Feminism And Migration

Feminism and Migration: Cross-Cultural Engagements is a rich, original, and diverse collection on the intersections of feminism and migration in western and non-western contexts. This book explores the question: does migration empower women? Through wide-ranging topics on theorizing feminism in migration, contesting identities and agency, resistance and social justice, and religion for change, well-known and emerging scholars provide in-depth analysis of how social, cultural, political, and economic forces shape new modalities and perspectives among women upon migration. It highlights the centrality of the various meanings and interpretations of feminism(s) in the lives of immigrant and migrant women in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Eastern Europe, France, Greece, Japan, Italy, Mexico, Morocco, Papua New Guinea, Spain, and the United States. The well-researched chapters explore the ways in which feminism and migration across cultures relate to women’s experiences in host societies --- as women, wives, mothers, exiles, nuns, and workers---and the avenues of interactions for change. Cross-cultural engagements point to the convergence and even disjunctures between (im)migrant and non-immigrant women that remain unrecognized in contemporary mainstream discourses on migration and feminism.

Migration is a multifaceted phenomenon that plays a critical role in today’s world, yet there have been few attempts to look beneath the surface of the mass movements of people. Particularly, the changing face of migration is becoming more feminized, with women increasingly moving as independent or single migrants rather than as the wives, mothers, or daughters of male migrants. Yet, in literature on migration, the voices of women are still silent. This creates an urgent need to advance academic research on female international migration by examining women as independent migrants. Immigrant Women’s Voices and Integrating Feminism Into Migration Theory comprehensively documents the experiences of immigrant women across the globe and the important theories that define their experiences. The chapters give firsthand accounts of women speaking about their own experiences on migration and topics associated with women and migration. This book aims to give women their own voice and to stand apart from previous literature in which male relatives spoke on behalf of immigrant women to tell their stories for them. While highlighting topics on women in migration including feminism, gendered social roles, first-person narratives, and the female identity, this book is ideally for professionals in social science disciplines as well as practitioners, stakeholders, researchers, academicians, and students wanting to expand their knowledge on women and migration, gender violence, and women empowerment.

Forced Migration in the Feminist Imagination explores how feminist acts of imaginative expression, community-building, scholarship, and activism create new possibilities for women experiencing forced migration in the twenty-first century. Drawing on literature, film, and art from a range of transnational contexts including Europe, the Middle East, Central America, Australia, and the Caribbean, this volume reveals the hitherto unrecognised networks of feminist alliance being formulated across borders, while reflecting carefully on the complex politics of cross-cultural feminist solidarity. The book presents a variety of cultural case-studies that each reveal a different context in which the transcultural feminist imagination can be seen to operate – from the ‘maternal feminism’ of literary journalism confronting the European ‘refugee crisis’ to Iran’s female film directors building creative collaborations with displaced Afghan women; and from artists employing sonic creativities in order to listen to women in U.K. and Australian detention, to LGBTQ+ poets and video artists articulating new forms of queer feminist community against the backdrop of the hostile environment. This is an essential read for scholars in Women’s and Gender Studies, Feminist and Postcolonial Literary and Cultural Studies, and Comparative Literary Studies, as well as for those operating in the fields of Gender and Development Studies and Forced Migration Studies.

Provocative and intellectually challenging, Gender and Migration critically analyses how gender has been taken up in studies of migration and its theories, practices and effects. Each essay uses feminist frameworks to highlight how more traditional tropes of gender eschew the complexities of gender and migration. In tackling this problem, this collection offers students and researchers of migration a more nuanced understanding of the topic.

This collection focuses on a variety of fictional and non-fictional East European women's migration narratives, multimodal narratives by migrant artists, and cyber narratives (blogs and personal stories posted on forums). The book negotiates the concept of narrative between conventional literary forms, digital discourses, and the social sciences. It brings together new perspectives on strategies of representation, trauma, dislocation, and gender roles. It also claims a place for Eastern Europe on the map of transnational feminism. (Series: Contributions to Transnational Feminism - Vol. 4) [Subject: Sociology, European Studies, Women's Studies, Feminist Studies, Gender Studies, Migration Studies]

The influx of female migrants to Europe has posed challenges to established European feminist movements. In this book the author assesses the significance of female immigration to Italy and its impact on Italian feminism by analyzing the way in which immigrant and Italian women have constructed their relationships over the past 30 years. The book provides comprehensive overviews of the Italian women's movement and the history of immigration to Italy before examining the formation of immigrant women's groups, the treatment of immigrant women by Italian women's associations, and the forging of new relationships in multicultural women's organizations. Broader comparisons on European migration are made to contextualize immigration to Italy and Southern Europe more generally. By drawing from a variety of research materials such as structured interviews, participant observation and empirical data, the book contributes to an interdisciplinary approach to the study of gender, migration and contemporary Italian history. The book is of interest for scholars and postgraduates in the fields of women and gender studies, migration studies and contemporary European history.

Transnational Black Feminism and Qualitative Research invites readers to consider what it means to conduct research within their own communities by interrogating local and global contexts of colonialism, race, and migration. The qualitative data at the centre of this book stem from a yearlong qualitative study of the lived experiences of Black women, who migrated to or spent a significant amount of time in the United States, as well as from the author's experiences as a Black German woman and former international student. It proposes Transnational Black Feminism as a framework in qualitative inquiry. Methodological considerations emerging from and complementary to this framework critically explore qualitative concepts, such as reciprocity, care, and the ethics with which research is conducted, to account for shifts in power dynamics in the research process and to radically work against the dehumanization of participants, their communities, and researchers. This short and accessible book is ideal for qualitative researchers, graduate students, and feminist scholars interested in the various dimensions of racialization, coloniality, language, and migration.

Based on the oral histories of eighty migrant women and thirty additional interviews with ‘native’ women in the ‘receiving’ countries, this volume documents the contemporary phenomenon of the feminisation of migration through an exploration of the lives of women, who have moved from Bulgaria and Hungary to Italy and the Netherlands. It assumes migrants to be active subjects, creating possibilities and taking decisions in their own lives, as well as being subject to legal and political regulation, and the book analyses the new forms of subjectivity that come about through mobility. Part I is a largely conceptual exploration of subjectivity, mobility and gender in Europe. The chapters in Part II focus on love, work, home, communication, and food, themes which emerged from the migrant women’s accounts. In Part III, based on the interviews with ‘native’ women – employers, friends, or in associations relevant to migrant women – the chapters analyse their representations of migrants, and the book goes on to explore forms of intersubjectivity between European women of different cultural origins. A major contribution of this book is to consider how the movement of people across Europe is changing the cultural and social landscape with implications for how we think about what Europe means. Cover image: Painting by Carla Accardi. Reproduced with the kind permission of Luca Barsi of the Galleria Accademia, Via Accademia Albertina 3/e, 10123 Torino.