The Elgar Companion to Gender and Global Migration: Beyond Western Research 1802201254, 9781802201253

Table of contents :
Front Matter
Copyright
Contents
Contributors
1. Introduction to The Elgar Companion to Gender and Global Migration
PART I BACKGROUND
2. A state-of-the-art review and future directions in gender and migration research
3. Revisiting the gender, migration and development nexus through the circulation of assets approach
4. The absent image of women: lacunae in the legacy of French colonial mobilities
PART II LATIN AMERICA
5. Extractivism, forced gendered migration and resistance in Latin America and the Caribbean
6. Women and punishment in Abya Yala
7. Scientific mobilities in the twentieth century: Gustaf Bolinder’s photographs of indigenous women in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta
8. Embodying ethnic and labor relations: indigenous women and US–Mexico labor mobility circuits in the agrifood industry
9. Desértica Feminista: collision of theories, identity, and [im]migrant–border encounters
10. Women’s mobilities: a on gender and care in the Amazon
11. Lack of opportunities for indigenous young women in Guatemala: forced mobility and absence of social protection systems
PART III ASIA
12. A study of the lives of internally displaced women after the Fukushima disaster
13. Chinese internal migration dynamics as a way of understanding globalization and gender
14. Shifting migrant categories and recast boundaries in China: transnational women in family migration
15. Qualified Brazilian migrant women in Dubai: constraints, agency, and change in the migratory process
16. In the eye of the storm: Afghan women and girls navigating displacement
17. Gender conflict and forced migration in India: human rights perspectives
18. Remittances, migration and economic abuse: ‘invisible in plain sight’
PART IV AFRICA
19. Women and cross-border trade between Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo
20. The Anglophone crisis and migratory patterns in Cameroon: some social and economic implications for women
21. Humanitarian tropes in the Casamance: presumptions about gender-based violence in conflict and displacement contexts
PART V THE MEDITERRANEAN
22. Missing in the Mediterranean: a perspective from Tunisian mothers
23. Origins of extreme violence in Palermo: health (infectious) impact of the trans-Saharan/Mediterranean route for women on the move
24. Gender and humanitarian issues in transitional shelter processes: the cases of Syrian refugees and displaced communities by the earthquake in Haiti
25. Sub-Saharan and Syrian women’s embodying migration experiences in Casablanca
PART VI EUROPE
26. Globalization and health: gender issues in temporary agricultural work (Huelva)
27. Squatting in a “home”: intersectional struggles of migrant women in Lucha y Siesta (Rome)
Index

Citation preview

THE ELGAR COMPANION TO GENDER AND GLOBAL MIGRATION

I tell my students, ‘When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.’

The Elgar Companion to Gender and Global Migration Beyond Western Research

Edited by

Natalia Ribas-Mateos Maria Zambrano Researcher, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain, and Mesopolhis, Aix-Marseille University, France

Saskia Sassen Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology and Member of the Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University, USA

Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

© Natalia Ribas-Mateos and Saskia Sassen 2022

Cover image: ‘Multitud’ (Crowd) by Anna Agustí Hontagas. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited The Lypiatts 15 Lansdown Road Cheltenham Glos GL50 2JA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2022944499 This book is available electronically in the Sociology, Social Policy and Education subject collection http://dx.doi.org/10.4337/9781802201260

ISBN 978 1 80220 125 3 (cased) ISBN 978 1 80220 126 0 (eBook)

EEP BoX

Contents

List of contributorsviii 1

Introduction to The Elgar Companion to Gender and Global Migration1 Natalia Ribas-Mateos and Saskia Sassen

PART I

BACKGROUND

2

A state-of-the-art review and future directions in gender and migration research 24 Laura Lamas-Abraira

3

Revisiting the gender, migration and development nexus through the circulation of assets approach Laura Oso

4

The absent image of women: lacunae in the legacy of French colonial mobilities49 Natalia Ribas-Mateos

PART II

38

LATIN AMERICA

5

Extractivism, forced gendered migration and resistance in Latin America and the Caribbean María del Carmen Villarreal and Enara Muñoz

6

Women and punishment in Abya Yala Elisabet Almeda Samaranch, Clara Camps Calvet and Dino Di Nella

7

Scientific mobilities in the twentieth century: Gustaf Bolinder’s photographs of indigenous women in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta Alexandra Martínez

110

8

Embodying ethnic and labor relations: indigenous women and US– Mexico labor mobility circuits in the agrifood industry Laura Velasco Ortiz

125

9

Desértica Feminista: collision of theories, identity, and [im]migrant– border encounters Ma. Eugenia Hernández Sánchez and Cynthia Bejarano

134

10

Women’s mobilities: a blacklight on gender and care in the Amazon José Miguel Nieto Olivar, Fabio Magalhães Candotti and Flávia Melo

v

85 98

148

vi  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration 11

Lack of opportunities for indigenous young women in Guatemala: forced mobility and absence of social protection systems Aracely Martínez Rodas, Ángel del Valle and Ramón Zamora

162

PART III ASIA 12

A study of the lives of internally displaced women after the Fukushima disaster 173 Anne Gonon

13

Chinese internal migration dynamics as a way of understanding globalization and gender Amelia Sáiz López

181

14

Shifting migrant categories and recast boundaries in China: transnational women in family migration Chieh Hsu

188

15

Qualified Brazilian migrant women in Dubai: constraints, agency, and change in the migratory process Raquel Nazário Motta, Marcos Linhares Goes and Jorge Malheiros

197

16

In the eye of the storm: Afghan women and girls navigating displacement Mandana Hendessi

212

17

Gender conflict and forced migration in India: human rights perspectives Rita Machanda

222

18

Remittances, migration and economic abuse: ‘invisible in plain sight’ Supriya Singh and Jasvinder Sidhu

233

PART IV AFRICA 19

Women and cross-border trade between Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo Asaf Augusto and Lesley Braun

241

20

The Anglophone crisis and migratory patterns in Cameroon: some social and economic implications for women Tassah Ivo Tawe and Henri Yambene Bomono

254

21

Humanitarian tropes in the Casamance: presumptions about gender-based violence in conflict and displacement contexts Markus Rudolf

265

PART V 22

THE MEDITERRANEAN

Missing in the Mediterranean: a perspective from Tunisian mothers Sofia Stimmatini and Constance De Gourcy

278

Contents  vii 23

Origins of extreme violence in Palermo: health (infectious) impact of the trans-Saharan/Mediterranean route for women on the move Tullio Prestileo and Natalia Ribas-Mateos

24

Gender and humanitarian issues in transitional shelter processes: the cases of Syrian refugees and displaced communities by the earthquake in Haiti 301 Patricia Muñiz and Luciano G. Alfaya

25

Sub-Saharan and Syrian women’s embodying migration experiences in Casablanca311 Fadma Ait Mous, Sana Benbelli and Sarah Ettallab

287

PART VI EUROPE 26

Globalization and health: gender issues in temporary agricultural work (Huelva)324 Angels Escrivà

27

Squatting in a “home”: intersectional struggles of migrant women in Lucha y Siesta (Rome) Chiara Denaro

334

Index352

Contributors

Luciano G. Alfaya Asaf Augusto Cynthia Bejarano Sana Benbelli Henri Yambene Bomono

Lesley Braun Clara Camps Calvet Fabio Magalhães Candotti Chiara Denaro Angels Escrivà Sarah Ettallab Marcos Linhares Goes Anne Gonon Constance De Gourcy Mandana Hendessi Chieh Hsu Laura Lamas-Abraira

Amelia Sáiz López Rita Machanda Jorge Malheiros

Alexandra Martínez Flávia Melo Raquel Nazário Motta Fadma Ait Mous Patricia Muñiz

Universidad San Jorge, Zaragoza, Spain University of Bayreuth, Germany New Mexico State University, USA Hassan II University of Casablanca, Morocco National Centre for Education, Ministry of Scientific Research and Innovation, Cameroon University of Basel, Switzerland Dept. of Sociology, University of Barcelona, Spain Federal University of Amazonas, Brazil Trento University, Italy Universidad de Huelva, Spain Hassan II University of Casablanca, Morocco Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, Portugal Doshisha University, Japan Aix-Marseille Université, France Social Development Consultant, London, UK Department of Sociology, National Taiwan University, Taiwan Researcher for the Access IN (Social Inclusion and Access to Basic Services of Third-Country Nationals) project, UAB INTERASIA-UAB, Spain South Asia Forum for Human Rights, India Associate Professor and Researcher – Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning, University of Lisbon, Portugal Departamento de Sociología, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Colombia Federal University of Amazonas, Brazil Faculty of Psychology of the University of Lisbon, Portugal Hassan II University of Casablanca, Morocco Universidade Federal de Alagoas, Brazil viii

Contributors  ix Enara Muñoz Dino Di Nella José Miguel Nieto Olivar Laura Velasco Ortiz Laura Oso Tullio Prestileo Natalia Ribas-Mateos Aracely Martínez Rodas Markus Rudolf Elisabet Almeda Samaranch Ma. Eugenia Hernández Sánchez Saskia Sassen Jasvinder Sidhu Supriya Singh Sofia Stimmatini Tassah Ivo Tawe Ángel del Valle María del Carmen Villarreal Ramón Zamora

Complutense University of Madrid, Spain University of Barcelona, Spain University of São Paulo, Brazil El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, Mexico ESOMI, University of A Coruña, Spain Infection Disease & Health, Migration Unit, Palermo Civic Hospital, Italy Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain and Mesopolhis, Aix-Marseille University, France Universidad del Valle de Guatemala, Guatemala Bonn International Centre for Conflict Studies, Germany Dept. of Sociology, University of Barcelona, Spain Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, Mexico Columbia University, USA Federation University Australia, Australia College of Business and Law, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium National Centre for Education, Ministry of Scientific Research and Innovation, Cameroon Population Council, Guatemala Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Universidad del Valle de Guatemala, Guatemala

1. Introduction to The Elgar Companion to Gender and Global Migration Natalia Ribas-Mateos and Saskia Sassen

1.

OVERVIEW: CROWDS, MOBILITY AND NEW NARRATIVES

From our perspective of the world, in this chapter we would like to explore the narrative of world history and the research relationship to global narratives, asserting that the history of migration becomes more, not less, significant under conditions of globalization, a key subject, while maintaining a belief in the distinct nature of contemporary globalization. In this introduction, we will follow a century’s trajectory in order to understand particular features concerning capitalist globalization and the relationship between global capital accumulation and changes to gender and migration paths. Logically, there would be many ways to develop the diverse periods and their different denominations. The period we aim to cover and analyse begins, according to our literature review, with the 1980s and is marked by neoliberalism, the settlement of a migration-driven sociology, and the analytical changes of women studies towards gender studies. By tracing the interlinking histories of globalization, gender, and migration, we also wind up recognizing the Western European origins of neoliberal globalized capitalism. What, then, are the forces driving these types of changes in our research? And perhaps more specifically, what is the future of this line of research? And what will such a reconfiguration of the analysis of migrations add to emergent formats? Notably here is the rise of world global powers and the partly unstoppable migrations originating in more and more countries. The familiar ways of reading and explaining migrations may well undergo deep and unexpected types of transformations in such future contexts of global capitalism as a world system. The notion of change has guided most of our work, as we have sought to identify how complex systems change. In our reading of changes during the 1980s, we do see how the system has changed; these complex systems do not transform everything, but they modify just enough to make a considerable difference, and we think this is what has happened, be it in the analysis of global narratives or, more specifically, changes in the relationships between locations, such as the Global North with the Global South,1 in terms of gender and migration.

1 We can find multiple examples in this clash between the Global North and the Global South. A good illustration related to research is knowledge production. For example, one of the first systematic introductions to gender and migration in Southern Europe is the work by King and Zontini (2000). However, this article was not created in the English-speaking production system, so it was less recognized. We also understand that there are many questions about the Global South that are not covered in conventional social sciences perspectives or in a more classic social-theoretical approach. and that there is a need to search for a common background, to use the Global South as a critical concept (see in our references section the works of Amar, De Sousa Santos, the Comaroffs, Halim and Wa Ngugi). In our

1

2  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration Moreover, our examination of recent migration flows opens a window into the larger dynamics that catapult people into migrating. Our proposed narratives may thus be seen in a wider scope, as our objective is nothing less than to grasp our own epochal transformation – the end of one historical period in human history and the radically uncertain and complex emergence of another. For the past 25 years, we have charted the unbundling of the nation-state system and the bifurcation of social, political and economic processes leading to the global turbulence we are experiencing today. The main effort has been to recover a politics among the dispossessed and, by locating the concept of the “global city” and the place of “migrant women” in such changes; to pinpoint the key sites where the practices and processes of our epochal shift materialize. In terms of the focus of this collective work, we have engaged in a gargantuan task. The major theoretical and political implication is to reveal a systemic repositioning of exploited or undervalued women. After 20 years of IMF-driven restructuring in poor Global South countries, these exploited and undervalued women are active actors in the making of alternative political economies for survival, not only for the survival of their households but also for a range of economic sectors and for governments. In this process, these women do not necessarily become empowered. In many cases, the women themselves most likely do not gain anything from their functioning as a capability in the making of alternative survival. In this volume, we have made an effort to elucidate the most significant moments of global change since the 1980s, in our view, and which are the events that make the most significant contributions to globalization, in terms of three impacts – global migrations, gender issues, and migration mobilities in terms of gender. In fact, we have come to recognize that those three elements are now recognized fully, in a way they were not in an earlier period. Today, as we will see, they are combined with somewhat contradictory conditions of climate change, rising waters and desiccating land; together telling a new tale that we will see at the end of the chapter.

2.

THE GEOHISTORY OF GLOBALIZATION AND THE TIME OF THE LONGUE DURÉE

For the purposes of our research, we have situated the contemporary world in the long history of its genesis. In that respect, when we position ourselves at the beginning the European footprint, we wonder, was Europe at the origins of our globalization, and were colonial mobilities such an important genesis within it? What multi-millennial dynamics were present, and which ones were extensions? Why is it only at the beginning of the twenty-first century and especially in the 1980s that we think of the origins of globalization? In general, this approach, in a retrospective manner, is a feminist invitation to rethink the multiple global narratives that structure in different ways the research on gender and migration. In such a longue durée, even if a quite limited amount of time in our case, we try to question from different vantage points, which helps us formulate future research questions. Thus, we see that the more recent challenges from migration and gender studies do involve a unidimensional conceptualization of the present. The multiple uncertainties besetting the general mapping as a research entry, we situate the emerging geographies of centrality that cut across the old North–South divide as attached to the loss of the big empires.

Introduction  3 future of gender and migration research need to take into consideration not only the global changes since the 1980s as the main narrative, but also the changes in migration and mobility (in theory and in practice) and gender perspectives. The persistent disparities and asymmetries are important when considering the mobility of both capital and labour around the world. One of the particular impacts of globalization is the worsening conditions of precarious workers, which affects all areas of the planet and which strongly marks the conditions in which contemporary mobilities take place. When exploring the gender perspective, our focus builds on the foundations of feminist economics and the identification of its elements of strength in the critique of mainstream economics, branded as androcentric because they were based on the exclusive foundations of the Homo oeconomicus thinking. A feminist interpretation is based on an economic critique as well as on a methodological one. On balance, this is where quantitative knowledge always prevails over qualitative knowledge, and where behavioural analysis is always a response to a rational solution of individual choices. By contrast, the feminist analysis provides a complex form of the analysis of society (where interpretation depends on the lifecycle of people, on the places in which they are located). Economic globalization, therefore, has also been a chronology of reference since the 1980s (growth in inequalities, financialization and commercialization, and contradictory trends in women’s participation in labour). The advantage of a gender perspective is that it provides an opportunity to reflect on the nuances of different societies and cultures’ labour markets, to enhance our understanding of the process of women’s absorption into factory work, which is key to the global distribution of labour. Therefore, a gender perspective’s notion of femininity highlights the importance of decision-making within a particular socio-cultural context that could contravene economic rationality and the supposed wisdom of supply and demand. It also suggests that neither class nor indeed ethnicities are the principal identities at work in dictating the movements of the labour market. In fact, the study of women migrants has typically focused on their family situation and responsibilities and how gender is affected by labour migration to a highly industrialized country. We sought to add another variable by linking female immigration to basic processes in the current phase of the capitalist world economy. The global process of economic restructuring is one element in the current phase of Third World women’s domestic and international migration. Although many of these women may have become domestic or international migrants as a function of their husband’s or family’s migration, the more fundamental processes are those promoting the formation of a supply of women migrants and a demand for this type of labour. In this movement of global change since the 1980s, do we need more background information to understand it, in terms of reviewing the context of the colonial, postcolonial, pan-African historiography, and so on? This angle opens up new vistas into our investigation, and we acknowledge here that we need to develop new vistas as an urgent matter of research. We clearly cannot continue to interpret the reality in the same ways we have established across epochs. This way of looking back shows us how scarcities of all types are becoming evident, visible, in ways we do not yet know. After referring to the use of global narratives, in the following section, we will consider a general narrative of the globalization conditions since the 1980s. Next, we will do the same within the parameters of migration trends (selected theories and concepts). Afterwards, we will review what it means to locate changes in the so-called “mobility turn”. We will then

4  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration review the research and the scope of mobilities in a gendered world (since the 2000s). By way of illustration, we will interconnect all the different topics and questions we have mentioned with a thematic view of the chapters. Finally, we will look at the future transformations of research in gender and migration.

3.

THE USE OF “GLOBAL NARRATIVES”

We use the term “global narrative” as an interpretation similar to the way in which we have previously achieved with the insightful analytical model of global cities inside a view of world history. The context of the changing global zeitgeist serves as a bridgehead for a host of scholarship in related fields and as a means to reinvigorate the debate in this introduction about the relationship between cities, migration and the world economy. Such narratives are the analytical frames for understanding contemporary globalization itself as well as the factors of globalization as far in the past as seems necessary and useful (Mazlish 1998: 389). From the articulation of narratives, we suppose here that, if globalization is to remain a key part of the narrative, and part of the raison d’être of world history, debates on the use of narratives in analysis are advisable, especially in terms of the impact of economic globalization. Economic globalization,2 then, needs to be understood in its multiple localizations, and not just in terms of the broad, overarching macro-level processes that dominate the mainstream account. Further, we need to see that some of these localizations do not generally get labelled as having anything to do with the global economy. From the articulation of narratives, we suppose here that feminism is the right approach. Developing a feminist analytics of the global economy today will require us to focus on these transformations if we are to go beyond a mere updating of the economic conditions of women and men in different countries. Much of the feminist scholarship on women, migration and the economy, and women and the law, has taken the nation-state as a given or as the context within which to examine the issues at hand. And this is a major and necessary contribution. But now, in view of the distinct impacts that globalization is having on the systemic properties of the state – i.e., exclusive territoriality and sovereignty – it becomes important to subject these to critical examination. Here we specify two strategic research examples with which to investigate the organizing dynamics of globalization and begin by examining how gendering operates in order to develop a feminist reading. These two research examples are derived from two major properties of the modern state – exclusive territoriality and sovereignty, and their unbundling under the impact of globalization – and are used to present the implications for empirical and theoretical work on the question of women in the global economy. First, “women and immigrants” emerges as an example where the labour supply facilitates the imposition of low wages and powerlessness. It does so under conditions of high demand for those workers and the location of those jobs in high-growth sectors. It breaks the historic nexus that would have led to empowering workers, and legitimizes this break culturally. Another localization rarely associated with globalization, informalization, reintroduces the The notion of a global economy is increasingly used to distinguish the particular phase of the world economy that began to emerge in the 1970s. Briefly explained, it is characterized by a rapid growth of transactions and institutions that are outside the older framework of inter-state relations. 2

Introduction  5 community and the household as an important economic space in global cities. We see informalization in this setting as the low-cost – and often feminized – equivalent of deregulation at the top of the system. Methodologically, the construction of these analytic borderlands pivots on what we call circuits for the distribution and installation of economic operations. These genderized circuits allow us to follow economic activities into terrains that escape the increasingly narrow borders of mainstream representations of “the” economy and to negotiate the crossing of discontinuous spaces. It also underlines how the particular distribution and installation of economic operations over a variety of terrains is but one possible form of the materialization of economic activity. Today’s multiple systems of power operate through technical systems and do not involve people as in traditional notions of class. The workplace as a strategic site where class gets articulated is but one site of a growing range of sites – the community, the household and novel techno-economic systems. In our work we try to access these other sites. Across the centuries, the international division of labour has included a variety of translocal circuits for the mobility of labour and capital (Wallerstein 1979). These circuits have varied considerably across time and space, shaped at least partly by the specific constitution of labour and capital. Many of these older circuits continue to exist today. But there are often new dynamics that feed them. And there are new types of circuits as well. One outcome is the emergence of novel global geographies, which cut across the old North–South divide. They are constituted through a variety of familiar processes: the increasingly globalized operations of firms and markets, the multiplication of firms’ affiliates and partnerships, as well as labour migrations and people trafficking networks. These new geographies are also constituted by far fewer familiar dynamics, such as new types of mobility through digitization and virtual outsourcing. Class, but also struggle, is today articulated through digital space too. There are many different, emerging ways of working with the Internet. This becomes clear if we use the case of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, protesting their disappeared children. It was as mothers that they gained standing, and protections against state abuse. If they had protested simply as citizens of Argentina (the formal political actor), they would have been in conflict with the state and probably arrested. But as mothers they stepped outside the Hegelian master–servant dialectic. Much of what we still narrate in the language of immigration and ethnicity is actually a series of processes involving: (1) the globalization of economic activity, cultural activity, and of identity formation; and, (2) the increasingly marked racialization of labour market segmentation so that the components of the production process in the advanced global information economy that takes place in immigrant work environments are not recognized as part of the global information economy. Thus, immigration and ethnicity are constituted as otherness. Understanding them as a set of processes whereby global elements are localized, international labour markets are constituted, and cultures from all over the world are in play, is central to understanding the narratives we present in this introduction.

4.

