Gender, Sexuality, and Migration

Abstract

Women have always migrated. Yet, earlier gender and migration debates on the “feminization of migration” have largely downplayed this reality, implying that women have only recently begun to migrate. To the contrary, as early as 1984 Mirjana Morokvasic reminded us, in an article titled “Birds of Passage Are Also Women,” that female migrants began outnumbering male migrants entering the United States as early as the 1930s (Morokvasic 1984, cited under Overview). As Martha Gardner’s exhaustive historical analysis of immigration regulations illustrates—Gardner 2006, cited under Gender and the State—the United States had historically curtailed the migration of independent women, thus limiting women’s migration as dependents who followed male family members. Since then, women migrants have crossed international borders and entered the United States and other advanced capitalist societies as independent migrants, responding primarily to the demand for their labor as nurses, domestic workers, factory workers, and sex workers. Pioneering feminist migration scholars in the 1980s first questioned the invisibility of women in mainstream knowledge production of migration. While they initially called just for the inclusion of women, since the 1990s scholars have demanded the incorporation of a gendered perspective in mainstream migration research, urging an examination of the various ways gender constitutes migration. Contemporary scholarship on gender and migration has focused on the constitution of gender in the macro context by analyzing the ways gender informs the political economy of migration. Focusing on the meso level, a larger group of scholars has interrogated how migration reshapes gender relations and accordingly the position of men and women in institutions such as the migrant family. Finally, others have examined the micropolitics of gender by examining the subjectivities of migrant women, particularly as mothers or cosmopolitan adventurers. Since the 1980s, we have also witnessed growing recognition of the global scope of women’s migration and the decentering of the United States and the West in contemporary empirical investigations of migrants’ gendered experiences. These works highlight how women migrate as workers, wives, and students to not only North America or Europe but also to Latin America and Asia. Migrant women also originate from disparate countries and regions, with larger groups coming from Mexico and Central America, Southeast Asia, in particular, Indonesia and the Philippines, and eastern Europe. However, gender and migration scholarship’s focus on women’s experiences has been criticized for privileging heteronormative assumptions about gender and for neglecting to incorporate the perspectives of men and sexual minorities. Masculinity studies have attempted to address such gaps in existing gender and migration scholarship by challenging the primacy of Western hegemonic masculinity. Likewise, the literature on sexuality and migration has challenged heteronormative assumptions underpinning migration theories and conceptualizations, insisting that sexuality is central to the regulation of migration and migrant experiences. This annotated bibliography provides an overview of the study of gender, sexuality, and migration. It begins with studies that provide a big picture of the study of gender and migration. It then proceeds to highlight how gender shapes institutions of migration (the state, family) followed by case studies of different groups of migrant women (students, brides, sex workers, domestic workers). Finally, it addresses thematic issues central to our understanding of gender and migration (trafficking, sexuality, masculinity). The dominance of US-centered studies in gender and migration research is reflected in this bibliography.