Welcome to the margins: Diversity, tolerance, and policies of exclusion

This article explores some of the ways in which UK Government policies inscribe tensions between tolerance of cultural difference, on the one hand, and an attempt to instil a regime of normalizing discipline, on the other. It argues that these tensions are expressed in the ambiguity of the figure of 'the immigrant woman', who simultaneously embodies the possibility of assimilation into and destabilization of the nation and the national. This is because this figure has come to occupy a significant place both in the struggles over the meaning of cultural plurality and as the subject around whom the characterization of the nation as tolerant and modern is invested.