ABSTRACT
Scholarship on women, gender, and migration has grown tremendously since the 1970s. Within this corpus, only modest attention has been paid to refugee women and men (e.g., Giles, Mousa, & Van Esterik, 1996; Indra, 1999); instead, refugees are often collapsed into the more universal category of immigrant. There is need to examine how refugee status with its distinctive course of violence and displacement, public discourses, laws, and practices impact women and men differentially. How violence, abuse of human rights, exile, and repatriation become occasions for displays of, or challenges to, patriarchy needs to be interrogated as well. This chapter treats these important issues, and it does so from the vantage point of gendered citizenship. In doing so, I seek to move the engagement of studies of gender and refugees/immigrants beyond the more familiar contours of home and workplace to additional and related sites such as the body, ethic communities, refugee camps, nation-states, international law, and international organizations. The analytical constructs of female consciousness and feminist consciousness, employed in this work, aid in tracing continuity and change in refugee women’s consciousness across time and space.
