ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the impact of wartime forced migration on gendered experiences among a Polish refugee community in post-war Britain. While the gendered nature of migration generally is now widely acknowledged (Donato et al. 2006; Buijs 1993), and indeed the gendered nature of all social practices (Butler 1990; Indira 1999; Pessar 2006), forced migration is arguably an even more transformative experience for migrants than economic migration, and so brings more potential for gendered change. Men and women often experience war, trauma and exile differently and have varying difficulties settling afterwards. Separate research into Vietnamese, Chilean and Palestinian forced migration, for example, suggests that male refugees suffer more acutely from a loss of prestige and a narrowing of public life, while female refugees lose social networks but ‘compensate’ by gaining a widening of their public lives (Kibria 1990; Eastmond 1993, 48-9; Abdulrahim 1993, 64-5). At the same time, the trauma of forced migration may lead to greater determination to hold on to the values and customs of the homeland, and recreate the same gendered structures in the new country. Whichever way, forced migration highlights the significance of gender either as a site of rupture or an anchoring space for the familiar.
