‘A picture speaks a thousand words’

Abstract

ABSTRACT Using the visual diaries of a group of African women migrants now living in Johannesburg, this article explores what is now termed the “feminization of migration.” It does this less by drawing attention to the fact that women are moving than by using women's own images and narratives to reveal dimensions of that experience that have yet to be understood. Central to the article's argument is an assertion that images communicate to us in ways that can reveal not only the material conditions of groups that are often hidden from view, but also their own political locations, and society's own assumptions about them. Women's visual diaries and their narratives reveal the ways in which they negotiate the structural impediments of asylum officialdom, police harassment, patriarchy, unemployment and poverty. The research argues that current understandings of the feminization of migration fail to reveal the socio-cultural and political complexities of women's mobility on the African continent. Women are not the silent emissaries that dominant iconography portrays them as being. Their discursive practices and images “talk back” to society, sometimes subverting, while at other times reinforcing hegemonic modes of representations. Thus, while many have overcome significant structural hurdles in order to survive, they are not always heroines. Using visual methods the article reveals women's schemas – their ways of making sense of, and conceptualizing their worlds and experiences. This research offers an alternative way of reading the complexity of African women's mobility in the twenty-first century.