Geographies of Gender and Migration: Spatializing Social Difference 1

This article provides a review of the contributions that the discipline of geography is making to gender and migration research. In geographic analyses of migration, gender differences are examined most centrally in relation to specific spatialities of power. In particular, feminist geographers have developed insight into the gender dimensions of the social construction of scale, the politics of interlinkages between place and identity, and the socio‐spatial production of borders. Supplementing recent reviews of the gender and migration literature in geography, this article examines the potential for continued cross‐fertilization between feminist geography and migration research in other disciplines. The advances made by feminist geographers to migration studies are illustrated through analysis of the findings and debates tied to the subfield's central recent conceptual interventions.     

The politics of erased migrations: Expanding a relational,intersectional sociology of Latinx gender and migration

Sociologists of gender and Latina/o migration and Chicana feminist scholars in Chicana/o Studies have made extensive interventions in the academic project of recovering the experiences of women in migration studies across disciplines. I consider these contributions and advocate for an interdisciplinary research agenda that continues expanding relational scholarship by developing the concept of the politics of erased migrations, an analytical tool to theorize why and how the embodied experiences of Latinas are marginalized and misrepresented in academic research. Latinas experience various physical and symbolic migrations—across and within national borders, social and political contexts, identities, academic disciplines, methodologies, and social movements. Yet Latina feminist experiences, knowledge, and political movement largely remain at the margins of these borders. Through a review of prominent research on gender and migration centered on heteronormativity, reproduction, and the nation‐state, I demonstrate the possibilities of the politics of erased migration as a theoretical intervention in expanding a relational, intersectional sociology of Latinx gender and migration. This paper carries implications for shifting the field of Latinx gender and migration from a focus on current oppressive conditions to one that also imagines new avenues for social justice and alternative social worlds.     

Gender and International Marriage Migration

In the last two decades, the growth of intra-regional marriage migration in Asia has stimulated scholarly interest in destination countries. Marriage migration led to social, demographic, and cultural transformations of current and future generations in these countries, and raised new issues in relation to race, ethnicity, gender, class, and nationality. Recent scholarly work on international marriage migration has moved beyond the so-called mail-order bride discourse and has critically examined various aspects of the experiences of women marriage migrants in affinal families, communities, and societies. Influenced by the postcolonial feminist perspective, a great deal of the ethnographic and qualitative research on international marriage migration focuses on women’s agency, the patriarchal and heteronormative underpinnings of marriage, and incongruous gender relations, as well as the dynamics between local transformations and the global political economy.     

Mapping Gender and Migration in Sociological Scholarship: Is It Segregation or Integration?

A review of the sociological research about gender and migration shows the substantial ways in which gender fundamentally organizes the social relations and structures influencing the causes and consequences of migration. Yet, although a significant sociological research has emerged on gender and migration in the last three decades, studies are not evenly distributed across the discipline. In this article, we map the recent intellectual history of gender and migration in the field of sociology and then systematically assess the extent to which studies on engendering migration have appeared in four widely read journals of sociology (American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Demography, and Social Forces). We follow with a discussion of these studies, and in our conclusions, we consider how future gender and migration scholarship in sociology might evolve more equitably.     

Strange Tempest: Agency, Poststructuralism, and the Shape of Feminist Politics to Come

This essay explores Judith Butler's influence on feminist and gender studies at two levels. First, the essay examines Butler's specific theoretical contributions with special attention to the performativity of gender and the conception of agency connected with it. It highlights the contributions and limitations of Butler's account of agency and the ongoing feminist conversation that it has incited. Second, this essay explores how Butler's account of agency has unsettled feminist conceptions of established political practice and sketches how specific responses to Butler's work provide clues to key contested issues. The essay closes with a brief look at feminist scholarship that draws together Butler-informed political visions with traditional accounts of feminist political practice in a manner that foreshadows a dynamic feminist politics yet to come.     

Filling the Glass: Gender Perspectives on Families

The challenge feminist scholarship posed to family studies has been largely met through the incorporation of research on gender dynamics within families and intersectional differences among them. Despite growing attention to gender as performance and power in more diverse families, the more difficult work of understanding the dynamics of change among institutions including the family and using intersectional analyses to unpack relationships of power is only beginning. Reviewing the contributions researchers have made in these areas over the last decade and applying the idea of circuits to the study of care work, this article points to promising practices for both improving research on gender and families and contributing to the slow drip of institutional change.     

Policymaking from a Gender+ Equality Perspective

ABSTRACT

This article discusses policymaking from a gender+ equality perspective. It connects the knowledge from various subfields ranging from development planning, to feminist policy studies, to works on gender mainstreaming. By connecting different but convergent feminist subdisciplines, it draws a picture of the field of gender+ and policymaking. Central in this analysis are the questioning of gender+ bias in the policy process and the development of strategies to mainstream gender into policymaking. By delineating the boundaries of research on gender and policymaking, the article addresses existing challenges and reflects on gaps and promising terrains of study that could further develop and establish the field of feminist policy studies.     

