ABSTRACT

This chapter brings together theories of intersectionality and the transnational studies in migration, discussing them in the light of empirical examples from the intra-European context. At the beginning it introduces recent social constructivist approaches to the analysis of migration and transnationalization. Their commonality is that they consider both migration and transnationality as socially generated and thus changing over time. This view allows to integrate the analysis of (transnational) migration with the concept of intersectionality, which makes possible the analysis of the interplay of gender relations and migration processes in the context of a variety of social inequality dimensions (i.e. ethnicity/race, class, sexuality, age/life-course, health/disability, space). What makes this intersectional perspective unique and powerful is that, first, it enables researchers to analyse the complex interplay of hierarchizing attributions both within a given dimension of inequality (i.e. gender or class or ethnicity/race etc.) and among the different dimensions involved (i.e. between gender and class), and that, second, it facilitates an analysis of social hierarchies without the a-priori definition of a master category of inequality.