Gender and Migration: Feminist Intervention - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1848134118 ISBN 13: 9781848134119

Verlag: Bloomsbury 3PL, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Provocative and intellectually challenging, Gender and Migration critically analyses how gender has been taken up in studies of migration and its theories, practices and effects. Each essay uses feminist frameworks to highlight how more traditional tropes of gender eschew the complexities of gender and migration. In tackling this problem, this collection offers students and researchers of migration a more nuanced understanding of the topic.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ingrid Palmary is a senior researcher in the Forced Migration Studies Progamme at the University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg. She has written on a range of topics including gender based violence in times of armed conflict, the gendered nature of displacement and the intersections of 'domestic' and 'political' violence.

Peace Kiguwa lectures in Psychology and currently Gender and Human Rights at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.

Erica Burman is Professor of Psychology and Women's Studies in Manchester Metropolitan University. Her most recent books Deconstructing Developmental Psychology (2008) and Developments: child, image, nation (2008) reflect these themes.

Khatidja Chantler is a lecturer and researcher in Social Work at the University of Manchester. She is also a counsellor and supervisor and has worked in health and social care settings for over 25 years.

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Gender and Migration

Feminist Interventions

By Ingrid Palmary, Erica Burman, Khatidja Chantler, Peace Kiguwa

Zed Books Ltd

Copyright © 2010 Ingrid Palmary, Erica Burman, Khatidja Chantler and Peace Kiguwa
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84813-411-9

Contents

1 Gender and migration: feminist interventions Ingrid Palmary, Erica Burman, Khatidja Chantier and Peace Kiguwa, 1, 
Part 1: Visibility and Vulnerability, 13, 
2 Gender, migration and anti-racist politics in the continued project of the nation Alexandra Zavos, 15, 
3 The problem of trafficking Chandre Gould, 31, 
4 Sex, choice and exploitation: reflections on anti-trafficking discourse Ingrid Palmary, 40, 
Part 2: Asylum, 65, 
5 Barriers to protection: gender-related persecution and asylum in South Africa Julie Middleton, 67, 
6 Safe to return? A case study of domestic violence, Pakistani women and the UK asylum system Sajida Ismail, 86, 
7 Women seeking asylum in the UK: contesting conventions Khatidja Chantler, 104, 
8 Explicating the tactics of banal exclusion: a British example Erica Burman, 119, 
Part 3: Depoliticising Migration, 139, 
9 Now you see me, now you don't: methodologies and methods of the interstices Caroline Wanjiku Kihato, 141, 
10 For love or survival: migrant women's narratives of survival and intimate partner violence in Johannesburg Monica Kiwanuka, 163, 
11 Re-housing trouble: post-disaster reconstruction and exclusionary strategies in Venezuela Isabel Rodríguez Mora, 180, 
12 An arm hanging in mid-air: a discussion on immigrant men and impossible relationships in Greece Stavros N. Psaroudakis, 196, 
Bibliography, 215, 
About the contributors, 236, 
Index, 238, 

CHAPTER 1

Gender and migration: feminist interventions

Ingrid Palmary, Erica Burman, Khatidja Chantier and Peace Kiguwa

Interrogating the 'and' in gender and migration

Gender has increasingly appeared as a specific preoccupation in research and writing on migration (see for example Chant 1992, Anthias 1992, Anthias and Lazaridis 2000, Jolly 2005). Whilst many have lamented the lack of attention to gender (see Indra 1999), a basic search of the literature now indicates much and frequent attention to 'gender and migration' (perhaps most clearly evidenced by the number of titles that attempt to 'engender' migration), although the nature of the 'and', the connection or articulation, has been little interrogated. It would seem, then, that the question should be less about why gender has not been (as yet) 'mainstreamed' into migration, than about how and why it figures in conceptualisations of mobility, and with what effects. Hence, in this collection, we aim not so much to 'add' gender to the existing migration research taking place globally, but rather to reflect upon how gender has become a preoccupation when thinking about migration. As such, we comment on the absences, silences and exclusions of understandings of gender that have become part of the production of knowledge about migration whilst also offering new analytic starting points for thinking through the connections. In this book, we are concerned with the meanings attached to different kinds of migrants, different kinds of movements and different motivations for moving, and how these meanings shape the kinds of support, or alternatively (symbolic or literal) violence – including non-response – assigned to their 'mobility'. The terms that circulate often reflect these classifications of migration, with 'mobility' evoking a specific register – of class mobility – so importing the spectre of economic issues that so much of state immigration policy proscribes or pathologises in order to frame forced migration. The term 'mobility' not only involves notions of movement to and from places (including assumptions about the unidirectional character of contemporary migration that are often unfounded), but also has notions of difference coded into distance. This implicit feature of spatio-temporal distancing is part of what allows racialised, gendered and classed assumptions to be covertly reproduced within migration discourses (Frello 2008). Thus the act of pathologising that is enacted within migration discourses is often only able to function or exist in decontextualised, essentialist and organic categories of 'the migrant'. Whilst much discussion on gender and migration, both here and elsewhere, focuses on the movement of women and the meanings assigned to this, the chapters presented here also interrogate the contested meanings of more broadly gendered constructs of home, nation, the political and the domestic and how these impact on both embodied migrants, and symbolic understandings of home and away.

Our rationale in composing this volume, therefore, arose from our view that, whilst the current focus in existing literature on women is not necessarily inappropriate, a further analytic shift is needed to interrogate the concept of gender at play. In other words, rather than understanding gender as a synonym of 'women' we seek to analyse gendered positionings within normative discourses (of state policies and practices) as our topic. Here gender represents a topic of inquiry rather than an assumed identity or even relationship. In spite of this, moving away entirely from constructed gender binaries is difficult, and potentially problematic, given that they shape so much of the response to migrants. As Calavita (2006) notes, the law (which structures much of the state response to migration) takes the male/ female binary to be a fact. Therefore, the different chapters in this book address gender as subject position rather than identity or attribute. In particular the chapters by Julie Middleton and Sajida Ismail, addressing the South African and United Kingdom asylum systems respectively, consider how implicitly masculine forms of violence are privileged in state responses to violence, as well as challenging the heteronormativity of the law that draws on this binary. Even as we may wish to challenge the male/female binary of legal responses to migration we cannot avoid its implications for those deemed less worthy migrants. In this sense, in its masculine presumptions, migration has, of course, always been gendered (see also Indra 1999). This has had deleterious consequences for both women and men, but in different ways. Thus while in this book we have taken up the focus on gender mainly in relation to consequences for women, this does not mean that gendered issues should be assumed or normalised in relation to men. It has long been recognised that migrant masculinity, including male migrant bodies, have been portrayed (following longstanding themes of hypersexual 'alien' men) as posing a threat to the host nation, often through an assumed threat to 'its' women (see also Bhattacharrya 2008). In this book Stavros Psaroudakis' chapter focusing on young male migrants in Greece specifically highlights the different, if equivalently problematic, positions accorded to these young men and their (attributed and proscribed) sexualised positionings. Recognising this requires us to challenge the aggressive claims to neutrality of so much state attention to migration – a task taken up in the chapter by Erica Burman (see also Spivak 1993).

In a related critique, Loescher and Scanlan (1986) refer to the double standards and calculated kindnesses of US refugee policy. This expression neatly captures the often benevolent discourse of state protection that functions to obscure its...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Bloomsbury 3PL
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1848134118
• ISBN 13: 9781848134119
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 252
• Herausgeber: Burman Erica, Palmary Ingrid, Kiguwa Peace
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland