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 violence against migrants. States are increasingly drawing their boundaries ever more tightly in an attempt to dissuade people from entering – including those most typically identified as 'forced migrants'. The resultant policies are frequently harsh and punitive and, given this context, some may question or challenge the focus on gender that this book takes. It could be argued that all migrants are treated punitively and that the focus on gender detracts from the overall positioning of migrants. By contrast, however, we argue that although the overall context is the same for men and women, a focus on gender illuminates accounts and positions (of both women and men) that would otherwise remain invisible and highlights the significance of gender (whether visible or not) in the responses that are made to migrants. More than this, we propose that gender is not merely an additional (discretionary or supplementary) variable that qualifies an already existent gender-neutral category of 'migrant' but rather structures that category (as male or female) in the first place, with the prototypical (presumed economic) migrant characterised as the single male and the woman positioned as dependent or victim. Developing Butler's (1990) analysis we should note that, once so founded, other related categories of identity that prompt or warrant migration – such as sexuality – are then elaborated. In this sense, we could say – following Shepherd (2008) – that migration discourses participate within the wider international relations debates that do not simply reflect but perform, and so often violently reproduce, gender.

The subtitle of this book, feminist interventions, is reflected in the conceptual and methodological tools drawn upon to evaluate representations of migrants and their gendered consequences. Key political consequences follow from the ways in which migrants are gendered. In the case of women migrants, these range from the level of the intimate and interpersonal realm of family to the nation-state, and indeed one of the central contributions of this collection is to recognise the interrelatedness of what Silvey (2006) terms scales of analysis. The tendency in writings on migration to perpetuate an imagined separation of state and family – of the household and labour market, for example – reflects the way that gender categorisations have been treated as 'ontologically given' (Silvey 2006: 68). Challenging the assumed distinctness between the political and the domestic, the state and the family is a longstanding but still necessary feminist intervention (see also Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1989, Palmary 2006). This is a concern central to many of the chapters in this book that focus on the state's regulation of intimate relationships in ways that highlight the myth of the public/private dichotomy. Further interventions include reflections on humanitarianism, state interventions and those more rooted in advocacy. As such, they are interventions both into the ways that gender is conceptualised and (under)theorised as well as reflecting critically on interventions with and for migrants.

But this book does not only draw on feminist politics as an interpretive frame. It also offers significant challenges to feminist theory and practice. A key assumption guiding contributions to this book is that attention to the gendered nature of the meanings we give to migration necessarily requires a rethinking and reassertion of themes central to the feminist project. This includes reconceptualising the relationship between state and domestic violence, including highlighting what kinds of violence get cast as political and what as domestic. These themes are elaborated in the chapters by Julie Middleton, Sajida Ismail and Khatidja Chantler, who – writing from the diverse contexts of South Africa and the UK – analyse the role that the asylum systems in both national contexts play in creating and perpetuating these categorisations and what might be at stake in undoing them. This interpretive move also involves challenging the assumed distinction between economic and political migration alongside exploring consequences of the gendered division between the body and the nation.

Fekete (2006), as well as contributors to this book (in particular see chapters by Chandre Gould and Ingrid Palmary), have raised concerns about the increasing alliances between right-wing politics and a (proclaimed) feminist movement. Practices such as loyalty testing and attitude testing, on the increase in many European countries, are frequently justified as a means of protecting the imagined gender equality of the host country from migrants from 'less progressive' countries. These developments require greater and more critical attention and intervention. There has been a long feminist tradition of engagement with and critique of the project of the nation-state (see Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989, Gouws 2005, Ueno 2004) and the new ways that the nation is re-created through discourses of migration requires attention for the way it equally legitimates practices of racism and exclusion in the name of protecting the 'womenandchildren' (Enloe 1990; Sylvester 1999). Thus, for example, denying family reunification on the basis that a marriage was not freely entered into has been justified in the name of protecting the woman in that relationship. The need to be able to analyse exploitative conditions of marriage in host and migrant communities without lapsing into racist assumptions about whether, for example, arranged marriages (set up in hierarchical comparison to an idealised and mythical notion of Western marriages) are ever freely entered into is central for a new feminist politics of migration. The growing concern in the West about the need to protect women and men from forced marriage has resulted in the state taking up feminist concerns (e.g. of forced marriage) and introducing immigration policies such as the increase in the age at which one can sponsor or reside with a non-European Union spouse to 21 in the UK and 24 in Denmark. Hence feminists need to be alert to the dangers of co-option in the current nation-state project of protecting borders (Chantler et al. 2009, Razack 2004). Fekete (2006) quotes Azizah Y. Al-Hibri, president and founder of Muslim women lawyers for Human Rights as saying: 'If Western women are now vying for the control of the lives of immigrant women by justifying coercive state action, then these women have not learned the lessons of history, be it colonialism, imperialism, or even fascism' (cited in Fekete 2006: 13).

