Abstract
Scholarship on migration in Europe continues to expand and mirrors not only the age that we are in but also a problematic political fixation with issues of security and exclusionary forms of national belonging in European societies. Although feminist scholars persistently confront such narratives, the larger mainstream field of migration tends to estrange contextual understandings of gender. In their book Gender and Migration: Transnational and Intersectional Prospects, the authors Anna Amelina and Helma Lutz take us through the terrain of dominant migration research and explore the potentials of a dialogue across academic fields and conceptual arenas. Their focus is on the cross-fertilisation of different theoretical approaches and prospects for analysing the productions of social categories and inequalities: the ‘doing’ of both gender and migration. The authors provide an academic inventory of gender in migration research and argue that there is a need to both ‘de-dramatize differences and re-dramatize social inequality’ (p. 24) as well as to commit to situating our research in explicit ways in relation to the samples we study, as well as the sides that we take. Although the book aims to speak to two multidisciplinary research areas, I read it foremost as a systematic critique of the canon of migration literature. This is because of the steady expertise with which the authors guide the reader through notions of mobility, transnational inequalities and citizenship, to which the major parts of the book are allocated. The authors argue that, first, intersectionality and transnationalism provide researchers in this field with the opportunity to challenge essentialist notions at the core of the category of women. Second, that intersectional and transnational approaches also challenge thinking that takes the nation as its methodological and normative starting point.
In the first chapters of the book, the authors review hegemonic notions of assimilation and theories from neoclassical approaches to world systems that, according to the authors, reduce migration to economic relations and ignore its gendered social embeddedness. They also review and discuss how perspectives on the social constructions of femininities and masculinities, and its interdependence with other social markers, have been increasingly incorporated in the migration literature. The introduction and presentation of theories of gender and intersectionality is an important node of the book, because it explains how the authors understand the heterogeneous academic approaches to studies of gender, sexualities, race/ethnicity, class and other social markers. That said, the introduction would have benefitted from also including a more extensive discussion of Black feminist responses to an appropriation, de-politicisation and academic institutionalisation of intersectionality.
In chapter 3, where the structure of the book allows advances in gender theory to be presented in tandem with prospects for transnational analyses, the argument is persuasive. The discussions and examples inspire a commitment to thinking about migration and its categories as socially constructed, for instance, through notions of immobile others and diasporic cosmopolitans, as well as the analytical possibilities of ‘doing space’. Here, Amelina successfully presents how it is possible to assume transnationality when different aspects of a globalised everyday life are studied. I think that the potentials of this intervention have previously failed to reach a wider audience, both inside and outside of the research community, and that the work of Lutz and Amelina is highly important in this regard.
The political economy of gendered migrant labour is portrayed in chapter 4, where Lutz illustrates the richness of feminist interventions in migration research. This chapter provides a welcome overview of feminist studies of care and domestic labour, the contributions of which, I believe, continue to be marginalised in mainstream literature and treated as exceptions to the political economy of migration. In this chapter, transnational insights are also presented as important criticism of gender-sensitive analyses that have, nonetheless, neglected to see the urgent fact that privatisation and commodification of care is also a commodification of transnational inequalities and migration. Central concepts such as social reproduction, circulation, welfare, labour relations and transnational motherhood are presented by the author in an accessible way, which also gives substance to the argument of how intersectional analyses are essential to an understanding of inequalities in a migration setting. Lutz’s insightful discussions and examples make the political importance of both recognition and redistribution in economic and institutional settings manifest.
In the following chapter, Amelina discusses ‘the changing face of citizenship’ and presents the reader with a systematic review of theoretical perspectives that dominate studies of migration. The author explores conceptual contributions to the possibilities of challenging static and nationalised notions of citizenship, such as scholarly debates on post-national membership and multiple citizenship, and post-colonial critique of the illusion of universalist citizenship and its Western foundations. The author provides precise and nuanced analyses of how hegemonic notions of national membership can be revised, which represents a much appreciated guidance for students and scholars who attempt to navigate these waters of citizenship theory. Here, I would have liked the authors to stay a little longer with queer interventions in the field, because queer scholarship represents vital attempts to transform migration studies through a re-thinking of the concept of borders, for instance, in relation to the orientation of bodies, desires and necropolitics. Also, the book could have further developed arguments in relation to current feminist debates on gender and religion that are at the core of ethno-nationalist discourses on the threat of the Muslim other.
The different arguments of the book are productively tied together in the final chapter, where Lutz draws on cultural representations in film to present what I read as an agenda on teaching intersectionality and transnationality. The selected films span from fictive to documentary and allow for questions to be asked on the role of the protagonists in producing gendered and racialised stereotypes, the complexities of inequalities, multiple belonging and social change. Furthermore, the suggested films bring up important themes that concern gender and migration in different ways, and are paired with theoretical concepts and study questions. These exercises allow for reflections on positionality, what it means to be a recipient of powerful narratives of migration and gender, and how intersectionality can facilitate innovative analytical work. This chapter therefore illustrates the pedagogical ambition that runs through the book and conveys an inspiring enthusiasm for finding ways to bring gender into studies of migration in more productive ways. This critical overview and feminist intervention in the canon of migration research is, therefore, a resource for gender scholars who encounter dominant notions of migration, borders and assimilation in their role as teachers and researchers.