In this article, I explore the integration of gender issues by immigrant women's associations in Argentina in the first years of this century. The analysis reveals the persisting heuristic potential of an old feminist tenet: the connection between the personal and the political. My specific question relates to the ways in which gender is politically articulated within the experiences of immigrant women. I thus explore how the experience of gender relates to the institutionalization of this experience, considering that migration studies addressing gender issues rarely question this Migrant Women and Politicized Experience: The Place of Gender in Three Social... Revue européenne des migrations internationales, vol. 35 -n°3 et 4 | 2019 1relationship. The main objective of this article is to reveal the different levels in which experience is formulated as political and the complexity its articulation entails.Before providing a description of the organizations examined as part of the fieldwork that informs this article, the second section briefly reviews the academic debate on experience in order to highlight the challenges this concept entails. In this analysis, I hope to avoid the question of how experience relates to language-a debate that is, as I will show, settled. The facet of this debate that deserves more attention-one often erroneously appended to the question of experience and language-is that of the connections between personal experiences of inequality and their integration to organizational and institutional agendas. The third and fourth sections provide an overview of the three women's associations examined in my fieldwork, describing their objectives, activities, institutional frameworks, and alliances with agents at other levels (international organizations, NGOs, and state agencies). The connections between the personal and the political go both ways, as seen in the fifth and sixth sections: activism affects gender experiences and gender experiences affect activism. Finally, the section "Politicizing Experience and the Dialectic between the Personal and Political" draws attention to the multiple aspects of life that can be politicized and are inextricably bound. Experience is politicized at different levels: at home, within political organizations, on the streets, within a state or supra-state institution. Politicization, then, can serve as an analytical entry point for understanding how positions like those of migrant woman, Bolivian, poor worker, mother, and others coexist, forming assemblages and hierarchies. Finally, in addition to summarizing the contributions of this article, the conclusions present three implications for the study of intersectionality and inequalities that come with acknowledging the levels of politization of experience (Stolcke, 1992;Davis, 2008).
The Political Meaning of ExperienceAll experience carries meaning. Meaning is social. And there is no meaning in our social lives that is not bound to our experiences. Therein lie both the force and weakness of different perspective...