ABSTRACT
Immigration studies has grown vastly in the last 30 years, but glance at the principal journals and publications in the United States, and immediately you get it: gender is still ghettoized in immigration scholarship. Basic concepts like gender, sex, power, privilege, sexual discrimination, and intersectionalities are regularly absent from the vocabulary and the study designs. The cottage industries of segmented assimilation, transnationalism, and citizenship-with a few significant exceptions-remain like hermetically sealed steam trains from another century, chugging along oblivious to developments in gender scholarship of the last 30 years. I went through all of the recent issues of the International Migration Review, the premier social science journal in this field, and I found that in 2007, 2008, and 2009, there were a total of seven articles with “women” or “gender” in the title. In 2006, there were none except those included in a special issue on gender. Why is that? Gender remains one of the fundamental social relations that anchors and impacts immigration patterns, including labor migration as well as professional class migrations and refugee movements. Gender is deeply implicated in imperialist, military, and colonial conquests, which are widely recognized as the roots of global international migration flows. Once immigration movements begin, they take form in markedly gendered ways. In addition, immigration processes bring about life-impacting changes, de-stabilizing and remodeling the gendered way daily life is lived. Sociology experienced an increase in feminist research in the 1980s and 1990s. In the 1970s,
feminist research projects had emphasized the ways in which institutions and social privileges are constructed in ways that favor men. Since then, most feminist-oriented scholars have dispensed with unitary concepts of “men” and “women.” Multiplicities of femininities and masculinities are recognized today, as interconnected, relational, and intertwined in relations of class, raceethnicity, nation, and sexualities. The focus on intersectionalities in immigration studies is palpable in gender and immigration studies elsewhere around the globe too, but from what I can see, it is perhaps less institutionalized in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Outside of the United States, there is also less focus on men and masculinities, and sexualities (with the exception of trafficking, which I discuss below). Looking at scholarship on gender and migration today, I see two seemingly contradictory
trends. On the one hand, an androcentric blindness to feminist issues and gender remains. It is business as usual, the missing feminist revolution. Morakvasic made this observation in 1984,
and Silvia Pedraza in 1991. That’s now an old song, and I don’t want to sing it here. On the other hand, there is a vibrant scholarship on gender and migration, but not only is it not reaching or shaping some of the debates at the core, but it is also balkanized. In fact, there are several distinctive arenas of gender and migration scholarship, and there appears to be a lack of communication among these arenas. Researchers working on, for example, the subject of migration and transnational sexualities may not be aware of the research on migration and care work. As I see it, there are at least five different streams of gender and migration research. In this chapter I provide a brief overview of these areas.
