gender and migration: integrating feminist theory into migration studies

Gender and Migration: Integrating Feminist Theory intoMigration Studies

Stephanie J. Nawyn*Department of Sociology, Michigan State University

Abstract

In approximately three decades, gender and migration scholarship has moved from a few studiesthat included women immigrants or included gender as a dichotomous variable to a burgeoningliterature that has made significant contributions to understanding numerous aspects of the migra-tion experience. The larger field of migration studies, however, has not yet fully embraced femi-nist migration analysis and theory. In this article, I describe the development of gender andmigration research and its theoretical underpinnings. Afterward, I highlight the key contributionsthat feminist migration scholars have made to our knowledge of labor migration, migrant familiesand social networks, transnationalism and citizenship, sex trafficking, and sexuality. Consideringthese important contributions, I explore the reasons why feminist migration research still lies lar-gely outside the mainstream of the broader field and how it might achieve better integration.

Introduction

Scholars across many disciplines include measures of biological sex (i.e. male or female) intheir analysis, and migration studies are no exception. But there is a difference betweenthinking about sex differences with a dichotomous variable and integrating more complexgender analysis and theory into one’s work. In this article, I lay out the development ofgender and migration scholarship, from its beginnings of examining sex differences to itscurrent state in which gender is conceptualized as a fluid, multi-level set of practicesembedded in social relations shaped by race ⁄ ethnicity, class, sexuality, and nationality.I describe the theoretical orientation of the gender and migration literature emergingfrom sociology, and the theoretical contributions of gender and migration research. Mygoal is not to review all the empirical contributions feminists have made to migrationstudies, but rather to highlight their overarching theoretical arguments. I conclude byoffering suggestions about what the future might be for more tightly incorporating genderresearch into the broader field of migration studies.

I use the term ‘migration’ and ‘migrant’ to include any movement of people from onenation-state to another, and sometimes from one region of a state to another region inthat same state (commonly referred to as internal migration). Although in public policydiscourse the term ‘immigrant’ is more common, I only use that term to refer to peoplewho have entered a host country, and the term ‘emigrant’ only to refer to people whohave left a home country. While in the past it was common for migration scholars to usethe term ‘immigrant,’ with the emergence of research on transnationalism and globaliza-tion scholars have come to recognize the importance of thinking about migrants as bothpeople who have left a home country as well as people who have entered a host country(or people who have moved across many nation-state borders). Because most peoplestudying gender and migration use a feminist analytic lens, feminist methods, or feminist

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epistemologies, I often refer to gender and migration scholars as feminist migrationscholars.

The evolution of gender analysis in migration studies

The integration of gender analysis in migration studies first emerged in the 1970s andearly 1980s with a conception of gender as an individual-level, static category determinedat birth. Scholars have referred to this stage as the ‘add women and stir’ approach (Hon-dagneu-Sotelo 2000; Indra 1999; Kofman et al. 2000). This approach limited the empiri-cal analysis of gender to an individual-level analysis of differences between women andmen, using a binary variable of male versus female to measure gender. But it was animprovement over studies that paid no attention to gender differences or studied onlymen and generalized those findings to all migrants.

As the field evolved into the mid- and late-1980s, feminist migration scholars shiftedtheir analysis from studying women to studying gender, the difference being that insteadof contrasting women to men, they focused on gender as a system of relations which wasinfluenced by migration. The shift from studying women to studying gender is illustratedin the 1984 special issue of International Migration Review. While several articles maintainthe focus on sex differences (see Boyd 1984; Houstoun et al. 1984; and Kossoudji andRanney 1984 for examples), many articles mark a transition to analyzing women’s experi-ences within a system of gender relations. In her introduction to that issue, Morokvasic(1984) connects the decision to migrate and the postmigration experience with genderedsystems of inequality in households, labor markets, and cultures. The theoretical framethat Morokvasic lays out for that issue continued to be utilized by feminist migrationscholars through the remainder of the decade.

