they don't have much appetite left for the pasta and leave a lot. They head off back to the Xbox and I take the opportunity to give thank you vouchers to Anastasia. She's delighted, but saying we didn't have to give her anything for doing this.*

*I wanted to show Anastasia the Favourites website with David on it so she put the laptop on to warm up because it is so old and slow now. She had asked to see it on her phone but I said it wouldn't really show properly in my view.*

*In the meantime she wanted to have a cigarette on the balcony, and I went outside with her and we chatted. She has a little business going making super hot chilli sauce. She had offered me some with the pasta and I had a tiny bit – it is certainly a very hot one. She's trying to earn money because she has to pay a lot of money for doing her NVQ course, since she already has a degree they charge her more.*

*We put the website on and she watched it, both laughing and covering her face at some of it, especially where David talks about shooting 'Dad's fat belly and mum's fat bum'. She enjoyed it and said she thought it was great, but also felt that it wasn't really her family. She couldn't believe it was her son speaking so confidently to me, she was thinking how different he is when she's not around. She didn't worry about the things I thought she might, like the belly and bums bit, or where he talks about them being busy because they have to pay the gas bill etc., and said she 'can't wait to show it to my friend'. I told her that it wasn't 'out' yet and we were still working on it so it wasn't public. She called David in to watch it, and J came as well. David thought it was OK, but tended to get a bit bored with it after a few minutes and was chatting over bits of himself talking, after he'd got used to what it was about. When Barnaby, his soft toy dog, came up in focus he said that sometimes he didn't sleep with him (in response to his voice on the website saying he did). He didn't seem bothered about listening to his own voice. Anastasia teased him about her 'fat bum' and asked him if she really had one and he said 'Soso'; she threatened to take something away so he said 'No she wasn't fat' and we all laughed.*

*Anastasia said she couldn't think why he hadn't included his Lego in his favourites and showed me his Lego models and I took a couple of photos. But when I asked David if he still played with them he said no. In fact, Anastasia had told me earlier that he didn't really play with anything except the Xbox since he'd got it. (I had thought of doing a panoramic shot of his bedroom, but it was now rather different and some toys had been cleared away and the hanging basket previously full of soft toys was completely empty, so I didn't.)*

# Thinking together

The first question of any case study must be – a case of what? If this were a childhood studies project this might be the 'case of David', itself speaking to a wide range of categories, including eight-year-old boys, only children or urban childhoods, for instance. For maternal studies we might be thinking in terms of Anastasia: a case of migrant mothering? But our approach endeavours to think about a mother and a child together and over time – a case of relationship in context, that asks what we might understand if we just keep looking. This is an approach to 'caseness' which in Andrew Abbott's words 'has to do with endurance and thingness; appearance, disappearance, combination and transformation'.22 It is impossible to think of Anastasia without David and vice versa, and neither would be available to us without Sue's presence as a trusted researcher. From the outset of the project Anastasia welcomed the research into her world. Sue's field notes always included details of hospitality and warmth. As migrants from two different continents Anastasia and her partner had met and settled in London and were careful about gathering and cultivating resources. Relatives could be a source of threat as well as security, and 'making do' in a long-hours, low-wage economy demanded an entrepreneurial collective strategy. The research and Sue herself were seen as something good, to be welcomed into the tight-knit trio. So, already, the 'caseness' of this case study involves the relatedness of David, Anastasia, her partner and Sue, as they appear, disappear, combine and transform over time.

When Anastasia was pregnant with David she emphasised her strong identity as a worker, and through the research she expressed frustration in the difficulty she experienced in regaining her pre-birth identity and body. Sue records that work plans are always being hatched. The documentation of David's favourite things and a day in his life, made several months apart in his ninth year, capture a dynamic and contingent moment in the life of the family. David himself is on the cusp of something: orienting towards friends in a new way, discovering the virtual space of the internet for himself, beginning to let go of the soft toys of his early childhood. Seeing David at school is strange for the researcher. He seems like a different boy. We have a taste of how Anastasia might struggle to recognise the grownup-sounding boy, recorded narrating his toys. Anastasia is busily involved in self-making: studying for new qualifications, producing and selling her own chilli sauce. We get a feeling of how this purposeful activity appears to David by noticing his remark that 'this family is too busy, making money to pay bills'...to host playdates or sleepovers? But we also know that this is about to be unsettled. It is no surprise when just a month later his room has been redecorated in a more grownup style and David is installed with a friend at the new Playstation.

The longitudinal method allows access to moments in the flow of a family's life; making 'scenes' from what is experienced as the everyday. Our interest in the connected maternal and child subjects mean that the scenes reveal, literally, how we are made out of each other, spurred on and enabled by the presence, absence, actions, reactions and anticipations of each other (amongst others). With the passage of time and the accumulation of new scenes this relationality turns into the stuff of life. It becomes possible to see how this case of Anastasia and David has *become what it is*. The way that we narrate these changes depends on our frame, and need not be determined by notions of linear development that fix subjects into well-worn trajectories. Indeed, we may be better served by tropes of dialogue, entanglement, echo and repetition which chime with the choreographies of lived experience. Our interpretations are shaped by preoccupations and methods that conceal and reveal, and which themselves become part of the lives that they document. At the time of writing this paper we learned from Sue that Anastasia is now working as a teaching assistant at David's school, pleased to be in a job with prospects but also baffled by seeing the school from inside in ways that are prefigured in Sue's observation of David's day.

From a maternal studies perspective, our first thought is about the shifting location of the 'subject' of the case study, and how we might locate mum, dad, David and Sue in this account. There is Anastasia, David's mum, but there is also Sue, the researcher, who enables a conversation with David about mum and dad, and a conversation with mum about David and dad. There is the mum and dad of David's private talk with Sue, and there is the mum, Anastasia, in the field note, who has her own work, her future aspirations, her past in another country, and her own relation with Sue, dad and David, the mum who listens in to the conversation between Sue and David with pride, and some amazement. There is also the mum and dad of David's fantasy world – not just the dad with the 'fat belly' and the mum with the 'fat bums', who are unable to play pool because they are working to pay for the electric and gas bills – but the mum, for example, whom David associates with the soft cuddly toys of his childhood, and whom he is both drawn towards and repudiates, reminding those assembled that he doesn't always need Barnaby to go to sleep. Perhaps 'mother' is a term, then, that attempts to tie together an embodied subject who delights in the otherness of the child (Anastasia), as well as a form of mediation (Sue's practice as a researcher), and a mental and emotional image (David's relation to an internalised version of 'mum'). This tying together is loose, and the maternal subject is always on the move.

