Inhabiting the New Home: Capitalism, Technology, and the Bodily Incorporation of Immigrants

• In Event: 039 - Regular Session. Sociology of the Body: New Directions in Body Studies

Abstract

This paper integrates key insights from the sociology of the body and immigration scholarship to theorize the body as a critical site of immigrant incorporation. Previous research has recognized that migrants alter their clothing and mannerisms to hasten assimilation or the nation-building process. This paper confirms these findings but also highlights a different form of embodied assimilation, one governed by technologies of modernity. Drawing on three years of participant-observation in a West African immigrant community, I demonstrate that, for new immigrants, adapting to the United States requires not just assimilating economically and socially but bodily. I show that immigrants’ ability to perform certain forms of bodily labor, particularly forms of bodily labor required by modern capitalist institutions, mediates their relationships with home, their economic integration in the United States, and their emotional health and personal safety. In this way, bodily practices of modern citizenship serve as a critical site where uneven power relations and social inequalities affect the eventual incorporation of new immigrants. These findings not only indicate the role that body work plays in the economic, emotional, and social incorporation of immigrants, it suggest a need to reorient immigration research around bodily inequalities and processes of embodied power in order to understand the incorporation process.

Author

• Hana Brown, Wake Forest University