More recent scholarship has advanced to what Hondagneu-Sotelo (2003:9) called ‘gen-der as a constitutive element of immigration’ which examines how ‘gender permeates avariety of practices, identities, and institutions implicated in immigration.’ This stage ofgender and migration research has produced numerous and complex understandings ofhow gendered institutions and gender relations are reconstituted and transformed follow-ing migration through interactions of micro- and macro-level processes. The focus isexplicitly on gender, not just women, so research focusing on men examines theirexperiences as gendered beings (Figure 1). This research is also more interdisciplinary;

Figure 1. Men migrants follow gendered labor migration paths, and experience migration in particulargendered ways.

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cross-discipline conversations have produced migration scholarship which conceptualizesgender as a practice or ideology rather than a fixed biological category, and as a structurethat shapes power relations in families, communities, and whole societies. The 2006 Inter-national Migration Review special issue ‘Gender and Migration Revisited’ is just one fruitof those labors, in which Donato et al. (2006) provide a wonderful introduction that laysout the state of the field up to that point.

Theoretical orientation of gender and migration literature

The most recent stage of the evolution of the gender and migration literature drawsheavily upon gender relations theory (Connell 1987, 2002), particularly work that focuseson how gender relations shift as a consequence of migration and settlement. Connelldescribed four dimensions of gender relations (power, production, emotional, and sym-bolic relations) that interact with one another in social institutions, with each institutionhaving a particular regime of gender relations that shapes how people’s individual gen-der performance is constructed. Connell’s theory of gender relations allows room forindividual agents to change the structure of gender while still recognizing the constraintsput upon agency, and the mutually constitutive relationship between agency and struc-ture. Although her theory includes some elements of culture and discourse, it draws lar-gely upon structuralism, which makes it a good fit for the kind of modernistepistemology within which most U.S. and Canadian sociology of migration research ispositioned (i.e. research that focuses on structural influences on human behavior). Addi-tionally, because it theorizes gender as socially constructed within the bounds of largersocial institutions and structures, it provides feminist migration scholars with a way ofunderstanding the fluidity of gender power relations as they change under the influenceof macro-structures such as global labor markets and state ⁄ supra-state regimes. While notall gender and migration research carried out by sociologists explicitly utilizes gender rela-tions theory, much of it incorporates the basic elements of Connell’s model of how gen-dered practices are maintained or challenged and reconstructed.

Feminist theorizing has made fewer inroads into explanations of why certain peoplemigrate while others do not. This research generally remains mired in sex role theory,conceptualizing gender as a static category in which fixed roles for men and womenshape their migration behaviors (Hondagneu-Sotelo and Cranford 2006). There are nota-ble exceptions to this, in which feminist migration scholars have connected normativegendered expectations to macro-structural forces and individual agency of women andmen. In her work on migration originating in Asia, Oishi (2005) proposes what she callsan ‘integrative approach’ in which she combines structural elements (mostly state policies)with cultural norms and women’s access to power within their families to explain differ-ential rates of women’s migration from countries that are similarly located in global eco-nomic systems. Studies incorporating analysis of employer recruitment and state-employercooperation to increase certain labor flows have illustrated how shifting gender relationswithin families has opened up new opportunities for women to migrate and contributedto new female migration flows (Buchan 2007; Cheng 2003; George 2005; Parrenas2001). And some feminist studies of gender relations in migrant households have shownthat men’s and women’s roles are hardly static, but rather shift in accordance with thechanging socioeconomic contexts of sending and receiving countries (Hondagneu-Sotelo1994; Kibria 1993; Mahler 1999; Menjivar 2000). Migration scholarship emergingfrom anthropology, political philosophy, history, law, area studies, and non-U.S.- andCanadian-based sociology often incorporates more postmodern conceptions of gender,

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focusing on gender as a discursive category rather than a category with clearly definedboundaries as is typical of more modernist frameworks. Work by Manalansan (2006),Luibheid (2002), Phizacklea (2003) Calavita (2006), and Parrenas (2001) are excellentexamples of such work. These scholars attempt to push further the cracking of the genderbinary that one sees in much North American sociological work, focusing not just on thereconstruction of gender through the experience of migration but rather a complete frac-turing of gender completely.

