The borderwork of sexual violence in immigration detention

This article examines the intimate geopolitical work that sexual violence in detention does. Focusing on the United States, which has the largest immigration detention system in the world, this article first explores how sexual violence and the figure of the “foreign rapist” is discursively mobilised to justify the necessity of carceral bordering and racialised constructions of the nation. Second, it analyses the institutional policies and practices designed to address and mitigate sexual violence in immigration detention, revealing how they perpetuate these racialised discourses, entrench carceral technologies of governance, and obscure the systemic nature of sexual violence in detention. Third, we examine everyday practices of sexualised violence that pervade detention to show how it forms a key feature of the daily operation of carceral power. In doing so, we develop the concept of the borderwork of sexual violence in detention, to illuminate how sexual violence enforces detention’s coercive purpose, constructs incarcerated subjects as racialised “others”, and reinforces and polices racialised and sexualised national borders.