Feminist and Gender Media Studies: A Critical Overview

This paper offers a general overview of past, current, and developing issues and debates in the growing field of gender and feminist media studies. Its main aim is to provide for those who are new to the field, as well as advanced students and researchers, a broad sense of what is now significant and important area of academic research. It engages with the differences and similarities between gender and feminist media studies, gendered communication systems, gendered news production, feminist methodologies and methods in communication research (textual, audience, and production based), the media's role in constructing gender, and gendered and feminist research by specific media form including advertising, magazines, film, television, news, radio, and the Internet and new media. The outline of research presented is not exhaustive; however, it attempts to trace certain significant developments in the field historically, conceptually, methodologically politically and trans‐nationally.     

Migration Governance and Policy in the Global South: Introduction and Overview

Building knowledge about migration governance and policy in the Global South is a priority for research and policy. The studies in this special section offer both new empirical insights and new frameworks for analysis, with key policy implications, that can enrich our discussion of these topics. They focus on issues that relate to national and sub‐national level governance and policy, speaking both to the impact of diverse governance structures and policies on the well‐being of migrants and host communities, and of the policy‐making process itself and the factors influencing that process. In so doing, they point toward promising directions for future work on these topics and underscore the value of multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and cross‐regional analysis. This essay provides an introduction to the studies included in this collection, framing their contributions in the context of research in development and ongoing global discussions on migration policy.     

New maps of struggle for gender justice: Rethinking feminist research on organizations and work

The 2018 Gender, Work and Organization conference was held in Sydney. That fact is relevant to the issues now facing feminist organization research. The journal was launched in 1994 in the global North, in the wake of the women's liberation movement but after a first wave of neoliberal politics. Gender studies has changed since then, especially with growing recognition of feminist thought and activism in the global South. There have been changes in the object of knowledge ‐ that is, work and organization ‐ especially managerial transformation of organizations and global economic restructuring. There are related changes in the political arena, most recently the rise of an authoritarian populism with new patterns of masculinity politics. Proposals are made for an agenda of feminist research in this field, relevant to the new circumstances and the continuing struggles for gender equality.     

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.     

Gender,poverty, and inequality: a brief history of feminist contributions in the field of international development

This paper provides a brief history of feminist contributions to the analysis of gender, poverty, and inequality in the field of international development. It draws out the continuous threads running through these contributions over the years, as the focus has moved from micro-level analysis to a concern with macro-level forces. It concludes with a brief note on some of the confusions and conflations that continue to bedevil attempts to explore the relationship between gender, poverty, and inequality.     

Gender Matters: Ethnographers Bring Gender from the Periphery toward the Core of Migration Studies

Ethnographers from anthropology, sociology, and other disciplines have been at the forefront of efforts to bring gender into scholarship on international and transnational migration. This article traces the long and often arduous history of these scholars’ efforts, arguing that though gender is now less rarely treated merely as a variable in social science writing on migration, it is still not viewed by most researchers in the field as a key constitutive element of migrations. The article highlights critical advances in the labor to engender migration studies, identifies under‐researched topics, and argues that there have been opportunities when, had gender been construed as a critical force shaping migrations, the course of research likely would have shifted. The main example developed is the inattention paid to how gendered recruitment practices structure migrations – the fact that gender sways recruiters’ conceptions of appropriate employment niches for men versus women.     

The rights of Turkish migrants in Europe under international law and EU law

This paper investigates three issues concerning female immigration in the European Union during the past decade: 1) the sequence of labor migration and family reunification is assessed; 2) family migration is examined in detail; and 3) the implications of the diversification of contemporary female migration are studied. In addition, it presents arguments regarding the necessity of considering the reality of changing patterns of employment, households, and social structures to increase our knowledge of European immigration. Family reunion, as much as full-fledged labor migration, reveals the multiple personal and familial strategies involved in the process of migration. Theoretization of international migration emphasizes its diversification including the growing significance of minority skilled migrants. Absence of a sustained dialogue between feminist and mainstream researchers in the field of migration studies is one of the major problems in achieving change in the theoretical understanding of gender international migration in Europe. It was also observed that the communication between migrant women and mainstream European feminist movements has been poor. Lastly, it was proposed that migration theories and models should revolve around the multiple aspects of women's lives in order to catch up with the changes of the last few decades in employment, household and social structures.     