GLOBALIZATION NARRATIVES SINCE THE 1980S

We have, to some extent, demonstrated that globalization provides the general context in which to understand international migration. Globalization forces backed up by neoliberal ideologies about market-oriented growth have been key in many aspects of what we nowadays

6  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration call the global era. However, such neoliberal ideology must be considered from before the crisis in 2008, as well as by its nature, which is historically specific and unevenly developed (Brenner et al. 2010). The genesis has been specified here as the 1980s. Is this the moment when a dominant neoliberal view relying on utilitarianism and rationality took hold, which explained gender status in society? By highlighting the role of “rational” men and women, it is argued that all persons, if left free (as in a free market), are capable of maximizing their respective utility, subject to a set of exogenously determined factors that include tastes and preferences, as well as asset holding. When the global era begins, it is the time to deregulate the economic sector. Building on research carried out in the late 1980s, Sassen (2000) strategically found three exemplars of the parallel developments she was charting in New York, London and Tokyo. Behind such cities there is neoliberalism that guides the restructuring of companies, of labour flexibility, and the importance of informality in feminine work, which replaced the traditional model of the Fordist company. A clear vision of this explosive change in globalization is the mini-job (part time, precarious and usually minimum wage). It is important to underline that one of the components of the global capital market is the stock market. The late 1980s and early 1990s saw the addition of markets such as Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Mexico City, Bangkok, Taipei, Moscow, and growing numbers of non-national firms listed in most of these markets. Building on research carried out in the late 1980s, we found three examples of the parallel developments charting in New York, London and Tokyo. The three served related functions in the global economy. Tokyo was the leading global exporter of money as a raw, unprocessed commodity; London was the ultimate entrepôt, a legacy of its imperial past; and New York was the Silicon Valley of financial innovations. For the majority of humanity, the decade of the 1980s has a lot to do with the global economy’s organization on a global scale. We focus on how, since the 1980s, we have observed a globalized unequal world, characterized by complex mobilities in a context of persistent poverty and institutionalized racism, with increasing vulnerability to financial crises, food crises and climate change. We consider the importance of the care economy, increasing pressures faced by women on a world scale, and the failures of neoliberal reforms (in the North and in the South) to bring about sustainable development, reduction in poverty, inequality, and vulnerability to the economic crisis. Looking at migration, the origins of the change of the classic migration paradigm emerged in the 1970s and onwards with the acceleration of the global economic neoliberal revolution. It started with a dismantling of much of the industrial apparatus in the most developed countries in the Global North, which had been relocated to the Global South’s low-wage, less-regulated countries (and eventually including tertiary activities such as the opening and expansion of call centres) (Palidda 2021). Therefore, the wealthy countries have experienced a lesser need for migrant labour to integrate/assimilate into stable manufacturing; instead they have displayed a requirement only for precarious labour in the semi-shadow and shadow economies, due to the outsourcing of all sorts of economic activities. Such an epochal transformation was made possible by the technological revolution in communications, transport and production, and also by the financial revolution. In the Fordist period, international migration was seen as peripheral, as the national industrial society was seen as the “container” for all aspects of social being, and crossing borders was the exception and a deviation from the nation-state model (Castles 2000). During that

Introduction  7 time, studies on migration and development, despite being strategic policies for many “Third World” countries, had only scant influence on social theory. In terms of the European experience during the industrial era, migratory movements from the South reached the factories of European cities (especially in France, Belgium, the UK and Germany), contributing to the expansion of the Fordist cycle. This migration cycle in Europe started as early as the First World War and acquired mass proportions after the Second World War, completing the cycle until the crisis in the 1970s and the obsolescence of Fordism in Europe’s industrial regions. The state changed from being hospitable and charitable to being repressive, and was constructed by the restriction of borders (Ribas-Mateos 2014a), converting integration into a residual symbolic measure. Logically, migration is also affected by the global crisis that has been distressing many high-income countries since 2008, with roots in the excesses of financial globalization and other neoliberal policies, which has generated high unemployment. So, the different neoliberal practices show how the impact of globalization results in a widening gap in inequalities between low- and high-income regions; the development of international networks (non-profit, country-based, international associations, commercial, family); the intensification of interregional migrations; the “care crisis”, and so on. Another factor explaining this global transformation is the intensification of neocolonial practices through the over-exploitation of resources and land devastation in the Global South. This expulsion process a grand transformation narrative, involves the depredation and expulsion phenomenon of global capitalism, which in turn is linked to the aggravation of the global ecological–political crisis. Consequently, such a process involves new mass migrations, in which people flee from devastated territories where not even a blade of grass grows nor a single fish swims in the rivers.

5.

MIGRATION NARRATIVES SINCE THE 1980S

From a North–South perspective, the closing of traditional labour migration was the “halt” of migration adopted by the OECD wealthy countries in 1974, after the 1973 oil crisis. However, in the context of Southern Europe, mass emigration continued in the 1970s and 1980s, especially after the end of the Salazar regime in Portugal and that of the Franco regime in Spain. Migration also accelerated following the economic and political dictatorships in various countries of Latin America, Africa and Asia. We can also add the phenomenon of boat people from Southeast Asia after the end of the Vietnam War and the consequences of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. After the Cold War period, there was also the subsequent mass migration from the Eastern European countries; that is, after the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Subsequently, stopping migration (or at least pushing it far underground to heighten the vulnerability and exploitation of migrants) became a principal goal of rich countries. Since the late 1980s, tens of thousands of migrants have died during migration attempts to wealthy countries. Although such reality received much media attention, it is important to remember that the majority of migrations take place between the countries of the Global South and, among those, between the rich and the poor countries (such as the Emirates and Saudi Arabia, where the immigrants are in extreme slavery, and Africa). The financial revolution – which has been studied by many authors, such as Sassen – has facilitated the rise of stock market speculation and tax havens. Nation-states have lost control

8  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration of these financial manipulations (in part due to the neoliberal imperative of deregulation), and thus financial transnationalization has increased. This process has also allowed for the global rise of the powerful financial troika (i.e., World Bank, World Trade Organization, and International Monetary Fund [IMF]), fully displayed in the dominant structure of transnational politics. In addition, the European troika (i.e., European Commission, European Central Bank and IMF), as well as the power of the private multinational banks of the wealthy dominant countries (United States, China and Japan) all play a key role in the global neoliberal economic configuration. Therefore, the impact of the powerful global financial system has caused even more impoverishment of the less developed countries, particularly an increasingly unequal distribution of wealth and income, as well as an increase in poverty (apart from China, where poverty has been greatly reduced). The historical-structural perspective in migration studies was very important during the 1970s and 1980s. We could relate it to various models such as dependency theory, the theory of internal colonialism, the “centre–periphery”, the economic theories of the dual market, the theories of global accumulation and the theories of social networks. From the analysis of the new international division of labour, it is considered that large employers in developed economies, faced with the difficulties of exploitation of workers in their own countries, opt for the exploitation of workers in peripheral countries, in search of not only economic but also social, environmental and political advantages. At the end of the 1970s, and developing during the 1980s, another framework of analysis predominated, based on the Marxist-structuralist tradition. This approach, unlike the previous ones, studies migration as part of the internal dynamics of a single system – the capitalist economic world. It is backed by a global perspective of migration in the world system determined by the expansion of the centre to the detriment of the periphery. From this perspective, there is a centre that attracts labour and an excluded periphery that expels labour. Back in the 1970s, from such a class-bonded perspective, the central interest of the work of Castles and Kosack (1973) was the effects of immigration on social class position. The authors suggest that immigration had become part of the mechanisms of the social structure and that immigrants occupy the lowest stratum of the social class. However, the theory indicating that capitalist colonial penetration played a significant role in the initiation of international labour migrations from less developed countries does not say anything about which part of that population was the most likely to emigrate, nor can it be validated in the field of individual decision-making. During the 1980s, the notion of race was used in situations that could be explained in terms of intergroup conflict, but without any mention of the concept of “race”; rather, severe forms of exploitation and rationalization were referred to that were justified by the dominant groups in terms of a certain type of deterministic theory (see Rex and Mason 1986: 11). In this way, the scope of study of these theories was no longer based on a theory anchored in a classification of racial phenotypes; it was constructed on intergroup conflicts. In the 1990s, the American sociology of migration was then the most relevant in scientific research production. Since the 1950s, in Northern European countries, migration policies were conditioned by importers of labour, as a temporary market need. This was the “Gastarbeiter modality”, the model that would become imposed across Western Europe. It can be understood as the “invitation” of foreigners in the role of blue-collar workers, a role that fulfilled its specific function in the reconstruction of postwar European industries. By the imposition of the modality of “guest workers” and its establishment in Germany in the 1970s, we can affirm that the idea of a “separate class” used as an affordable offer is recurrent, but this time in the economic recon-

Introduction  9 struction of the European capitalist countries affected by the postwar period, eager for cheap labour in technologically underdeveloped contexts. With the breakdown of the Gastarbeiter modality, a new phase was inaugurated in the stages of massive labour migrations. In the former labour-importing countries, the first phase is set at the entry of immigrant workers in 1945, with a culminating moment in the 1950s, and its great expansion in the late 1960s and early 1970s, to then become paralysed between 1973 and 1974. The end of the Gastarbeiter modality supposes the beginning of a new phase of the migratory process characterized by family reunification: overcoming the will of state policies, immigrants decided to settle with their families, transforming the immigration model, as new demands were made for fundamental human rights, such as the right to live as a family. Another identifying element of the new European migration models, and inseparable from the transformations that have taken place (e.g., family reunification, importance of the second generation), is the increase in autonomous female emigration. The proportional weight of women in migrations is increasingly representative, even, in some groups, exceeding the numbers of male migrations. From this female proportional weight, we also highlight the increase in migrations that we call here “autonomous”; that is, outside the context of family reunification migrations.3 With regard to labour migration, the 1950s and 1960s revealed the same Mediterranean strategy: at the beginning men departed alone, sending money to their families at home, but, after the women joined them, thereby completing the break with the country of origin, it often meant that the village of origin would eventually fall into total abandon and ruin. The patriarchal family was, and still is, in some countries, a common model in the Mediterranean. Anthropologists have shown that the degree of integration of women in the various types of families and that the role of this integration in the intensity of their identification was reflected in their husband’s honour. This was back then a Mediterranean-wide researched issue. It is important to consider how everything began when discussing these migration narratives. Portes (1997) recalls how, at the end of the nineteenth century, many immigrants began their American careers not only in new cities and with new jobs but also with new names. The way this happened came to symbolize the careless way in which the country treated newcomers at the time. On Ellis Island, immigration inspectors did not have much time to examine papers or to correctly pronounce complicated names. When necessary, they confined themselves to renaming the immigrant ipso facto. Thus, the German Jew who, stunned by the inspector’s questions, babbled in Yiddish, “Schoyn fargesin” (I forget), was quickly answered by the inspector, “Sean Fergusson, welcome to America”. For Portes, this form of symbolic violence reflected very well the position of immigrants in the American hierarchical order, while also representing a strong push towards assimilation. The country was then young, midway through its greatest period of industrial expansion and ready for world hegemony. Regarding adaptation in recipient countries, Portes had developed the concept of adaptation mode and reception 3 If we take Mediterranean migrations as an example, we can see how, concerning Maghreb migrations in Europe, family emigration represented the second phase of autonomous male emigration, while autonomous female emigration corresponds with a model that is still a minority but is increasingly acquiring greater numerical presence. Based on the Zehraoui (1994) model, it is argued that, even after a woman has emigrated through a process of family reunification, the female migration that takes place is individual and not inside the community, as was the case in the first process. In this case – the woman emigrating in a very specific context – it is precisely when the emigrant opts for settlement emigration instead of ending the migratory project upon return.

10  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration context. For Portes and Rumbaut (1990), the contexts and modes of integration represent the analytical basis of interpretation. These are defined according to the interaction of three contextual factors: the policy of the host government, the labour market conditions of the host agency, and the characteristics of their ethnic communities. The notion of the ethnic enclave was also key in the development of Portes’s concept. During the 1990s, other migration theories and research were developed around the migrant’s network and the “informal training system”, a mechanism through which not only is the supply of entrepreneurs in immigrant communities ensured, but it can also offer attractive mobility opportunities for immigrants, and more experienced and trained workers. The metaphor of the ethnic enclave was then developed as a business creator rather than as a source of exploitation. The ethnic enclave contributed to the understanding of these structures and to the explanatory reasons why the apparently exploited workers endured in them. Most of these types of research were really isolated in case studies, and, as Portes added, a case study of a small group of immigrants cannot invalidate a general theory supported by large-scale trends. According to Portes, immigration as a data-driven field of study has had no need for wide generalizations based on highly abstract theorizing. Indeed, the general tendency has been quite the opposite; that is, towards ground-level studies of particular migrant groups or analysis of official migration policies (Portes 1997: 799). It is for this reason that, rather than providing major generalized theories, immigration studies have consistently yielded conditionalities constrained to a single time and place. Among the works of the enclave, we can also situate “ethnic entrepreneurship” studies. Ivan Light is undoubtedly one of the pioneering authors within this field of research. His classic Ethnic Enterprise in America, published in 1972, has been for more than one of us the first contact with the world of ethnic entrepreneurship. Many years later, he points out how, during the last years in the United States, the works on ethnic economics focused on the study of economic independence, understood as a basic and omnipresent self-defence against exclusion and disadvantages in the labour market, expanding the definition of ethnic economy. If a decade ago we spoke of the ethnic economy to refer to self-employed and employers, their non-salaried family workers and their co-ethnic employees, today the ethnic economy is considered as encompassing two sectors, namely the ethnically controlled economy and the ethnically owned economy, each of which consists in turn of three subsectors: formal, informal and illegal. That is, ownership is not an essential requirement to define the ethnic economy, since it is enough for co-ethnic employees to exercise “an important and lasting power […] over workplaces because of their quantity, concentration, and organization, but also where they are assigned by external political or economic powers”. Furthermore, those who have stronger networks, have more educational resources, and more social capital related to different forms of business success, turn to formal capital. Conversely, the rest goes to the informal sector. The opposition of the collectives of Cubans and Haitians in Miami would be the exponents of these two groups (Light, cited in Beltrán et al. 2006: 25). Also, during the late 1980s and 1990s, in the line of criticism of the push–pull model theories of migration, we can place Sassen’s work. In her book The Mobility of Labor and Capital (1988), she indicates the correlation between foreign investment and emigration. In this way, the thesis goes beyond the classic explanatory phenomenon of international migration related to population explosion, poverty and economic stagnation. Sassen develops a new hypothesis linking the field of international labour migration with the literature on international trade and investment. To locate this hypothesis, she identifies three main processes.

Introduction  11 First, she describes how, in the early 1960s, there was an increase in exports in several Third World countries as a result of increased foreign investment, as well as outsourcing by industrialized countries. This increase caused off-shore production in these countries, especially in agriculture and manufacturing, but also in export processing zones (EPZs), as the most formalized case of this evolution. A second process to consider is the development of large cities into control and management nuclei of the global economic system. These cities represent the place of production for a large number of services, including financial services necessary for management and control – for the most part, control. A third process to consider is the emergence of the United States as the main core of foreign investment in the world, after having been the largest exporter of capital for 30 years. These three processes configure the intersection through which to understand the internationalization of production and the internationalization of labour migration (Sassen 1988: 3). In this context of world economic processes, the feminization of the proletariat in the export of industrial jobs to the Third World, in the form of free industrial zones, must also be taken into account. The processes of industrial relocation have given way to the emergence of free zones in developing countries, especially in Southeast Asia, in Latin America and the Caribbean. Women would represent the large component of this proletariat in free zones located in specific areas of Malaysia and in the zone that borders Mexico with the United States (the maquilas, which has constituted a key topic of feminist research). We also deal with another type of literature that was also important to researchers. During the 1990s, research on the informal economy was key. In line with Portes (1997; as well as Mingione 1995 and Sassen 2000), the informal economy is seen as a substantial element of the capitalist system and not a residual part of it. Thus, a social agent of the informal economy can be closely involved in the global chain of modern subcontracting through foreign immigration or through export-oriented manufacturing in the production of clothing and textile products. In the same decade, there was a proliferation of works related to the feminization of the labour force. This tendency, together with the nimble fingers, servitude and caring attitudes of women, featured consistently in the discourses. Historically, the garment industry has been one of the sectors where capitalism has made the most blatant use of patriarchal structures to connect reproduction and women’s reproductive roles. Worldwide employment of women in off-shore assembly manufacturing plants has been a subject of considerable interest in labour studies (Fernández-Kelly 1983). Research conducted on the gendered nature of the internationalization of capital and the implication of women’s wage labour in industrialization processes has highlighted the feminization of female-led industrialization of the labour force in export zones where production has been relocated. In a study of the clothing industry in Morocco, owners were seen to take advantage of lower female employment costs, justifying them on the basis that women were “working for lipstick” (Joekes 1982). A similar justification was used in Hong Kong electronics factories where young, single women were assigned secondary status in the labour market because of their capacity to bear children (Lim 1981, 1990). Other major studies included those on the Bangladesh garment industry (Kabeer 1991), the relocation of international production in Singapore (Heyzer 1988), and the female workers in the Mexican border industries (Fernández-Kelly 1983; Pearson 1988, quoted in Moser and Peake 1995: 306–307). So, to create an order, in the case of migration theory, we have established the following moments: Portes and the informal economy and the Miami enclaves; Ivan Light and ethnic entrepreneurship; transnational studies; and the mobility turn (Urry 2007). Are these examples

12  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration key to understanding one century of migration research? As we have seen through this vast amount of bibliography, these and other similar modes of analysing migrations have produced important information, and they have truly contributed to our present understanding of migrations. But now we must see how this literature serves us as a background – we have entered a new epoch, so we fear that much of that older analysis may be losing ground today. We mean this in the sense that novel conditions are arising, and they are arising increasingly quickly. Next, we will see that in this type of “mobility” we have not dealt with enough. At its most extreme, we would argue it is a mobility marked by survival – basic survival, brutal modes of survival – and probably the people in the West may not be ready to handle this as they used to do in the past.

6.

INTRODUCING GENDERING NARRATIVES

This gendering process may be detected in a set of social relations that structure the migration field. The gendering narrative can be comprehended through the different practices and discourses that are reproduced in migration and mobilities, and heavily articulated by power structures, which are globalized in an equal mapping of power geometries. As we have seen though the detailed narratives, women were, and are, important actors within the analyses since the 1980s. This matters to us in two ways. One is that, yes, women are losing rights; the other is that women are also emerging as critical political actors. But beyond these extreme cases, there is a less visible loss of rights being actively pushed or supported by governments that affects all citizens. It is less visible because it operates through specialized technical domains. If you are rich, you do not notice it, but if you are poor, and a woman, you feel it, insofar as the largest share of the poor in most countries are women and children. The more significant force that women represent is derived through informal channels. There are multiple invisible political histories made and enacted by women all over the world. Sometimes these histories become visible. Thus, the women who have recently won a Nobel Peace Prize – Wangari Maathai from Kenya and Shirin Ebadi from Iran, and further back in 1997, Jody Williams, the key organizer of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) – worked outside the formal state apparatus. Similarly, we see immigrants as informal agents making history. Their numbers are small, their powers almost nil, yet whole state apparatuses gear up to address their presence, to control them. They are also agents who make very complex processes visible, not through their power, say, to bomb a country, but through their mobility, their wounds and their new strategies. Women are becoming a particularly significant factor in all these global changes. It is estimated that over half of all immigrants are women, and they are a vanguard in the struggle for survival. These are informal actors that disrupt existing formal arrangements. This, then, means that it is critical to understand that systemic positioning can trump biology and cultural gendering, and that the term gendering (whose critical dimensions we find increasingly difficult to capture) is not enough to understand what is going on with men and women. The female monarch in past kingdoms was clearly a masculinized subject, as, indeed, was Cleopatra. Today’s immigrant men working long days in factories, become domesticated subjects, the feminized subject as per our Western historical-cultural notions. Moreover, we

Introduction  13 think that inequality, discrimination and power are made. We need to understand the making of these binaries in the migration narratives. The condition of being a migrant woman emerges as crucial to the formation of novel economic arrangements in global cities – emergent alternative political economies. For decades now, most of the research on immigrant women4 has focused on the poor working conditions, exploitation and multiple vulnerabilities of these household workers. These are facts. We know this. However, we are not satisfied with simply describing other people’s misery as research entries. We want to dig empirically and theoretically and complicate things. Analytically speaking, what also matters is the strategic importance of well-functioning professional households for the leading globalized sectors in these cities, and hence the importance of this new type of “serving class”. For a variety of reasons, immigrant and minoritized women are a favoured source for this type of work in the Global North but also inside the Global South. Theirs is a mode of economic incorporation that makes their crucial role invisible and hence they can be paid very little. Being an immigrant or minoritized citizen facilitates breaking the nexus between being workers with an important function in the global information economy – that is to say, in leading industries – and the opportunity to become an empowered workforce, as has historically been the case in industrialized economies. In this sense, the category “immigrant women” emerges as the systemic equivalent of the offshore proletariat; that is, the low-wage workers in Global South countries doing the outsourced jobs of the rich countries. There is a further complication in this analysis: insofar as they are strategic, these women become a masculinized subject (as historical-culturally shaped and understood). Immigrant men tend to become a feminized subject – invisible, systemically marginal and often redundant. After decades of research, all these gender intersections show the extent to which the binary man–woman is not very useful for addressing some of these issues. In this complexity of powerlessness lies a possibility for politics, including the making of the political. To sharpen the elaboration of the argument in this introduction, we have chosen to focus on systems that can be first seen as negative, notably, the trafficking of women for the sex industry, perhaps one of the most extreme forms of trafficking of workers. The other side of the coin is to see how the analysis reveals how these exploited women have become a key source for the survival not only of their households, as has been widely reported in the vision of the “migrant hero”, but also, and less noted, for the survival of “entrepreneurship” in regions devastated by neoliberal policies that have destroyed traditional economies. Entrepreneurship in the context of trafficking ranges from global criminal syndicates, which are truly murderous, to small local entrepreneurs who are actually hired by the “trafficked” migrant, whether woman or man. Furthermore, these trafficked workers have become a source for enhancing government revenues at a time when many of these governments are burdened At the beginning of this century, four key works (Morokvasic 2004, 2007; Phizacklea 1983, 2000) reflected on what had changed in the past two decades of feminist research on migrant women and labour markets, in Europe and globally. They show how classic gender structures are persistent, and that segregation of women in low-paid reproduction jobs was a continuation. The persistent focus on the female domestic/care worker in feminist research of gendered labour markets, though understandable, is problematic. It reinforces stereotypes of migrant women (Catarino and Morokvasic 2013). In relation to other jobs, despite the growing number of highly educated migrants, both those from the European Union and non-Europeans have faced considerable levels of deskilling and devaluation of their cultural capitals (Bourdieu 1986). 4

14  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration by massive debts to the international financial system and access to hard currencies has become critical.5

7.

THE “TIME OF MOBILITIES”

Where do we go from now in such big narratives? Globalization is definitely challenging the state–centre model or the territorial focus of social sciences, thereby highlighting the importance of mobilities in contemporary societies and in social theory (Bauman 1998; Held et al. 1999, among others). In contrast to the ongoing attention reserved for a variety of classic perspectives on integration (which may be termed assimilation or adaptation, referring to the idea of settlement), and the predominance of a unilocal, unilineal, unidirectional and ethnocentric approach, the existence of various and multidirectional human mobilities typical of the global era – of varying durations and in different directions, even in opposing directions (hence the idea of circularity) – tends to be overlooked. The contribution of the mobility turn is an important part of today’s narratives. It raises the fundamental concern for questioning the divisions and borders between disciplines, proposing the revision of classical concepts associated with the “territorial” and the “sedentary”, precepts that we have seen as past terms linked to the social science of the twentieth century (Sheller and Urry 2004). Under such premises, the paradigm of mobility uses two main axes: one related to geographic mobility in connection with space, the second underlining the relationship between the mobile and immobile elements, on the dichotomy mobility/locality, and on the connection between people and places (Sheller and Urry 2006). Globalization and mobilities here are heavily interconnected. We trace the most important changes from the radical change that emerged in the 1990s, a change related to globalization and the “flexibilization” of work in the countries of origin and destination, countries of the labour migrations. Likewise, changes in world trade patterns radically affect the occupational structures of labour-emitting countries towards richer countries, which are increasingly closely linked not only by foreign investment but by a whole series of interactions between these countries. Population mobility has always been an inherent part of colonialism and industrialization. However, there are two important pieces of news regarding current migrations in a global scope: the scale of influence. They affect all regions and most countries simultaneously, as we see in most examples of the book through the heterogeneity of the origin–destiny links. Although migrations often originate in former colonies or areas of military presence in host countries, many migrants come from areas where connections are based on more indirect experiences of economic and cultural penetration. This is the case, for example, for Arabs going to the United States, Southeast and South Asians going to Japan, or Chinese going to practically all developed countries (Castles and Davidson 2000: 9). Other important novelties of these changes, apart from the internationalization of migrations, are that more and more countries are involved, the acceleration of the mobility index, the differentiation of flows that

So whilst some vision of criminality in society tends to portray women as passive victims of trafficking, there is critical interpretation of this, condemning how it negates their agency and decision-making capacity when opting for sex work (Agustín 2005; Mai et al. 2021). 5

Introduction  15 introduce various categories such as temporary workers, irregular foreigners, family groups, and so on (Castles and Miller 1998). For this we turn also to the helpful concept of “power geometry” introduced by Doreen Massey (1994: 149). Massey argues that the particular conditions of modernity that have produced time–space compression place people in very distinct locations regarding access to and power over flows and interconnections of places. She helps us see how people’s social locations affect their access to resources and mobility across transnational spaces, but also their agency as initiators, refiners and transformers of these locations.6

8.