But I do not want to overstate disciplinary differences or rifts. There are far morecommonalities than differences within the field of gender and migration studies, and thegeographic distinctions I have made here are far from absolute (for an excellent exampleof North American sociological scholarship that incorporates a postmodern discourseanalysis see Korteweg and Yurdikul 2009). In large part, this is because conversationsbetween feminist migration scholars across disciplines have been more productive thanconversations with those outside of feminist circles within disciplines. Earlier scholarslamented the absence of attention to gender in the larger field of migration studies(Morokvasic 1984; Pedraza 1991) and while the amount of migration scholarshipaddressing gender has skyrocketed since then, its integration into other aspects of themigration literature is still lacking (Gabaccia 1994; Harzig 2001; Hondagneu-Sotelo1999; Mahler and Pessar 2006). This may be a phenomenon that is particular to thestudy of migration, and not particular disciplines. Within sociology for example, Curranet al. (2006) found that among some of the top journals in sociology, gender-basedarticles were underrepresented in migration research compared to what existed insociology as a whole.

The larger migration field’s lack of attention to the gender scholarship in its midst pro-duces a blind spot in the field not just because of what goes unrecognized about womenmigrants, but about men migrants as well. Men are gendered beings who work in gen-dered labor markets, garner resources through gendered social networks, interact withinfamily relations shaped by gendered power dynamics, and are subject to gendered statepolicies and laws. In the following sections, I highlight just a few key areas in which fem-inist migration scholars have made significant theoretical contributions to the interdisci-plinary field of migration studies.

Studies of gender and labor migration

Most migrants enter a new country entirely or in part to seek economic opportunities,and the whole of the migration literature focuses largely on labor migrants. This was alsothe focus of gender and migration research, particularly early on in its development. Butfeminist migration scholars have found that the explanations of men’s economic migrationdo not apply to women (Kana’iaupuni 2000). Neo-classical economic (Borjas 1989;Massey et al. 1993; Sjaastad 1962) and Marxist political economic theories of migration(Breman 1985; Shrestha 1988) have been a primary target of feminist criticism and revi-sion, as those theories conceptualize migrants as purely rational actors embedded in socialcontexts devoid of gendered power relations. Even the theory of the new economics ofmigration, which positions households at the center of analysis, treats households ashomogenous groups with a shared moral economy, acting rationally in the collectiveinterest of household members. Feminist migration scholarship has uncovered the conflictand tension within migrant households emerging from gendered power relations, usingwhat I and my colleagues (Nawyn et al. 2009) refer to as a critical household lens.Through this lens, scholars have revealed the ways in which the migration process (from



the decision to migrate through the period of settlement in and adaptation to the hostsociety) is intricately tied to gender relations (Anthias 2000; Fapohunda 1988; Folbre1988; Grasmuck and Pessar 1991; Hondagneu-Sotelo 1992, 1994; Kofman et al. 2000;Truong 1996) (Figure 2).

Feminist migration scholarship has uncovered a variety of gendered patterns of eco-nomic push and pull dynamics that lead to different migration experiences for womenmigrants compared to men. Whole industries have shifted to hiring predominantly immi-grant women (Safa 1981; Tienda et al. 1984), yet immigrant women still face many dis-advantages in their access to social networks (Livingston 2006; Menjivar 1999, 2000) thatshapes their costs and benefits of migrating. Immigrant women’s opportunities foremployment are not only shaped by opportunities in the host country by home countryopportunities as well. For example, women’s access to education in their home countriesaffects their competitiveness with male compatriots vying for limited immigration visas(Donato 1992). And home cultural norms have been found to have a greater influenceover some immigrant women’s likelihood of employment than their human capital char-acteristics (Heering et al. 2004; Read 2004).

