Embodying the nation-state: Canada’s response to human smuggling

This paper argues that a shift in the scale of analysis of the nation-state, from national and global scales to the finer scale of the body reveals processes, relations, and experiences otherwise obscured. The response of the Canadian government to the arrival of migrants smuggled by boat from China to British Columbia in 1999 serves as a case study. I draw on feminist and post-structural theories that locate exercises of power and productions of difference at the body in order to address a broader debate about the power of the nation-state to mediate transnational flows. Following accusations that they were losing control of borders, civil servants of the federal government of Canada sought to contain the issue of human smuggling by detaining migrants, controlling flows of information, and carefully constructing the public image of the state. This research, based on ethnographic fieldwork with Citizenship and Immigration Canada, suggests potential in new epistemologies of the nation-state drawn through corporeal geographies, currently undervalued in mainstream political geography.