RESEARCH AND THE SCOPE OF MOBILITIES IN A GENDERED WORLD SINCE THE 2000s

Analysis of the feminization of mobilities (Ribas-Mateos 2014b) can be easily located on a global map, as new paradigmatic regions, new countries of transit and immigration, within an intensification of mobility and circulation. Such mobility is mostly examined from a particular axis (the global care chains and relocation of care services, technological change, marital strategies, circularity and transnational practices as in the South–South mobilities). Sassen (2000) provides a framework in which to understand the profound transformations of the economic globalization processes (structural adjustment programmes, opening up to foreign capital and removal of state subsidies), which match the growing significance of female international migration as a way of activating household survival strategies – from domestic work to industrial cleaners, from searching for marriage partners to sex work, from many of those sectors where the global economy is present. Such sectors are incorporating workers through specific circuits that connect labour demand and supply. Through such circuits, they can connect labour and capital from the Global North to invest in multiple ways in their own households of origin in the Global South. Sassen also discusses the South–North female migratory flows to work in the informal economy within a framework that she refers to as the “counter-geographies of globalization”. She considers that these circuits generate major economic resources that very often remain invisible (Sassen 2003). If such increased circularity is to be considered one of the elements of global migration, the participation of women in international mobilities is another of its key features, covering new regions and migration poles (West Africa, Southern Europe, the Gulf, China), as well as emerging new countries of emigration–immigration and spaces of transit (Sub-Saharan Africa, Maghreb, Turkey, Mexico since the 1990s). Women now cover all the global parameters of migration: the structure of the global care chains and new transnational practices, related to remittances, subjective transnationalism and transnational identity (Ribas-Mateos 2013). In migration studies, one of the fundamental contributions of transnationalism is that social restructuring is influenced by the process of globalization, by which such structures go from

“We can see it directly expressed here: “groups who are really in a sense in charge of time–space compression, who can really use it and turn it to advantage, whose power and influence it very definitely increases [such as media moguls and the business elite] […] but there are also groups who are also doing a lot of physical moving, but who are not ‘in charge’ of the process in the same way at all. [For example] [t]he refugees from El Salvador or Guatemala” (Massey 1994: 149). 6

16  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration national to transnational. The transnational power, and with it, its social inequalities, do reproduce to a significant extent in a transnational space. During this period of time, most gender and migration research is concerned with the connection between women’s migration, paid domestic work and family care. The key concepts addressed in the literature include “care work”, “global care chains”, “care deficits”, “transnational motherhood” and “international social reproductive labour”, then transnational connections (since the early 1990s) as applied to gender and migration, and later on connected with theories of intersectionality, black feminism, postcoloniality and eco-feminism. Research was common on the members left behind, family reunion processes, changes in care roles, the role of remittances in the family, the impact of the status of women, the change in gender relations and female empowerment. Agency and empowerment-based discourse and studies continue to be centred on the reproductive sphere (domestic service, personal services and sex work), the role of ethnic entrepreneurship and skilled labour. However, in order to organize a chronology in gender studies, we have started to think first about the studies of Balbo (e.g., 1978) and the doppia presenza (double presence) production/ reproduction in the early 1980s, and have then followed the trajectory of women’s studies at the international level (and development) to the gender relations focus. We find that one critical and still underdeveloped aspect of gender studies is a recognition that something foundational is emerging and more research must be done. It is not easy to see, but one way of putting it is that we women, we men, we youth, and all the novel terms we have developed to capture our differences both big and small, are bringing us into a vastness of emergent options. These options have brought us enormous varieties of ways of understanding ourselves and others, and this is still part of the new research to be conducted.

9.

THINKING A RESEARCH MAPPING FOR A NEW GLOBAL AGENDA

Tables 1.1 and 1.2 give a chronological overview of main narratives and thematic words of chapters in this volume.

10.

FUTURE VISIONS: CHALLENGES FOR THE NEW DECADES TO COME

Let’s consider the emergence of new topics. For example, eco-feminism is a relatively new part of the feminist movement, evolving out of political activism over the past three decades. Peace marches, anti-nuclear protests, environmental and animal liberation movements, and world hunger activism have raised the consciousness of many. A range of theoretical positions has emerged from this movement, resting on the assumption that there are critical connections between the domination of nature and of women. Particularly, eco-feminists attack patriarchal society’s dualistic thinking, wherein one side of the dualism reflects the “self” or the subject, while the other side represents the “other” or the object. The future is a form of development from an economy that puts people at the centre and that solves the most acute problems of the global world: the multiple crises of capitalism, the increase in inequalities, climate change, and the problems that prevent progress towards

Introduction  17 Table 1.1

Chronological overview of main narratives, as traced in this volume’s chapters

Historical Background

The Bias of Knowledge Production Decolonial (The Amazon & Colonial Mobilities) Pan-Africanism and Diaspora Images – Ethnography (various examples) French Colonial Ideology (various examples)

1980s

Neoliberalism as New Global Context Feminization of Migration – Theories of Development in Women’s Studies China and the Dynamics of External and Internal Migration “Double Presence” (Balbo) and Production/Reproduction Spheres (literature overview) The Maquila Paradigm

1990s

From Women Studies to Gender Studies Labour Market Segregation, Urban Ghetto, Informal Economy Entrepreneurship Theories Household-centred Studies (e.g., Afghanistan) “Bracero” and Agriculture in the Agrifood Industry (e.g., Border Regions)

2000s

High-skilled Migrations (e.g., Dubai) Global Care Chains (see theoretical debate) Right to the City: City-level Resistance (e.g., Rome) Displacement and Mobilities (e.g., Japan) Migration and Development Nexus Revisited

2010s

Transnational Theories, Transnational Household Focused (e.g., India/Australia) Transborder Activism (e.g., US–Mexico Border) New Migration Routes and South–South framework (e.g., Morocco, West Africa)

2020s

“The Humanitarian Reason” (e.g., Refugees, Syria–Haiti) Extreme Violence in the Mediterranean (e.g., Libya, Tunisia) Latin American Extractivism and Forced Migration Latin America: Control and Punishment

2030s

Health (COVID and Mobilities) New Criticisms of Postcolonial Theories Care Crisis Extractivism Energy and Eco-feminism

equitable and sustainable development. The state of the art review in the first part of the book is important in order to identify past themes and new themes for the future regarding gender and migration. Many chapters have put forward important specific themes for the future – for example, in understanding internal migration and family migration for future research. In particular, it is interesting to identify what drives a mother to migrate, or the drivers of migration as a form of searching for an equal partner, or even the role of the good daughter and the good daughter-in-law as a form of remitting home to the family. However, such remittances link do show forms of abuse that have not been properly unveiled by previous research. For example, in locating the specific narratives in particular spaces, like, for example, the desert. The narrative concerning the desert and its people as “savages” in need of civilization as part of a colonialist ideation, a construction based on a man-made border wall and and with its evident institutionalization of violence in borders affecting in a collision of identities. Thus, spatial mobility creates a highly differentiated terrain of the geographies of power (a term

18  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration Table 1.2

Thematic words of chapters within the main narratives

Scientific mobilities and looking at

A. METHODOLOGIES

indigenous women; ways of seeing

Emerging methodology

 

The Amazon. People on the move and ethnography, not only as a method but as a situated arrangement of knowledge practices: ● Decolonial (the Amazon and Colonial Mobilities) ● Pan-Africanism and Diaspora ● Ethnography ● French Colonial Ideology B. NEOLIBERALISM ● Feminization of Migration – Theories of Development ● Internal Migration

● China’s global economic dominance;

● Production/Reproduction Spheres (Literature Overview) C. THEORIES

Chinese transnational migration (women

Socio-economic:

and family)

● Gender and Labour Market (Patriarchy Dominance)

● Entrepreneurship (Congolese in Angola)

● Entrepreneurship Theories

● Afghan women, displacement; give

● Household-centred Studies

voice and visibility; different responses;

● Agrifood Industry

international development policy and programming ● Gender roles, displacement; counter-geographies and globalization of survival (Sassen’s framework) ● Squatting, intersectional struggles;

D. PARTICULAR SITES

migrant communities and individuals;

Cities

rights and safe places

● City and Gender (Migration and Resistance) ● High-skilled Migration ● Global Care Chains (see Theoretical Debate) ● Right to the City: City-level Resistance ● Displacement and Mobilities Ecology

US–Mexico border as a space of constant

Borders

re-elaboration; border communities; transborder experiences; affective border communities  

E. BRANSNATIONALISM ● Transnationalism and Remittances ● Transnational Household-focused) ● Transborder Activism ● New Migration Routes and South–South framework (e.g., Morocco “embodying practices”; West Africa)

Introduction  19 ● Extractivism

F. VIOLENCE

● Harragas; women and border crossing;

● “The Humanitarian Reason”

relatives of missing people; Missing

● Extreme Violence in the Mediterranean

people: desaparecidos; mourning

● Latin American Extractivism and Forced Migration

● Prisons: control and punishment of

● Control and Punishment of Women/Migrants/Foreigners

women (Latin America) ● Violence through medical research; extreme violence; border zones; infectious diseases ● Forced marriage ● Teenage expulsions (indigenous women) ● Theory: mothering; daughtering; care

G. HEALTH AND CARE

● Research: body; migration;

● Health (COVID and Mobilities)

Sub-Saharans; Syrians; intersectional

● New Criticisms of Postcolonial Theories

analysis

● Care Crisis ● Energy and Eco-Feminism

used by Doris Massey). Such spaces can be also seen as “diamond frontiers” in the intensified exploitation of natural resources in Africa. Other scales present conflictual zones that have not been fully researched nor made visible such as the Anglophone Crisis of Cameroon, opposing Cameroonians from the Northwest and Southwest to the government. Other scales of present and future research open up the agrifood terrain, where national ideology of indigenous inferiority adds to the analytical complexity to the feminization of the transnational agrifood circuit. This marks an additional line of the intersectional analysis that considers the connection between the body and the exploitative technology (in Haraway’s [2016] terminology) and the transmigrant perspective. The recurrent violent scenario is displayed by extractivism, forced migration and resistance. Generation is also important as a gender cross-cut of the research in the Global South – for example, in Guatemala, very young adolescents (ages 10–14), whose futures depend on how successfully they negotiate the transitions to the roles of citizens, spouses, parents and workers. These teens in the Global South are highly pressured by unsafe labour markets, migration and other survival strategies. This future vision is, of course, something left unfinished, incomplete, meaning that it is always in a state of desiring that completion. This volume does not seek to provide closure, but rather aims to be open to future developments.

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Introduction  21 Mai, N., Macioti, P. and Bennachie, C. et al. (2021). “Migration, sex work and trafficking: the racialized bordering politics of sexual humanitarianism”. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 44(9): 1607–28. Massey, D. (1994). Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Mazlish, B. (1998). “Comparing global history to world history”. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 28(3): 385–95. Mingione, E. (1995). Urban Poverty and the Underclass: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Morokvasic, M. (2004). “‘Settled in mobility’: engendering post-wall migration in Europe”. Feminist Review, 77(1): 7–25. Morokvasic, M. (2007). “Migration, gender, empowerment”. In I. Lenz, C. Ulrich and B. Fersch (eds), Gender Orders Unbound? Globalisation, Restructuring and Reciprocity. Opladen: Barbara Budrich Publishers, pp. 69–97. Moser, C.O.N. and Peake, L. (eds) (1987). Women, Human Settlements, and Housing. New York: Tavistock Publications. Moser, C.O.N. and Peake, L. (1995). “Seeing the invisible: women, gender and urban development”. In R. Stren (ed.), Urban Research in Developing Countries, Vol. 4: Thematic Issues. Toronto: University of Toronto, pp. 279–347. Oso, L. and Ribas-Mateos, N. (2013). The International Handbook on Gender, Migration and Transnationalism: Global and Development Perspectives. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Palidda, S. (ed.) (2021). Racial Criminalization of Migrants in the 21st Century. London: Routledge. Park, R.E. ([1936] 1975). “Cultural conflict and the marginal man”. In E.C. Hughes, C.S. Johnson and J. Masuoka et al. (eds), The Collected Papers of Robert Ezra Park Vol. II. 1936. New York: Arno Press. Phizacklea, A. (ed.) (1983). One Way Ticket: Migration and Female Labour. London: Routledge. Phizacklea, A. (2000). “Ruptures. Migration and globalization: looking backwards and looking forward”. In A. Phizacklea and S. Westwood (eds), Trans-Nationalism and the Politics of Belonging. London: Routledge, pp. 101–19. Piper, N. (ed.) (2008). New Perspectives on Gender and Migration: Livelihood, Rights and Entitlements. New York: Routledge. Polanyi, K. ([1944] 1989). La gran transformación: crítica del liberalismo económico. Madrid: La Piqueta. Portes, A. (1996). “Globalization from below: the rise of transnational communities”. In W.P. Smith and R.P. Korczenwicz (eds), Latin America in the World Economy. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, pp. 151–68. Portes, A. (1997). “Immigration theory for a new century: some problems and opportunities”. International Migration Review, 31(4): 799–825. (Special Issue: Immigrant Adaptation and Native-Born Responses in the Making of Americans.) Portes, A. (2000). “Immigration and the metropolis: reflection on urban history”. Journal of International Migration and Integration, 1(2): 153–75. Portes, A, Rumbaut, R. (1990) Immigrant America : A Portrait. Berkeley : University of California Press: 1990. Portes, A. and Zou, M. (1993). “The new second generation: segmented assimilation and its variants among post-1965 immigrant youth”. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 530: 74–98. Ram, M. and Holliday, R. (1993). “Relative merits: family culture and kinship in small firms”. Sociology, 27(4): 629–48. Reyneri, E. (2003). “Immigration and the underground economy in new receiving South European countries: manifold negative effects, manifold deep-rooted causes”. International Review of Sociology, 13(1): 117–43. Rex, J. and Mason, D. (1986). Theories of Race and Ethnic Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ribas-Mateos, N. (1999). “Notes on a Southern European model: immigration, family and the welfare state”. In B. Agozino (ed.), Theoretical and Methodology Issues in Migration Research. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishers.

22  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration Ribas-Mateos, N. (2014a). “Introduction. Réflexions sur la place des femmes et des mobilités dans la globalisation”. In N. Ribas-Mateos and V. Manry (eds), Mobilités au féminin. Paris: Karthala, pp. 7–28. Ribas-Mateos, N. (2014b). Border Shifts: New Mobilities in Europe and Beyond. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sassen, S. (1988). The Mobility of Labor and Capital: A Study in International Investment and Labor Flow. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sassen, S. (2000). “The global city: strategic site/new frontier”. American Studies, 42(2/3): 79–95. Sassen, S. (2003). “The feminisation of survival: alternative global circuits”. In M. Morokvasic-Müller, U. Erel and K. Shinozaki (eds), Crossing Borders and Shifting Boundaries, Vol. I: On the Move. Opladen: Leske + Budrich. Sayad, A. (1994). “Qu’est-ce que l’intégration?”. Hommes & Migrations, 1182: 8–14. Sheller, M. and Urry, J. (2004). Tourism Mobilities: Places to Play, Places in Play. London: Routledge. Sheller, M. and Urry, J. (2006). “The new mobilities paradigm”. Environment and Planning A, 38(2): 207–26. Simmel, G. (1908). “L’Étranger”. In I. Joseph and Y. Grafmeyer (eds), L’École de Chicago. Paris: Aubier. Simpson, R. and Simpson, A. (2018). “Embodying dirty work: a review of the literature”. Sociology Compass, 12: 1–9. Tienda, M. and Booth, K. (1998). “Migration, gender and social change: a review and reformulation”. Paper presented at the Conference on Women’s Position and Demographic Change in the Course of Development, Oslo. Urry, J. (2000). Sociology beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century. London and New York: Routledge. Urry, J. (2007). Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press. Wallerstein, I. (1979). El moderno sistema mundial. Madrid: Siglo XXI. Wa Ngugi, M. (ed.) (2012). “Rethinking the Global South”. The Journal of Contemporary Thought (Summer). Reprinted in http://​www​.globalsouthproject​.cornell​.edu/​rethinking​-the​-global​-south​.html (accessed 02/09/22). Williams, F. (2018). “Care: intersections of scales, inequalities and crises”. Current Sociology, 66(4): 547–61. Wojczewski, S., Pentz, S. and Blacklock, C. et al. (2015). African female physicians and nurses in the global care chain: qualitative explorations from five destination countries. PLoS One, 10(6): e0129464. Yeoh, B. and Willis, K. (2005). Singaporeans in China: transnational women elites and the negotiation of gendered identities. Geoforum, 36(2): 211–22. Zehraoui, A. (1994). L’immigration: de l’homme seul à la famille. Paris: L’Harmattan.

PART I BACKGROUND

2. A state-of-the-art review and future directions in gender and migration research Laura Lamas-Abraira

The objective of this chapter is twofold. It aims on one side to resolve definitional ambiguities on the research of gender and migration, and on the other to provide an integrated and synthesized overview of the current state of knowledge in order to offer a pathway for future research. It begins by reviewing the concept of care, as this has been a main axis of research in migration and gender studies. Into the care concept it introduces the classic divisions of production and reproduction literatures. Next, it covers a wide state of the art, more or less chronologically presented, regarding first women and migration, and second the migration– care nexus. To a certain extent the question arises from the debate on the feminization of migration, but it focuses also on the key role of care in global migration. In considering the migration–care nexus, the chapter reviews the most influential theories and frameworks, separating the literature regarding global care chains from writing on the care circulation framework, among others. Subsequently it offers a critical illustration of what the author considers the most striking example of such circulation of care within and across borders: transnational mothering, grandmothering and daughtering. The chapter concludes by reflecting on future lines of research as a way of taking new research responsibilities in an uncertain and hyper-globalized world.

1.

INTRODUCING CARE AS A MAIN AXIS FOR GENDER STUDIES AND MIGRATION

The feminist literature of the 1980s placed the central issue of care in social policies. The concept of care was then articulated as a central concept or unrecognized informal work as well as commercialized work. Certainly, the social organization of care has emerged as a matter of crucial importance in gender studies. Furthermore, the service supplied by family caregivers includes a way to provide unpaid care and support to people who are sick, disabled or frail in the community, as well as many other circumstances in which care goes beyond dependency (Glenn, 2000). Such roles have heavily affected women as they tend to be the main caregivers; to a greater extent, they also affected the stereotyped reproduction of what has traditionally been considered the role of women. Such literature signalled the start of putting care into the centre of research, but care has always existed, as people perform and exchange care in order to sustain human life (Carrasco et al., 2011). However, as of the proliferation in its use, often the term is used in such a way that assumes a “shared implicit understanding of what care is” (Duffy, 2011, p. 9). What seems clearer is the permanent link between gender and care (Oliker, 2011; Harrington Meyer et al., 2000, among a large number of scholars) becoming quite ambiguous. 24

Review and future directions in gender and migration research  25 Fisher and Tronto (1990) posit that caring – as a verb – encompasses orientation and practice: it permeates people’s lives and seeks to give continuity, wellbeing and/or recovery. In order to provide a good standard of care, the caregiver must care about the historical and cultural context conditioning care processes. Tronto (1998) considers care a species activity that characterizes the human being. As Glenn (2000) points out, we all need it. Thus, this means going beyond the stereotypical image of care as being linked to dependency. As an activity that permeates our daily lives and is ubiquitous, it involves power relations and struggles (Tronto, 1998) regardless of whether it is performed as a formal or informal activity (Glenn, 2000). Care occurs in both the paid and the unpaid spheres, forming part of a continuum in women’s lives (Alber and Drotbohm, 2015). Finally, Tronto (1998) emphasizes its “central value in human life” (p. 17), and also its undervalued condition because of being considered a women’s activity. 1.1

On Reproduction

Over the previous decades, feminist scholars have focused on the caregiving role of women and their generally subordinate status worldwide. Marx and Engel’s original concept of reproductive labour was based on the differentiation between the production of goods in the economy and the reproduction of the labour force necessary to maintain that productive economy. From the 1970s onwards, feminist scholars have extended this concept, to refer to “[a]ctivities such as purchasing household goods, preparing and serving food, laundering and repairing clothing, maintaining furnishings and appliances, socializing children, providing care and emotional support for adults, and maintaining kin and community ties” (Glenn, 1992, p. 1); in short, to “the array of activities and relationships involved in maintaining people both on a daily basis and intergenerationally” (Glenn, 1992, p. 1). In doing so, they questioned the private/public dichotomy and the naturalization of linking women with domesticity and its subordinate status (Duffy, 2011), which leads to the differences between the work performed inside and outside the home being overlooked (Clement, 1996; England, 2005; Cancian, 2000; Glenn, 2000) and thus, to the work performed at home being classed as non-work (Clement, 1996; Chodorow, 1999). The intersection between the domestic and market spheres is key in the concept of reproductive labour. First, because through domestic work women create the necessary conditions for market workers’ maintenance; and second, through reproduction and childrearing, they replenish the future labour force (Duffy, 2011). In other words, women literally produce and reproduce workers, and the concept of reproductive labour links the capitalist system with their reproductive work. Although reproductive labour was first coined to highlight the invisibility of unpaid work and its key role in the market economy, its meaning has expanded to include caring occupations in the labour market, which are also performed mainly by women and therefore undervalued and underpaid (Duffy, 2011). Socialist feminism views the classification of reproductive labour as women’s work as related to care’s use as an instrument of oppression (Abel & Nelson, 1990; Alber & Drotbohm, 2015). This view is based on the scarce opportunities to choose this form of work, the disadvantage of women in the labour market as a result of performing care, the invisibility of their work and alienation from it, and their embeddedness in capitalist networks through childrearing, which is seen as supporting the system with an endless supply of new workers (Abel & Nelson, 1990).