Two threads within this area of research that have drawn the most attention from fem-inist migration scholars recently are the findings on employer preferences for immigrantwomen workers and the effects of increased labor market participation on women’spower within their families. Employers seeking workers in domestic carework (Hondag-neu-Sotelo 2001; Lan 2003), light manufacturing (Espiritu 1997), and service industries(Tyner 2003) have shown preferences for immigrant women workers as a moreexploitable source of labor than men or native-born women. These preferences have

Figure 2. Some immigrant women have made inroads into small business ownership within industriessuch as garment making, often hiring other immigrant women as laborers.



been accommodated by institutions in the sending countries that facilitate labor migrationof their nationals (George 2005; Rodriguez 1999, 2005; Tyner 2003). Conversely, thepreferences for single immigrant men (either unmarried or without their spouses or chil-dren present) in agricultural jobs led to specific state policies designed to recruit migrantmen from the Philippines (Teodoro 1981) and Mexico (Galarza 1964). Feminist scholarsargue that it is the employer preferences and the institutional support those preferenceshave received (support that often comes from the sending and receiving states themselves)that has shaped the prevalence of immigrant women and men in particular occupations,and not the mere presence of immigrants alone.

Next I review briefly the literature on women migrants’ increased familial power thatresults from their greater economic power in the next section, as there is a rich literaturethat examines the intersections of labor market participation and family life for immigrantwomen. In some cases, immigrant women move fluidly between performing work that ispaid and that which is done as a ‘labor of love’ (Lan 2003; Piper and Roces 2003), per-forming the same types of care work as part of relationship obligations rather thanthrough paid employment. This research illustrates the ways in which large structuressuch as global labor markets interact with individual-level interactions within households,shaping women’s and men’s power vis-a-vis gendered structures operating at both macro-and micro-levels.

Gender relations in migrant families and social networks

Perhaps the most significant contributions that feminist migration scholars have made tothe field (and certainly the most prolific contributions) have been in the study of migranthouseholds, family relations, and social networks. First, the decision to migrate and theopportunities that facilitate migration are often nested in household gender relations.Increasing economic opportunities for women migrants has contributed to a feminizationof migration (Castles and Miller 1993), with women seeking employment opportunitiesin domestic work (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001; Mattingly 1999; Parrenas 2001; Romero2002), healthcare (Donato and Tyree 1986; George 2005; Kingma 2007; Tyner 2003),and sex work (Lutz 1997; Morokvasic 1993).

But women may also be drawn into migration for non-economic reasons, such as toflee violence from a partner (Adams 2002; Gamburd 2000; Hart 1997; Minter 2002;Phizacklea 2003) or from widespread systematic violence, such as that which createsmajor refugee flows (Boyd 1999; Coven 1995; Hyndman 1998; Indra 1987, 1999; Mah-mud 1996). While men also migrate to escape violence and persecution, women areoften more vulnerable to such experiences in part because they either hold subordinatedpositions within households (as well as the larger society) or because as the transmitters ofethnic culture in their families women are targeted as representatives of a subordinatednation (Albanese 2001; Enloe 2000; Hodge 2007; McClintock 1996; Sackellares 2005;Silverman et al. 2007; Smith 1991; Yuval-Davis 1997). International marriage marketshave increased women’s migration. Many women migrating as ‘mail order brides’ arecoming from the Former Soviet Union, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and SoutheastAsia, following similar paths taken by labor migrants moving to wealthier countries(Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003).

Migration theories generally stipulate that while migration flows first emerge from inte-grated economic relationships between states or regions or from violent upheavals andinternational political ⁄ military relationships, those flows are sustained through socialnetworks. Social networks provide a structure through which potential migrants gain



resources (such as material assistance or useful information) that lower the financial costsof migration, lower the risks associated with migrating, and make incorporation into thehost society easier (Boyd 1989; Curran and Rivero-Fuentes 2003; Curran et al. 2005;Gold 2005; Kana’iaupuni et al. 2005; Massey and Espana 1987; Massey et al. 1993; Win-ters et al. 2001). Normative gendered expectations shape the kinds of social networks towhich men and women have access. For example, where women are expected to main-tain close family ties they have greater access to kin social networks than men, and wheretheir sexual relationships (either real or perceived) are closely proscribed they have lessaccess to non-kin networks consisting of mostly men (Curran and Saguy 2001; Grasmuckand Pessar 1991; Menjivar 1995, 2000). Women are also more likely to be connected tomostly female networks, and men to mostly male networks; if these networks have differ-ent levels of resources to offer, the men and women connected to those networks willhave more or less resources at their disposal (Curran and Rivero-Fuentes 2003; Curranet al. 2005).

