Abstract
In her much-praised and discussed book, Floya Anthias summarizes her decades-long work on translocational positionality, refining and operationalizing the traveling concept of intersectionality by weaving together a coherent theoretical framework of “translocational belongings.” Her book is an essential contribution to intersectionality, identity, difference, bordering, and belonging studies.
The book's location and translocation serve as heuristics for the social places that individuals occupy or are forced into by modern neoliberal capitalist societies’ power structures and processes. These social locations are transient and fluid and thus constitute translocations. Anthias’ proposed lens of translocation “combines a focus on categories as places and how they are filled by subjects at different points in time and place, with a view that these places, in concrete relations, are entangled and intersecting” (Anthias, 2020, p. 177). In opting for a spatiotemporal lens, this framework enables a fuller and more complex view of hierarchical relations as the outcomes of processes that include social categorizations and division, which operate as forms of governmentality. Considering that power and oppression also operate in distinctive ways, their types and modalities intersecting with each other in time and space within modern capitalist societies, a translocational analysis throws into relief the context and history of social categories that are subjected to power structures, and the resulting reinforced, contradictory, or dissonant social locations of individuals.
Debating the notion of identity as fixity and, with it, the conceptualizations of intersectionality offered by Patricia Hill Collins, Anthias considers mutual constitutions, that is, the inherently intertwined and inseparable categories of difference, as an antithesis to an additive model. Anthias instead focuses on belonging rather than on identity as the outcome (and, conversely, a tool) of the processes of bordering, both physical, around nation states (through the migration and citizenship controls), and symbolic, around constructed categories of difference (race-gender-class). Combined with the goals of resource allocation and ensuing struggles and also agency and positionalities of social actors, the framework of translocational belongings provides a rich theoretical tool for understanding inequality.
As an example, Anthias’ framework offers a nuanced analysis of the often-contradictory social locations occupied by migrants (migrants, being a collectivized category of difference, with myriad migrant subcategories created by migration control and integration policies). In moving across physical and symbolic borders, migrants find themselves in new social locations, either losing or acquiring minority statuses and privileges in interactions between changing and varied dimensions of identities. The categories are enmeshed, and dimensions of identities are inseparable, such that the salience of specific identity labels deeply depends on context. Migrants also preserve and develop complex transnational links of different strengths and purposes that change over time. The concepts and meanings of “class” and “race” in the context of migration can only be analyzed through a translocational lens that allows for this spatiotemporal fluidity and situatedness.
The framework of translocational belongings is also helpful when considering migrants’ divergent responses to the policies of belonging making, that is, migration control and disparate local welfare policies that differentiate the artificial categories of migrants by allocating or withholding resources, thus, excluding and including them in local “integration” efforts. In their responses, migrants use the identity markers of language, ethnicity, race, gender, and sexual orientation as contextual resources in the process of adapting to new social positions, resisting them, and constructing their social identities with an ultimate goal of fostering a sense of belonging(s). If used heuristically, identity politics here acquires a larger goal of solidarity aimed at transforming societal hierarchies and oppressive power structures.
Characterized by the overarching theme of translocation, Anthias’ book is organized in logical chapters that individually pertain to specific issues. Together, they speak to sociologists, social workers, and anyone looking to understand the complexities of contemporary societal stratification and inequality better. Although authored in an academic language that requires an understanding of sociological jargon, graduate social work students, researchers, and experienced practitioners can easily grasp the book's central concepts. Social workers will appreciate Anthias’ theoretical contribution to operationalizing intersectionality as applied to current critical societal and academic debates. Situated in the contemporary feminist and queer studies’ discourses, translocation belongings, as a refined yet complex, theoretical framework, provides a fresh interpretation and understanding of intersectionality. In line with the proposed focus on processes and outcomes of interactions between changing but targeted power forces and the resulting social locations (with social categories understood as spatiotemporal places rather than fixed labels), the social constructs of difference and identity have been troubled recently in debates around transgenderism, racialization, displacement and migration, and “essential” work. Harking back to the social justice roots and orientation of intersectionality, at the end of the book, Anthias argues that, rather than seek internal commonalities and interests to coalesce around to be effective, various social movements must orient toward a larger common goal and a common “enemy.” This goal includes struggles against essentialized binary categories, physical and symbolic borders and boundaries, and, more generally, the neoliberal capitalist world through claiming a right to have rights for everyone. Tactics for this include accepting difference, moving beyond dialogue, and straddling identity and solidarity politics. By applying a translocational intersectional lens, organized groups can thus better understand structures of oppression, how social practices manifest in people's lives and institutions, and how these structures categorize, position, and affect people in the process.