The conversations between Sue and David are linked, on the website, to objects in David's room. The material culture of David's world includes toys that allow some form of regression and comfort, such as Barnaby, and the tiger-cat, and those that seem to be about managing aggression, fear and competition, such as guns, a Darth Maul mask, the Dalek, car games, pool and chess. Barnaby is held onto in a supermarket and mum responds to David's immediate need for its softness by tearing off the label and allowing him to hold it even while she pays. She refuses to separate David from Barnaby. Yet later the cuddly toys are put away by mum, as if *she* has grown out of, or become embarrassed by, David's early attachments. The guitar is a 'substitute' or fake, but David is also proud of his 'real' phone, the pool table, the Dalek that speaks, and the wooden games set. Anastasia is surprised he hasn't chosen the Lego, noting how much time David used to spend with this before the Xbox stole his attention. The materiality of both motherhood and childhood means negotiations about money, and endless attempts at working the line between trying to get what you want and getting what others deem good for you, or what you are convinced is good for others. It makes visible the struggle to identify whose needs are whose, and the relative urgency of those needs. There is a trace of these negotiations in all the objects David plays with, in his room, and how it is configured, and in how it changes over time.

There is also profound identity work going on in David's talk: 'I win'; 'you'd better watch out for me and my guns'. There is his identification as a rock guitarist, and the invitation by a friend to come and see his band: these seem to be bids for a separate and powerful identity, as someone who can kill off his opponents with a bang. The question 'who am I' and 'who am I to you' are also questions of 'who am I without you' and 'what can you do to me', and they apply to mother and researcher too. Mum is trying to get ahead, or maybe just keep afloat, and does and doesn't want to be pulled into an engagement with David. The cigarette on the balcony seems to signify time out, connecting Anastasia to her own needs and desires, recalling a time when she may have been separating from her own mother through marking out her body and desires as her own. It is also a shared moment between women. We are told that Sue and Anastasia have become friends, and that Sue comes round to 'catch up'. What goes on between the two of them? And what does the researcher want?

Posing the same question but changing the subject helps to see multiple perspectives that are relationally premised. Reading together allows us to see the push and pull between Anastasia and David that is both a bid for separation and an expression of their ongoing relation to one another. Separation, here, is not simply a push away, but also the movement towards inhabiting the position of the other, in order to understand something, that allows further separation. 'Weaning', understood broadly as a process of separation, from this perspective, is mutual, gradual and recursive. In order to shed his earlier childhood identity, David needs to return to the question of his relation to others. His questions may be aimed at Anastasia, but in the case material they are mediated through a third figure, Sue. In psychoanalytic theory this third position that facilitates separation is usually characterised as a 'paternal' function that enables separation between mother and child. However, where feminism and psychoanalysis have fruitfully engaged, it has been precisely around this issue of the gendering of thirdness (with its connotations of the symbolic world beyond the milky dyad). Anastasia continually welcomes the other in, and yet is surprised by the developmental shift that David has taken, which is manifest in the adult-sounding recording of his conversation with Sue. Her own self-making is not a process of simply pursuing her course, her kitchen-table business, or her project of survival, but is enabled through her ongoing relation to her separating and returning son.

By bracketing mother and child together, rather than separately from one another, we can allow the conceptual entanglement of 'mother' and 'child' to be tolerated and sustained in a way that enriches both childhood and maternal studies. Reading together involves an engagement between sociology and psychoanalysis, noticing the relational practices of 'childing' and 'adulting' through which social categories are created,23 and how these flesh out the mother for the child and the child for the mother. In becoming objects for each other it becomes possible to do the work of separation and, leading from this, to become subjects through whom relationality becomes possible.24 We can understand the encounter between mother and child, and between childhood and maternal studies, as a 'growing sideways' that is relational, dynamic and generative.25 Thinking *through* in this way involves at least two projects of self in relationship, as precipitated by one other but also by the material and temporal properties of the environment in its concrete and abstract manifestations.

Maintaining a focus over time enables us to see the fluid character of this relationality, but also the obstacles and inflexibilities which may structure the pathways of least resistance. The temporalities involved are complicated. There are practices of waiting (to get back to your 'old life', to being 'old enough'). Things move slowly and suddenly very fast as we realise that something may have happened outside of view (our child has become someone else). Technologies become sluggish and eventually obsolete, and an upgrade or a new toy can feel like time travel into the future. The child and the mother – if thought together – express a tension between together and apart, acting as the 'other' to one another. They are each other's audience, whether they like it or not, though they may only come to realise it through the mediation of a third. When we hold them in mind within a research frame it becomes possible to notice and think about the qualities of this relationship, and to offer a different kind of audience or sense of the 'public' from which to see them.

In conclusion, we have taken up the challenge of using feminism as a space of encounter for connecting childhood and maternal studies, allowing us to think about how we conceptualise the relationship between mother and child. Our approach has tracked how notions of conceptual autonomy and relationality have become important in both fields, reappearing in successive waves of theorising. We have also explored why they may be so difficult to maintain, in the face of the pull and push of conceptual collapse and separation. Our aim has been to show how it might be possible to think mother and child together in such a way that escapes the temptations of abstraction, maintaining a connection to situatedness, contingency and intersubjectivity. By using the terminology of 'weaning' we may have provoked some of the uncomfortable associations of maternalism, while asking our readers to follow through an expanded reading of relationality enriched by this affective charge. Feminism is the unmarked yet prime mover that shapes our conviction that it is possible to generate new knowledge by engaging seriously with the ordinary business of living as mother and child. For us the feminist encounter involves the acknowledgement of a political dimension to our investigations, and this feminist encounter has prompted us to think about what might be unthinkable for childhood and material studies.

