Violence in the Borderlands: A Dialogical Approach to Intimate Partner Violence among Migrant Women.

In this article I explore the Dialogical Self (Hermans, 2012) as a framework to study the experience of undocumented victims of intimate partner violence (IPV). I argue that the concepts of multiplicity of selves, collective voices, and I-positioning in physical and imaginal spaces can be used to account for the fluidity and complexity of undocumented women’s self as transnational migrants, embedded in gender narratives, articulated in a physical and imaginal transnational space fraught with power dynamics. Drawing on scholarship in migration studies (De Genova, 2002; Sigona, 2012), I will deploy elements of the Dialogical Self to show that conditions of ‘everyday illegality ’ and deportability constitute physical and imaginal spaces for the undocumented, closely intertwined with the dynamics of power operating in the life of undocumented victims of IPV which are, in turn, part of the articulations of gender particular to their interpretative communities. Two biographical accounts of undocumented women will be used as illustration. In so doing, I will seek to contribute to Dialogical Self scholarship in matters of power and constraints. ‘I worked with one eye and I cried with the other’—Alicia, migrant woman from Mexico living in the United States. Undocumented women affected by violence stand at a liminal space, not only in the borderlands of the drama of US-Mexico migration, but also as it relates to discourses of mental health. On the one hand, studies tell us that their suffering meets diagnostic criteria for mental illness in the Western tradition (e.g. PTSD an