Abstract
Considering the proliferation of scholarly, policy, and activist work on gender and migration, this edited volume offers a refreshing view of how gender has configured into conceptualizations of mobility. The editors, Ingrid Palmary, Erica Burman, Khatidja Chantler, and Peace Kiguwa, situate the collection within recent trends in feminist migration scholarship by asking “how and why gender figures in conceptualizations of mobility and with what effects” (p. 1). The chapters in this volume feature empirical research from South Africa, England, Pakistan, and Venezuela. Although they illustrate diverse national contexts to illustrate cross-cutting patterns in how the nation is reproduced through discourses of migration, they also decidedly shift our focus away from Anglo–U.S.-dominated discourses on migration. At the heart of this body of work is a refreshing analytic for gender, not merely as a synonym for women or as a presumed social or political identity but as an impetus for particular forms of knowledge production on mobility, movement, political space, and violence.
The book is organized into three sections: visibility and vulnerability, asylum, and depoliticizing migration, with the common thread of interrogating what issues have been linked to migration and what forms of violence are read as political versus private. Several chapters explore the ways in which rape, forced marriage, and domestic violence are normalized (i.e., are seen as a regular occurrence) and thus read as apolitical in asylum and refugee determinations. For example, Gould challenges those who have benefited from the growth in antitrafficking activities in South Africa—both not-for-profit organizations and governments—that build upon “long histories of preoccupation with the sale of sex” (p. 50). Her critique of the moral imperative against prostitution in South Africa intersects with attention to rising securitization efforts that serve to construct some foreign women as “victims” deserving of help, while criminalizing women who are seen as “local.”
A few chapters stand out particularly for their research design and methodology. Kihato illustrates the use of “narrative visual diaries” as a photovoice methodology for representing women’s self-perceptions of vulnerability and agency when navigating violence—both state and interpersonal—on the streets of Johannesburg. Of particular interest is Kihato’s discussion of the dialectic and potentially contradictory politics of bringing visibility to migrant women’s lives, while the women themselves seek to remain hidden from state scrutiny. Kiwanuka similarly reconsiders women’s agency in her analysis of how women “choose” cohabitation with abusive South African partners as a survival strategy to mitigate the greater costs of deportation. In a different vein, Psaroudakis uses video art with migrant men in Greece to explore the “impossibilities” embodied in gendered masculinities of racialized male migrant bodies.
Each of these chapters engages the spirit of the book’s subtitle, Feminist Interventions. They each draw on a range methodological tools and political sensibilities to challenge our understandings of how migration has been engendered, who benefits from existing discourses, and what issues and vulnerabilities remain hidden from our view. While the readings are steeped in emerging feminist theories (and thus are dense when read as a whole), they offer tangible recommendations to guide both scholarly inquiry and practical interventions.