#### NOTES

# 5 Notes on unlearning *Our feminisms, their childhoods*

Debolina Dutta and Oishik Sircar

When we first watched the documentary film *Born into Brothels* (*BiB*) in 2008,1 little did we know that a couple of years later we would be urged by a group of children of sex workers,2 not unlike those in *BiB*, to make a film to counter its narrative. As feminist human rights lawyers, our first impulse on watching *BiB* was an amazement at the film's omission of any references to a vibrant sex workers' collective right next door to where the film had been shot in the Sonagachi red-light district in Kolkata.3 The Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC), a sex worker-led organisation with more than 65,000 female, male and transgender sex worker members, has been active there since 1997. However, *BiB* chose to make no mention of them. For us, such active exclusion was of grave consequence because we believed it only added to and strengthened a dominant narrative that worked to create an image of the sex worker as helpless, incapable and in need of rescue. Such narratives also lend legitimacy to a global saviour impulse that is put into practice by a whole host of state and non-state actors, even when sex workers refute the asserted need for external interventions in their lives.4

The DMSC protested against the film's voyeuristic and denigrating portrayal of the lives of sex workers and their children.5 But the directors' portrayal of their own struggle to rescue children of sex workers in Kolkata from their suffering had won hearts – and also the Oscar for best documentary in 2005. The film had become famous for the distanced publics of global compassion that it mobilised.6 The filmmakers were celebrated for their display of courage in the face of indigenous patriarchy, an underdeveloped and corrupt state and the incompetent, immoral parents of the children. If it was not for their intervention, the film suggested in no uncertain terms, the children would have had to remain captive within the hellish brothels, a location that was their home. The removal of the children from their homes, from their mothers, was the valiant mission that the filmmakers were undertaking. The directors were the protagonists of the film; it was their story about their triumph over Third World miseries.

When we first watched *BiB* we had already been associated with the DMSC as feminist allies for many years.  We had been part of their rallies and written about their activism. As human rights lawyers we had held legal awareness workshops with their members. In the course of our interactions with sex worker activists we had learnt a key lesson in feminist politics, which was conveyed to us through a wellknown slogan of the global sex workers' rights movement: 'nothing about us without us'. We learnt that the communities of people with whom a feminist engages and works must be regarded as active subjects capable of knowing, evaluating and deciding on what is best for their lives; that the feminist self who claims to be an ally in the struggles of marginalised people must not also claim superiority of knowledge and being.

Over the years, during our visits to the DMSC's offices in north Kolkata, we would meet many of the children of the sex workers milling about and participating in the DMSC's work. We would join with them to raise slogans at protests.  *BiB* was, in many ways, an extension of such a feminist position, and reinforced an image similar to that of the Third World sex worker without agency, as was deployed in the 1996 Emmy Award-winning documentary *The Selling of Innocents*. 7 These films have portrayed children born to sex workers as being trafficked at birth. By marshalling specific filmmaking techniques – the use of grainy, red-filtered, shaky images and haunting background scores – the films pursued a pedagogical mission: to train their viewers to believe that children of sex workers would naturally grow up to be prostitutes if they were girls and pimps if they were boys. Their fates were sealed – unless the abolitionist feminists intervened.

Strangely enough, as pro-sex-work feminists, we had seldom thought of the children of sex workers from the DMSC as fully agential subjects. Our focus was almost solely on the rights of sex workers and their right to sex work. This included their right to the custody of their children, but not necessarily the children's right not to be forcibly removed from their mothers. However, the fact that the children had stakes in their mothers' struggles, that they too were political actors who were an integral part of the sex workers' rights movement, didn't dawn on us until we attended a DMSC protest rally led by Amra Padatik (AP), a collective of children of sex workers formed under the aegis of the DMSC.

On the evening of 3 March 2009 – International Sex Worker Rights Day – over 3,000 children of sex workers (aged between 6 and 25 years), all from Kolkata's Sonagachi and surrounding red light districts, marched through College Street. They held placards and shouted slogans demanding their rights as children to be free from stigma and discrimination.  The rally was organised and led by AP.

**Fig. 5.1** At the Amra Padatik Rally, Kolkata, on International Sex Workers' Rights Day, 3 March 2009. (Photograph by Oishik Sircar)

One of the marchers' most popular slogans targetted India's then Minister for Women and Child Development: '*Renuka Chaudhary'r Kalo Hath Guriye Dao, Guriye Dao*' (Smash Renuka Chaudhary's Black Hand). In using this slogan the children in the march were alluding to an amendment that the ministry had been seeking to make to the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1956, to criminalise clients of sex workers. This move would have pushed sex work underground and exposed the children's mothers to additional violence and extortion. Along with this, they were also protesting against a provision in the same law that would allow the state to remove children attaining the age of majority from their mothers if they were defined as living off their mothers' earnings (in other words, living with them).

It was at this rally that we conceived the idea of a project on the collectivisation of children of sex workers, and their activism as political actors.8 We felt that it was necessary for the human rights world, of which we were a part by profession, to hear this story that we were learning about. In the light of a film like *BiB*, we aimed to foreground the experiences of these children from Sonagachi to challenge the singularity of focus on suffering that their ostensible plight has attracted. We did not mean to dismiss it, but to bring to light the multiple and overlapping realities of coercion, celebration, negotiation and determination that marked their lives. It was also an attempt at exposing how a singular focus on suffering worked to erase the complexity of their lived experiences – in turn, denying these children an opportunity to be recognised as citizens who have the capacity and vision to give meaning to how their lives are to be perceived or lived. While children of sex workers are on the receiving end of multiple forms of disadvantage they are also active agents in resisting disadvantage and formulating daily negotiation strategies which constitute an exemplary show of resilience.9 When they are minors, age not only leads to the violation of the rights of these children: it also becomes the reason why compassionate interventions do not consider them as citizens whose voices matter.

As feminists whose politics were strongly informed by a postcolonial sensibility,10 we assumed that our idea already carried an ethical heft. As part of our participatory methodology, we discussed our idea with a group of members from AP to get their feedback. While the group, which comprised AP's office-holders Pinky, Gobinda, Ratan, Mithu and Chaitali, were happy about a project of this nature, they raised doubts about its transformative capacity. They were concerned that we would end up publishing the outcome in English, in an academic journal, which would be of no use to them: it would benefit only us. The suggestion came from one of them that we make a film that could both offer a counter-story to that of *BiB* and that AP could use as a part of their own advocacy work. Both Pinky and Gobinda had watched *BiB*, and they were troubled by how a film that demeans them and their mothers could find such widespread appeal, not only globally but also in India.

