“Like a Tree Without Leaves”: Syrian Refugee Women and the Shifting Meaning of Marriage

Abstract

There is a growing body of feminist scholarship that highlights aspects of agency and empowerment of the refugee woman, mostly through citing examples of women challenging patriarchy and cultural norms. Extending the latter, I use a decolonizing framework to examine how refugee women strive for autonomy and empowerment through acceptingthose norms and utilizingthem strategically. In doing so, I reveal a more complex relationship between agency and victimhood and how they relate to other notions such as empowerment, vulnerability and traditional gender roles. I use the case of Syrian refugee women who marry for refugeto explore how their stories challenge Western liberal feminist views that often stigmatize similar arrangements as exploitation, sex trafficking, and/or forced marriages. The narratives of those women move beyond highlighting instances of agency, resistance, and empowerment as subversion to question the Eurocentric conceptualization of such notions. The objective of this study is three-fold: (a) reporting on and giving context to an under-research phenomenon such as marriage for refuge; (b) rethinking and challenging liberal feminist understanding of concepts such as agency, empowerment, traditional gender roles, and marriage; and (c) making the case for the potential contribution a decolonizing approach could bring to refugee research.

Decision-Making, Violence, Resistance, and Love: Contested and Complicating Narratives of Syrian Marriages

“…The fact that women may exercise agency to choose not to marry because marriage may hold the potential to undermine them, represents an important contribution of the study. This finding contrasts with existing literature in the region which links marriage to improved social status for women (Salamandra, 2006; Taha, 2020), instead suggesting that there are situations where women may decide marriage is not the best option. In these accounts, women's role in choosing (or not choosing) spouses also places them in positions of power, which is a less-visible narrative about Middle Eastern women both in academic literature as well as in humanitarian reports.…”

“…By exercising agency in deciding not to marry, the example of Khadija illustrates how marriage may not always be the solution to strengthening a woman's position but may at times undermine it. This contrasts with other literature that emphasizes the importance of marriage for social position (Salamandra, 2006; Taha, 2020).…”

Allies, access and (collective) action: Young refugee women’s navigation of gendered educational constraints in Greece

“…Melissa, for example, reported that she had seen a number of such cases at her centre. While recent research has suggested that refugee women's decisions to marry are agentic and empowering acts (Taha, 2020), there is also a body of research which documents how early marriage, as a coping mechanism, can result in abuse and the limiting of freedoms such as attending school (e.g. DeJong et al, 2017;Hattar-Pollara, 2019;UNHCR, 2016).…”

Grandmothers Behind the Scenes

“…Although matriarchal families exist across different conditions and settings, we suggest that the subordinate integration of these elder women in Canada mediates their former power as matriarchs. This heeds the call by feminist scholars to add to the "upsurge" in work on Arab women's public rights, identities, and political participation by also studying dynamic changes in family life (Johnson, 2018, p. 467;Taha, 2020) as well as to contribute to emerging knowledge in migration studies about Syrian resettlement in Canada (Hamilton et al, 2020;Hynie, 2018;Oudshoorn et al, 2020).…”

“…It follows, then, that an emerging body of research with SRRI newcomers attends to their integration-related experiences and outcomes (consult, for example, Hamilton et al, 2020, Kyriakides et al, 2018, Taha, 2020. We know less, however, about the experiences of older adults in this migration wave (Boutmira, 2021).…”