One Million Refugees: Numbers and the Sexuality of Statistics

Project conducted by Dr. Michelle Pfeifer.

This project conducted by Dr. Michelle Pfeifer analyzes the sexual and gendered politics of migration data. The project interrogates how the production and circulation of numbers in form of refugee quotas, allocation keys, and migration statistics are central for bordering practices such as the decreasing possibilities for family unification, the pathologizing of the migrant family, and state practices of family separation and detention. The project further connects these strategies to the eugenicist and colonial genealogies of population control to argue that migration statistics, while conjured as objective indicators, are central in framing migration as crisis and situating migrants as a racialized threat of biological and social contagion. The project explores the relationship between biopolitics, statistics, and border policing by looking at the use of statistics in the reception and treatment of refugees, the governmental use of viruses (HIV/AIDS to MPX) for border control, solidarity between queer and migrant rights activists in the resistance against border violence, state control of reproduction in form of family separation and detention and the global rise of anti-feminism and TERFism.