In similar ways, debates in France over the ban on the hijab have often set racism and sexism up as competing concerns in unhelpful ways that return us to the single-issue politics that has been so thoroughly critiqued in, for example, post-colonial feminist writing (see Mohanty 1993). Examples of questioning the legitimacy of marriages and the preoccupation with migrant women's sexual transgressions is just one example of how sexuality and racialised gender norms are disciplined by social institutions, assumptions and practices that normalise (racialised) heterosexuality and subject different migrants to different kinds of gendered stereotypes. Attention to the sexual lives of migrants has been extensive and almost entirely problem focused – through a preoccupation with HIV infection, sex work, trafficking, forced marriage and so on. The inseparability of these practices and their role in sustaining the myth of the 'free world' figure as an important undercurrent in this book.

Equally evident in this kind of approach to protecting migrant women is the assumption that the threat posed to migrant women is from migrant men. This excludes the hierarchies set up between citizens and migrants that make violence against non-citizens tolerated, a topic clearly taken up in Monica Kiwanuka's chapter, and it occludes the ways that the state renders migrants more vulnerable to abuse and indeed perpetrates much of this abuse; for example, through extended detention periods for migrants. In this way, the history of racism, sexism and colonialism of Western societies is erased at the same time as, and by virtue of, migrants being positioned as those who are bringing intolerance to host societies. This theme is central to Alexandra Zavos' analysis of the anti-racist movement in Greece, which explores the risks and challenges of different political standpoints for social movements and activists, as well as state protagonists. Similarly, subtle forms of this representation of the state as neutral and rational are challenged by Erica Burman's chapter in her analysis of formal institutional responses to questions about the functioning of the asylum system.

The authors of these chapters draw from a range of diverse national contexts and arenas of practice. As such, the arguments may appear divergent, but read together these diverse contexts raise some questions about the spatial distribution of power, with each country context negotiating its own forms of recognition and exclusion in the context of an increasingly globalised and Anglo-US dominated discourse on migration. Furthermore, an obvious but significant point to note is that the meaning of different places affects who migrates and with what consequences – consequences that are (over)determined by 'race', class, religion and country of origin. A third area of differentiation is the range of research frameworks and analytic methods drawn upon by the authors, which include critical reflection on academic research, cross-national research, and programme analysis. Articulating the tensions between and across such conceptual and topical arenas is important if we are to understand local manifestations of the global project of migration control and its particular forms of marginalisation and exclusion.

Nevertheless, whilst the contributions in this book draw from different disciplinary perspectives, some shared methodological as well as political presuppositions guide the analyses presented here. In particular, in part overdetermined by the longstanding cultural connections between women, emotions and the private sphere, there is an engagement with theoretical frameworks that emphasise their constructed character alongside the real, material effects of contingent constructions. Hence – contrary to some readings of 'discourse analysis' as relativist – a clear political commitment to using our analysis as the basis of critique and engagement informs the work collected here (Parker 2003, Van Leeuwen and Wodak 1999). In spite of these differences, there are three strong common themes that tie these chapters together, namely visibility, vulnerability and credibility.