**Fig. 5.2** Film poster artwork by Anirban Ghosh depicting the five protagonists. (Source: Anirban Ghosh)

In 2011, we completed the documentary film *We Are Foot Soldiers*, 11 which featured as protagonists the five members of AP mentioned above. We also published an article that accompanied the film.12 While writing the article was a rehearsal of activist-academic conventions in feminism and jurisprudence, making the film was a provocation to unlearn a lot of these very conventions. It was not our inexperience in the technique of filmmaking that was the cause for this provocation. That challenge, although pertinent, we had overcome by bringing on board like-minded friends who had the requisite technical knowledge.13 Rather, it was the challenge of thinking about a form of storytelling that was able to bring our pro-sex-work feminism into conversation with the politics of AP. The risk in such a conversation was of letting our feminist interpretive lens become a totalising explanatory framework for AP's narratives of childhoods. How do we tell a story which is both ours and theirs? How do we tell a story in which the aesthetics will not overwhelm the politics and vice versa?

The film was a collaborative exercise and yet not. It appeared to us that the children were, through active participation in the filming, assuming ownership of the film which was seeking to tell their stories. But as directors we exercised creative control and authority. At the time

**Fig. 5.3** Debolina with Gobinda, at his residence, during the filming of WAFS. (Photograph by Anindya Shankar Das)

of filming, we decided never to enter the frame of the camera during interviews. Yet, from over 12 hours of footage, the decision of which frames to retain into the final 26-minute cut was ours.14

Of course, these are standard dilemmas regarding the ethics of documentary filmmaking, especially when there is a clear differential in power between the filmmakers and the human subjects of the film. But for us, negotiating these dilemmas was more than a practice of professional ethics.  Within prosex-work feminist discourses, children of sex workers often appear either as an apology or a justification for their mothers' choice of occupation. Through the conversations with our protagonists we realised that we needed to walk a fine line between foregrounding a pro-sex-work politics and at the same time not making that politics the sole foundational peg for the film. How could the film foreground an account by one of our protagonists who, while supporting the right to sex work, did not like identifying as the child of a sex worker all the time? How were we to present disagreements between children and their mothers without being predisposed to either position? If the children were to occupy centre stage in a narrative about their lives, the film had to make space for accounts that were not entirely in alignment with our pro-sex-work feminism. This necessitated that both we and the sex workers remain entirely out of the frames; thus, we decided to not interview any sex-working mothers.

The encounter between feminisms and childhoods that we saw was not one of rivalry, but unfolded as a dialogue in which we had to confront the fact that feminism, even in its best-intentioned and most selfreflexive versions, must recognise its limitations. For us, this recognition hasn't been a paralyzing force. The encounter has shown us the merits of unlearning to make way for learning anew.

#### NOTES

# 6 Ideal women, invisible girls? *The challenges of/to feminist solidarity in the Sahrawi refugee camps*

Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh

### Introduction

Since their establishment in the mid-1970s, the Sahrawi refugee camps in South West Algeria have become internationally recognised – and constituted – as ideal spaces in which gender has been successfully mainstreamed and female empowerment has been achieved. Such a gynocentric1 representation has been projected, repeated and consolidated by the Sahrawi refugees' political leaders and a wide range of international actors – ranging from UN agencies to Western academics, journalists, and NGOs – as an essential part of the Sahrawis' politics of survival, to secure humanitarian and political support for this enduring refugee community. However, this idealised depiction of the camps has simultaneously been characterised by a homogenisation of an idealised image of 'the Sahrawi woman', and by rendering invisible and unaddressed both 'non-ideal' Sahrawi women and girl-children, and their respective, diverse and at times competing rights, needs and concerns. This occurs on multiple levels and scales: local, national and international alike.2

How can we understand the hypervisibility of 'Sahrawi refugee women' in representations of, and responses to, these protracted camps, while girls remain largely invisible? How and with what effect can feminist solidarity for 'refugee women' be implicated in processes of marginalisation on the basis of, inter alia, gender and generation? This chapter addresses these questions through a case study of the Sahrawi refugee camps, which appear to be a success story3 in that Sahrawi refugee women have long been identified not as 'generic' refugee women (read passive, subjugated, violated), but as 'ideal' refugees in 'ideal camps': active and empowered agents who effectively run gender-equal camps which are free from violence against women. This chapter examines both empirical instances of the apparent disjuncture between the roles played by – and given to – women and girls in these camps, and the *representational* (and thus constitutive) processes that centralise particular figures in this refugee situation whilst marginalising others. The aim of the chapter is not to offer an absolute account of Sahrawi refugees' lived experiences in the camps, but, rather, to highlight the paradoxical nature, and implications, of mainstream representations of women and girls in this refugee situation.

The following reflections are based on my ethnographic research. This had two focuses: on the one hand the roles of gender and Islam in everyday sociopolitical dynamics in the Sahrawi camps, and on the other the significance of gender and religion in Sahrawi refugees' interactions with diverse international audiences, including providers of humanitarian aid and political support.4 In particular, my research has examined the ways in which the Sahrawi's political representatives – the Polisario Front – have presented an idealised depiction of equal gender relations and the empowerment of women in the camps as part of a broader representational strategy designed to attract and maintain international humanitarian and political support for the camp's inhabitants and the Sahrawis' quest for the right to self-determination. As such, my research into the roles of gender and religion in supporting the Sahrawi 'politics of survival'5 has not explicitly aimed to explore the *relative* position of girls and women in the Sahrawi camps or across the transnational networks that provide different forms of assistance and support to Sahrawi children, youth and adults. Nonetheless, the differential position given to 'women' and 'girls' by diverse international state and non-state actors repeatedly emerged as a key theme throughout my multi-sited research in Algeria, Cuba, Syria and Spain.

Since 2001, this research has involved a total of over 100 interviews with Sahrawi refugee adults, children and youth residing in the refugee camps in Algeria; with Sahrawi refugee youth participating in a transnational education programme in Cuba and Syria; and with Sahrawi youth and adults studying and living in Spain, in addition to interviews with more than 50 European aid providers and pro-Sahrawi solidarity activists across these and other spaces.6 My fieldwork has also included participant observation of diverse encounters between Sahrawi refugees and various aid and solidarity providers. Such encounters included high-profile political meetings between female Sahrawi political representatives and European solidarity activists in the camps, local-level encounters between 'aid providers' and various 'beneficiaries' of humanitarian programmes (such as the children's activity camp discussed below), and diverse representational encounters between Sahrawi refugees and external readers and observers, through media and NGO reports published in the international arena and via the parades that the Polisario regularly organise when non-Sahrawi visitors travel to the camps.

