Spectred Mobilities across Borders

Feminist scholarship on women’s pathways to prison has foregrounded the gendered processes that lead women to the prison (see Cherukuri et al., 2009; Daly, 1994; Owen et al., 2017, Rowe, 2012). Histories of gender-based violence, socio-economic precarities, homelessness, substance abuse, emotional abuse, caring responsibilities, deception in relationships, problematic familial relationships, child abuse have been identified as experiences that shape women’s pathways to the prison. Although this scholarship has been limited in terms of its inclusion of foreign national/migrant/refugee women’s experiences, there is some focus on this often invisibilised group. Some of the reasons discussed for migrant and refugee women’s pathways to prison, include, financial vulnerabilities, abusive relationships with carers and/or intimate partners leading to social isolation and drug and alcohol addiction (Nuytiens and Christiaens, 2016), sexual humanitarian anti-trafficking interventions that lead to the criminalisation of sex workers (Hoefinger et al., 2020), discrimination during childhood and adulthood (Matos, 2016) and androcentric paradigms of state sovereignty and border control (Mehta, 2016). Building on this body of work, this article draws on the narratives of 9 foreign national women from South Asian and African countries in a prison in India to foreground their experiences of isolation and abandonment and how that shapes their mobilities across borders and their pathways to prison. The article will engage with the emerging literature on feminist loneliness studies to unravel the structural and systemic ways that these women become spectres as they move across social and political borders, leading to their imprisonment.