Gender and International Migration: Contributions and Cross-Fertilizations

Abstract

The focus in the gender and migration literature has moved from the recovery of women's experiences, to the mainstreaming of gender within migration studies, to intersectionality. Both mainstreaming and intersectionality have proven to be fertile grounds for cross-fertilization with other fields of social analysis beyond migration studies. This review examines three sites where this happens: migrant care work, transnational families, and gendered analysis of migration policies. First, I briefly cover the shift from a gender mainstreaming approach to an intersectionality approach. I then examine the literature on migrant care work and its contribution to the analysis of economic globalization. I continue with how analyses of transnational parenting may widen our perspective on gender and the family. Finally, I look at how work that integrates gender into its analysis of migration policies may provide new understandings of citizenship.

Gendered Migrations and Global Social Reproduction

“…More recent studies have encompassed a wider range of actors -such as mothers (Parreñas 2005), fathers (Pribilsky 2012), children (Mazzucato and Schans 2011) and processes -than the earlier analyses of transnationalism (Herrera 2013), but have tended nevertheless to focus on the emotional and material practices of parenting. Care is one of the most important practical, emotional and symbolic resources circulating through different forms of migration (labour, family, educational and retirement), and stages in the life cycle (childhood, parenthood, middle age, young old and old old), and within diverse configurations of transnational families (Baldassar and Merla 2013).…”

“…Immigration restrictions and the reduction in countries of net immigration are reinforcing an asymmetric globalisation (Czaika and de Hass 2014). Many of the vectors of differentiation -and the intersection between themwhich are used to understand migration, such as class, race and nation, are being reconstituted transnationally and globally through migration (Anthias 2012;Bose 2012;Herrera 2013;Purkayastha 2012). Gender is a significant aspect influencing these processes and the increasing number of women who move has attracted the attention of researchers and policy makers (Piper 2005).…”

Acciones colectivas y reconfiguración de ciudadanía. Mujeres jóvenes en situación de desplazamiento en la Comuna 3 de Medellín, 1994-2015

“…Estas jerarquías y posiciones sociales generan intersecciones complejas que desembocan en diferentes formas de exclusión y marginación, en las que es necesario anotar que la discriminación de género no es adicional sino relacional (Rodríguez, 2006, p. 20), es decir, no es acumulativa, pero sí se intensifica en las intersecciones dadas. Así, el género como categoría discriminatoria no debe analizarse como unidad cerrada sino en constante interacción con categorías como edad, nacionalidad y clase, entre otras (Herrera, 2013).…”

Gendering Migration

“…Domestic service, considered to be the biggest employer of immigrant women, is increasingly providing jobs for men as well. Almost three decades after Claude Meillassoux's (1975) powerful demonstration about the importance for the capital to have the household and its reproductive labour preserved and available, the conceptualization of female migration as "global care chains" (Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2002;Parreñas, 2001) resets the argument within a transnational frame and in the processes of global inequalities (Herrera, 2013).…”

“…It has its roots in Black feminism, but in the European context a number of studies on the articulation of social divisions of power have been central in "paving the way" and enriching the debates: they called for contextualizing gender and drew attention to the simultaneity and articulation of gender with class, race or migrant status Yuval-Davis, 1983, 1992;Brah, 1996;Morokvasic, 1987 among others; in French see Kergoat, 2009;Cahiers du CEDREF, 2006). For further discussion mainly on the production of knowledge in English see Herrera (2013) and Anthias (2014).…”