Gendered Migrations and Conceptual Approaches: Theorising and Researching Mobilities

Abstract

While the repetitive rhetoric of ‘discovering’ women as active agents in mobility decisions, plans and the execution of such, might have had a major contribution in filling an important lacuna in migration studies literature several decades ago now (Morokvasic, 1984; Kofman, 1999), there are a number of analytical problems with continuing claims that seem to either conflate ‘gender’ with women or tend to nearly essentialise the ‘feminization of migration’ in reflecting discursive stereotypes. In the latter case, gendered migration research requires taking on board the historicity and local embeddedness of particular case studies which should clearly frame socio-political and development strategies when conducting studies to understand women migrants and female migration (Cornwall et al., 2008; Dannecker & Sieveking, 2009; Amelina & Lutz, 2019). This perspective becomes clear in the following sections and in the box included in this chapter where we include exemplifications from case studies and our own research findings.