Identity without Politics: Framing the Parity Laws and Their Implementation in French Local Politics

This article provides an alternative approach to the argumentsof "critical mass," whose tenets assume that policies fosteringwomen’s rights would arise from an increase in women’spolitical representation. Instead, the article argues that thecultural repertoires that are used to justify women’shigher numerical presence also matter. Indeed, different repertoires—suchas claiming women’s inclusion into politics in the nameof women’s interests or in the name of their difference—havedifferent political outcomes. This case study of the Frenchsex-parity laws, which ensures a 50-percent quota of women inpolitics, explores the connection between the rationales tolegitimize the laws and their implementation at the local level.This provides for, first, an investigation of how the requirementto make the parity claim compatible with French cultural repertoireson citizenship and sovereignty has led parity advocates to definesexual difference as universal. Then, drawing on interviewswith local politicians, it shows how this rationale underliningsexual difference has failed to define gender relationshipsas political and, thus, to promote gender equality in localpublic policies.     

Rethinking care through social reproduction: articulating circuits of migration

Care has come to dominate much feminist research on globalized migrations and the transfer of labor from the South to the North, while the older concept of reproduction had been pushed into the background but is now becoming the subject of debates on the commodification of care in the household and changes in welfare state policies. This article argues that we could achieve a better understanding of the different modalities and trajectories of care in the reproduction of individuals, families, and communities, both of migrant and nonmigrant populations by articulating the diverse circuits of migration, in particular that of labor and the family. In doing this, I go back to the earlier North American writing on racialized minorities and migrants and stratified social reproduction. I also explore insights from current Asian studies of gendered circuits of migration connecting labor and marriage migrations as well as the notion of global householding that highlights the gender politics of social reproduction operating within and beyond households in institutional and welfare architectures. In contrast to Asia, there has relatively been little exploration in European studies of the articulation of labor and family migrations through the lens of social reproduction. However, connecting the different types of migration enables us to achieve a more complex understanding of care trajectories and their contribution to social reproduction.     

Gendered Labour Migrations in Europe and Emblematic Migratory Figures

This paper explores the dichotomies and gendered invisibilities underpinning the concept of the knowledge economy and society through a closer examination of two emblematic and contrasting figures working in Information and Communication Technology and domestic/care work as bearers of different configurations of knowledge and skills in the contemporary circuits of globalisation. Such knowledge can be broken down into different types—such as embrained, encoded, embodied and encultured—which are valued differentially and with consequences for gendered labour markets. These gendered differences are reflected in current immigration policies which privilege migrants in scientific and information technology sectors and discount those engaged in care work, associated with embodied knowledge and skills. The impact of these differences has been reinforced during a period of economic recession when immigration has become increasingly restricted, even amongst the skilled.     

Figures of the cosmopolitan

In contemporary European social and political thought, cosmopolitanism is frequently closely linked with the modern cultural citizen, who is open to the variety of global cultures and can participate equally at al levels of society from the local to the global. The cosmopolitan or privileged national moves freely and, from a secure vantage point, is at home anywhere. However what I suggest in this paper is that there is a darker dimension, which is too easily forgotten in the celebratory figures of the cosmopolitan based on unfettered movement and consumption of places. There is another cosmopolitan figure which draws upon an ambiguous historical baggage where the rootless and flexible outsider was treated with suspicion and hostility. In 20th century Europe, cosmopolitanism often epitomised the Jew with divided allegiances and little attachment to the land, and more often at home in the city, unlike indigenous populations. Today the fear of divided loyalties and transnational political participation falls in particular upon Europe's Muslim populaitons, who must demonstrate that they are not cosmopolitan. Thus what is interpreted positively in the privileged national is deemed to be negative and problematic in the migrant.     

Family Migration as a Class Matter

Traditionally, family migration was conceptualized as a separate form of migration from labour migration. Increasingly socio‐economic criteria (labour market participation, language competence, financial resources, independence from welfare), have been applied to family migration policies in Europe, and are harder to fulfil by those with a weaker labour market position. Hence class now plays an increasingly significant role in stratifying the right to family migration. The article examines the imposition of minimum income requirements in three countries – the Netherlands, Norway and the UK – and the significance of class in its economic and cultural dimensions in meeting the requirement. For those without sufficient economic capital to meet the requirement, cultural capital may facilitate the development of coping strategies to overcome or reduce the duration of family separation. Class is not the only stratifying element: gender, age and ethnicity interact with and reinforce the effects of class.     