Most gender and migration research focuses on the period after one migrates, examin-ing the gendered processes of integration and adaptation to the host society. In particular,this research uncovers the transformation of gender relations as a result of the specific pat-terns of migration and how the shift in economic relations shapes family (specifically het-erosexual family) relations. Because of gender-specific labor demands, a ‘family stagemigration’ often occurs in which one partner (often the husband) migrates without his orher spouse or children (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1992; Toro-Morn 1995). When families areseparated through migration, women and men must often adopt new cultural practicesthat upend their previous status and responsibilities in their families. Husbands must learnhow to cook and clean, and wives develop more autonomy during their husbands’absence (George 2005; Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994). Cultural norms regarding genderedpractices are challenged, although several scholars have found those norms to be surpris-ingly durable despite the structural difficulties families face in maintaining them (Dreby2006; Kibria 1994). Some research has found that immigrant women find even thechanges that challenge patriarchal authority in their families to be disruptive and unwel-come. Challenging immigrant men’s patriarchal authority also challenges immigrantwomen’s authority as mothers (Gold 1992; Kibria 1993, 1994), and can leave immigrantwomen worse off in cases of spousal abuse (Bui 2004; Bui and Morash 1999; Sokoloff2008). Some immigrant women may need to leave children behind in their home coun-tries to seek employment opportunities in other counties. Practicing ‘transnational moth-erhood’ (Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997) puts strains on mother’s relationships withtheir children, as long distances challenge the expectations put upon mothers by them-selves, their communities, and their own children (Dreby 2009; Hondagneu-Sotelo andAvila 1997; Menjivar and Abrego 2009; Parrenas 2000, 2005). As a method of copingwith this strain, women generally present their decision to migrate as an extension oftheir mothering responsibilities, as it allows them to provide necessary remittances for thecare of their children (Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997; Mahler 1999; Menjivar andAbrego 2009; Pessar 1986). Fathers also experience difficulties with their identities asgood parents when separated from their children; despite the fact that they feel they arecaring for their families by sending home remittances, they frequently feel reproached fortheir long absences (Dreby 2006, 2009; Mahler 1999). But when fathers form new unionsin the United States, they often stop remitting to avoid conflict with their new partner;mothers, however, rarely stop remitting after forming new unions (Menjivar and Abrego2009) (Figure 3).



Feminist migration research has also explored gender among immigrant children, boththe first (foreign-born) and second (native-born with foreign-born parents) generations.Studies of second generation Caribbean children indicate that girls experience more suc-cess in school than boys in part because they are motivated to succeed and avoid the hardlife their mothers lead (Lopez 2003). American-born children of immigrant parents oftenbristle under the weight of their parents’ cultural expectations (which frequently run con-trary to American cultural norms), and daughters bear a much greater responsibility thansons to uphold cultural norms. These norms often involve sexual purity and virtue, soconsequently second generation girls experience much less freedom than boys (Espiritu2001, 2009). However, migration presents a new set of cultural norms that can be usedto negotiate with normative values of sexuality from the sending country, belying theidea that ‘traditional’ culture is somehow stagnant and immutable (Gonzales-Lopez 2005).Innovative research emerging from the area of transnational studies has examined the par-ent–child relations of children who have stayed in their home country while their parentsmigrated to find work. These studies revealed the conflicts and resentment toward theirparents (especially toward mothers, although fathers are not immune) that the childrenleft behind feel (Dreby 2006; Parrenas 2005).

