In search of recognition: Gender and staff–detainee relations in a British immigration removal centre

Abstract

In this article we draw on research conducted in a British immigration removal centre (IRC) to explore the affective nature of detention. We consider staff and detainee testimonies of their everyday interactions within the IRC as bids for recognition of social status in an institution characterized by uncertainty and diversity. In their accounts, men and women draw on gendered identities to make sense of others and themselves. Responses to status subordination in the IRC played out across a range of emotional responses, mediated and framed by gender. While these responses emerged in everyday interactions, the frustrations of life in an IRC, we argue, speak to much wider struggles over the status of immigrants in the UK, the confused and contested purpose of IRCs and the widening of detention as a strategy of migration control; in short, to matters of living under conditions of mass mobility.