26  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration In contrast with the concept of reproductive labour, which focuses on women’s relationship with a broader economic structure to maintain the labour force, the concept of nurturing work highlights the emotional and relational side of care work (Duffy, 2011). Here, the emphasis is upon the unique value of caring as part of feminine morality. The feminist “ethic of care” (Tronto, 1987; Noddings, 1984) considers women to have a distinctive and superior moral orientation (Clement, 1996). In addition, they posit that caregiving might be meaningful and fulfilling for many women, suggesting that the practice may humanize people and serve as a pattern of behaviour for building a better world. From this perspective, this school calls for the ethic of care – based on contextualizing, attachment and interdependence – to be appropriated to apply to all social relationships, in contrast to the dominant ethic of justice, based on separateness, universalism and an equality/inequality duality. Both theories are “gender-coded” and therefore hierarchical (Clement, 1996). Nevertheless, this perspective has been criticized for partially helping to perpetuate women’s subordinate status, through the link between care and the female domain. Carrasco et al. (2011) point out how the use of the term “care” works to support patriarchal ideology, helping to reaffirm women’s normative submission, because it avoids classing the practice as work, and focuses instead on the “mysticism of care”, which is linked to feminine identity and emotionality, and is therefore devalued. In summary, the efforts of care-focused feminism can be divided into two research perspectives: those who focus on paid and unpaid work, with the caregiving role seen as instrumentally oppressive, and those who highlight its meaningfulness and positive component (Abel & Nelson, 1990). While these approaches may be seen as contradictory, both perspectives coincide in their regard of women’s capacities for care as a “human strength rather than a human weakness” (Tong, 1998, p. 163), and their common aim of fighting against gender inequalities. Moreover, while the image of the woman as carer and the subordinate status of this role is dominant across the globe, there is no unique and universal woman. There is, rather, a very diverse range of women, surrounded by highly heterogenous circumstances and contexts that shape their everyday lives. Several scholars (e.g., Glenn, 1991; Duffy, 2011) among a vast literature urge us to address the fact that in power relations, gender interrelates with other factors such as ethnicity or social class. Also, age and generation may determine their normative family duties and social positioning (for example, leaving a waged work to perform reproductive work). Moreover, in transnational contexts, nationality – and attached institutional benefits and social stereotypes – or migration status are also influential (Abel, 2000; Duffy, 2011; Glenn, 1991; Huang, 2016), sometimes prompting racialized hierarchies (Huang, 2016; Zontini, 2010).

2.

STATE OF THE ART: WOMEN IN MIGRATION

The research on migration encompasses an androcentric approach that often fails to fully address the experiences of women moving and maintaining ties across borders. For decades, the visibility of women in migration studies remained overlooked and/or intimately linked with their family role, in opposition to the breadwinner male figure integrated within the international labour migration fluxes. As Catarino and Morokvasic (2005) point out, to finally find women in the migration literature, to make them sociologically visible, has entailed a focus on their role as migrant workers giving rise to a compensatory phase on migration studies, particularly through the change from Women’s Studies to the Gender Studies approach (see Lutz,

Review and future directions in gender and migration research  27 2010). Within the frame of globalization, new gendered mobilities have appeared, including new regions, migration poles and spaces of transit (Oso & Ribas-Mateos, 2013), those shaped by structural factors and world-based asymmetries such as colonial history among them. As the selection of texts in the current volume reflects, research starts to finally go beyond the ethnocentric focus on the Global North (Kofman & Raghuram, 2010). Sassen (2003) links the growing feminization of migration and women’s presence in diverse cross-border settings to the process of globalization, conceptualizing these diversifying circuits as “countergeographies of globalization” characterized as “profit- or revenue-making circuits developed on the backs of the truly disadvantaged” (Sassen, 2003, p. 21). These circuits situate women in the global economic system and include prostitution and formal and informal labour migration, the status of woman and foreigner being key. Following Oso and Ribas-Mateos (2013), several themes are key within the actual debates on gender and migration. First, there is the feminization of migration, in which men and gendered differences have become secondary (Catarino & Morasavic, 2013). This becomes particularly visible regarding the on-distance care practices that characterize transnational families, as further sections will explore. With regard to this, Lutz (2010) points out that an integral analysis of migration requires us to take into account the micro-, meso- and macro-levels and a gendered approach that considers four aspects: “a) feminised and masculinised labour markets; b) care practices; c) shifting discourses and practices on gender orders in receiving countries; and finally, d) discourses and practices on gender in sending countries” (Lutz, 2010, p. 1651). Additionally, to fully address the implications of migration regarding care and gender relations, research must focus on the model of the care diamond (Kofman & Raghuram, 2010). The care diamond model (Evers, 1996; Razavi, 2007) posits that family, community, market, state are key agents in the management of care at the social level. In local and transnational contexts, different structural, institutional and cultural factors shape the weight of each of these agents. As a second theme, the focus upon women has resulted in a shift to the transnational household as a unit of study. Particularly, authors point to the potential to transform gender relations and care roles. In general terms, spatial dislocation incorporates a potential for the freedom and empowerment of women (Grasmuck & Pessar, 1991; Dreby, 2010; Yeoh et al., 2005; Lam et al., 2002; Hadi, 2001). This is particularly true regarding women who, in their home country, are subjected to a strong patriarchal ideology; for these women, a new role as breadwinner challenges family power dynamics, and distance provides them with more autonomy. Nevertheless, this is not always the case, and some of those women who remain behind may also be subject to greater supervision from their husband’s families and neighbours (Plaza, 2000; D’Aubeterre, 2002). Similarly, in the so-called destination country, gendered care roles can also be reinforced, particularly in countries that lack a strong welfare system and in which care duties and burdens are placed over families (Lamas-Abraira, 2021). On the other hand, through this transnational household approach, the so-called left-behind family members and their physically co-present and on-distance care become central actors in migration research (Baldassar et al., 2007; Hoang & Yeoh, 2012; Lam et al., 2002; Lutz & Palenga-Möllenbeck, 2012; Salazar Parreñas, 2008). Third, there is the “commodification of intimacy” (Constable, 2009), of intimacy and body in different degrees (see Sevilla Casas, 1997), with a focus upon care work (England & Henry, 2013; Hochschild, 2000; Huang et al., 2012; Lutz & Palenga-Möllenbeck, 2011; Michel & Peng, 2017; Yeoh & Huang, 2010), sex work and sex trafficking (King & Mai, 2009; Oso,

28  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration 2010; Saunders, 2005), and cross-border marriages in the context of globalization, which continues to attract great attention. The sexual and ethnic international work division serves to tie women to low-qualified, low socially valued and low economically paid jobs, therefore affecting the status of the so-called “global woman” (Ehrenreich & Hochschild, 2003) positing them as “servants of globalization” (Salazar Parreñas, 2001). This is true also for skilled female migrants who face deskilling and gender segregation (Cuban, 2012; McKay, 2003). In this sense, mixed marriages have been posited as a way in which to circumvent structural barriers, becoming the object of research (Catarino & Morokvasic, 2005; McKay, 2003). In contrast, the fourth actual debate pinpointed by Oso and Ribas-Mateos (2013) refers to the emergence of an agency-based approach to gender and migration research that is able to go beyond women’s reproductive role and to inquire into other domains of life, such as qualified work (Erel & Kofman, 2003; Nedelcu, 2004) or ethnic entrepreneurship (Morokvasic, 1991; Sáiz López, 2012). The following sections of this chapter will unveil how care-migration research has been characterized by an essentializing, ethnocentric and ageist approach that has typecast women in transnational settings as mothers. It would be worth focusing on women’s subjective experiences and their role as agents in organizational, activism and political domains (Gidengil & Stolle, 2009; Kirk & Suvarierol, 2014), up until now an under-researched area. The fifth, and final, key theme on the actual debates on gender and migration encompasses intersectionality. The articulation of gender, class and ethnicity is key within the migrant care work–globalization–privatization axis, serving as the background for social reproduction (Hochschild, 2000; Lutz, 2018). During the previous decades an increasing demand of low-wage domestic and care-workers in the global market has resulted in a growing feminization of the international migration and the rise of the “Care Economy”, nowadays key in global development prospects (Oso & Ribas-Mateos, 2013). Women and their work in the global system are key within such prospects, as first their cheap – when not free – and extensive care work relieves states from having to cope with care needs through a more formal and expensive system; and second, their economic remittances have a deep impact in the so-called home countries, contributing to the cost of social reproduction (Verschuur, 2013). Sassen (2003) unveils the systemic links between these gendered migration circuits and the macro-level development strategies, with economic remittances and the organized – sometimes highly institutionalized, such as in the case of the Philippines – exports of workers serving as sending countries’ sources of revenue. In doing so, Sassen suggests there is a “feminization of survival”, with governments being dependent on women’s economic activity, albeit this may operate in the shadow economy.

3.

STATE OF THE ART: GROUNDING THE MIGRATION– CARE NEXUS

In this section, four approaches that link together migration and care are presented. These are the Global Care Chains (Hochschild, 2000), the Care Circulation Framework (Baldassar & Merla, 2014), the Theory of Transnational Social Inequality (Lutz, 2018) and the recovery of the classic concept of social reproduction in the context of migration (Kofman, 2012). Finally, taking a critical perspective, the example of transnational mothering, grandmothering and daughtering in migration research is introduced.

Review and future directions in gender and migration research  29 3.1

First Approach: The Global Care Chains

At the very beginning of the 21st century, Hochschild’s work on the Global Care Chains (Hochschild, 2000), linking care – and therefore gender – migration and globalization meant a new departure from the migration research agenda. The approach focuses on the commodification of care work within globalization, resulting on growing inequalities between the Global South and the Global North (Hochschild, 2000; Yeates, 2012). The Global Care Chains approach points to women as disproportionately affected by care work burdens and disadvantaged in broader gendered contexts. The Care Drain results from mothers’ migration to Global North countries, where they work as care workers, most often as nannies. The spatial dislocation prevents them from providing daily physically co-present care to their own children. As such, childcare and care to other dependent family members is partially delegated to other family members, generally women of the extended family, or subcontracted to other women who occupy a lower status in the local context, being located at the end of the chain. The Global Care Chains model has served to make women and their work more visible and to unveil inequalities at the global scale. However, this approach has been criticized for typecasting migration as mainly economically driven movements from the Global South to the Global North and back in the form of remittances. Nowadays the migration phenomenon is much more complex than that; moreover, other flows such as South-to-South ones are missing from this perspective (Lutz, 2018). Similarly, the Global Care Chains approach has also been criticized for ignoring the skilled workers (Kofman & Raghuram, 2010) and to a lesser extent working-class families within which are the migrants in the destination countries who themselves also hire local caregivers (Lamas-Abraira, 2021; Souralová, 2015). Finally, due to its focus upon the hostile context, the individual agency is underestimated (Tyldum, 2015). Other critics rely on the assumption of shared and universal meanings of family and care (Raghuram, 2012). First, the conceptualization of care, or desirable care, is mainly reduced to physical co-presence and to the female domain (Baldassar & Merla, 2014). In doing so, it demonizes distance and other dimensions of care and care actors are neglected (Baldassar & Merla, 2014; Kofman, 2012). The nuclear families and the role of the (physically co-present) mothers are reified, and it ignores migration that is not female led and families that are not normative hetero-centred (Fresnoza-Flot & Shinozaki, 2017; Kilkey, 2010); additionally, it essentializes women by equating them with the figure of the mothers (Oso, 2016; Catarino & Morokvasic, 2005). 3.2

Second Approach: The Care Circulation Framework

The Care Circulation Framework (Baldassar & Merla, 2014), complementary to the Global Care Chain approach rather than alternative, presents more open and flexible conceptions of care, family and migration. First, it implies a view of migration that goes beyond a back-and-forth movement, in which the reasons triggering mobility are not solely of an economic nature, and it considers both movers and stayers as actors in the transnational social field. Second, it focuses upon the family as a unit of analysis, in its extended and multiple forms, therefore decentralizing research from specific care roles or actors. The Care Circulation Framework challenges the Global North-tailored classic assumption that family and care are bound to proximity and focuses instead on relatedness and family members’ practical, emotional and symbolic care activity (Merla & Baldassar, 2016). Care roles – caregiver and care-receiver –

30  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration are particularly dynamic (Kilkey & Merla, 2014; Baldassar & Merla 2014); however, unequal power and asymmetries governed by gendered settings determine care roles and burdens. Finally, this approach presents a multidimensional conception of care that is not necessarily linked to co-presence. Although it is posited that care is shaped by context(s), macro-, mesoand micro-factors affecting the capacity and sense of obligation regarding care within transnational families, the Care Circulation Framework fails to unveil the structural barriers and the broader context(s) of social and emotional inequalities (Lutz, 2018). 3.3

Third Approach: Theory of Transnational Social Inequality

Further building on this, by seeking to fill the gaps between the Global Care Chains perspective and the Care Circulation approach, Lutz (2018) proposes visiting the theory of Transnational Social Inequality as a third and complementary approach, aiming to understand “the new features of asymmetrical resource distribution in their global manifestation” (p. 577). The author distinguishes three aspects of this approach. First, female care work is both a gendered form of capital and a “gendered obligation – if not burden – interlinked with the moral economy of kin” (p. 583). Here, the romantic view of the family incorporates the idea of its being a place for love and good care (Cancian, 2000). Nevertheless, families may be a place for different levels of interdependence, asymmetries and power relations. The quasi-universal social construction of women as natural caregivers conditions their role within the family context where often “caring is experienced as a labour of love in which labour must continue even when the love falters” (Graham, 1983, p. 16). Moreover, Lutz (2018) points out “emotional and care inequality is an implicit aspect of transnational care giving” (p. 583); the provision of physical care is often restricted for those family members who stay in the so-called origin country. Second, there is a lack of social protection and a very reduced portability of rights across countries. As a result, access to benefits is often curtailed, the South-to-South migrants being the greatest harmed. Finally, Lutz refers to the “race–migration nexus” and the weight of institutional racism in “creating or reinforcing class-bound and racialized occupational pathways” (2018, p. 584), which also limits the potential of migrants to achieve social mobility. 3.4

Fourth Approach: Recovering the Classic Concept of Social Reproduction

The social reproduction of the family needs to continue even when faced with the challenge of distance, as families have become particularly fluid in times of the mobility paradigm (Sheller & Urry, 2006). Kofman (2012) proposes an approach to migration research through the concept of social reproduction, in which analyses of the different migratory circuits that configure social reproduction in different ways – including work in the labour market, the family sphere and education dimension – are integrated, in a perspective that seeks to ensure social reproduction locally and transnationally. Thus, the different migratory circuits, and the circumstances that circumscribe them, shape how care is organized and deployed, in which forms and directions, and how it affects individuals, families and communities, including movers and stayers. Kofman uses the concept of “global householding”, pointing to their multi-situation and the accumulation and deployment of economic and social resources, and “how different types of migration enable such resources to be embedded and disembedded across space and

Review and future directions in gender and migration research  31 time” (p. 154). However, it is important to understand care as a part of the social reproduction, not as a synonym (see Verschuur, 2013). 3.5

An Example of Transnational Mothering, Grandmothering and Daughtering

The research on transnational mothering has become paradigmatic in the migration–care research. This section seeks to emphasize how the generalized focus upon mothers typecast women by their reproductive role being traversed by an essentializing, ethnocentric and ageist approach. The view of women as natural caregivers considers caring to be “like a natural expression of one’s personality rather than work” (Clement, 1995, p. 59), therefore (egoistically) understood as unlimited and taken for granted (Folbre, 2012). Particularly, motherly care is often used to exemplify genuine and natural care (Cancian, 2000), with motherhood conceived as the path to the realization of womanhood (Laslett & Brenner, 1989). Therefore, implying a strong essentialization of women (Oso, 2016; Catarino & Morokvasic, 2005) by reducing the category of “woman” to that of “mother”. A criticism that recalls old feminist debates regarding the figure of the housewife in opening ways. The portrayal of women and the role of women within familial and domestic spheres inside the global system of domestic labour has been a primary concern for feminists since the 18th century. Moreover, this view ignores the meanings of motherhood in different societies and cultures by equating it with the universal experience of women’s pregnancy (Chodorow, 1999). The permanent equation of women with the role of caring mother is present in broader literature on care and migration through the use of such expressions as “other mothers” (Bloch, 2017; Bonizzoni, 2012; Carling et al., 2012; Kofman & Raghuram, 2010; Orellana et al., 2001; Schmalzbauer, 2005) to refer to the people who are in charge of daily childcare in families in which mothers do not cohabit with their children. Even though the “other mothers” approach may help to make care work and female networks beyond the nuclear family visible (Bloch, 2017), at the end it also reifies the mother–child bond and essentializes women through their mothering role. Similarly, there is the concept of “mothering father” (Lam & Yeoh, 2018; Lutz, 2018), in reference to those fathers who engage in care, as it also assumes caring to be a female attribute and, moreover, a motherly one. We have seen how in recent decades, the literature on care and migration has focused on transnational mothering and, to a much lesser extent, on transnational fathering (Lutz, 2018; Kilkey et al., 2014; Salazar Parreñas, 2008), by assuming that they constitute very different phenomena (Carling et al., 2012). Moreover, the mothers’ migration is seen as an obstacle to fulfilling their normative mothering role, despite the fact that they perform the dual role of breadwinner and nurturer (Hondagneu-Sotelo & Avila, 1997). The gendered ideologies of mothering – and fathering – affect children’s expectations and the broad conceptualization of migration and its adequacy (Abrego, 2009; Dreby, 2006; Salazar Parreñas, 2005; Hondagneu-Sotelo & Avila, 1997; Lutz, 2010). The social and emotional costs of migration weigh more on mothers than on fathers (Aranda, 2003; Catarino & Morokvasic, 2005). However, while the role of women as caregivers is heavily scrutinized (Salazar Parreñas, 2005), so is that of men as breadwinners (Abrego, 2009; Dreby, 2006). In most cases, grandmothers, or other female kin, are the children’s daily caregivers while mothers migrate (Bonizzoni, 2012; Moran-Taylor, 2008; Tse & Waters, 2013; Salazar Parreñas, 2005; Schmalzbauer, 2005; Orellana et al., 2001). These “middle women” (Dreby,

32  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration 2010, p. 33) or networks of female caregivers are in charge of daily co-present care in coordination across borders (Carling et al., 2012; Ho, 1999). Also, non-kin members, such as close friends or pastors and, to a lesser extent, paid caregivers, may be involved (Hondagneu-Sotelo & Avila, 1997). However, grandparents are often claimed to be inadequate caregivers by the media in countries such as Mexico (Dreby, 2010), Ukraine (Tymczuk, 2011), Poland (Lutz & Palenga-Möllenbeck, 2012), China (Binah-Pollack, 2014) or the Philippines (Ribas-Mateos & Basa, 2012), through the portrayal of child neglect, which is assumed may lead to a broad range of problems, from physical issues to psychological problems or addictions. These problems, they suggest, would be avoided if the children lived with their parents, and more specifically with their mothers. Moreover, often they oppose emotional relationships to material provision, as if they were contradictory and incompatible. The discourse emanating from the media in these countries is biased and reduces migration and its outcomes to a set of questionable decisions, obscuring any structural constraints and the lack of alternatives. Moreover, the left-behind discourse (Pantea, 2011) that dominates migration research assumes that minors who take part in this kind of transnational care arrangement are automatically disadvantaged. In doing so, the Global North-tailored care practices – particularly childrearing – are conceived as the desirable model and any deviance from the normative is automatically as dysfunctional (as, for example, collective childrearing versus the nuclear family model) being objective of moral scrutiny. In transnational families, children and the older family generations circulate between countries seeking to lessen the expenditures associated with social reproduction. Particularly grandmothers, the so-called flying grannies (Plaza, 2000), move internationally to support their adult children by taking daily care of their grandchildren and domestic tasks (King et al., 2014; Lie, 2010; Zhou, 2013, among others). Either in the home country or in the destiny country, their care work makes a meaningful contribution to their families and the wider society contributing to social reproduction (Lamas-Abraira, 2019, 2021). However, they lack in visibility and social recognition as the work they perform does not form part of the capitalist circuit (Zhou, 2013) and remains conceptually linked to the domestic sphere and therefore undervalued and classed as non-work (England, 2005; Cancian, 2000; Glenn, 2000; Clement, 1996). The invisibility of grandmothers is shaped by the intersection of gender, age-generation and class. In this sense, it is worth noting also the key role of policies in transnational families’ care circulation, generally privileging economic capital over care needs, with grandparents of poor families facing bureaucratic barriers to entering many countries (Zhou, 2013; Treas, 2008; Baldassar et al., 2007). Finally, the care-migration literature tends to emphasize the care burdens of the so-called middle generation, overlooking that of the other family generations. This ageist approach also entails the assumption of families having three generations and therefore making great-grandparents and other generations invisible (for some exceptions, see King et al., 2014; Lamas-Abraira, 2021) by privileging the nuclear family versus the extended family model, and assuming the Global North family age-structure to be universal. Similarly, while research has emphasized the caregiving role of daughters (Valenzuela, 1999; Lee & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2011; Salazar Parreñas, 2005) over sons, most often these care roles are overlooked and children are presented as passive agents, being portrayed as “luggage” (Thorne, 2001; Orellana et al., 2001) or “objects” (Dobson, 2009, p. 356) when dealing with migration research. They are perceived as lacking any agency, therefore ignoring their caring roles within migrant families. Nevertheless, the caregiver and care-receiver roles are not exclusive. The portrayal of com-

Review and future directions in gender and migration research  33 pletely passive minors relies on the hegemonic notions of the child and childhood, as socially and culturally constructed (Zelizer, 1985). In sum, care in transnational families is managed through networks of women, traversing families generationally, transnationally and beyond the genealogical lines. Although in recent decades women have become visible in migration research, this visibility remains linked to the mothering role and beyond this essentializing focus it presents an ethnocentric and ageist approach that privileges some care practices, care roles and family members over others.

4.

CONCLUSION: WHAT IS NEXT AS EMERGING RESEARCH?

Given the growing interest in migration and gender research, the aim of this chapter has been to provide a brief and coherent introduction to the concept of care and to present a variety of themes and issues in which care, migration and gender intersect, being interdependent and complementary in the context of globalization. This is a context characterized by growing asymmetries in resources and opportunities, by invisibilities and biased approaches. This chapter also emphasizes the importance of models and categories used in academic research. Often hegemonic ideologies serve to legitimize and even naturalize socially constructed categories, drawing a red line between the “good” (i.e., socially accepted) care practices and roles, and the deviant ones. Such is the case of the migrant motherhood and the left-behind children discourse, among many others. As researchers, we need to critically reflect on the way we produce and reproduce (biased/non-biased) knowledge and its implications. New ways of knowing gender migration also make for new ways of acting on/in it. In this case, the vantage point is not only observation but also the possibility of intervention in an uncertain world. Researching futures entail acknowledging research as taking responsibility for the future, by doing, knowing and caring about a particular topic. In this case, it is a topic, that of care, on which human life depends.

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3. Revisiting the gender, migration and development nexus through the circulation of assets approach Laura Oso

INTRODUCTION This chapter seeks to recontextualise the nexus between gender, migration and development in order to progress towards a research agenda in this field. This will involve a review, which is not intended to be exhaustive, of the literature, initially considered from the economist perspective based on the theories of modernisation and dependence. We assess the manner in which other theoretical approaches (new economics of labour migration, social networks, transnationalism, livelihood), including the gender approach, have broadened the migration– development nexus. Next, we review the principal studies that have adopted a gender-based approach to the question of remittances. Finally, and starting from a number of recent perspectives, we propose an approach rooted in the transnational circulation of assets, taking transnational families as a unit of analysis. This perspective allows an understanding of gender dynamics within the framework of development corridors, through the study of the various assets that circulate in the transnational space.