Institutions in the home and sending countries also shape the gender relations of womenand men in migrant families. Policies and laws regarding immigration define what consti-tutes a family, systematically excluding kin ties outside of heterosexual, nuclear familiesfrom family reunification opportunities (Luibheid 2005; Manalansan 2006). Women maybe targeted for persecution because of their affiliation as family members of men that thegovernment or other entities consider harmful, or they may be targeted to punish malefamily members that are the primary concern of the persecutors (Crawley 2001). Conse-quently, women’s asylum applications are less frequently approved than men’s applications(Kelly 1993). In my own work, I have found that non-governmental organizations that

Figure 3. Care work is a common occupation for immigrant women from developing countries, whosometimes leave their own children behind to make money caring for children in developed countries.



resettle refugees shape the opportunities that refugee women have to challenge patriarchy,often facilitating challenges to household patriarchal relations while simultaneously reaf-firming patriarchal capitalism in the labor market (Nawyn 2010).

New directions in gender and migration research

Some exciting new developments have happened in the gender and migration literaturein the past decade, much of it emerging from transnational and globalization theoreticalframes such as that laid out by Mahler and Pessar (2001), Pessar and Mahler (2003) andSassen (1998, 1999). This research explores the transnational landscape of gender andpower, and further fractures the binary of gender by positioning gender practices withinnot just a social location that includes race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, and nationality butalso a context of place and history. Gendered systems of power span the globe (such asglobal capitalism, which is rife with patriarchal constraints imposed upon women andsubordinated men) but are not evenly distributed (for example, global capitalism imposesdifferent levels and kinds of constraints upon women in different places). Thus, Parrenas(2008) argues that women migrate from one patriarchal system to another, and eventhough they may find new barriers to autonomy in the host country, they also find newopportunities and new ways to negotiate for additional power (Figure 4).

The gender and transnational ⁄ globalization literature has also generated new ideasabout women migrants’ access to citizenship. I am not referring here to legal citizenshipnarrowly, but rather I am using the term broadly to encompass ‘rights (political, civil,social) or membership (affiliation, belonging, exclusion)… [or] relationships among citi-zens, between citizens and governments, and between levels of governments’ (Jackson2009:439). Ong’s (1999) work in this area has shown how the state’s interest in a particu-

Figure 4. Immigrant women can integrate home cultural expectations and practices with those oftheir receiving society and may adopt more conservative gendered behaviors in their receiving societyas a way of setting themselves apart culturally.



lar family configuration (i.e. whatever configuration is determined to be in the best inter-ests of the nation-state) creates connections between what she calls ‘the moral economyof the family with the moral economy of the state’ (p.152). Therefore, women’s access tocitizenship in the state is constrained by their rights within that family configuration.Benhabib and Resnik (2009) recently produced an edited volume on gender and citizen-ship which mobilizes the analytic lenses of human rights and feminism to interrogate newpatterns of control in state sovereignty, transnational legal regimes, and global patriarchies.Their book brings gender theory to bear upon citizenship and migration studies, but alsouses emerging findings on citizenship to inform gender theory. They argue that ‘whenone inflects citizenship, sovereignty, and migration theories with gender analysis, newquestions emerge both about feminist conceptions of women and men and about politicaltheories of the state’ (2009:5).

Related to global or supra-national rights for women, there is a growing body of femi-nist migration scholarship on sex trafficking. One of the fastest forms of organized crime(United Nations 2002), sex trafficking has become a growing component to the overallmovement of peoples across borders. But despite its growing importance and its connec-tion to systems of exploitation and gendered demands for women’s labor that encouragesmore voluntary forms of migration, research on sex trafficking is not widely incorporatedinto the broader migration literature. Despite calls from some scholars that trafficking beconceptualized as one end of a continuum of labor migration (Mix and Piper 2003; Piperand Roces 2003) and the connections feminist scholars have made between sex traffickingand other forms of violence that uproot women from their homelands (Davidson 2001;Watts and Zimmerman 2002), the field of migration studies has not incorporated muchof the findings from this important research. Research on trafficking, while still relativelysmall compared to that available on voluntary labor migration, exhibits a great dealof affinity with the transnational migration literature and is a promising area of futurestudy for feminist migration scholars despite the difficulties such research presentsmethodologically.