Carceral politics as gender justice? The “traffic in women” and neoliberal circuits of crime,sex, and rights

This article draws upon recent works in sociology, jurisprudence, and feminist theory in order to assess the ways in which feminism, and sex and gender more generally, have become intricately interwoven with punitive agendas in contemporary US politics. Melding existing theoretical discussions of penal trends with insights drawn from my own ethnographic research on the contemporary anti-trafficking movement in the United States—the most recent domain of feminist activism in which a crime frame has prevailed against competing models of social justice—I elaborate upon the ways that neoliberalism and the politics of sex and gender have intertwined to produce a carceral turn in feminist advocacy movements previously organized around struggles for economic justice and liberation. Taking the anti-trafficking movement as a case study, I further demonstrate how human rights discourse has become a key vehicle both for the transnationalization of carceral politics and for the reincorporation of these policies into the domestic terrain in a benevolent, feminist guise. I conclude by urging greater and more nuanced attention to the operations of gender and sexual politics within mainstream analyses of contemporary modes of punishment, as well as a careful consideration of the neoliberal carceral state within feminist discussions of gender, sexuality, and the law.     

The co-optation of feminisms: a research agenda

This article introduces the thematic section “The co-optation of feminisms: a research agenda,” which brings together contributions that discuss the appropriation, dilution and reinterpretation of feminist discourses, and practices by nonfeminist actors for their purposes. Recognizing the myriad ways in which feminist scholars and activists have shared their concerns with co-optation within their respective subfields, we propose that it is productive to develop a more substantive research agenda around co-optation. In the first section, we seek to contribute to this by synthesizing the scattered literature on co-optation in various feminist subfields. Subsequently, we present a selection of studies on co-optation published outside feminist studies in order to identify concepts and empirical insights that are instructive for developing a feminist research agenda on co-optation. This forms the basis for a set of guiding questions that we propose could be helpful in analyzing co-optation. The article finally presents the contributions to this thematic section and discusses what each article adds to our understanding and conceptualization of co-optation.     

Marriage‐Related Migration to the UK

Spouses form the largest single category of migrant settlement in the UK, but research and policy making on marriage‐related migration to Britain provides incomplete coverage of the phenomenon, having been dominated by a focus on the South Asian populations that are among the largest groups of such migrants. By bringing together immigration statistics with information from academic and third‐sector sources, this article attempts to provide a more balanced and nuanced portrayal of patterns and practices of marriage‐related migration to the UK. In doing so, it reveals important nationality and gender differences in migration flows and considers how varying marriage practices, social and political contexts, and policies of both receiving and sending countries may work to influence marriage‐related migration streams. It also exposes the limitations and lacunae in existing research on this diverse form of migration, highlighting the danger that immigration policy made on the basis of partial evidence will produce unexpected consequences.     

The Education‐Migration Industry: International Students,Migration Policy and the Question of Skills

This special section specifically focuses on student‐migrants and the way they are being catered to by an emerging education‐migration industry. The articles included build upon the observation that especially within the Asia‐Pacific region there is an increasing conflation and entanglement between categories of international students and skilled migrants. This has led to an emerging “industry” that facilitates study‐abroad trajectories and acts as broker for two‐step migration pathways. This Introduction aims to situate the research presented here within the broader context of a burgeoning field of research which examines the growing popularity of international education across the Asia‐Pacific region; the way its emergence is increasingly entangled with specific ambitions that skilled migration programmes cater to; and the way highly regulated skilled migration programmes have given rise to a migration industry in general.     

Epistemic authority and the gender lens

Researching ‘hidden’ forms of social inequality such as gender often poses particular challenges. Not least of these is how to uncover such dimensions of social life whilst preserving the perspectives of research participants, who may not consider such matters relevant to their lives, particularly if other forms of identity or oppression are more prominent for them. Here, I reflect on these issues in the context of researching user involvement in mental health services from a feminist perspective. I show how ‘uncovering’ gender and other forms of social inequality in the field was aided through adopting a wide analytical lens focusing on power, along with reflexivity and openness in discussing my own political analysis and commitments in relation to the study area with the researched. I also describe how I attempted to resolve the epistemological‐ethical issues involved through conceptualising these in terms of ‘situatedness’ and gender salience and adopting a feminist standpoint which emphasised what researchers can, and indeed should, bring to the research enterprise. Related issues of power and empowerment in the research process are discussed.     

Le genre des politiques sociales. L'apport théorique des « gender studies » à l'analyse des politiques sociales

In English-speaking countries and Scandinavia, where feminist and gender studies have developed over the past thirty years, the issue of sex and then of gender has led to a very fertile renewal of social policy analysis, in particular in the field of comparative welfare state studies. By insisting on the cultural, social, normative and historical construction of welfare states and social policies, this approach sheds light on the societal paradigms that define how social policies are drawn up and their impact in terms of gender. It enables us to undertake a critical, original examination of the concepts, theories and analytical tools traditionally used in comparative welfare state litterature. This article presents an inventory of the theoretical advances made in writings on this topic.