The chapter is structured as follows. I firstly provide a brief history of the Sahrawi refugee situation – noting an early commitment to gender equality stated by the Polisario. I then outline the now-hegemonic depiction of the Sahrawi camps as 'ideal', gender-equal and democratic spaces – a depiction which I refer to as 'gynocentric' in nature. I then set out the relationship between this discursive representation and international support for the camps and their inhabitants. With the gynocentric foundations of Western humanitarian and political support for the Sahrawi in mind, I then analyse firstly the position (or absence) of girl-children in accounts of the camps, and secondly the ways in which Sahrawi refugees and members of a Spanish solidarity-based aid programme responded to a group of refugee mothers' reluctance to allow their daughters to participate in an overnight camping activity outside of the 27 February refugee camp. While the activity camp could be seen as a welcome attempt to redress the longstanding invisibility of refugee children in aid programmes in the Sahrawi camps, this case study ultimately highlights not only the difficulties that refugee girls may face in accessing projects in these idealised 'gender-equal' camps, and the tensions that might exist between different groups of girls and women in the camps, but also the paradoxical ways in which feminist rhetoric is invoked by Spanish NGO leaders during their interactions with Sahrawi women and children. Ultimately, the camps emerge as microcosms that exemplify the potential for feminist discourse and claims of solidarity to be used against, rather than to support, 'real' beneficiaries of international aid programmes, women and children alike.

# Setting the scene

The inhabitants of the North African territory now known as the Western Sahara were historically members of nomadic tribes with mixed ethnic origins (including Arab and Berber), who spoke Hassaniya Arabic, shared a series of cultural practices and followed the Maliki school of Islam.7 While the term 'Sahrawi' in Arabic refers to any inhabitant of the desert (*sahra'*), this identifier is now most frequently used to refer to the people who traditionally lived in and moved throughout the Western Saharan territory. This usage of the term Sahrawi is relatively recent, emerging as a key identifier in the anti-colonial movements which developed in the 1960s and 1970s, towards the end of the Spanish colonial occupation of what was then referred to as the Spanish Sahara.

In 1964, the territory was placed on the UN Decolonisation Committee's agenda and, after the birth and suppression of a number of anti-colonial movements, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguiat El-Hamra y Río de Oro (known by its Spanish acronym Frente POLISARIO, henceforth Polisario) was established in 1973. Polisario gained popular support as it resisted first Spanish colonialism and later Moroccan and Mauritanian claims over the territory. Although Spain conducted a census of the population in December 1974 to prepare for a referendum on self-determination, Spain subsequently withdrew from its colony without holding a referendum in late 1975, and the territory was then occupied by Morocco and Mauritania, which claimed historic rights over this area. Following the Spanish dictator Franco's death in November 1975 the conflict between Morocco, Mauritania and Polisario intensified, with a mass exodus of Sahrawis being displaced first to other parts of the territory and later to the nascent Algerian-based refugee camps near these countries' common border.8

Mauritania withdrew from the conflict soon after, while Morocco and the Polisario continued to engage in armed conflict until 1991, when a ceasefire was brokered by the African Union. Today the Western Sahara remains on the UN's list of non-self-governing territories pending decolonisation, and the camps continue to be home to both Sahrawi refugees and the Polisario.

Before turning to the camps themselves, given this chapter's focus on the centrality of gender equality in accounts of the camps a brief reflection is necessary vis-à-vis the Polisario leadership's official position on gender equality. In essence, the Polisario's leaders were primarily male activists who, as a result of their educational experiences, brought to the movement a range of anti-colonial, socialist and non-aligned theories and frameworks which permeated the region at the time.9 Amongst the implications of these approaches is the extent to which external analysts documented Polisario's 'strong commitment to the principle of women's emancipation' in the 1970s (echoing a central concern across socialist and non-aligned movements at the time).10 Amongst its priorities in the 1970s, the Polisario officially aimed to establish equality both between the men of different tribes, and also between men and women. Solidifying the notion of the pre-colonial freedom of nomadic women in the territory,11 the Polisario asserted that Spain's colonial occupation had imposed artificial restrictions on Sahrawi women, and, in its 1975 Programme of Action, declared that it would struggle 'to *reestablish* the political and social rights of the woman and open up all perspectives to her'.12

In addition to the ideological commitment to 'reestablishing' the rights of women and promoting equality and unity between all men and women, these moves were pragmatic in nature since they automatically increased the movement's potential membership base, as evidenced in the following extract from the Polisario's official journal published in 1974:

It has become necessary for our struggle ...that the Sahrawi woman bears all responsibilities and undertakes her duty in the national struggle by participating actively in the armed revolution like her sisters in the Palestinian, Algerian and Guinea-Bissau revolutions.13

As I argue below, the centrality given to 'Sahrawi women' has continued to be a central motif of the Polisario's struggle for self-determination, and has also become central to accounts of social dynamics in the camps. For instance, following her visit to the camps in 1981, Harrell-Bond reported that the Polisario had built 'a twentieth-century democratic nation, women's equality being one of the strongest features of their social organization',14 and Oxfam's desk officer in the mid-1980s wrote that 'Perhaps the most impressive thing about Sahrawi society is that it is the most fundamentally balanced society I have ever come across in terms of the relationships between men and women'.15

Although the movement's early political commitment to women's emancipation may indeed have been related to its ideological position in the 1970s, I argue that it is important to also consider the significance of *pragmatics* when we consider the Polisario's modes of politically and discursively mobilising Sahrawi women through what I denominate the Sahrawis' gynocentric politics of survival.16

### Women's position in the Sahrawi refugee camps

Since the mid-1970s, Polisario has governed and administered the Sahrawi refugee camps and its refugee population via the 'state in exile' (the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, SADR) which it constituted on the 27 February 1976, one day after Spain officially withdrew from its colony. The Polisario and its SADR state has developed its own constitution, camp-based police force (and prisons), army, and parallel state and religious legal systems.

