Doing Family and Doing Citizenship: Care Work in Mixed-Status Families in Jordan as Intimate Acts of Citizenship

In contexts where citizenship is governed by patrilineal descent, access to fundamental rights becomes a deeply gendered and negotiated process within migrant families. Jordan is one of 28 countries worldwide with such a patrilineal citizenship law meaning that Jordanian women cannot transmit their citizenship to their foreign husband nor their joint children. As a result, children of Jordanian women married to non-citizen men, many of whom are migrants or stateless, are denied full citizenship rights, including access to public education, healthcare, and formal employment. This research project examines how mixed-status families act to secure their children’s access to Jordanian society and to social rights despite their precarious legal status. Particular attention is paid to the relationship between private, familial practices and public–political forms of action. Drawing on the thematic analysis of biographical-narrative interviews with members of eleven mixed-status families, the paper argues for the high relevance of care work in all its dimensions as an integral form of citizenship practices. In doing so, it builds on Anne-Marie Fortier’s concept of affective acts of citizenship as well as Saskia Bonjour and Betty de Hart’s notion of intimate citizenship, both of which challenge restrictive understandings of citizenship that limit it to overtly public and political acts. Focusing on the case of Jordanian mothers who seek to secure belonging, participation, and legal claims for their foreign-national children, the analysis highlights the close entanglement of intra-familial care work and citizenship practices. In order to enable their children’s sense of belonging and participation, these mothers not only navigate numerous bureaucratic obstacles and advocate for their children within administrative arenas, but also provide extensive emotional support. Beyond the care work performed in all families, they continuously encourage their children to assert themselves and their rights, to persist in the face of exclusion, and to perceive themselves as legitimate members of society. Both dimensions are essential to ensuring that children without Jordanian citizenship remain able, both materially and motivationally, to claim their rights, including after reaching adulthood. By focusing on lived citizenship within families in the Global South, this paper contributes productively to ongoing debates within the Citizenship Section. It broadens prevailing perspectives on citizenship regimes beyond the Global North and brings feminist and family-sociological debates on (emotional) care work into dialogue with citizenship scholarship.