Table Of ContentCrossing Borders and Shifting Boundaries I
Schriftenreihe der Internationalen Frauenuniversitat
»Technik und Kultur«
Band 10
Mirjana Morokvasic, Umut Erel,
Kyoko Shinozaki (eds.)
Crossing Borders and
Shifting Boundaries
Vol. I:
Gender on the Move
Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH 2003
Die Schriftenreihe der Internationalen Frauenuniversitat "Technik und Kultur" wird ge
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Contents
Acknowledgements ...... ................. ..... ................ ........ ......... ......... ................. 7
Umut Erel, Mirjana Morokvasic, Kyoko Shinozaki
Introduction. Bringing gender into migration ............................................... 9
Ethel Kriger
Narratives from the margin, narratives from the centre 23
Part I
Christiane Harzig
Immigration policies: a gendered historical comparison ............................... 35
Saskia Sassen
The feminisation of survival: alternative global circuits. 59
Annie Phizacklea
Transnationalism, gender and global workers ....... ................. ............ ........... 79
Mirjana Morokvasic
Transnational mobility and gender: a view from post-wall Europe .............. 101
Part II
Bettina Gransow
Gender and migration in China: feminisation trends .................................... 137
Tasneem Siddiqui
An anatomy of forced and voluntary migration from Bangladesh:
a gendered perspective .................................................................................. 155
6 Contents
Riitta Vartti
Equal partners online? German matchmaking web sites and trafficking in
women ........................................................................................................... 177
Laura Gso
The new migratory space in Southern Europe: the case of Colombian sex
workers in Spain........................ ... ......... ........................... ....... ........ .............. 207
Part III
Keiko Yamanaka
A breakthrough for ethnic minority rights in Japan: Ana Bortz's
courageous challenge .................................................................................... 23
Umut Erel
Skilled migrant women and citizenship .. ...................................................... 26 i
Heike Alberts
Researching self-employed immigrant women in Hanover, Germany.......... 285
Teresa Kleba Lisboa
Migration and female empowerment in Brazil............... ........ .... ..... ...... ........ 299
Authors ......................................................................................................... 309
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all those who made the International Women's Univer
sity possible - the IFU team and the president Ayla Neusel, the lecturers, the
junior faculty and all the students. Mirjana Morokvasic wants to express her
thanks to the Department of Social Studies of the Ruhr University, Bochum
where she was Marie lahoda Professor in gender studies in the winter semester
1999-2000. This position facilitated her work on the preparatory stages of the
project area migration. Umut Erel and Kyoko Shinozaki would like to thank the
Department of Education at Munster University for support and providing the
time and space to co-edit this book. Umut Erel would like to especially thank
Helma Lutz for invaluable encouragement and advice. Kyoko Shinozaki would
like to express her gratitude to Helma Lutz and Mirjana Morokvasic for having
encouraged her to join this book project, through which she gained gratifying
experiences with a wonderful working team.
This book is one of the outcomes of the unique experience that IFU repre
sented for all of us. We would like to dedicate it to IFU participants with whom
this experience was shared and who were a constant source of inspiration and
endless energy. Our most sincere thanks to Margot Poppenhusen for her valu
able advice, support and patience, and to Heike Alberts, a former participant,
who smoothened the writing of the contributors and editors who are not native
speakers of English.
Mirjana Morokvasic
Umut Erel
Kyoko Shinozaki
Umut Erel, Mirjana Morokvasic and Kyoko Shinozaki
Introduction. Bringing gender into migration
Migrations are complex world-wide phenomena - for millennia people have
moved in search of a better livelihood or political climate, have fled from perse
cutions and pogroms or have been displaced when new nation states were cre
ated or existing ones disintegrated. Migration patterns and processes, the experi
ences of migrants, as well as the social, political, economic and cultural impact
of their migration are gendered. Under the influence of feminist inquiry about
the position of women in society and in gender hierarchies, migration scholar
ship has slowly moved away from male centred universalism - a perspective in
which women either remain invisible or are considered as dependents. The times
when migration was considered to be an all male phenomenon, and the 'main
stream' was a 'malestream,' have been long forgone. It is now common knowl
edge that migrations world-wide are 'increasingly feminised,' a sine qua non as
sertion in scholarly work and in international reports on migration.