Although the camps are almost totally dependent upon externally provided aid, since the 1980s they have been heralded as 'unique' and even 'ideal' due to the Sahrawis' self-management and administrative, bureaucratic and professional self-sufficiency,17 with analysts identifying the camps as 'models of efficient local government' and even 'the best run refugee camps in the world'.18

Importantly, between the mid-1970s and the 1991 ceasefire, the camps were effectively run and managed by Sahrawi women. This was, on a pragmatic level, necessary as the majority of male refugees were either at the military front or representing the political struggle abroad.19 In the words of a woman who arrived in the camps in March 1976 and who was 74 years old at the time of her interview:20

We [the women] took care of the organisation of life in the refugee camps, while the army took care of the war of resistance. We started building our schools and tents. Children went to Algeria, Cuba and Libya for schooling. The other tents were used as classrooms. Literacy campaigns were launched, and women were the basis of this construction, and despite the suffering of families since 1976 until now, women have been contributing to the state and their families.21

During this time, women played a key role in all aspects of life in the camps: distributing aid and being officially recognised as heads of household, playing active roles as builders, teachers, doctors and as active members of the camp-based National Union of Sahrawi Women and of parts of the SADR.

Given the minimal presence of men in the camps throughout the first decades of the conflict, Sahrawi refugees have publically celebrated the determination and resourcefulness of Sahrawi women as they managed the harsh camp conditions despite suffering as mothers, wives, sisters and daughters:

One could not see men around here*,* maybe you would find one man in each [camp district]. The men were fighting at the battlefronts, and women did not know whether they would be called to be told that a husband or brother was martyred. Despite all this, women worked with enthusiasm and conviction.22

Further reflecting the transgenerational nature of these female-centred accounts of the camps, a 14-year-old girl born and raised in the camps also indicated that 'the Sahrawi woman':

is the most important [in the camps]. She built the tents, and provides the food, organises the [camps'] municipalities, and in all the refugee camps, they are active. During the war, the men were not in the camps, otherwise they would have helped.23

Echoing these narratives, in academic accounts24 as well as in solidarity events designed for Western visitors to the camps, Sahrawi refugee women are primordial and almost omnipresent,25 not as victims but rather as empowered, liberated and active agents, who, to a large extent, appear to overshadow their male compatriots in the camps.

The idealisation – and mobilisation – of Sahrawi refugee women

In 2001, the UNHCR's Refugee Women and Gender Equality Unit not only declared that the case of Sahrawi refugee women's empowerment is 'unique' but explicitly presented the camp-based National Union of Sahrawi Women as an example of 'good practice on gender mainstreaming'*.* 26 In turn, in its overview of camp conditions in 2002, the World Food Programme stated that Sahrawi women 'are known to be assertive and to participate in all aspects of camp life',27 indicating that between 2000–04 Sahrawi women comprised 80 per cent of the health workers in 29 health centres in the camps and 60 per cent of both medical and paramedical staff and camp teachers.28 The organisation's description of Sahrawi women's participation in the camps was substantially magnified in 2004, when the organisation claimed – with no reflection on the meaning of the terms invoked – that 'Saharan society is primarily *matriarchal* and the women are *totally empowered*'.29

It is clear that Sahrawi women have played a key role in establishing and running the camps, and yet a key question which arises for the purposes of this chapter is why and with what effect women's roles have been mobilised on the international stage through gynocentric accounts which have been projected both to and by international observers. Indeed, the longevity of this idealised depiction of women's roles in the camps is particularly notable when we acknowledge that the common understanding of the camps as 'feminised' and female-run spaces is largely based on a continued acceptance of war-time demographics, in spite of increasing numbers of Sahrawi men having 'returned' to the camps since the 1991 ceasefire and the WFP estimating that by 2000–02, 40 per cent of the camp population was male.30

On an empirical level, depictions of the camps as female-dominated and female-run spaces simultaneously elide the heterogeneity of the female camp population and the extent to which women's spheres of action and access to resources have historically depended on age, tribal background, education and marital status (amongst other factors); equally, they fail to acknowledge the presence or activities of different groups of men in the camps, or, indeed, the extent to which the camps' political structures have consistently been managed by elite males since the 1970s. With only one woman (Senia Ahmed Marhba) ever having acted as a camp governor, since the 1970s men have held the most powerful positions in the political administration of the individual camps, districts and neighbourhoods, and have also systematically controlled Rabouni, the camps' male-dominated 'capital' and structural core.31

Nonetheless, in spite of the clear demographic shifts which have taken place since 1991, and elite men's long-standing and ongoing monopoly over key spaces and politico-administrative positions, discourses which represent the camps as feminised spaces inhabited by active women continue to prevail, with diverse effects.

Whether 'real' or not, I argue that representations of active and empowered Sahrawi women are particularly powerful – and attractive – precisely because they are unexpected when compared with the standardised and generic images which have become the norm when discussing refugee camps.32 Indeed, mainstream accounts of refugee settings habitually reproduce the image of women as helpless victims of war and forced displacement,33 re/creating 'the refugee' as a generic and essentialised figure, either Madonna-like34 or as weakened, dependent and victimised 'womenandchildren'.35 The centrality of this essentialised figure leads Malkki to suggest that refugee women's and refugee children's symbolic power may be derived from their 'embody[ing] a special kind of powerlessness' or being the embodiment of 'pure humanity' and simultaneously of 'a pure victim'.36 Importantly, Malkki also suggests that the extent to which the repetition of such conceptualisations of 'normal' or 'generic' refugees potentially provides a framework against which other refugees can be compared.37 In effect, the tendency to compare refugee groups and evaluate them accordingly is confirmed by mainstream accounts of the Sahrawi camps, including a report by the Norwegian Refugee Council, which explicitly indicates that the Sahrawi camps are 'unique' by virtue of their difference from 'other' camps.38 The Sahrawi camps are said to be an 'exception' to 'what has become the norm',39 and Sahrawi women are, precisely, a 'positive example' when compared with the 'usual' position of generic refugee women in generic refugee camps.40

As such, the Sahrawi camps, as portrayed by Polisario/SADR and Western observers alike, are in essence the antithesis of what refugee camps are 'meant to look like':41 they are democratic, empowering spaces that are safe for active and empowered women. In this context, we could argue that the symbolic power of Sahrawi refugee women arises precisely because they are *not* passive, powerless, 'pure victims', but because they embody an *idealised* form of female agency.