Finally, similar attempts to challenge binaries of gender and nation can be seen inthe growing body of research on migration and sexuality. In particular, the researchthat is grounded in queer theory presents the most binary-fracturing (and sometimesmind-bending) critiques of the very foundations of gender and nation. These critiquesinclude the ways in which immigration enforcement policies such as asylum law actu-ally construct sexual bodies and practices, rather than merely adjudicating the law onneutral (and neutered) individuals (Cantu et al. 2005; Luibheid 2002; Randazzo 2005).And turning a queer theory eye to migrant heterosexual family life has revealed howeven seemingly private acts and desires are bound up in economic interests (Cantu2001).

Can feminist migration research permeate the larger field of migration studies?

What is most striking to me as someone who reads a great deal of gender and migrationresearch is the consistent refrain that begins so many articles and books; that despite theimportance of including gender analysis in migration studies, gender (and often women)continue to be largely ignored. There is strong evidence to support this assertion, but lit-tle hypothesizing as to why it is happening. Perhaps the lack of attention is caused bysexism, in that non-feminist migration scholars do not take women or their experiencesseriously, and thus do not give women migrants or gender serious scholarly attention orincorporate gender into their migration theories. Or perhaps it is something more subtle,



an androcentric bias emerging from a long-held assumption that most migrants have beenmen, as DeLaet (1999) argues. It is also possible, as Lawson (1998) suggests, that thedynamic nature of gender is difficult to capture with quantitative data, and thus theresearch that relies on survey data (which represents a large proportion of the migrationarticles published in the top sociology journals) is methodologically limited to measuringsex differences.

But I argue that the work of feminist migration scholars has in fact been embraced inparticular areas of migration studies, most notably in studies on immigrant families. Theabsence of a gender analysis in migration is most apparent in theories of why peoplemigrate and how migrants improve their standing in the host country over time. Thesetwo areas of migration research (the theory of migration itself and theories of assimilation)are intricately tied to the economics of migration. Studies of the economics of migration(both the economic forces the drive people to migrate and the economic upward ordownward mobility of migrants) have been a major pillar in the field of migration studies.Particularly in the United States, much of the mainstream migration research published inleading sociological journals seeks to elucidate the economic well-being of migrants, oftenwith an eye for arguing that migration is a net benefit to the United States and somethingAmericans should support; this approach is most obvious in Portes’s and Rumbaut’s semi-nal work, Immigrant America (2006), now in its third edition. So while there are manyother vibrant strands of research within migration studies, within the sociology of migra-tion (particularly work conducted by North American scholars) analysis of economics hasbeen most visible. It is also the area within migration studies which has seen the leastintegration with feminist migration research.

Cantu (2001) argued that non-feminist migration scholars have viewed economics as amacro-level structure that has greater explanatory power than individual-level characteris-tics, gender being one of those. Thus, ‘gender was perceived as a social factor subsumed bythe economic or considered to be a variable of analysis, like age or education, that simplyneeded to be added to migration studies’ (p.115). While Cantu was referring to the migra-tion field up to the 1990s, many migration scholars today still conflate gender with sex cate-gory, treating it as a demographic variable to be controlled in a model and requiring noserious analytic attention. Moch (2005) makes a related critique of migration research, argu-ing that it is the failure of migration scholars to think about gender as a dynamic and criticalconcept that prohibits the broader field of migration studies from incorporating feministmigration research. She writes that gender ‘is a most revelatory concept when it is used as anorganizing principle to elucidate the experiences of both men and women… for this reason,gender can be a central construct fruitfully used to interrogate and analyze immigrants andthe migration process, using a variety of distinct methodologies’ (p. 101).

