The affective and intimate life of the family migration visa: Knowing, feeling and encountering the heteronormative state

Abstract

This article explores the intimate entanglements of heteronormative power, citizenship and affect in the UK family migration visa. It pays particular attention to the material intricacies of the application process itself and the place of narration and emotional investment central to this form of government. The power of the family visa is how it is attuned to the explicit quantification and categorisation of intimate relationships on which claim to territorial rights rest. Drawing on both the analytical and methodological promise of work on ‘intimacy’ we take the family visa as a particular site for exploring our own intimate entanglement and complicity in this practice of ‘geopolitical making’- that is as both subjects and researchers of the visa. We are interested in how the visa both relies upon and produces certain forms of intimacy, particularly through processes of ‘archiving’ and the intricacies, solidarities and fragments that this is entangled with. We thus explore how we are both authors and subjects of the reproduction of heteronormative order central to visa and the drawing of borders around sanctified and unsanctified intimacy.