FROM AN ECONOMISTIC PERSPECTIVE TO A GENDER-BASED VISION OF THE MIGRATION–DEVELOPMENT NEXUS Traditionally, the nexus between migration and development has been considered from an economistic approach, based on the analysis of the amounts involved and types of transfer made by the migrant population, as well as how the money is invested and its impact on development (Montoya Zavala, 2006). These analytical approaches to international migration are substantiated by the principles of the modernisation theory and the dependency theory, both of which are of an essentially economistic and androcentric nature (Scott, 1995). On the one hand, the neoclassical approach, rooted in the figure of the “rational individual”, considered migration to be a mechanism intended to offset the spatial imbalances in the distribution of employment and capital (Lewis, 1954). In contrast, the structuralist perspectives, including the World System Theory (Wallerstein, 1974), considered migration to be part of a process in the unequal accumulation of capital in the global capitalist system and the creation of a reserve army of labour that exacerbated peripheral dependency on the centre (Castles and Kosack, 1973). Both theories positioned men as the principal actors of migration, either as workers, migrating in their role as the main breadwinner and a “rebalancing figure” for market dynam-

38

Revisiting the gender, migration and development nexus  39 ics, or as a member of this army – a kind of “foot soldier” marching from the periphery to the centre of the global capitalist system (Oso, 1998).1 In this sense, and as Catarino and Oso argue, the connection between migration and development was considered from the perspective of “production”, highlighting the role migrant men played in sending remittances. They were considered the key figures of population movements and the principal household breadwinners (Catarino and Oso, 2014). Nevertheless, by the late 1990s, migration literature was moving towards a less economistic approach, following the emergence of the network theory (Massey, 1999), the New Economics of Labour Migration theory (Stark, 1991)2 and the livelihood approach (Chambers and Conway, 1992; De Haan and Zoomers, 2003; Eillis, 2003; Thieme, 2008).3 These shifts in perspective highlighted the role of family and household strategies in terms of migratory dynamics, moving beyond those centred on the figure of the rational individual or the migrant “reserve army of labour”, and integrating structure and agency perspectives, “explaining the heterogenous relationship between migration and wider development processes” (De Haas, 2010: 242). Likewise, the transnationalism theory contributed to broadening the vision of population movements, revealing how migrants build up and maintain their cross-border social, economic and cultural relations. The implication is that individuals construct their lives in accordance with different social spaces that are not bounded by national borders (Basch et al., 1994; Vertovec, 1999; Faist, 2000; Levitt, 2001). This approach also contributed to a growing interest in transnational families (Bryceson and Vuorela, 2002; Baldassar, 2007, among others). As a result, scholars began to consider a type of impact other than the mere economic effects of remittances, such as the wellbeing of transnational family members (Mazzucato and Schans, 2011), thereby opening up the approach to the migration–development nexus. Consequently, transnational communities and households emerge as key actors in the development process (De Haas, 2010, among others). In turn, the gender-based vision of migration studies, which first appeared in the late 1990s (Boyd, 1989; Morokvasic, 1984, among others), seeks to draw attention to the agency of migrant women and raise awareness of the importance of transnational social reproduction and care work in the context of globalisation (Catarino, with the collaboration of Verschuur, 2013; Catarino and Oso, 2014). A number of studies would address South–North internationalisation and the transfer of reproductive work that was traditionally associated with women, such as domestic, care and sex work, as part of a process that is parallel to the global transfer of pro1 In the 1980s and 1990s, as a reaction to the modernisation theory, a critical trend emerged that was known as postdevelopmentalism, which, as Matthews (2010) claims, argued the failure of development. Postdevelopmentalism theorists defend local over global solutions, shun grand-scale projects and support local social movements (Matthews, 2010). Another alternative to the modernisation perspective of development is the “Buen Vivir” approach (Gudynas, 2011). Nevertheless, these perspectives have not been linked to international migration, in scientific production, so they will not be the object of analysis in this text. 2 For the contributions of these theories, see Massey et al. (1993). 3 “The term livelihood attempts to capture not just what people do in order to make a living, but the resources that provide them with the capability to build a satisfactory living, the risk factors that they must consider in managing their resources, and the institutional and policy context that either helps or hinders them in their pursuit of a viable or improving living” (Ellis, 2003: 3–4). “[A] livelihoods perspective will reveal that migration is, on the other hand, in most cases a necessary and enforced strategy to adapt to economic globalisation” (Thieme, 2008: 55).

40  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration ductive activities (Truong, 1996). Ehrenreich and Hochschild (2003) identified the concept of global care chains, whilst Rhacel Salazar made a significant contribution to the analysis of the international transfer of reproductive work within the context of globalisation (Salazar, 2001). A number of authors raise the issue of the “commodification of care work on a global scale”, due to the care crisis sparked in the northern hemisphere by the increase in life expectancy, falling fertility rates and the growing numbers of women joining the labour market (Benería et al., 2013). In this sense, care chains shed light on how gender division in the international labour market forms part of the processes leading to unequal economic development (Oso and Ribas-Mateos, 2013). From the 1990s onwards, a broader approach to migration studies that embraces the New Economics of Labour Migration (NELM), the network and livelihood theories, and the transnational approach, together with the development of a gender-based perspective in population movement literature, would contribute to a wider conceptualisation of the migration– development nexus. This greater analytical flexibility would pave the way for a move beyond mere economic considerations, allowing for the inclusion of social, cultural and emotions factors, including the reproductive sphere, with a particular reference to care work, as part of the conceptualisation of the migration–development nexus. Furthermore, a gender-based approach would also allow its consideration in terms of family, intergenerational and gender relationships, highlighting the fact that they may lead to situations of inequality and conflict stemming from power relations. Nevertheless, when considered alone, these analytical perspectives are limited in the analysis of the migration–development nexus. Indeed, the transnational approach has been accused of emphasising cultural categories over economic ones, paying less attention to the amount and the impact of economic activities on migrants themselves, as well as on their sending societies, together with the failure to consider the economic activities of non-migrating individuals (Thieme, 2008). In turn, the livelihood approach tends to focus on considering the impact of migratory flows on the local development of the sending countries, without considering the effects migration has on the receiving countries. Furthermore, these two perspectives fail to address the unequal relationships of power within communities and households according to gender and generation (Thieme, 2008). This criticism is also applicable to the NELM, which perceives households as compact units, failing to take into consideration the conflicts that arise and how the various strategies families adopt during migration may lead to tensions in decision-making processes, as well as the impact migration has on the various members of the household. Moreover, a number of studies into gender and migration have been influenced by a modernising and ethnocentric vision that considers the South–North migration of women to be part of a linear process that transports them from a context perceived to be less favourable to another that is supposedly more favourable to their empowerment (Oso, 1998). In addition, gender-based migration studies have largely tended to be centred on care chains and transnational maternity, thereby continuing to “ensnare” migrant women in the “reproductive sphere” (Catarino and Morokvasic, 2013), relegating the role they play in the economic activities generated by migratory processes. In short, it can be claimed that, traditionally, scant attention has been given to female migration in terms of remittance studies, particularly when compared with the vast amount of literature addressing care work and transnational maternity research, despite considerable

Revisiting the gender, migration and development nexus  41 developments in this area in recent years. We will now go on to consider the principal contributions of literature to the analysis of the nexus between migration, gender and development.

A GENDER-BASED VISION OF REMITTANCES: A TRANSNATIONAL, SOCIAL, RELATIONAL AND EMOTIONAL PERSPECTIVE ON THE MIGRATION–DEVELOPMENT NEXUS Generally speaking, scientific production has adopted the view that, although men may send a greater amount of money, due to the fact that they have higher incomes than migrant women (Semyonov and Gorodzeisky, 2005; Jayaweera and Dias, 2009), women send a greater proportion of those earnings. In addition, women send remittances more frequently and on a more regular basis, thereby making a greater contribution to the financial stability of the households (Herrera, 2005; INSTRAW, 2006; Orozco et al., 2009; Benería et al., 2012; Le Goff, 2016; Khamkhom and Jampaklay, 2020; UN Women, 2022, among others). The fact that women are more responsible than men when it comes to sending remittances may lead families to prefer female migration strategies (Ramírez et al., 2005, Tacoli, 1999, among others). This is attributable to cultural values and gender-based imperatives, which imply women’s greater sense of solidarity and obligation towards the members of the core and extended family (Salazar Parreñas, 2001). Ribas-Mateos has shown how households in Morocco may choose to overlook the restrictions traditionally imposed on female migration, as family income is greater when women migrate (Ribas-Mateos, 2004). The type of transnational household, as well as the woman’s position within it, are other factors that affect remittances. Monetary remittances vary depending on whether the objective of migration is to support the family group, autonomous migration or husband-dependent migration (Ramírezet al., 2005; Oso, 2017). However, this is a complex debate, as differences can be perceived depending on the sending country and the receiving context, as shown in the series of studies published by INSTRAW (2006). The work of Ribas-Mateos and Basa has also shown that remittances vary in accordance with the social context, as well as the configuration of the gender relationships in the sending societies (Ribas-Mateos and Basa, 2013). A recent study highlights that, due to the fact migrant women are more highly involved in the informal economy, the COVID-19 crisis is impacting their availability to send remittances, increasing the vulnerability of families in the countries of origin (UN Women, 2022). Literature has also addressed the matter of women as the recipients of remittances sent by migrant men to their countries of origin. A number of studies have shown how Ecuadorian women achieve greater authority thanks to their control over the remittances sent by their husbands (Pribilsky, 2000; IOM, 2010). Migrants tend to trust women more, as the recipients of monetary remittances, and they are the principal administrators of the money received in the sending communities (Morales, 2004). On the other hand, the gender-based, transnational analysis of remittances revealed the role of the so-called “social remittances”. This term was first coined by Levitt (1998) and is used in literature to refer to the circulation between the sending and receiving countries of ideas, practices, identities and social capital thanks to migrants’ deployment of a number of communication mechanisms such as the Internet, letters, the telephone or travel. Social remittances include regulatory structures, such as ideas, values and beliefs, as well as behavioural rules, community participation principles and social mobility aspirations (Boccagni and Decimo,

42  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration 2013; Boccagni et al., 2015; Guarnizo, 2004; Levitt and Nyberg-Sørensen, 2004). Women play a particularly relevant role in the sending of these social remittances (Mukherjee and Rayaprol, 2019). Moreover, remittances cannot be isolated from their associated symbolism (Morales, 2004), and in this sense a close relationship has been identified between the sending of remittances and emotional relationships within families (Oso, 2016). In general terms, migration and development studies that address the question of gender have shown that remittances have a positive impact on households’ living conditions, improving their members’ capacity to consume, nutrition, access to healthcare and education (Guzman et al., 2007; Orozco et al., 2009; Vullnetari and King, 2011). However, a number of studies have concluded that the nature of the investments is influenced by the gender of those receiving the remittances. For instance, there would appear to be a positive correlation between assets controlled by women and improved health for girls (Guzman et al., 2007; Lopez-Ekra et al., 2011). Several studies have claimed that women who send remittances may enjoy enhanced status, earning them greater respect within both their families and the community of origin (Herrera, 2005). Whilst this may be the case, it is equally true that the connection between sending remittances and the enhanced status or empowerment of migrant women is complex (Lopez-Ekra et al., 2011). Indeed, more critical research has shown that remittances can also have negative impacts, such as the trafficking and forced migration of women, and the exploitative situations that women migrants face, for example in the domestic sector or the sex industry (Kunz, 2008). Furthermore, migrant women are at risk of losing control over the remittances they send, as the male recipients may use the money for their own interests (Gregorio Gil, 1998). Distance may reduce women’s capacity to take decisions regarding household expenditure (Guzman et al., 2007; Lopez-Ekra et al., 2011). Migrant women have to bear the stigma associated with the “guilt” of separating the family, as a result of the migration process and “leaving their children behind” in the country of origin (Lopez-Ekra et al., 2011; Petrozziello, 2011). However, other studies have shed light on the crucial role migrant women play as carers via the virtual community, thanks to videoconferencing, smartphones, etc. (Francisco-Menchavez, 2018). Some women lose control over the proportion of their income that their spouses send, without consulting their wives, to their own family members in order to acquire expensive items, whilst the family in the receiving country experiences financial straits. In addition, on occasions, migrant husbands send remittances to other men or members of the family rather than to their wives, thereby underpinning gender hierarchies (INSTRAW, 2007; Lopez-Ekra et al., 2011). Moreover, women receiving remittances in the countries of origin may feel overwhelmed by their financial and household responsibilities. Indeed, separation also takes its toll on the various family members in the migration process (King et al., 2013). In addition, the pressure on migrant women to send remittances may be “locking these women even further into the global care chain, with not only economic, but social and cultural consequences” (Basa et al., 2011). In short, migration leads to varying results with regard to female empowerment (Petrozziello, 2011). To sum up, the majority of studies addressing the issue of migration, gender and development have tended to focus essentially on the differences between remittances sent by men and women, as well as their use and management, analysing the impact of remittances on the living conditions of families in the country of origin, as well as on gender relationships (see the bibliographical reviews carried out by Catarino and Oso 2014, and by Oso and Ribas-Mateos 2015).

Revisiting the gender, migration and development nexus  43 Literature has shown that female remittances are considered a means of articulating family relationships, playing a crucial role in transnational dynamics as an element for the construction of social and community networks. They are also interwoven in emotional ties. These connections are not limited to monetary remittances, but also the sending of goods and social remittances. Furthermore, the studies conducted have revealed the manner in which remittances can transform relationships between men and women, whilst also highlighting the fact that the changes in gender ideologies that occur in migration may have an impact on the communities of origin (INSTRAW, 2006, 2007). However, other studies have warned that women are becoming naturalised in the role of “primary caretakers”, converting them into development agents, and thereby feminising the associated obligations and responsibilities (Kunz and Maisenbacher, 2021). Moving beyond the macroeconomic debate, the gender-based approach foments the analysis of remittances as part of the reorganisation of global labour, as well as social relations and politics (Bach, 2010). Within the framework of a new stage in neoliberal capitalist and development, transnational households are playing the essential role of “providing social protection amidst narrow public responsibility for provisioning” (Khanal and Todorova, 2019: 515). Nevertheless, there is a lack of in-depth analysis into the various ways family strategies for remittances and investments in various types of resources revert to family members (Gregorio Gil, 1998; Oso and Suárez-Grimalt, 2017). A number of studies have shown that migration, despite forming part of transnational families’ improvement strategies, does not always imply better living standards for all members of the household (in material and non-material terms), which may lead to intra-household gender and generation inequalities (De Haas and Fokkema, 2013). Sending remittances is embedded in complex negotiations between household members, conditioned by gendered power relations (Kunz, 2008; Lopez-Ekra et al., 2011). Indeed, kinship, generation, gender, as well as power relations structured through a patriarchal system, are the principal underlying factors for the construction of remittance dyads, understood as an individual sender-to-receiver pairing (King et al., 2013). In addition, studies analysing the nexus between migration, gender and development have tended to focus on analysing the impact of migratory processes on the societies of origin, failing to take into consideration the development and social mobility dynamics that unfold in the various social spaces inhabited by the migrant population, namely the social spaces of origin and destination, as well as the transnational space. Indeed, the focus remains firmly fixed on national states. We will now consider how recent perspectives on development can contribute to broadening our vision of the nexus between migration, gender and development.

TRANSLOCAL DEVELOPMENT, DEVELOPMENT CORRIDORS, AND THE CIRCULATION AND INVESTMENT OF ASSETS Recent perspectives could lead us to reconsider the nexus between migration, gender and development. Zoomers and van Westen (2011) have addressed the concept of “translocal development” and the role of migration in the creation of “development corridors”. They stressed the importance of the development of the territorial approach (in terms of local, rural or regional development), considering local development from the perspective of the various “local” development networks that are interconnected with other places. They advocate a relational vision of the interrelated development processes, emphasising spatial connectivity

44  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration and the importance of local-to-local connections. This conceptualisation highlights translocal connections and spatial connectivity, taking into consideration the relationship between local and extra-local influence. The result is an articulation between “local” developments through money, goods, information, ideas and people flows; migration remains a process stemming from the emergence of “development corridors” (Zoomers and van Westen, 2011). This conceptualisation invites us to adopt a different approach to the nexus between migration and development, focusing on transnational connections. However, such an approach fails to consider the complex gender dynamics that may be articulated within the framework of the translocal exchange of money, goods, information and ideas. Articulating this approach with the exchange dynamics that are generated within transnational families can contribute a more precise vision of how to analyse development corridors from a gendered approach. On the other hand, gender and migration literature has introduced a “care circulation approach”, defined in the words of Baldassar and Merla as “the reciprocal, multi-directional and asymmetrical exchange of care that fluctuates over the life course within transnational family networks subject to the political, economic, cultural and social context of both sending and receiving societies” (Baldassar and Merla, 2013: 25). The “care circulation” approach has centred mainly on highlighting the exchanges in which transnational families engage. Their conceptualisation has focused on the relational aspect of care. However, less attention has been paid to how, as a resource, the circulation of care has an impact on the quality of life and social mobility trajectories of transnational families. In this sense, we could delve further into the theoretical conceptualisation, going beyond the relational concept and considering not only the exchange process or circulation of care. Taking into account the idea of development corridors, we could assess transnational family investments in different development dimensions, including care. In this sense, we could analyse the unequal impact these types of investment may have on families’ living conditions and development. In previous studies (Oso, 2016, 2017; Oso and Suárez-Grimalt, 2017) we have highlighted how, when explaining the social mobility strategies of transnational families, it is necessary to consider investments in the various types of assets (financial, physical, social and human, including care and emotional assets). A study of transnational Latin American families revealed how households negotiate family social mobility strategies in the transnational space, bringing to the fore the tensions that are produced in the asset investment dynamics of different members of the transnational household. In turn, this shows how investment in a particular type of capital may benefit some members of the transnational family but prove detrimental to others in terms of quality of life and social mobility trajectories. The study also attempts to reflect on the analytical complexity of understanding assets investment dynamics within the transnational space, highlighting the fact that households may invest in a type of asset in the country of origin, thus causing a negative effect on other capital in the receiving country (Oso, 2016, 2017; Oso and Suárez-Grimalt, 2017).

CONCLUSIONS This chapter has reviewed the principal theoretical approaches to the nexus between migration, gender and development. From the economic perspectives, which traditionally analysed

Revisiting the gender, migration and development nexus  45 the connection between migration and development, men were positioned as the principal actors of migration, either as workers, migrating in their role as the main breadwinner, or as members of the “reserve army”, marching from the periphery to the centre of the global capitalist system. The perspective of transnationalism and the focus on gender and migration led to a transnational, social, relational and emotional approach to the nexus between migration and development, although studies have to date centred mainly on the analysis of remittances, albeit in a broad sense (including, for instance, social remittances). Our chapter concludes with a proposal for the consideration of the nexus between migration, gender and development from the perspective of translocal development, development corridors, and the circulation and investment of assets in the transnational space. In order to take the research agenda further, our proposal is to rethink the migration, gender and development nexus, from an asset circulation approach, considering the gender tensions that the circulation and investments may have on the transnational families and the different impact on translocal development.

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Revisiting the gender, migration and development nexus  47 King, Russel, Diana Mata-Codesal and Julie Vullnetari (2013), “Migration, development, gender and the ‘black box’ of remittances: comparative findings from Albania and Ecuador”, Comparative Migration Studies, 1 (1), 69–96. Kunz, Rahel (2008), “Remittances are beautiful? Gender implications of the new global remittances trend”, Third World Quarterly, 29 (7), 1389–1409. Kunz, Rahel, and Julia Maisenbacher (2021), “Gender and remittances”, in Claudia Mora and Nicola Piper (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Migration, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 321–338. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-63347-9 Le Goff, Maelan (2016), “Feminization of migration and trends in remittances”, IZA World of Labor 2016, 220. Levitt, Peggy (1998), “Social remittances: migration driven local-level forms of cultural diffusion”, International Migration Review, 32 (4), 926–948. Levitt, Peggy (2001), The Transnational Villagers, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Levitt, Peggy, and Ninna Nyberg-Sørensen (2004), “The transnational turn in migration studies”, Global Migration Perspectives, 6, 2–13. Lewis, William Arthur (1954), “Economic development with unlimited supplies of labour”, The Manchester School, 22 (2), pp. 139–191. Lopez-Ekra, Sylvia, Christine Aghazarm, Henriette Kötter and Blandine Mollard (2011), “The impact of remittances on gender roles and opportunities for children in recipient families: research from the International Organization for Migration”, Gender & Development, 19 (1), 69–80. Massey, Douglas S. (1999), “Why does immigration occur? A theoretical synthesis”, in Charles Hirschman et al. (eds), The Handbook of International Migration, New York: Russell Sage Foundation, pp. 34–52. Massey, Douglas S., Joaquín Arango, Graeme Hugo, Ali Kouaci, Adela Pellegrino and J. Edward Taylor (1993), “Theories of international migration: a review and appraisal”, Population and Development Review, 19 (3), 431–466. Matthews, Sally J. (2010), “Postdevelopment theory”, Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of International Studies, https://​oxfordre​.com/​i​nternation​alstudies/​view/​10​.1093/​acrefore/​9780190846626​.001​.0001/​ acrefore​-9780190846626​-e​-39​?print​=​pdf Mazzucato, Valentina, and Djamila Schans (2011), “Transnational families and the well-being of children: conceptual and methodological challenges”, Journal of Marriage and Family, 73 (4), 704–712: DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-3737.2011.00840.x Montoya Zavala, Erika (2006), “Experiencias internacionales en el uso productivo de las remesas”, Migración y Desarrollo, No. 6, primer semestre. Morales, Julio (2004), “Mujeres mixtecas al volante: un análisis transnacional de movilidad, trabajo y empoderamiento”, in Emma Zapata and Blanca Suárez (eds), Remesas. Milagros y mucho más realizan las mujeres indígenas y campesinas, Mexico: Editorial GIMTRAP / Fundación Ford / Fundación Rockefeller, Serie PEMSA, pp. 407–459. Morokvasic, Mirjana (1984), “Birds of passage are also women”, International Migration Review, 18 (4), 886–907. Mukherjee, Anushyama, and Aparna Rayaprol (2019), “Women migrants and social remittances: the case of barkas in Hyderabad”, Economic & Political Weekly, 54, 62–68. Orozco, Manuel, B. Lindsay Lowell and Johanna Schneider (2009), Gender-Specific Determinants of Remittances: Differences in Structures and Motivation, Washington, D.C.: World Bank. Oso, Laura (1998), La migración hacia España de mujeres jefas de hogar, Madrid: Instituto de la Mujer. Oso, Laura (2016), “Revisiting the gender, migration and development nexus through the ‘care circulation’ approach”, Papers: Revista de sociología, 101 (2), 259–264. Oso, Laura (2017), “Remesas, relaciones de género y movilidad social de las familias migrantes en Turubamba Bajo, Quito”, in Laura Oso and Alicia Torres (eds), Migración ecuatoriana, género y desarrollo, Quito: FLACSO, pp. 93–119. Oso, Laura, and Natalia Ribas-Mateos (2013), “An introduction to a global and development perspective: a focus on gender, migration and transnationalism”, in Laura Oso and Natalia Ribas Mateos (eds), The International Handbook on Gender, Migration and Transnationalism: Global and Development Perspectives, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 1–41.