Embedded in this feminist conceptualization of gender is the notion of power. Whilemost migration scholarship recognizes the social inequality experienced by migrants, mostnon-feminist scholars that study economic assimilation (again, particularly those in NorthAmerica) do not analyze that inequality through the lens of critical social theory. Silvey(2004) credits feminist migration scholars for integrating critical social theory (by whichshe is referring to theory that questions taken-for-granted definitions of boundary andspace used in positivist research) into the geographic study of migration. Questioning theheteronormativity of migration policy, destabilizing masculinity and its privilege, anduncovering the political implications of how work itself is defined are all ways in whichcritical social theory has contributed to migration scholarship. Analyzing migrationthrough a critical social theoretical lens, Silvey asserts, has illuminated power relations inthe migration process that would otherwise be invisible. Feminist migration research



could do the same for the sociology of migration, greatly benefiting the existing work onthe economics of migration that continues to be largely androcentric, or that analyzes sexdifferences rather than gender relations.

What feminist migration scholars have made clear is that gender is more than an indi-vidual-level binary category ascribed at birth. In fact, some feminist scholars would arguethat gender is not an individual characteristic at all. It is, rather, a system of power rela-tions that permeates every aspect of the migration experience. One cannot understandthe opportunities or barriers to migrate, nor the economic upward mobility of some andthe downward mobility of others, nor the desire to settle or return, without understand-ing how migrants are embedded in a gendered system of relations, with one another andwith macro-structures such as global labor markets or states. Where once feminist scholarsmade claims that studying women in migration was important, now we must push theidea that the structures that precipitate migration flows and shape the economic experi-ences of all migrants are gendered, as this is what makes feminist migration research socritical to the larger field.

What would such an integration of feminist conceptions of gender in migration scholar-ship look like? Analytically, this would require migration research to focus on gender andnot women, per Hondagneu-Sotelo’s and Cranford’s (2006) and Moch’s (2005) recom-mendations. Methodologically, it would necessitate greater integration of the survey datathat is often used to produce androcentric explanations of migration with the feministqualitative data that has uncovered the bias of such research. Ethnographic work lendsitself well to analyzing gender as a dynamic concept, as it is easier to capture the dynamicnature of gender in ethnographic work than with the snapshots in time that survey datausually represent. However, quantitative researchers can and do incorporate feminist theo-retical contributions, and are generally well equipped to analyze gender operating at amacro-level. Utilizing feminist conceptions of gender (rather than a simple binary variablemeasuring sex category) shapes what variables quantitative scholars choose to analyze (forexample, including measures of children and their ages in the household, which has differ-ent effects on the earnings of women and men) and how they choose to interpret theirfindings (i.e. recognizing the gendered structures shaping male and female migrants livesrather than attributing outcomes to individual choice or static ‘sex roles’). Recent researchon labor and migration utilizing survey data that exemplify this approach are Semyonovand Gorodzeisky (2005), Waldinger (2001), and Torres Stone et al. (2006).

And feminist migration scholars should be encouraged to pursue work that dialogueswith and presents challenges to androcentric research on the economics of migration. Inparticularly, feminist migration scholars need to demonstrate how gender and sexualityeach act as an axis of power relations that ‘shapes and organizes processes of migrationand modes of incorporation’ (Cantu 2009:31–32). They would do well to make theirwork more comparative, as suggested by Oishi (2005), to identify the gendered structuresacting on migration flows. All of that is a tall order to fill. But if feminist migrationscholars can more successfully make the argument that gender is more than an individual-level control variable within the broader field, and other migration scholars are willing tolisten, we will likely see more integration and less segregation (per Curran et al.’s 2006framework) of gender in migration research.

Short Biography

Stephanie J. Nawyn is an assistant professor in Sociology at Michigan State University.Her research and teaching areas of expertise are in gender, immigration, family, and race



and ethnicity. Dr Nawyn conducts research on how community organizations contributeto immigrant and refugee incorporation, and on the socioeconomic advancement of Afri-can-born immigrants in the United States. She has also recently published work on thegendered precipitates of migration.

Note

* Correspondence address: Stephanie J. Nawyn, Department of Sociology, Michigan State University, 316 BerkeyHall, East Lansing, MI 48824–1111, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

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