This uniqueness, and the centrality of Sahrawi women in the camps, is also central in sustaining the transnational networks which provide humanitarian and political support for the Sahrawi people and their quest for self-determination. Importantly, in addition to general support for Sahrawi refugees from across a range of transnational civil society networks, many Western observers directly relate their support for the Sahrawi to the 'special' nature of Sahrawi women in the camps, with an International Platform of Solidarity with Saharawi Women having been created in 1998. Indeed, one of the primary aims granted by the SADR Constitution to Sahrawi mass organizations and unions, such as the campbased National Union of Sahrawi Women (NUSW), is precisely to '*help widen the field of solidarity* with the Sahrawi people and to draw attention to its national cause'.42 The NUSW – which is based in the 27 February Refugee Camp (also known as the 'Women's Camp') – states that one of its international objectives is to 'enlarge the solidarity and support base for our people's struggle for self-determination and independence',43 and

calls for all women across the world to express their moral and political solidarity with the legitimate struggle of the Sahrawi people ...We consider that solidarity between all women...is highly important because that solidarity constitutes an essential pillar in the interwoven relations of cooperation, solidarity and friendship and exchange of experiences and thus constitutes an essential factor in the search for solutions for the innumerable problems which women encounter in their struggle for the freedom and dignity of women.44

In many ways, the distinctive content of the gynocentric representation of life in the Sahrawi camps, and the NUSW's call for international audiences to act in 'cooperation, solidarity and friendship' with Sahrawi women as active agents and equal partners, could appear to be diametrically opposed to the universalising representational practice apropos refugee women identified by Malkki.45 However, while providing an important counter-narrative to the tendency of viewing refugee women as passive and vulnerable recipients of aid, in the following section I examine the extent to which girls are simultaneously rendered invisible in such accounts, and consider the tensions that have emerged when Spanish 'solidarity' organisations have developed and implemented programmes in the camps.

#### 'Where are the girls?'

As I have argued elsewhere,46 one element of the official discourse's representation of ideal Sahrawi women has been its failure to account for changes and differences in positions, responsibilities and needs throughout different stages of women's lifecycles in the camps. The static and eternalised image of women re/presented in the mainstream discourse neither defines the term 'Sahrawi women' (thereby eliding the heterogeneity of the term) nor reflects on the processes by which one becomes a woman (following de Beauvoir)47 or, indeed, how one becomes a girl in the camps. While I have elsewhere explored girls' experiences of growing up in the camps and participating in transnational education and fostering programmes in Cuba, Libya and Spain – including by noting the extent to which opportunities for mobility and transnational education have been limited by parents' and relatives' fears vis-à-vis puberty and nascent 'womanhood'48 – here I argue that Sahrawi girls are in effect invisible in the official discourse projected to and by Western audiences and, concurrently, in projects designed for and implemented in the camps.

With reference to the broad corpus of representations of displaced and conflict-affected peoples, Nordstrom documents and denounces the tendency for such representations to 'focus almost entirely on adults' whilst failing to ask 'where are the girls?'49 Indeed, prevailing accounts of, and projects for, conflict-affected 'children' have long been criticised for systematically failing to ask whether the term 'children' 'really [means] girls and boys, or just boys?', and girls are therefore frequently rendered invisible or muted.50 In the Sahrawi context, few academic studies or NGO projects have focused on documenting or addressing girl-children's experiences of growing up in the camps or in the *Vacaciones en Paz* programme through which circa 10,000 children leave the Sahrawi camps to be hosted by Spanish families every summer.51 On an operational level, while there are numerous projects 'for children' in the Sahrawi camps and beyond, none of the projects established or run in 27 February Camp at the time of my research (2001–09) were gender-sensitive, with a 'gender-blind' approach to Sahrawi childhood meaning that initiatives were designed by external actors for (ideal-typical) boy-children.

One result is that, although women are (hyper)visible throughout the camp52 and a number of 'women's' spaces exist in the camp (including the 27 February Camp itself *as* 'The Women's Camp'), and boys and young men have access to a wide range of 'public areas' (including a space by the entrance to the 27 February Camp's administrative core – an archway known as the *gaws* – where they regularly play football), there is a distinct absence of facilities, services or spaces for girls outside of their tents.53 For instance, a 17-year-old girl stressed that

Life is very difficult in the camps, and girls have very limited places to meet or play. We meet with each other in our homes, in my room for example, and discuss school, the future, and politics.54

Further, a 54-year-old woman indicated that the humanitarian system has failed to address the specific needs of girls, stating that 'we need programmes that provide skills for girls and enable them to remain near their families'.55

These quotes, which echo sentiments arising in a broader series of interviews and my ethnographic research in the camps, highlight that many girls and women are longing for spaces where girls will be able to participate in different activities. Yet the second quotation also highlights that another dimension of 'space' – girls' *proximity* to their families – is also central to understanding which kinds of activities and spaces are considered to be desirable or undesirable for different groups of girls, according to different groups of camp residents and, indeed, external observers.

#### *The feminist politics of supporting girls*

Against this backdrop – on the one hand the discursive idealisation and hypervisibility of active Sahrawi women, and on the other the invisibility of 'girls' both in mainstream accounts of the camps and in the camp's public spaces – I now explore the tensions that underpin and arise from a Spanish NGO's activity camp recruitment drive in spring 2007. The drive sought Sahrawi children to participate in a three-day trip (*rihla*) for an 'activity camp' to be held in the sand dunes located between the refugee camps. A brief examination of how the trip was designed and how children were 'recruited' simultaneously reveals the difficulties which girls may face in accessing projects, and the extent to which the priorities of different groups of women and girls may be positioned at loggerheads in the camps.

Having arranged to take a group of boys and girls to the nearby sand-dunes for three days, the members of a Spanish NGO expressed surprise and anger when the children's mothers allowed their sons to spend a few days away from home 'having fun,' but refused to allow their daughters to do the same. Inter alia, the mothers wanted to know where the girls would sleep, what sort of contact they would have with the boys, who would be responsible for them (i.e. Spanish or Sahrawi, female or male instructors), and when they would return home. Given social, cultural and religious norms in the camps underpinning (adult) perceptions of un/acceptable behaviour and activities for girls and boys, I suggested to the Spanish organisers that they ask female, rather than male, Sahrawi instructors to speak with the mothers about the project and to explain the sleeping and supervisory arrangements that would be in place. The Spanish organisers replied that the mothers were simply 'ignorant' ('*son unas ignorantes*') not to allow their daughters to 'have fun' in the dunes.