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4. The absent image of women: lacunae in the legacy of French colonial mobilities Natalia Ribas-Mateos

1. INTRODUCTION This chapter is conceived as a way of finding valuable material on the colonial legacy and female mobilities, structured to provide a background to the research included in this book. It will be limited mainly to a photographic archive I had access to thanks to MESOPOLHIS (Aix-en-Provence) support during the summer of 2021. More specifically, this chapter introduces and overviews conceptual issues relating to decoloniality and feminism with a historical background, through the use of photography and opinions on colonial photographs. Photography is inter-related here with theoretical discourses; for example, through the context of the archive and the vision of the time at which the images were obtained, forming a complex interwoven discussion. The general discussion considered here is framed within a larger historical–sociological context for the first part of the chapter, before moving on to consider the colonial photograph as an artefact used in a range of different ways and circumstances and particular contexts. How are they read? How are they made? In this sense, it is essentially about offering a wide background of coloniality, circulations and feminism, intended to introduce key debates, and at the same time to indicate sources and resources by using French colonial photography as an illustration tool. Through this exercise, I propose to embark on the context of history articulated with the history of images, and in particular photography, which has often been excluded from the traditional classification of arts and crafts. In this history, I propose not only to refer to the colonial context, but also to connect with the question of the meaning of feminine memories; of the memory of women1 as a lacunae. We understand that images register historical transformation figuratively: the question is not about tracing the iconography, but rather about how history acquires figurative and memorable figuration (in the sense described by Griselda Pollock, 2013). Guided by such a connection – between a wide conceptual framework where the work is situated, and by an observance of “coded” photographs – we will see that there are no simple rules in order to “decode” them. By exploring such complex connected elements, Despite the use here of the term “woman”, I am aware of such a generalisation in this exercise. Mohanty (2007) highlights the strategic location of the category “women” depending on the context of analysis. Western feminist texts have produced “the woman of the developing world” as a singular, monolithic subject, who sees herself as an active agent of history, liberated, educated and free, in sharp contrast to others, who are portrayed as poor, uneducated, tradition bound, domestic, family oriented, victim, etc. So on the one hand, Western feminists see themselves as free to make their own choices, yet on the other hand, all other women are placed in a coherent group (without place, class, ethnic or racial differences and contradictions). Group resistance for Mohanty is not here based on biology, colour or geography but rather on a common history of colonial domination. 1

49

50  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration the essential question to be answered is whether the legacy reviewed in the chapter provides us with a maner of understanding the future (see the conclusions for how I intend to open up new research lines). The motivation – my motivation – behind this chapter considered questions on the French colonial legacy. Was there really a French vision contrasting with a European vision? How, with the passage of time, did the colonial contexts shift in their interpretation? What can be considered innovative or challenging today when addressing a historical perspective of gender and mobilities traced from the colonial context? I was also intrigued by “l’œuvre civilisatrice de la France” in building up the colonial migration legacy, in contrast to other colonial systems. When referring to the French Empire, authors tend to highlight contrasts with the British Empire in particular, essentially the differences between British and French forms of indirect rule. Alternatively, they compare and contrast French colonial discourse (mission civilisatrice et républicaine), with the technological–business orientation of the British Empire, typical of the colonial office of the British Plantation. British indirect rule used pre-existing local structures, which were also used in French Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, as well as in the Spanish Protectorate in Northern Morocco. Indirect rule was in force in the Dutch East Indies, Portuguese African colonies like Mozambique, and was also applied by the Belgians in Burundi. Therefore, even though we can consider the notion of a European colonial mind, a review of the in-depth research into multiple historical realities reveals sharp differences. An example of this is the research into Algerian colonialism conducted by Thénault (in her book of 2012). She shows that contrasting direct control/indirect control, which in a political instance is often portrayed as the opposition between British and French rule, was not always the case. The exception of the Algerian model is the common example.2 1.1

Une Archéologie Féministe Décolonial

Before considering the meaning of decolonial, we must first briefly consider the meaning of the colonial.3 This “decolonial moment” is also difficult to locate. For example, many

2 She shows this case of direct rule through the illustration of the municipal mixed communities, by considering the role played by the “cadis” (as they were the ones who knew the territory). The idea of the citizen was thought as an “assimilé”, which was normally of European origin. They were all a territorial minority in a big country where the majority of the population was of rural origin. The right to vote was guided by the following hierarchy: full representation – the male “colon”, then the “homme indigen”, then the European woman and then, the “femme indigène”. In this respect, Thénault, 2012) analyses in detail the sense of the “indigenat”, basically as a way to designate Muslims (with a dual rule, the civil law and the sharia). 3 The dictionary of the “France Colonial” (directed by Pierre Rioux, 2007) distinguishes the following key periods, and the following figures of colonialism: a) As the different historical periods, we can distinguish the “Etapes” of: 1815, La fin de vieux rêves; 1830, La prise d’Alger; 1845, l’abolition de l’esclavage; 1855, le désastre de Lang son; 1898, L’humiliation de Fachoda; 1912, Le protectorat sur le Maroc; 1917, la “force noire”; 1931, L’empire s’expose; 1934, L’achèvement du Congo-Océan; 1944, La conférence de Brazzaville; 1945, L’insurrection du Nord Constantinois; 1946, La naissance de l’Union française; 1947, La révolte malgache; 1954, Diên Biên Phu; 1958, L’éphémère communauté; 1962, les accords d’Evian; 1998, l’accord de Nouméa; b) As figures: Brazza, Bugeaud, Camus, Cupleix, Ébou, Faid Herbe, Ferry, Foucauld, Gallieni, Garnier, De Gaulle, Lavigerie, Lyautey, Senghor, Urbain; c) As colonies or colonisateurs: Les administrateurs, les banquiers, les colons, l’école, les émigrants,

The absent image of women  51 references tend to pinpoint 1962, the year of Algeria’s independence, as the crucial moment. However, the French rupture with the Maghreb is not so clear. Others consider that the term “postcolonial” refers to the date of the publication of the founder of postcolonial studies The Empire Writes Back,4 which is normally defined as “all the culture affected by the imperial processes from the moment of colonisation until nowadays” (Hendrickson 2013: 56). Such postcolonialism is at the same time different from postcoloniality. The second term implies a more dynamic intention, a more relational connection of the present to the colonial past (again, referring to Spivak’s differentiation, Hendrickson 2013: 56). In recent decades, the terms “postcolonial” and “postcolonialism” have been imposed in the intellectual and political debate. Some authors (like Bayart 2010) have examined it as a direct influence of Anglo academic hegemony clashing with French production. Such postcolonial interpretations are nourished from the following: the critique of Orientalism, Pan-African philosophy or “méditerranéisme” (like Michael Herzfeld), and literary criticism from India and the Caribbean in relation to the British Empire. 1.2

A Note on Methodology

This archéologie, part of the empirical research of the chapter, has been conducted thanks to the sources found in French archives and bibliographical secondary sources in Marseille– Aix-en-Provence (collection of images). Here, some key axes of the methodology employed can be indicated: ● “Une cartographie concrète: La France impériale.” Specific places: a list of places “territoires français”.5 ● “Une chronologie concrète.” Overview of Maps of 1928, diverse chronological indications. Longue durée perspective (particularly end 19th and 20th, the long 20th century). ● Concrete images, “Images des femmes” (photographs). The photography as a base of representations: archives d’Outre Mer, Iconothèque, base Ulysses, books as a base of secondary texts as well as books concerning the selection of images. ● A research practice: identifying the mental mapping, “the French colonial map” and “décortiquer les catégories”.

médecins et pharmaciens, les militaires de la conquête, les missionnaires, les négociants, savants et ingénieurs, et la ville coloniale. 4 Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin (2002) review critical models of postcolonial literature, the liberation of postcolonial writing, indigenous theory and postcolonial reading, and ways of re-thinking the postcolonial in the 21st century. More particularly, Ashcroft et al. in The Empire Writes Back recall a postcolonial moment, where postcolonialism (or often post-colonialism) deals with the effects of colonisation on cultures and societies. It emerged in the late 1970s to designate an area of cultural studies regarding colonised societies, and it is different to the postcolonial term used by historians, which had a chronological meaning. In this particular postcolonial moment, Ashcroft et al. show how one can be grounded and yet mobile; this is one of the most important aspects of diasporic dynamics. 5 We not only cover the mapping of 1929, as seen in the Atlas of the time with all its lists of locations, but also the France of today: it has 96 departments in Europe, 5 as D’Outremer (Dom), Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guyane, La Réunion and Mayotte (after April 2011), and the following territories: Nouvelle-Calédonie, Polynésie française, Îles Wallis et Futuna, Terres australes et antarctiques françaises, some islands in the Indian Ocean and Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon.

52  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration By using secondary sources, we have captured a plethora of categories, forms of categorisation and representations that have served as a key background in order to critically organise our literature reading and our collected images. We have chosen photography as a base. Today, we are immersed in a world of images that would have been unimaginable in colonial times, when images were a novelty. Photography has played many roles since then, and has also been used as a metaphor for the “lumière” against obscurity. It has also served to denounce a devastating colonial regime. Examples include the case of Alice Harris, who took her Kodak camera to the Congo and portrayed all the physical destruction (hands, feet, corporal punishments), imposed by the organisation of forced labour in the rubber industry. Through it, we see the hidden role of woman; how photography acts as humanist tool and how it serves to understand its own origins. On the other hand, through historical research into the role of photography in the military terrain, particularly in the colonies, we discover that photography is often presented as a mere propaganda tool. Or rather, the origins of photographic use motivated by concerns that are located in a kind of military “off-screen”, but set apart from “domestic life”. 1.3 Structure What is the key to “finding lacunae” in French colonial mobilities connected with images of women? I first considered the meaning of type of deconstruction by using feminist decolonial tools, French archives and bibliography secondary sources both in Marseille and Aix-en-Provence (during the months of July and August 2021), based on a “cartographie concrète” (Maps of 1929), and in the “images de femmes”, photographs as forms of representation, using for example books in the libraries, the iconothèque of Archives d’Outre Mer (iconothèque, base Ulysses) based in Aix-en-Provence, and by using a designed mental mapping of a sketched French colonial map. What is the conceptual method for the research? I have traced and explored the “lacunae” with a help of a particular framework. First, by approaching the term decolonial with the help of the work of the Comaroffs (1992), by reviewing the production by Latinas (see the references to the connection of decolonial/eco-feminism theories); by a revision of the historiography in France (with a historical mapping of a long durée perspective (particularly the end of the 19th century, and with the conception of the “fracture colonial”, in various texts of Blanchard: 2011; et al. 2003, 2005). Further actions in this sense included a contextual revision from a centrally located vision: the metropole, the colonial harbour; from Marseille as “ville-port colonial”; by the revision of the persistence of the “pensé coloniale” (in the perspective of “imperial durability” – in various texts of Stoler: 2002, 2010a, 2010b, 2016). Thus, such a rich and complex context serves to see how one is able to décortiquer (peel) les categories of images. Within this framework, I also problematise other concepts such as feminism, patriarchal colonialism and post-Beauvoir feminism, as well as mobilities (imperial mobilities), through multiple concepts (circulation, settlement, migration, displacement, “banlieue”, repatriation, exodus, expulsions). This focus on deconstruction is driven by a careful examination of unhinging meanings in order to identify the decolonial, as a French construction, especially in contrast with the British Empire (using the mentioned notions of indirect rule in contrast with “la mission civilisatrice et républicaine”). An additional point should be considered in attempts to introduce the idea of archéologie – namely the use of the “archéologie du savoir”, the history of sexuality, the effort to see the

The absent image of women  53 “history of femmes” as “la poubelle de l’histoire”. This effort is also seen through the archéologie of migrations (particularly in Marseille), colonial history (to see colonial migration and its gender implications), “le fait colonial”, “la colonie paradigmatique”, and “la construction du discourse colonial”. Nevertheless, it is probably overly ambitious to attempt to enumerate all the reasons behind such an overview of the archéologie. Yet again, this is not a compendium, or a colonial checklist to bear in mind, but instead a conceptual framework to facilitate reflection in contemporary social thought. Reflection is necessary in order to think about future research lines. We are confronted here with the difficulty of the “science de la science et réflexivité”, in the terms of Bourdieu, in order to better approach “mémoire et restitution”. Thirdly, and following the structure of the book, I turn to the methodology and the categories, as identified through the archival process, as for example in: ● ● ● ●

MMSH sources. Use of photos. Observance of images. Women in the colonies (representations, constructions). Collection iconographie. Archives d’Outre Mer. Fonds EHESS (Vieillie Charité, Marseille).

Fourthly, I review the categories used (“décortiquer les catégories”) and try to understand them from a critical perspective. Examples include the reiterative image of “the 3 Races” flag; the tripartite vision “trois couleurs, un drapeau, un empire”; the observance of how the multiple categories work together in as intersectional mode, in a form of crosscutting of categories that I have selected: Indigène, sauvage/savage, the invention of the Tuareg, femmes de colons, tiralleur, travailleur colonial (extractivisme, mines, domestiques, plantation), harki, negre– négritude (Césaire 1955, 2000, 2009; Fanon,6 Nardal7), odalisque, prostituée, etc. ● Expositions coloniales. ● Museumification (exposer l´humanité,8 folklorisme, sexualisation). ● Ethnographies.

6 Fanon was head physician at the psychiatric hospital of Blida, Algeria, then part of France. His writings and clinical practice led to the development of a political conception of the pathogenic structures of postcolonialist society and its psychic effects on identity and self-understanding. 7 Even though Césaire, Fanon and Senghor have been recognised as the source of the negritude concept, we must stress how Nardal’s reflections on race began nearly a decade before Césaire and Senghor were credited with founding the philosophy of Négritude, together with Suzanne Césaire and her sister Paulette Pauline Nardal. By acknowledging their work, we can trace how women were both the movement’s founders and the inspiration behind this philosophy. 8 Esposer l’humanité (a book by Conklin, 2005), teaches us the importance of taking into consideration the contribution to the “science raciale” for the Musée de l’Homme, continuing the task of the 19th-century study of races, particularly anthropologists seeking professionalisation. They used the study of cranial examination. Not only the event of the moulding of the Venus Hottentote, but also the exhibition of 300 skulls shows the pertinence of the concept of race and the justification of the zoological classification. It was the time of Paul Rivet and his ethnographic studies of the colonial world, and also of Alfred Métraux and the origins of anthropology, and the beginning of Germain Tillion and her first fieldwork in the Aurès (Algeria, 2000).

54  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration Finally, I conclude the chapter by looking for ways in how to capture such a legacy today, in order to address future research by reviewing the following topics: Mémoire–restitution, Mémoire eurocentrisme. ● The catégorie postcolonial tardive (sortir du colonialisme, réseau as action). ● Reflection. The postcolonial studies reader. Carnaval postcolonial.

2.

AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE

2.1

Foucault: une Archéologie du Savoir,9 in the History of Sexuality

We must begin this discussion with a genealogy, as perceptions and descriptions are historically conditioned and conceptualised. Dorlin, in her Matrice de la race (2009), shows a common sexual and colonial genealogy of the French nation. In other words, illuminating a system that instrumentalises healthy and non-healthy people, in the line of gender and race as a way of legitimising oppression. A system that makes weak and strong in such parameters and that can be exampled in many ways, for example, in the way that black people are bestialised or else in the way that “marrons” in the Caribbean are seen as sick people. 2.2

Histoire des Femmes: “la Poubelle de l’Histoire”

One of the main obstacles in this chapter’s attempts at deconstruction–construction was to reveal the position of women in this history. This required capturing the view of the “histoire mondiale”, the “histoire du” and the “histoire de la famille et de la vie privée”. A bibliographical review of global history yields little information regarding gender and world history (or also referred to as “histoire globale”, “histoire connectée”). In this respect, in the introduction to gender in history, Scott (1999) argues that the difficulty of equality is the “difference dilemma”, which resides in the assumption that equality presumes sameness. For her, history is the repeated illustration of the play on differences. This historical research also reveals key issues for consideration: ● French history regarding: historique du féminisme. La marche du siècle: Docilité, soumission, effaces. Contraposition of Femme objet/Femme ménagère.

9 What do we understand by this? Most authors refer to Foucault in such a search: “l’archeologie […]. Ellen est rien de plus de rien d’autre qu’une réecriture: c’est-à-dire dans la forme maintenue de l’extériorité, une transformation réglée de ce qui a été dejà écrit. Ce n’est pas le retour au secret même de l’origine; c’est la description systématique d’un discours-objet” (Foucault 1969: 183). Furthermore, Foucault (see in Stoler 2002) provides working concepts for colonial studies, analytical openings, category-making projects that facilitate comparisons. An example of such an interpretation is biopolitics: . “The enslaved Africans, were strictu sensu “corps-machine” – where the body is taken in a mechanical sense (Foucault 1976), (…) where women worked in the plantations next to the men.

The absent image of women  55 2.3

Histoire des Migrations: Migration Coloniale, Migration Coloniale et Genre, Migration Coloniale et Mémoire

Another obstacle in this effort to see the traces of women in colonial circularities and migrations was to consider the ancient role of women in colonial migration, in terms of a memory of colonial migration. There are numerous examples of such a twisted vision of women in colonial migration, as shown in the following quotation: “A man remains a man as long as he stays under the gaze of a woman of his race” (George Hardy, in Chivas Baron 1929, quoted by Stoler 2010a: 1). Stoler refers here to how Georges Hardy was at the time one of the main architects of French educational policy, and his words warned a group of fonctionnaires, “a man remains a man as long as he stays under the gaze of a woman of his race”. His words embraced an ideal of domesticity “that few European men in the colonies were able to realize, want or afford […]. European men should ‘take on’ native women not only to perform domestic work but to service their sexual needs, mental well-being, and physical care. In relation or else in contrast to such domesticity, a further feature of colonialism is the establishment of the figure of the single man, the ‘célibataires misogynes par vocation ou par institution’” (Gautier 2003: 606). Continuing with the extrapolation of the current day, today’s extrapolation, some authors refer to these kind of images as the endurance of stigmas of colonialism in the practices of sexual tourism or in the nostalgia of the “droits à la terre perdue”. European manhood in the colonies, whether measured by “character” and civility or by position and class, was largely independent of the presence of European women (Stoler 2002: 45). On the other hand, European women of different classes experienced the colonial venture very differently from one another and from men, and “we still know relatively little about the distinct investments they had in the racism they shared” (Stoler 2002: 45). This female place in the colonial system, for example when Jacques Bergue confirmed that in Algeria there was no intermarriage, no children born out of wedlock, remains unchanged even a century after the end of colonisation, as if “woman was the last refuge of the autonomy of the colonised” (Stoler 2002: 47). Furthermore, we found little on gender and colonisation in French literature in comparison with Anglo-Saxon production. In Anglo-Saxon literature, studies have shown how gender was regulated, sexuality was patrolled and race was policed (Stoler 2002: 210). Within this framework, recent studies have also drawn attention to the fact that a fairly immobile form of domesticity was also an inherent ingredient in the “civilizing mission”, the vision of an ideal nuclear family, embedded in a particular ideology distributing gender division roles. If we start our search from the times of the plantations, Spensky (2015) recalls how advice was proffered to women in the Manuel pour les jeunes habitants. For example, the Guadeloupian colony would offer advice to the women who had just given birth: give them two months to stay with their babies. Control over women was very different from that in the metropolis. On the plantations, women were forced into abortion for economic reasons affecting the plantation structure. It would therefore take many years for these women to be fully recognised as “mothers”. On balance, the history of such constructions is firstly based on the time of the conquest, then on the “traite transantlantique”, where deportation was conducted taking one third of women against two thirds of men (Gautier 2003: 575). This is because men’s work was valued more highly in America than in Africa. In fact, the price of the captive women was higher on the African market than on the Atlantic one. After the raiding of their societies, women

56  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration were also taken away from their relatives and were prevented from returning home. African slavery in America was then legitimised in the name of “progrès”and the “domestication” of women. Their lives would unfold in the domestic sphere, slowly learning how to care for their husbands and children (for more on this conception, see Rogers 1980). When women were working in the mines, their salaries would be far lower than those of men, even when there was full discrimination, as with the so-called “viellies colonies françaises” (Guadeloupe, Guyane, Martinique, Réunion). Legal discrimination was introduced in favour of men: in 1848 they obtained suffrage, in parallel with French citizens, whilst the “anciens esclaves” and the “métropolitaines” would have to wait another century (Gautier 2003: 206). Of course, many other issues surrounding the construction and “invention of woman” could be placed into this colonial legacy. We could give numerous examples here, ranging from health issues, with the mother at the centre in order to “save the race” to the “indigenous maternity” as a tool of progress, but also of the culpabilisation of women: “elles étaient jugées à la fois […] et sauvages, pires que les amimaux”.10 Other visions were regarding the contrast of the indigenous (in Indochina) with “la française”.11 The lack of “non-reconnaissance” for women in the “anciennes colonies”, or even for the Christians in the new colonies, would have very harmful effects on their concubines and their descendants. Another vision of such “body observance” of the woman in the colonies was the example of prostitution. In the case of Algeria, proletarisation came hand-in-hand with the evolution of the families in the bidonvilles of the city, which would develop the figure of “Fatma” (sujet domestique) and the “mauresque” (objet érotique), which would be imposed to create the archetype of the “prostituée indigène”. This would lead to the construction of the racialised with a “lascive”, “soumise”, “savage et criminèlle” femininity (Taraud 2010 : 139). These kinds of attributions remind us of the old examinations of Lombroso and Ferrero’s female criminals in 1896, drawing a parallel between the criminal character and the primitive character of the “prostituée”, defined in psychiatric terms. Furthermore, when these women had children, the problem of the “métis” would arise. In the colonies, the problems regarding the affiliation of children were common, together with their severe stigmatisation, which was problematic in a common and different manner (see the contrasts in Guyana with Indochina, for example) in all French colonies. In this embedded body vision of the circularities of gender, we can also introduce the intimate encounter of what Taraud (2003) terms “la question de la collaboration charnelle”. For her, it is presented as one of the final avatars of the colonial encounter, the real expression of colonialism and sexual violence (in her case analysed in the case of the Maghreb). When the French army commenced the colonisation of the Maghreb, one of its first actions was to regulate prostitution. Taraud sees the passage of a masculine domination to a colonial domination to adapt women to a form of “sexual Taylorism”. Furthermore, she sees their figures as “passerelles” between the “indigènes” communities and the European colons. She uses the examination of this figure (through archival research, interviews, artistic production and

10 Not all sexualisation was aggressive or sadistic. Some was protective, suggesting that women would become ménagères, housekeepers doubling as sexual partners. As a result there was more than one sexual economy at work, crosscutting in complex forms. 11 “Pourquoi, en effet, serait-elle inférieure parce qu’elle est d’une autre race? elle à un cœur et un âme […]. La Française souffre du climat, tandis que cette indigène demeure fraiche, sèche et douce comme l’ivoire” (words of the geologist Pierre Ternier, in Gautier 2003: 599).