Gendered Perspectives on Integration Discourses and Measures

This article focuses on gendered discourses in integration policy and the problems immigrants pose in the reproduction of inequalities in a number of European countries. There has been little consideration of how gender categories operate in relation to broader political discourses around the construction of ‘us’ and ‘them’ and the constitution of national social and political communities and identities. Yet gender issues have become significant in the backlash against multiculturalism and gender and sexual relations have moved to the centre of debates about the necessity to enforce integration, if not assimilation. The first section outlines recent developments in the immigration‐integration nexus in different European states. The second section draws out some of the reasons for the focus on family migration and spouses who are seen as the main importers of the ‘backward’ practices and with ‘doubtful’ parenting practices for future generations of citizens. The third section tackles the shift of current debates about integration of migrant women from the periphery, where they were largely invisible or mere appendages of men, to the centre, where they have acquired in the process a heightened, though not necessarily positive, visibility. Too often, representations of migrant women are based on a homogenised image of uneducated and backward migrants as victims of patriarchal cultures, legitimizing in this way the use of immigration controls to reduce the numbers entering and to tackle broader social issues, as has clearly been the case with forced marriages. Furthermore, the more discourses focus on Muslim women and Islam as inimical to European societies, the more the debate becomes culturalised and marginalises the socio‐economic dimension of integration and the structural inequalities migrants face. Thus pre‐entry tests may have less to do with integration than with a desire to reduce the flow of marriage migrants or to raise their human capital.     

Gendered mobilities and vulnerabilities: refugee journeys to and in Europe

ABSTRACT

Recent refugee flows across the Mediterranean have been heterogeneous despite often being represented as predominantly male. However, there exist relatively little disaggregated data for adults and children which would enable us to achieve a better understanding of gendered mobilities in refugee journeys and settlement. Furthermore, such mobilities are affected by notions of vulnerability applied to those in need of protection, which prioritise the mobility of some categories. These include single parents, pregnant women, the elderly and unaccompanied minors. Drawing on data collected by international organisations and national sources (Greece, Italy) as well as a project EVI-MED (Constructing an evidence base of contemporary Mediterranean migration) (2015–2107), this article argues for the need to generate more disaggregated data (gender, age, family status) reflecting complex gendered mobilities and experiences of vulnerability.     

Female "birds of passage" a decade later: gender and immigration in the European Union

"First, this article critically assesses the dominant accounts of the sequence of labor migration and family reunification and argues that it is time to reclaim the heterogeneity of women's past migratory experiences in our understanding of European patterns of post-war immigration. Second, it examines family migration, covering diverse forms of family reunification and formation which, although the dominant form of legal immigration into Europe since the 1970s, has received relatively little attention. Third, it explores the implications of the diversification of contemporary female migration in the European Union and argues for the necessity of taking account of the reality of changing patterns of employment, households and social structures to advance our understanding of European immigration."     

Gendered Global Migrations

The globalization of migration has entailed a greater diversity and stratification of migration. Integrative approaches, such as transnationalism, structurationism and alternative circuits of globalization, have helped to place migration in broader socio- cultural fields but have not adequately addressed the complex gendered stratification generated in countries of origin and destination. Much literature focuses on the socio-economically disadvantaged, especially those undertaking domestic and sex work, but the opening up of skilled migration in developed countries, increasingly in feminized welfare sectors, is creating new lines of exclusion and inclusion and privileging the skilled and educated of the Third World. It also means that a neat division between the masculine high-tech sector and the feminine intimate, racialized and menial 'other' does not do justice to the complexity of gendered migratory flows. This article explores diverse forms of female migrations, labour market positions and the intersection of class, racialization and gender. I argue that we need to question the relegation of female migrants to the subordinate circuits of globalization and to extend our analysis beyond productive and reproductive labour in less skilled sectors. The inclusion of female skilled migrants can add a distinctive counter narrative, which includes care for and education of people, to our conceptualization of a knowledge economy and society, which tends to be based on scientific and technological sectors.