ABSTRACT
The chapter criticizes the omission of gender relations in many of the major classical theories of migration and assimilation. Theorizing social inequality, these theories usually focus on the categories of social class and ethnicity/race. Considering “ethnic culture” as significant for social inequality genesis, these concepts assign gender relations to play a minor role, if any. This is true of both, the sedentarist assimilation approaches that focus on the receiving states, the neoclassical theories and world-systems theories that have a global research focus. These approaches ignore not only the gendered distribution of life chances but also their interaction with other dimensions of inequality that assign individuals their particular position in the social order. Contrary to these approaches, the more recent theories of transnational migration have increasingly been expanding their scope to include analyses and discussions of gender and intersectional relations. The chapter details the benefits of a transnational perspective when conducting research on migration and analysing the interplay of categories of inequality such as gender, ethnicity/race and class.