The absent image of women  57 media), not only to narrate sexual violence during the colonial times, but also in the colonies. More particularly, by showing how the colonial imaginary takes shape in metropolitan society. 2.4

Histoire Coloniale

How do we use and refer to a certain type of “mental mapping”, intimately inhabited by the French colonial map? Logically, the term “colonial” was seen at the time as positive for the French, whereas today the connotations are extremely negative. In those days, the term “colonial” represented a dream, that of the small bourgeois male for whom the colonial project was a means of personal and professional advancement. In such a mapping, we can place the colonial ideology at its core. It had meaning inside a mission: civilising colonialism, missionary imperialism and settler colonialism. That mission is therefore submerged in the long durée: in the slavery past and afterwards, in the Republican pact. This mapping was not always merely homogenous, even when seen from what were supposed the most critical voices of the day. The mental hierarchies were to remain for a long time, as we can see in the words of the Marguerite Duras, writing in Indochina in 1940: Our imperial conception is, in fact, the very negation of racism. France has given to all its overseas subjects, without distinguishing between races, the same opportunities for development and the same hopes. The “indigène” was never treated as defeated; not only do we have responsibilities towards him, but we recognise his social and political rights and, above all, his right to acquire new knowledge. Certainly, it is not up to him to decide when he will be able to use his abilities. It is up to us to do it, at the appropriate time, to lighten our tutelage over him. (translated from French)

Even today, these issues are key elements in the manner of constructing racism, its rejection, and even in the way humanism develops the idea of “protecting the other”. Logically, the colonial map always underlies the colonial policies. Nevertheless, the creation of the empire has a very elaborate model with an underlying central philosophy: “La creation de l’Empire français serait la reproduction imparfaite d’un modèle politique et administratif de type centralisé, d’une philosophie abstraite de rêve égalitaire”, as De l’Estoile (2007) points out. To understand the complexities of such mapping, it is more accurate to speak of different colonial meanings. De l’Estoile (2007) proposes distinguishing between “rapport colonial” and “colonisation”. This relation (rapport colonial) would entail the main structures between Europe and the rest of the continents (15th- to 20th century). It is characterised by violence, by appropriation (religion, economy, demography, politics, linguistics, arts), by negation of the colonised, which vary according to time and context. There is therefore a “colonisation” in the technical sense, to designate the political control of a territory by a foreign force that aims to exploit a territory. This is one of the possible relations of the “colonial rapport”. Thus, according to De l’Estoile (2007), the terms “colonial” and “colonisation” conform to the ideal-types in history that are descriptive, but they do not entail a moral evaluation. He also adds that the “rapport colonial” normally includes violence, as a part of the appropriation and negation of the colonised. In actual fact, such appropriation is multiple and varies according to place and time. In the case of women, an example can be found in Algeria, in the description of extreme violence against the FLN activist in Algiers, Djamila Boupacha, by French militaries in 1954 as a form of genocide (De Beauvoir and Halimi 1962). According to Kamel Kateb (Brower 2009: viiii), around 825,000 lives were lost as a result of violence during the first 45 years of French

58  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration occupation, and an equal number died in the famines and epidemics triggered principally by the colonial-induced economic mutations suffered by Algerian society. This is referred to in Brower’s book: “they make a desert and call it peace, taking for Algeria a quotation by Tacitus”;12 “fascinated by the lure of the Sudanese interior, the French built an empire not on a solid economic foundation but on a grand illusion[;] unlike Urbain, Enfantin had little interest in Sahara Trade or mapping circuits” (2009: 1). It must be remembered that the Sahara has been one of the great myths of colonisation. In contrast, he refers to “colonisation” as the political control of a territory in order to exploit it. He understands “Colonial” and “Colonisation” as “ideal types historiques” that do not imply a moral evaluation. Along the same lines, he refers to “heritage”, not only as the past, but also to what Malinowsky referred to as “le passé dans le présent”. It is here, then, that we could add the term of “heritage colonial”, in order to reflect on such a past. In the case of “héritage colonial”, the old topos of the virgin land offered to the explorer is a basic part of the colonial myth. In such exploration, “primitifs arts”, “art nègre”, are understood in opposition to “Western tradition”, which later become an alterity to be consumed (De l’Estoile 2007), yet again another element of the colonial heritage. Furthermore, De l’Estoile (2007) distinguishes diverse realities: migration, circulation of goods, diplomatic and military, monuments, art collections, linguistic practices, musical forms, and food habits. He also indicates the inclusion of a certain type of debate, “le débat dans une alternative entre universalisme-assimilationniste et pluralisme différencialiste, ansi que les schèmes de classification tels que ceux d’art primitif ou tribal”. This universalist discourse seems to be reaffirmed in the time of the “Exposition coloniale” and around the activities of the “Musée de l’Homme”, which, according to De l’Estoile (2007), build up a colonial humanism, founded by a diversity of cultures and symbolising harmony between civilisations. However, such discourse seems to find serious contradictions in today’s public debate, showing two poles: that of pluralist universalism and that of the globalisation driven by the American way of life, opposing assimilationism to multiculturalism. Yet overall, and looking beyond De l’Estoile’s work, we need to find the answers to at least a further three questions. Firstly, how does history locate “the colonial”? Or, expressed in the French manner, “Le fait colonial”? Ethnologist Daniel Rivet called for a reconsideration of the “fait colonial”. Lingering passions, he said, have burned historians with facile binary categories of coloniser and colonised, bad and good. For Rivet (Brower 2009: 54), colonialism was found in the port cities but not in rural Algeria, like the Aurès mountains where they did not see “the European face” until the arrival of French troops during the Algerian war. Secondly, how does history locate the “colonial discourse” or else “the construction of the colonial discourse”? Regarding colonial discourse, there are naturally numerous issues for consideration, including various elements that will be discussed in different sections of the chapter. They can range from colonial history to the history of colonisation, to the history of the fait colonial. As most literature indicates, there is an entire plural history embedded in the chronological context of the 19th and 20th century, which refers normally to the second phase of the colonial expansion. In fact, the discourse can be traced back even earlier, as shown in the example of the dogon art of the Khmer, within the discourse of art as a form of 12 “Il a fait de notre pays un désert.” He made our land a desert. French translation of a Kabyle poem, recorded in 1850.

The absent image of women  59 colonisation. In general, the discourse is based on the perspective of a different civilisation, which is seen mostly as fixed in time, such as the annamite (vietnamienne), laotiènne (from Laos) or cambodgiènne (Khmère), which are also seen as “dégénerées” (degenerated) nations. The discourse is also constructed differently with regard to geographical distance, economic potentiality, demographic balance, peripheral position etc., with imperial history relating to the scant knowledge of the history of each colony. A further expression can also be found in Algeria. The colon Enfantin went to Algeria to establish virtuous and productive settler colonies that would realise some of the dearest ideals of the movements. These included material progress, technical planning, rational spirituality, pacifism, and a society free of individualism and class conflict. Settlement in Algeria represented the possibility to enact on a much larger scale in the Saint-Simonian “family”, to encourage the spirit of mutual help (Brower 2009: 65). Thirdly, how is colonial administration located? As pointed out earlier, “L’administration coloniale à la française” has its peculiarities in contrast to other examples of European colonialism. Yet who were they? Who were these men that belonged to the colonial administration? There was indeed a diversity of “colonialistes”, as “militants du fait colonial” and the “coloniaux”, “des fonctionnaires”, “les colonisateurs of the colons” (the French settlers in the colonies). Even with the figures of the French colonialism, we can distinguish between several periods: the ancient ones (Jules Ferry, Théophile Delcassé, Félix Faure), and the colonial figures of the 19th centuries,13 with their specificities of thought and their influences on the people of action (Bugeaud, Pavie, Brazza, Gallieni, Lyautey) (D’Anduray 2017: 5). At first they were the explorers (the explorers of the world and its colonisation), through maritime expansion; through their doctrinal discourse, they would install a kind of normative sermon of the colonial, and within it, the differentiation of a French discourse based on Republican values and the universalist mission of French culture. Within such discourse, the civilisation that provides the background to all European discourses was founded; in this case, the aim was to civilise with the help of Christianism and the launch of new commercial routes. Certainly, in terms of intention, back-up discourses are qualitatively different. There were naturally major differences in the type of administration. An example is the case of the “Afrique Équatoriale Française”, which the “voyageurs français” would term the “Cendrillon de l’Empire”, as can be seen in the documentary and the work of Gide (2004), who, despite his criticism of the system, would act in the same manner as other colons. In the case of Indochina, “l’indigénat” was abolished in 1903, concealing the continued imperial division between “citoyens” and “sujets”. Finally, Algeria stands apart, as always, and was designated as “la colonie paradigmatique”. The plethora of bibliographic production on the colonisation of Algeria is overwhelming in comparison with other works. France had arrived in a territory it knew very little about – not even the language – but which would become its paradigmatic example.

We can cite as key names: Paul Dislère, Augute Terier, Robert de Caix, Eugène Étienne, Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, Jean-Marie de Lanessan, Charles Le Myre de Vilers, Jospeh Chailley-Bert, Jules-Harmand, Paul Deschanel. 13

60  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration

3.

PROBLEMATISING THE TERM “DECOLONIAL”

Does the noun “decolonial” exist in the French language? We could fill up pages on the lexicon debate concerning all the variants from “colonial”. Some authors, like Handysides (2013), prefer the term “a-colonial” over postcolonial, thereby eliminating the chronological connotations of the prefix “post”. In actual fact, the “decolonisation process” covers a period of 15 years, when France was losing control of much of her empire. Prior to this process, we can also consider the various phases of historic decolonisation: discoveries and exoticism (1875–1925); the hit moment: pro-against Empire (1940–1945); the Vichy moment and the liberation of France (1940–1945). This would be followed by decolonisation: the post-war shock; French Union and the creation of departments (1943–1954); French Union (1945–1958), Independence (Morocco, Tunisia); Sub-Saharan Africa: reforms (1955–1959); the crisis of the “vieilles colonies” (1946–1960); Algeria and the war (1954–1959); African and Algerian independence (1960–1983); the last fight for independence, from Gong in 2018 to Nouvelle-Calédonie (Groupe de Recherche ACHAC 2021). However, not all cases narrate the same process, as ACHAC points out (2021). Sometimes independence was negotiated (Morocco, Tunisia), whilst in others it was the result of open conflict (Algeria, Cameroon), or it was granted, as in West Africa14 (except Guinea) and Equatorial Africa (except from the Upper Volta and Ivory Coast revolts); or violent (Vietnam), or resulted from post-violent conflicts (Cambodia, Madagascar); institutional agreements with different status in the “old colonies” (Djibouti, Polynesia, New Caledonia). Unlike other colonial powers, the French model offers some particularities in the way colonial history reverberates in present-day society. It is the only power that retains territories such as Guadeloupe, Polynesia, New Caledonia, Mayotte, Martinique, French Guiana and Reunion, as well as, for 15 years, the Comoros and Djibouti (1975 and 1977). 3.1

Problematising Colonisation and Decolonisation: The Comaroff Legacy

This chapter’s contribution also reveals some of the contradictions of colonialism, here and elsewhere, in the making of history. This effort of problematising decolonisation opens up how many aspects surrounding this notion must first be disentangled. For example, in regarding the making of both coloniser and colonised as problematic in order to understand better the forces that, over time, have drawn them into an extraordinarily intricate web of relations. This can be seen in many types of colonialisms, and in this section we will look beyond the French example. How can we understand this effort of problematisation? Most attempts found during our literature review analyse and understand the relevant processes proceed from an unquestioned “Western” perspective, failing to consider the methodological and theoretical implications of the historical conditions and the politics of anthropology, capitalism, and the nuances involved. However, we can see how (in the interview with the anthropologists in Angosto

In the context of West Africa, Senegal has been a central country for France, as it had a relationship with it long before the time of the empire, and during the empire, and was chosen as the pivotal state for the AOF (Afrique coloniale française). 14

The absent image of women  61 201215), this problematisation can be partly understood. For a long time, the methodology of anthropology, particularly cultural anthropology from the Boasian tradition, was very much focused on finding unique societies and treating them in terms of their internal complexity, considering them in isolation, in terms of the beauty of their internal social, semantic and cosmological relations. Therefore, how should we understand this problematisation effort? The problem with this perspective is that it fitted the hegemonic ideology of a colonial world that thrived on a vision of European modernisers bringing light and development to simpler people bound by tradition. Treating the latter in terms of their unique beauty was a good liberal rebuttal to cruder evolutionary stereotypes, but masked the harsher structural realities of overrule and the impact of modern empires, which often had distressingly similar effects on the diverse local communities brought within their way. This nuance questions the resilience of once independent societies, in the face of political and economic domination. For the Comaroffs, it has been revealed how even large, violent forces of colonisation (especially through their research on South Africa), are never simple determination, but always involve local processes of history-making, meaning-making. Yet when texts are treated at the expense of contexts, of social and political forces of larger scale, the bigger story is masked, namely the larger processes of worldwide scale that are introducing distressingly predictable processes of marginalisation and homogenisation on small-scale communities across the planet. This was the case under high modern colonialism, and it is also the case, albeit in a different way, under neoliberal “globalisation”. Differences were also constituted between “postcolonial” states, for example comparing Latin America and Africa, dealing with their position in the global order through strengthening the state, and seeking to have it mediate translocal capital more effectively.

For the Comaroffs, Chicago anthropology was about understanding the relationship between otherness and the global phenomena that impacted upon peoples across the world – phenomena that, in turn, were affected by the actions and intentions of those peoples. That implied problematising about “writing culture”, which raised some important ethical and authorial questions, positioning anthropology as a political and an ethical practice; as “politics of knowledge”. An example of this “writing culture” can be found in the study of the “traditional” Maasai society in East Asia. Their world was being rapidly commodified, and therefore the romance of treating these peoples as though they inhabited isolated islands of history made little sense. As a result, the “writing culture” obsession with authorial authority seemed absurd, as ethnographic experience showed that it was rarely the authority in situations of fieldwork in South Africa. They were themselves “cultural dupes”: they were used by “their natives” for all kinds of things, because they did not understand their worlds, nor always their own, as well as many of them did. They did, however, recognise that writing comes out of a world where what you write, how you write, the privilege of access to writing, all those things, are part of a larger political context, of social conditions. And so to fetishise the writing dimension of ethnography alone seemed to them to misread what the legacy of social science was all about; and furthermore, it was writing the discipline into obscurity. They were faced with the contradiction of the text-real account, regarding the criticisms claiming that, to get it right, you need to obtain the native voice in the account, moving beyond “his master’s voice” (Angosto 2012). This is referred to as the writing culture debate – in the colonial and postcolonial context – concerned itself with adequate forms of ethnographic writing, reflexivity, objectivity and the culture concept, as well as ethnographic authority in an increasingly fragmented, globalised and (post)colonial world. 15

62  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration 3.2

Problematising through the Voice of Latinas in France: The Legacy of Decolonial Eco-feminism

Following the legacy of bell hooks (2007: 46), and in a dialogue with the artistic, pedagogic and theoretical contributions of African feminists, in France, decolonial feminists of Abya Yala (Latin America) betray the lack of connection between hegemonic feminism and grassroots feminism. As Yuderkys Espinosa points out, decolonial feminism calls for an epistemic choice, which implies a selection of theories and proposals of thought from the margins (Espinosa-Miñoso 2014: 7). Along similar lines, María Lugones (2008) reflects on how, after the historical moment of “colonisation”, the power relations of domination, influence and exploitation of the territories and people of America, colonised by Spain, have been resignified and currently continue to remain valid within the framework of “coloniality”. Necessarily, Indians and Blacks could not be men and women, but genderless beings. As beasts, they were conceived as sexually dimorphic or ambiguous, sexually aberrant and uncontrolled, capable of any task and suffering, without knowing, on the side of evil in the dichotomy of good and evil, mounted by the devil. As beasts, they were treated as fully accessible sexually by man and sexually dangerous to women. The term “Woman”, then, points to bourgeois Europeans, breeders of race and capital (Lugones 2008). 3.3

Problematisation from the Perspective of Mobilities/Imperial Mobilities

In order to study historical mobilities within the historiography, it was often observed how societies from the Global South were considered “not apt” for a “mobility transition” attached to industrial revolution, technological progress, and rationality. This concept of mobility was not often found in the various texts available, or in either the role of women and migrations. A historical review is a necessary step in the construction of such mobilities. When considering 21st-century France and its stakes, it is essential to address its colonial legacies, overseas territories and migratory histories in a lucid and passionless manner (Groupe de Recherche ACHAC 2021). Re-orienting our historical and conceptual maps is not merely a question of checking historiographic material of European history regarding colonisation or comparing the various common ideologies and divergences; instead, it is necessary to think how the transformation of these conceptual constructions occured, as well as their political connotations. These historical analytics require considering how mobilities and circulations have disappeared or remain in circulation. Migration viewed from the “trois étapes de la migration algérienne en France” (Sayad 1977) It is from this example, and especially from the perspective of “the centre”, the metropole, from Paris as the capital, and from Marseille as the colonial harbour (the ville-port colonial) that we locate our problematisation as also being a way of where to place the production of the images we wish to analyse. From the mobilities and circulation context we have selected the following codes: settlement, migration, déplacement, exodes, expulsions, banlieue. For Sayad, colonial and postcolonial emigration from Algeria to France was a real chirurgical–social operation, which would cut off the umbilical link of a reserve army attached

3.3.1

The absent image of women  63 collectively to a peasant community. Such an operation would be of an almost experimental nature and would enhance the adventure of migration, the adventure of proletaristation, which, according to Sayad (2002: 87), was the real contribution of colonisation to the world capitalist order. As for feminism in Sayad’s perspective, Benotuhami-Molino introduces into France the ideological critique of the epistemic violence of Western feminism, which is supposedly universal. It questions the fight against the violence experienced by Third World women, without taking racism and class differences into consideration. Instead, she celebrates the creolisation of language in migration context: “les étrangers, les migrants qui l’habitent en apportant ce qu’ils ont de syntaxe, de mots-valise, d’intonation, d’accentuation, de pensées du monde” (Bentouhami-Molino 2015: 135).

4.

A METHODOLOGY FOR IMAGES

In this colonial search, we have overlapped the chronology of technological and photographic developments with that of the formation of modern European empires. Furthermore, this legacy remains with us in various commercial spaces (flea markets, archives, bookshops, or in other objects such as foulards, dresses, trays etc.), and is reproduced in the context of academia (which also poses ethical questions stemming from their reproduction). Ethics in gendered colonial images is now becoming a central issue for many researchers (see for example, the work of Tina Campt, 2012). When looking at a photograph, we must also observe everything to do with it: its materiality, the observance of the observed, the observer, the collector of photos etc., as well as how we use the colonial photography as an illustration tool; how we manage the observance of the coded photographs. For the purposes of the analysis in this chapter, I have taken the following criteria into consideration. 4.1

Who was the Photographer?

The photograph, technically and aesthetically, has a unique and distinctive relation with the person who is/was behind the camera and, if possible, the circumstances of the contextual history, as images imply the specificity of time and place. The study of particular photographs is significant due to the analysis of ways in which photographs may acquire political significance through references to the collective memory. In contrast to the role of the colony photographer, we can locate “the natives’ horror of being photographed”, which curiously enough originated in Europe. (It is known that Balzac refused to be photographed for fear that camera would steal a layer of his soul.) 4.2

What is the Message?

The fact that the photograph appears as iconic not only contributes to an aura of authenticity, but also makes it appear reassuringly familiar or unfamiliar in a colonial context. Within this message, we will see the cultural cliché, the fantasy scenario, the connection of symbol, myth and fantasy, the colonial fantasy as a European object of consumption, in contrast, for example, with Algerian models who could only remain silent when faced with the colonisers’ “abuse of their bodies” (see Alloula 1987).

64  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration 4.3

“I was There”: The Visitors’ Collection

Photography validated the experience of “being there”, out in the colonies, “seeing is believing”, which is not merely a question of visiting an unfamiliar place, but of capturing the authentic experience of a strange place (Wells 2004: 22). Some photographs do not traffic in multiple images but are instead constructed for the gallery, for the purpose of exhibition. 4.4

The Function of the Gaze of the Colon

The voyeuristic gaze is used to describe the way in which men often look at women, as well as the way in which Western tourists look at the non-Western world. More recently, discussions have focused on the implications of a “female gaze” (Wells 2004). Throughout the colonial and postcolonial periods, photography was a major tool in the framing of a confrontation between local and external cultural styles. In this confrontation, nudity was used as a visual marker, central to colonial modes of power, including the processes of representation. Much of the critical work in the study of colonialism and postcolonialism has been concerned with the body, and, at the symbolic level, photography was, as we have noted, of central importance in mediating the relationship between the colonised and colonisers. Urry (1990, in Wells 2004: 25) says, “To photograph is in some ways to appropriate the object being photographed. It is a power/knowledge relationship. To have visual knowledge of an object is in part to have power, even if only momentarily over it.” In such a gaze, modernity (photography as a central visual experience in the formation of modernism) was composed by the centrality of the tension between the modern and the primitive and the evolution thinking (where “The Congo” was the heart of “darkest Africa”), with two principal axes. 4.5

The Female Body16 Seen with the Colonial Eye

Here, the term “icon” refers not so much to the verisimilitude of the image but rather to the symbolic value invested in it (Wells 2004: 54). It takes the vision of imperialism connected with patriarchy, where women often become the exoticised targets of the colonial observer. During the 19th century, the camera joined the gun in the process of colonisation. The camera was used to record and define those who were colonised according to the interests of the West and reaffirm an unequal relationship of power. This female vision requires various reflections: how the figure and concept of woman change over time and how the conception of woman also accompanies the theories of social evolution. In this respect, we can also add other criticisms on the concept of women through-

For recent feminist criticism, the virtual body has become the starting point for new investigations on gender, sexuality and identity. Donna Haraway (1991) has argued that all bodies are becoming cyborgs, losing the earlier sense that the human was essentially different from animals on the one hand and machines on the other. There is danger and opportunity here: “A cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the panel on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in Star Wars, apocalypse waged in the name of defence, about the final appropriation of women’s bodies in a masculinity orgy of war. From another perspective, a cyborg work might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints” (Haraway 1991: 154). 16

The absent image of women  65 out history, such as that provided by Shiva. For Vandana Shiva, patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism are part of the same register.17 Table 4.1 gives a brief interpretation of images, indicating how the photographs have been coded for analysis.

5.

THE USE OF CATEGORIES AND THEIR ENTANGLED INTERPRETATION

Based on Table 4.1, we have drawn up the following interpretation of the images found. 5.1

Paramètres (Chronologies, Cartographie, Mental Map, la Poubelle de l’Histoire)

We initiate this visualisation starting with the book whose cover depicts the image of “la femme dans les Colonies Françaises” (Petrud Durel), portrayed as a figure of a naked European women surrounded by non-European men and musical instruments, weapons and folklore objects. We then looked at the “histoire mondial”, “une cartographie concrète”, the French colonial map, “the mental mapping”. We have reviewed images of Vieilles colonies françaises, of the colonie paradigmatique. There is a clear differentiation based on geographical distance, economy and demographic balance. I have also reviewed various chronologies in books, and cartographies. Next, I have situated geography with a world map on which France radiates out towards the colonies and the sign: C’est avec 76.900 hommes que la FRANCE assure la PAIX et les BIENFAITS de sa CIVILISATION à ses 60 million d’indigènes. Distribution des 5 Grandes Races. 20 Races à la surface du globe. Maps of beautiful drawings with decoration by flora and fauna of the Caribbean with boats and one metis man, illustrated on top of coloured maps. I have also reviewed the itineraries of the “explorateurs” (Panet 1850, Caillé 1828, etc.; see also the affiche of Pionniers et explorateurs coloniaux, Musée de l’Homme), the Principal foyers de révolte du XX siècle colonial, and the 19th-century maps.18 In such parameters, and with the help of images, we have tried to understand the political control of a territory, and also its exploration. By conceiving the old topos of the virgin land (the colonial myth) and the “primitif arts” opposed to modernity. We have also tried to go beyond a fixed map, to see beyond societies set in time by the fixed image, by its temporary fixity. Through the “mental map”, I have collected all the photographs related to the book shelves, sections, in the various libraries visited, as well as in the bibliographical references consulted, using them to create the chapter’s conceptual map. A number of book covers are very reveal17 Shiva uses an extractivist approach that combines it with the birth of the “male timing”. Domination was human, but of course the colonial force was a domination of all forms of nature. Hope also comes from such analyses presented by Shiva (2000). 18 Africa in 1870 (Turkish Suzerainty, Portuguese, British, French), Africa in 1914 (Portuguese, British, French, Belgian, German, Spanish, Italian); Asia in 1870 (British, Russian, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese), Asia in 1914 (British, Russian, French, Portuguese, USA, Dutch, Japanese, German); Carte génerale de la Polynésie et du Pacifique (islands belonging to the British Commonwealth and to the US); Carte de Tahiti (Le Creuset du protectorat, Robineau and Panoff 1989: 90).

