Undesirable: Passionate Mobility and Women’s Defiance of French Colonial Policing, 1919–1952 - Softcover

Boittin, Jennifer Anne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226822257 ISBN 13: 9780226822259

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2022

Synopsis

Archival research into policing and surveillance of migrant women illuminates pressing contemporary issues.

Examining little-known policing archives in France, Senegal, and Cambodia, Jennifer Anne Boittin unearths the stories of hundreds of women labeled “undesirable” by the French colonial police and society in the early twentieth century. These “undesirables” were often women traveling alone, women who were poor or ill, women of color, or women whose intimate lives were deemed unruly. To refute the label and be able to move freely, they spoke out or wrote impassioned letters: some emphasized their “undesirable” qualities to suggest that they needed the care and protection of the state to support their movements, while others used the empire’s own laws around Frenchness and mobility to challenge state or societal interference. Tacking between advocacy and supplication, these women summoned intimate details to move beyond, contest, or confound surveillance efforts, bringing to life a practice that Boittin terms “passionate mobility.” In considering how ordinary women pursued autonomy, security, companionship, or simply a better existence in the face of surveillance and control, Undesirable illuminates pressing contemporary issues of migration and violence.

About this title

About the Author

Jennifer Anne Boittin is the Frank Porter Graham Professor of Global History at UNC Chapel Hill. She is the author of Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226822257
• ISBN 13: 9780226822259
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 282