Performances of vulnerability: migrants’ encounters with health, state and the law in Italy and Greece

Vulnerability has become an important criterion applied by states and humanitarian actors in their migration management. In the health sector specifically, those classified as ‘vulnerable’ can qualify for benefits such as housing, mobility and/or asylum. In this paper, we look at how vulnerability operates in refugee health management in the European Union. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Greece and Italy, we trace the ways in which two main actors in this sector–migrants and doctors–take part in what we term ‘performances of vulnerability’. Asking how and why (i.e. for which aims) migrants and doctors perform vulnerability, our ethnographic material highlights that contrary to the rationalist, objectivist legal discourse on vulnerability, the body is not a neutral object that can be scientifically measured to grant rights, nor is it merely docile, passive and acted upon. The body is in fact performed and enacted by doctors and migrants in an intersubjective, embodied and affective encounter. In this process both migrants and doctors selectively engage in discourses on ‘deservingness’ and ‘rights’, but also transform the very materiality of the migrant body, thus pointing to the generative potentials of vulnerability.