It is generally admitted today that women represent about half the world's
migrants, and sometimes even the precise figure of 48% women is given
(OEeD, 2001), suggesting the availability of statistical evidence to prove the
claim that migration has become feminised. However, collecting data disaggre
gated by sex still remains difficult (INSTRA W, 1994). Women and men are still
not perceived as equal agents in migration processes and are not considered as
equally important to be surveyed and counted: Massey and Espinosa (1998), for
instance, carried out an empirical test of different theoretical propositions on
migration from Mexico to the US. For that purpose they select a sample of male
heads of household.
Since the end of the bipolar world order migration has been at the centre of
the debate on globalisation. Increasingly feminised, international migration is
indeed an area where globalisation, development and gender intersect (see Sas
sen in this volume). This reflects several trends underlying new migratory proc
esses and their outcomes: first, the transformation of the world economy, with
the expansion of free-trade and development policies orientated towards market
based economies; second, the resurgence of violent conflicts between collective
10 Umut Erel, Mirjana Morokvasic and Kyoko Shinozaki
entities ('justified' by religious or ethno-nationalist claims for territories and re
sources); and third, migrants moving across state boundaries defy the state cen
tred inquiry and call for scholarship examining transnationalltransstate social
spaces (Faist, 2000a, 2000b, 2000c; Glick-Schiller, Basch, & Szanton-Blanc,
1995, etc; see also the contributions by Morokvasic and Phizacklea in this vol
ume). In transnational spaces territorialised identity definitions can be both
challenged and re-essentialised. These are the spaces where the nation state's
capacity of control and management of differences is often defied (Sassen,
1996), but its determination to control can also be enhanced (Nyberg-S0rensen,
1998; Widgren, 2001)
It is in this context that we want to examine the significance of the increased
percentage of women among migrants found in a large number of studies. But
we also want to look at women' s increasing mobility as evidenced by data about
different kinds of cross-border movements.
Whereas the feminisation of migration is now a widely acknowledged trend,
in particular in Asia (see Gransow in this volume) but also in Europe, it is the
recognition of women's participation in migration that is a new phenomenon in
research and in policy making, rather than the participation of women per se.
Women, who make up a majority among the world refugees, have always been a
part of migratory movements, internally or internationally (INSTRAW . 1994),
but their participation varied from country to country and from one community
to the other. In many areas of the world the mobility of women is still restricted,
as the chapter by Tasneem Siddiqui illustrates.
Feminist migration scholars have been insisting on women's agency in mi
gration. They seriously challenged the idea of migration as a male phenomenon
and that of migrant women constructed as dependents (mirrored in the expres
sions such as 'migrant workers and their families,' or 'women and children').
They have also focused on women migrants making independent choices or
taking the initiative for their own families, pioneering migration chains or being
the main breadwinners for their families (Chant, 1992; Kofman, 1999; Morok
vasic 1983, 1984, 1987, 1993; Oso, 1998; Pedraza, 1991; Safa, 1981, 1995).
In migration approaches which had the ambition to fill these gaps, so-called
'compensatory approaches' (Prodolliet, 1999), the tendency was to treat gender
as an additive and to reduce it to looking solely at women migrants and female
migration. Today there are a number of studies devoted to gender and migration
(Anthias & Lazaridis, 2000; Kelson & DeLaet, 1999; Kofman, Phizacklea,
Raghuram, & Sales, 2000; Willis & Yeoh, 2000) - a new generation of research
and inquiry which moves beyond the compensatory phase. Looking closely at
their contents, however, 'gender' often seems to have replaced 'women' in the
analysis.
Gendering migration does not only mean that one should be adding women
where they are missing. It means looking at processes and discourses in migra-