The Spanish organisers – longtime supporters of the Sahrawi people – indicated that they were particularly disappointed to encounter such resistance in the 27 February Camp since it is the home of the National Women's School and the Headquarters of the NUSW. One of the organisers angrily stated:

I can't believe this is happening here. We've been running projects around the camps for five years and we've never encountered such ignorance. And this is meant to be 'The Women's Camp'? They are just ignorant.

The NGO representatives stringently declared that unless the girls were allowed to participate, they would never run a project in that camp again. They demanded that a group of girls be ready for collection in the morning outside of the *gaws* and sent home all the children who were ready.

The designation of the mothers as 'ignorant', in contrast with the NGO workers' emphasis on the 27 February Camp as a supposedly female-centered and female-powered camp, is notable. It directly reflects the Spanish women's preference and identification with the nowhegemonic gynocentric representation of the camp, and their rejection of the 'ignorant' mothers' perspectives. In essence, Sahrawi women, in these Spaniards' imagination, should have unequivocally accepted the project because 'educated' and empowered women *should* hold the same views as them; they should not have questioned its organisers or demanded information about supervisory arrangements, and should, instead, have resolutely encouraged their daughters to participate in the 'fun' outing. Any understanding of why these Sahrawi mothers might have expressed concerns regarding their daughters' contact with unrelated Sahrawi boys and men without proper supervision, especially when their daughters were approaching puberty, was absent. In effect, if Sahrawi women's 'spaces' in the camps are directly associated with their (hyper)visibility in certain locations, the *rihla* had the potential to make these girls temporarily 'disappear' from the spaces which their parents considered to be appropriate and acceptable: near their families.56

Several girls did eventually go to the dunes, meaning that both boy and girl children took up the opportunity to participate in this activity. However, it was clear that not only gender, but also birth order and age affect girls' opportunities for movement in the camps. In the case of one family which I visited almost daily over the course of two months' fieldwork in the camps in 2007, the mother rapidly granted permission for one of her younger daughters (aged eight) to go on the *rihla* once a responsible female guardian had been identified, but she prohibited her eldest daughter, aged 13, from doing so.

The mother invited me to act as an intermediary between herself and the female Spanish NGO representative, asking me to explain to the Spanish woman that:

I am alone with the children and I need to take my baby to the hospital. She [pointing to her eldest daughter] has to help me with the other children. Ask *her* [the Spanish woman] where the girls will sleep...Will she be in the *khayma* [tent] with the girls? She will? *Tayeb* [ok]. Tell her that I will let my [younger] daughter go with her. Tell her that. [Pointing at the Spanish woman emphatically] *With her.*57

The NGO workers were so happy to have 'gotten another girl' that they made no attempt to understand the reasons why the mother had blocked her eldest daughter from participating in the trip. Any possibility of this, or future, projects meaningfully listening to and addressing Sahrawi girls' and women's preferences and needs was also curtailed early on as a result. In this sense, even when some girls' participation was 'successfully' secured, 'Sahrawi girls' were literally rendered invisible in the *rihla* because *certain* girls were blocked from participation. They simultaneously figuratively disappeared, as attempts to implement the project erased any possibility of understanding the position of different groups of girls and diverse approaches to girlhood within the camp's socio-cultural and religious normative frameworks.

Importantly, the ultimate outcome of this encounter (in which the youngest daughter was able to participate while the eldest daughter could not) must be situated within the context of eldest daughters in the camps typically being expected to help their mothers with younger siblings, household tasks, and looking after infirm relatives.58 Equally importantly, this trend is conceptualised, justified or resisted differently by different girls and young women. For instance, one eldest daughter in her early twenties informed me that she had voluntarily decided to leave school elsewhere in Algeria to return to her home camp during her mother's last pregnancy, and had eventually been able to pursue further education classes at the vocationally focused 27 February National Women's School.59 While she explained this as having been a choice that she did not regret, as she had been able to combine supporting her mother with subsequently completing her studies, another eldest daughter was highly resentful that she had been withdrawn from school at 11 years old to help her mother with her younger siblings, and wanted desperately to leave the camps to return to her studies in northern Algeria.

This girl – aged 13 at the time of our discussions – explained that she understood that her withdrawal from school had been particularly urgent because her father had left the camps for life-saving medical treatment in Spain; however, she repeatedly asserted – often in her mother's presence – that she was not happy having to help her mother with the new baby at the expense of her education.60 It was, precisely, this eldest daughter who had been unable to participate in the activity trip examined above. She vocally expressed her distress at the injustice of being prevented from accompanying her friends and younger sister to the activity camp, with this girl's experiences clearly exemplifying the extent to which mothers and daughters on the one hand, and different groups of women (Sahrawi and non-Sahrawi) on the other, may have seemingly irreconcilable desires, priorities and preferences.

Where the 13-year-old girl was shocked at the injustice of being prevented from participating in the activity due to her imposed responsibilities as an eldest daughter, the Spanish organisers were shocked that their ideals and aims were neither shared nor upheld by Sahrawi mothers (who, as such, clearly were not the 'ideal' women they had previously assumed inhabited the camps); in turn, many mothers were shocked that their concerns regarding girls being 'away from home' at night and their own need for support at home were ignored both by their daughters and by the Spanish organisers.

In this instance, just as the Polisario/SADR and NUSW has developed an alternative to the normative 'dependent-victim-refugee' script by demonstrating its self-sufficiency and independence to non-Sahrawi observers through (amongst other things) the mobilisation of the representational figure of the 'ideal' Sahrawi woman, many mothers were also determined to negotiate the terms of engagement with the NGO on the basis of their own social, cultural and religious norms and priorities regarding gendered and generational roles and responsibilities. In many ways, this particular mother felt that she had 'won' an uneven battle in which 'other' women were trying to take her daughter away from her against her will and in contravention of diverse norms prevalent in the camps. At the same time, this and other mothers' refusal to allow the Spanish women to simply 'take' their daughters threatened to exacerbate the vulnerability of the relationship between Sahrawi refugees and 'their' aid providers, who assert that they are motivated to support the Sahrawi by the intersecting principles of feminism and solidarity. Simultaneously, the battle over the girls' participation in the *rihla* fought by these groups of Spanish and Sahrawi women continued to render certain girls invisible, and demonstrated the extent to which different groups of women's and girls' desires and rights may be in conflict in the camps, as elsewhere.61 The challenge of developing and maintaining a meaningful and respectful encounter between these different groups of citizen and refugee women on the one hand, and between different groups of women and refugee girls on the other, remains.

# Conclusion