66  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration Table 4.1

Codes for photos: colonial legacy slideshow (under 51 codes)

Paramètres (Settings)

● Chronologies, cartographie, “mental map”, la poubelle de

Origines (Origins)

● Esclavage

l’histoire) (the rubbish of history) ● Épopée coloniale et mission civilisatrice (epic colonialism and civilisation mission) ● “The savage” ● Ville-port colonial (Marseille) (harbour city) La base (The base)

● L’outre-mer (territoires) ● (Dom, rom com, taf) ● “Primitive économique man” ● Colon ● “Trois couleurs, un drapeau, un empire” (affiche) (three colours, un flag, un empire) ● Aventure coloniale de la France ● Extractivism ● Ethnographie coloniale ● Patriarchal colonialism

Archives d’autre mer (types de femmes, women’s types)

Collection of photographs

Exposition coloniales (Colonial exhibitions)

Collection of affiches (posters)

Revision

● Discours sur le colonialisme ● Argonaute ● Négritude

Études (Studies)

● La colonie paradigmatique (paradigmatique colonie) ● Museification et science (museification and science) ● Musée de l’homme ● Pigmentaucracie ● Circuits of mobilities ● Orientalism - odalisque - métis - “indigènes” ● Civilisation et culture ● Sociologie coloniale ● Corps

Le sexe comme vecteur (Sex as vector) Catégorisation

● Harkis ● Pied noirs ● Rapatriés (repatriates) ● Islam

Violence

Photographs and videos

Publicité (Publicity)

Collection of affiches (posters)

Ethnographies

● Ethnographie post coloniale ● Cliché

The absent image of women  67 Après la décolonisation (After decolonisation)

● Banlieu (theâtre colonial) ● Espoir (horizons of expectations) (hope) ● Déplacement ● Ethnologie ● Décolonisation et féminisme

Globalisation

● Relationes multicirculaires ● “Le choc de la colonisation” ● Mémoire (memory) ● Restitution ● The postcolonial studies reader

Note: This slideshow was presented at the “Degrowth Conference” under the Panel of “Women on the Verge”, August 2021.

ing, such as that of the Archives des Colonies, Afrique noir, depicting the powerful presence of the African man with his three wives of different ages. Or the one on the title page of the work by Evans-Pritchard, La femme dans les sociétés primitives. Also the hardback cover of Ann Laura Stoler’s book Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times. Through the poubelle of history I have collected all the images and drawings alluding to the problematic place of women in history, and especially in colonial history. 5.1.1 Origins The origins are described below: 1. There are the pictures of the “esclavage”, the slavery of Africans in the name of “progrès” and the “domestication” of women (considering that the abolition of slavery was in 1848), the first independence of slaves, which was the Independence of Haïti in 1898. Also, the works around the “épopée coloniale et mission civilisatrice”. 2. We have also collected here photos of young girls and teenagers in colonial schools; girls looking happy and dressed all in white in Madagascar; a photo of a half-naked boy in a remote area of Indochina facing a large blackboard with sentences scribbled in French. We have observed photographs of women in a village in Madagascar (a view of a party village in 1921); a 19th-century print of a proud-looking Polynesian fisherman on the seashore; “Cérémonie du bicentenaire de la découverte de Tahiti” (Samuel Wallis, 1767). We have observed sailing ships, shown as sketches from the Musée de la Marine, in Paris. We looked closely at the cover of the book by Alain Forest, Le Cambodge et la colonisation francaise. Histoire d’une colonisation sans heurts (1897–1920). 3. We have enlarged the image of a white teenage girl in Roman dress holding the French flag on a postcard entitled “La France gardienne de la civilisation” (Carte postale patriotique 1915); and a photo montage with photo and drawings, making him more official, of General Gallieni (who was a commander of first Niger, then Senegal and afterwards Tonkin, where he would take Lyautey as a commandant). 4. We have looked at a particular print: Pendant que les femmes de l´îlle de Pâques agacent les soldats et les matelots des navires de la Pérouse, les hommes leur volent les mouchoirs et leurs chapeaux (William Smith, 1841). In this sense, the women are portrayed naked, blatently inviting the soldiers to sexual intercourse. 5. We have observed the “savage representation”. 6. We have looked at a mountain woman in Algeria, carrying her baby on her back, taken in profile with her eyes cast down.

68  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration 7. We have looked at a photograph of a smiling teenage girl from the Tchad, with pointed teeth and a tattoo on her face, with a caption on the side that reads, “Elle n’est pas cannibale… ”. ● The ville-port coloniale: Marseille. It is in this city that we place settlement, migration, déplacement, exodes, expulsions, banlieues. Marseille portrayed as “Porte de l’Orient” with paintings dating back to the end of the 19th century, representing a beautiful Vieux Port with orientalised images of diverse people, mostly men with a few women, on ships entering the harbour. They all recall this type of affiches with the sea and Notre-Dame de la Garde and a globe, where Marseille seems to be at the centre of the world: “Le monde entier passe pour Marseille”. L’Exposition coloniale of 1906, which baptises Marseille as “capitale d’empire”, heralds the beginning of a booming immigration. This can be seen in monuments, sculptures, paintings all over the city. Going into more detail, we observe another affiche as Marseille as key port in the Paris–Tanger–Casablanca par Marseille (avec transbordement direct du train au Paquebot (Môle A), 1933. Finally, the place Marseille is located as the key city of the “chocs de la décolonisation” (guerre d’Algérie et exode de 1962), Marseille seen as “Porte Sud” (a century of colonial history and immigration, a book by Pascal Blanchard and Gilles Boëtsch). ● The “primitive-colon” figures. L´indigénat seemed to be a key concept in the colonial administration practices of the French Empire (highly diverse, e.g. from places like Nouvelle-Calédonie and other colonies). The cover of a book addressing this theme portrays a colon in the middle, this time dressed in modest attire, flanked by two natives as if all three were part of the same team, working in the forest. “Indigénat évoque une triste histoire. D’abord, pour les colonisés qui subierent pendant plus d’un demi-siècle les effets de ce régime juridique répressif. Ensuite, pour la nation française qui dévoya en colonie ses idéaux démocratiques en refusant à ceux qu’elle soumettait” (see the cover of the book by Merle and Muckle). They also use a table to differentiate the models of “indigénat” (Algérie, Cochinchine, Océanie, Nouvelle-Calédonie). ● Sexism. Tracing the elements of “le colon” recalls the title of the book by Martin Thomas, The French Colonial Mind, Volume 2: Violence, Military Encounters and Colonialism. The adventurous hero in colonial exploration is attributed to the man. In such a division of gender roles, a frequent criticism is the way in which patriarchal roles were also embedded in the colonial project, and feminism would very rarely acquire a role due to its construction as “féminisme imperialiste”, “qui denonce à la fois le racisme et le sexisme […] appele à une autre forme de colonisation, fondée sur l’intérdiction de la polygamie et une complète assimilation des Algèriennes” (Bard and Chaperon 2017: 332). The colon was always represented by the white helmet; they were also worn by white children. It was a mandatory accessory, except in the case of Algeria. ● Compassion. Another image of the colonist, was the humanist, the ultra-paternalist person who would talk of the “gentil noir” or “des enfants qu’ils on besoin d’être protégé”. Many types were found in the figure of the doctor, handing out food to starving Ethiopians. ● Virility. We have naturally found many photographs of the man, alone or in a group, representing the colonist in the photographs. Here we can highlight the following: the painting of the white man cared for by the native woman in the Caribbean (the painting

The absent image of women  69 Petit blanc que j’aime); the image of the central place of colon men mostly dressed in white and wearing a white helmet; the vision of the explorer, men in boots, relaxed, against a charming natural backdrop. They represent the central image with the black boys who seem to be their helpers on the margins. We can also find the vision of the missionary, mainly in photographs with children. ● Power. The most direct figure is that of the colon in a direct vision of power. Examples include the portrayal of groups of colonial administrators (e.g. Les délégués des colonies en novembre 1992, tableau de Fréderich Régamey. Tahiti, Diego Suarez, Nossy-Be, Mayotte, Annam et Tokin, Guiné, Nouvelle-Calédonie). There is also a meeting in a kind of beautiful palace with the flag and the male sculpture of power in the background, together with a print also depicting an engraving with pre-Raphaelite women of fashion. There is an attitude of controlling interrogation: a man in a white helmet dressed in professional attire, holding both a cigarette and a pen, interrogating a supposed “pirate” (Cho-Go, Tonkin). Moreover, there is being carried en filanzane (1953), for two white men wearing sunglasses who are carried by a large number of natives; the vision of professionalism of a team, being a mixed medical team including Italians (Tunis 1920), (all men) dressed in white professional clothing; the vision of the colon in the “colonie de peuplement” (especially the case of Algeria). We can find photos of mixed family moments between male and female workers. This is related in particular to Europeans, who were first called the “Algeriens”, and later the French of Algeria. Finally, we can also find the vision of intermarriage: a colon with his family in Roth, Cassamane, born in Senegal but still dressed as a colon. ● The message ● Republicanism. This addresses the role of republican values and a universalistic mission. Images are outlined and presented as if exposed, exhibited or revealed, function as signs of the colonial times. Apart from these, one must question art (as we will see in the following section through museumification) in its diverse forms, for example in the case of the colonial cinema. I take here the example of L’homme the Niger by Jacques Baroncelli, with the humanitarian discourse of the French Republic. The “fanatiques indigènes” want to destroy the work of the “barrage”, the sign of prosperity. The films are used as propaganda for the glory of the colonisation “à la française”, in the Republican manner (with the discourses of Jules Ferry, Léon Blume, etc.), attempting to civilise “the indigène” with the arms of a political republicanism aided by cosmopolitan businessmen, not in the British way, which wanted to convert natives into the “pseudo-British”. A Republic of the Lumières, anti-racist, with universal values of “liberté, égalité, fraternité”. The classical affiche that has been reiteratively found in many searches – “Trois couleurs, un drapeau, un empire” – is represented by three young brave-looking men who represent the three races of the empire – the Arab, the Black, the Yellow-Asian – with a mixed republican nationalistic setting (secretariat aux colonies; service d’information). Next to it, I located a contemporary photograph showing a huddle of youngsters in a multicultural setting and with a French flag (“Nous sommes la nation”, “L’islamophofie n’est pas une opinion, c’est un délit”). ● Adventure. It also addresses the aventure coloniale de la France. The desire for adven-

70  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration

●

●

●

●

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ture is connected to efforts to contextualise the curious. The vision of the explorers, or rather the image of the explorer himself, as in the painting “Looking for Pérouse”, featuring all the maps and the globe. Other images show the colonial adventure in which three men dressed in beige with white helmets stand before a breathtaking landscape. Others portray the “Tahiti metises”, the photographs taken by travellers (only rarely women), and also photographs of rural life in the colonies. Close exploration also reveals extraction. Photographs in this sense refer to oil in Gabon as a form of long-term extraction since the colonial times (the offshore company Elf Gabon), Gum Copal for sale (Upper Congo), recolte de copprah, société des Océanistes (publicity, image of the family Salmon). Domination. The message is also transferred by colonial ethnography. In Genre et geographie coloniale, Sibeaud (2005) refers to the need to understand the confrontation between the coloniser–colonised in Africa in the following way. On the one hand, we have colonial man; on the other, dominated and colonised men and women. Therefore, domination is driven by a male-centric system. We also have the photographs taken of ethnographers, such as example Lévi-Strauss eating a simple meal inside a tent in Brazil in the 1930s. Ethnographical South. One of the ethnographers who provided the largest number of photographs and an extremely detailed insight into the colonial type was Malinowski: in many photographs he is the only white person, accompanied by members of different tribes. His study of a system of exchange of shell jewellery around a circuit of far-flung islands, known as the “kula ring”, formed the basis of his best-known work, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922). “Argonauts” showed how the exchange of objects of no apparent value in terms of use was a way of facilitating trade, negotiating status and extending relationships. His research contributed to the basis for future ethnographers working on detailed knowledge and images in the Global South. Patriarchy. The message is also transferred by patriarchal colonialism. This includes the portrayal of women, often in images of African women returning from the market, highlighting the startling weight they carried on their heads. On other occasions, they are shown half-naked in the sea in Santo Domingo. From 1949 onwards, following the publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, other types of images can be found. Examples include girls’ schooling, feminist leaders such as Rafia Bornaz in Tunis in the 1950s, or the demonstrations of women in Tunisia, also in the 1950s. Discourse. The message can be found in the discours sur le colonialisme. Césaire (1955 : 45) introduced the idea of the “discourse of colonialism”: “je parle de millions d’hommes à qui on inculqué savamment la peur, le complexe d’infériorité, le tremblement, l’agenouillment, le désespoir, le larbinisme”. In this same line, we could also position the ambitious work edited by Marc Ferro, Discours du colonialisme. Négritude. This is an important part of the message. Originally, it was Césaire (and all the people who wrote in the journal Tropiques, revue culturelle, Port-de-France, Martinique), who produced the basic material for the foundation of “négritude” and who were key vectors of radical anticolonialism. However, the ideology of “négritude” appears as an avatar of French colonisation in West Africa. For some authors (e.g. Villasante 2003), it is the result of ideological colonisation of racial classification, even in the case of Senghor. The result would be a form of differential racism (which

The absent image of women  71 originated with Sartre, Gide, Monod, Balandier, etc.). We can see all the photographs of the covers of the book of Frantz Fanon, Peau noir, masques blanches (2011). In this same line, we could also position works on Afrocentrism (from a historical perspective). ● Colonie paradigmatique. The colonie paradigmatique is specifically the case of Algeria. Firstly, images of affiches, Ministère de la Guerre, Colonisation of Algeria, coloured paintings of Algerian women (“peintre de la mission”), mapping of the colonisation authored by the RF: Colonisation (“création et agrandissements de villages), photos of women dressed in white hakis voting, 68 images addressing the “misery of the Algerian woman”. We also have photographs of women in Berber settings carrying out their domestic chores, women dressed in lots of Berber jewellery, amulets and prophylactic talismans, types of women as coded as folklore designs. ● Typology of women: Archives d’outre mer (types de femmes). I have included here the photographs of women I found in the Archives d’Outre Mer. Outre-Mer includes the territories in very diverse cultural areas: the Caribbean and America (Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guyane, Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon); the Pacific (New Caledonia, French Polynesia, Walles and Future); the Indian Ocean (Mayotte, Réunion, Îles Éparses); and the Arctic. Despite their varying status, cultures and socio-economic conditions, they all share a colonial past, a fragile economy and social inequality. In the case of the African pictures, they show the image of the African house, always with the figure of the barefoot woman with her toddler on her back, gazing vacantly. Houses and women are mostly shown in a humble way or highlighting their precariousness. Others draw the eye to their varied and sophisticated hairstyles, their dances, their extravagant accessories, their colourful fabrics. Others still depict women in groups expressing their strong sense of togetherness. And others simply represent their nudity. In the case of Indochina, similar pictures are also portrayed: women looking down, women working as wood carriers, and emphasising the serious looks of annanite women. ● Expositions coloniales. In the famous colonial posters, beautiful pictures in Art Deco scenario highlight the real “choc de civilisation” and racist clichés, together with elements of local acculturation and mixed aesthetic influences. On the one hand, they reveal the “affiche” as a form of colonial propaganda centred on conquest and the need for a civilising force; and on the other, there is a place for the position of the artist before an “objet exotique” (see the writings of Victor Senegalen, who, whilst drifting between Paris and China, Java and Tahiti, wrote his “Essay on Exoticism” in 1904). The artist normally reacts to finding a picturesque object or else an object that awakens a sense of fascination. Of the diverse “affiches” collected as “exposition coloniales”, the one on the 1922 “exposition colonial” in Marseille stands out in particular. It again shows the three races, but this time in a female vision, in an interesting gendered reconstruction. Women are portrayed in a general visualisation of an orientalised view of the Vieux Port, with the sensual Arab, the serious and rigid Chinese, and the smiling African. We can also find numerous series of stamps, for example one dated in 1922, that illustrate the folklorisation of men (mostly) from the colonies. ● Museumification ● Exhibition. Most of the photographs are taken from Coklin’s book Exposer l’humanité

72  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration (she examined the use of images through the French Empire, 1850–1950). Impressive photos of outdated display cabinet containing skeletons, thousands of skulls – goniomètre facial et latéral de M. Broca –, hair from the “race indonésienne” exhibited in test tubes, photographs of the study of the form of the eye from the laboratory of the Institut colonial de Marseille, masques collected by Lévi-Strauss, images of the “primitive vision”, designs of the white men with pleasing “modern objects” being offered to the surprised natives, spectacular native scenography in the Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro, a book cover by Maurice Delafosse on the “civilisation négro-africaines”, exhibiting male statues of Dahomey, photos of the observation posts by the Nile (extrait de Malinowsky, cliché Bibliothèque centrale MNHN), affiches of the courses of the Institut d’Ethnologie (comité directeur, Laugier, Mauss, Olivier, Pelliot, Rabaud, Rivet,19 Vendryes). Moreover, figures and concepts are revealed in the “Musée d’ethnographie” transformed into the “Musée de L’homme” (a museum conceived pour le peuple). For example: designs of the “collections de la région du Thad”, wood-carved busts and photos of men dancing. ● Concept of race. We can also highlight the book by Montandon (Traité d´ethnologie culturelle), with 438 figures, 7 graphs, 19 maps inside the text, 12 out of the text and 32 planches hors texte. Or even the book by Montadon (Comment reconnaître le juif?) with 3 different pictures of the supposed profiles of the Jewish man, sephardim, etc. This section could be closed with the Statement of Race (UNESCO 1950), the first condemnation of scientific racism by an international institution. ● Modernisation and Commodification. The most important example is then the “Musée de l’Homme”. We have reviewed photographs relating to the debates regarding the recent transformations of the museum and the debate on the forms of modernisation in the age of digital technologies and getting closer to the people, which, of course, is extremely complex. We have taken photos of the part of the museum connected to the museum in Marseille. For example, photos of carved images, totems, placing Vanuatu at the centre of the “Océanie sections” with the “festival des arts, Île de Spiritu Santo” 1991, and the video of the ceremony. ● Circuits of mobilities/place. We have taken photos of boxes and suitcases belonging to art collectors from Africa, Oceanie and Mexico, which are also exhibited at the museum in Marseille (e.g. those belonging to François Beichenbach). We can find two illustrations of these mobilities here.

19 In 1925, Paul Rivet (together with Mauss), sets up the first academic studies of ethnology in the Sorbonne, partly financed by the colonial empire. The Musée de l’Homme, directed by Rivet since 1928 (see such studies for example in the case of Rivet in Indochina, 1932) was a clear example. They established the concept of race of human groups similar to those of Franz Boas in the United States. They would then go on to develop, in the case of Montadon, who would later become a Nazi collaborator, the camouflaged racism of the science of humanity. The term “racial science” describes at this time the study of races originating in the 19th century, especially by anthropologists who sought the professionalisation of anthropology in the social sciences. As we have seen through the exhibitions, the basis of this racial category was found in the detailed study of the human body, and especially, through examination of the “crâne”. The museum would continue with this quest throughout the 20th century, until the cataclysm of 1945, one of the moments of greatest human suffering, paradoxically as part of the search for a science of humanity.

The absent image of women  73 ● The Sahara. Implying the Sahara as a myth, a passion for the Sahara (from ethnology to anthropology). The cadres coloniaux (et militaires, missionnaires ou administrateurs) have since imperial times tried to control mobility and circulations. Today we can still conceive the Sahara as mondes connectés, for example, connecting Agadez, Libya, Algeria, transporting in pick-ups, vans and trucks packed with African migrants across desert (as observed in an image combining “huile et photographie”). ● The Midi. The South of France as a place of arrival. For example, through the photograph of “Runnymede Park”, Exodus 47: three English vessels transporting Jewish refugees expelled from Palestine, of Vietnam refugees – men, women and children, mixed and non-mixed – in boats (1955) after the “accords de Genève”: the arrival of refuges (a part families) in Marseille on board the Aeolia (1957). ● Orientalisme ● Odalisque, prostitutes and harems. This interpretation code of the images provides us with a plethora of views of women. First, the image of the “odalisque” in resting positions, diverse representations of the infatuation with the Orient in detailed observations in erotic paintings (with intimate images of women bathing and at their toilet, etc.), collections of postcards, the pornographic photographs of diverse colonial women in the brothels of Paris (as in “Le Harem”, 1904), in the prostitution of Berber women in Ouled Naik (Biskra, Algérie 1870), in the figure of the charmeuse de serpents, Messauda (Aquarium exotique), in the influence of “Japonisme”, inspiration from the Art Deco movement (e.g. the paintings by Wenceslau de Moraes), in the photo-cartes of Salambô ballet (estampe colorisée, Paris 1913). ● Travel. We can also add photos of the Colosse of Abou Simbel (Nubia), during his trip with Flaubert (1849–1851), where the egyptomanie had a central place in the elaboration of Orientalism. Apart from Paris, Marseille as the “Port de l’Orient” takes a central place in this production. Some women were also involved in the search; see for example the photos of Odette du Puigaudeau in Mauritania (1933–1934). ● Sociologie colonial and labour forms. We can distinguish three types of French colonial labour relations: plantation, exploitation and “peuplement”, where the total lack of dignity in the work of the indigenous population would justify the desire for colonial independence. Le “travailleur colonial” is mainly portrayed as “cautxo” workers, mines, domestiques. ● Women and productive work. We see little of women at work. Mostly as domestic servants or else as women going to markets in Africa. We watched excerpts from old videos La France dans le Monde… de la Mer Rouge à l´Océan Indien, for example, in the French Comores (les quatre sœurs au jardin d’Eden), laughing girls and women, women portrayed as kora musicians in the desert, etc. Postcards of Mongo wives mourning their deceased husband Mompono, Congo (postcard, Banfield Collection, Ontario Museum), 14 wives in a former Abir post. Their bodies and foreheads are smeared with clay, part of a mourning ritual. ● The body/corps ● Masculinities. The vision is directed from the colon, the “homme célibataire” and his European manhood in the context of the colonies, an invention of woman inside the construction of the civilising mission, involving two contrasting images: “docilité et

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summission”, where “soumisse” is a form of feminity, and another polarised side is shown as brutal, “lascive”, “sauvage et criminal”. This portrayal of the body forms part of the sensationalised savage, “Le corps de l’Autre racialisé, lieu de désirs et des peurs, a été de passerelles commodes entre le biologique et le culturel” (Pap Ndiaye, La condition noire, 2008: 30). French imaginary has often assimilated the black body with sexualised objects, phantomised, fetishised. In this sense, reducing the black man to his reproductive capacity through sex and to his productive labour force creates a match between domination and virility. The body as sex. On the one hand, I found the sexualised body. In particular, the combination of black, colonial, the female condition and nakedness is one of its most profitable categories. Many photographs, although not all, are taken from the book by Blanchard et al. titled Sex and the Colonies, showing a wide repertoire of the colonial erotica, such as the domination of the body in a multi-layered violence. The body of the “other” racialised, exaggerated, in a mixture of sexual attraction and bestialised image of the African women, exaggerating any type of protuberance, in the form of the “Vénus Hottentote”20 (sex as an exaggerated body). They are portrayed in 1933 in Gabon (“les amours coloniales”), where a colonist with a pipe applauds the black woman dancing in front of a bonfire; he is facing the back, wearing a white helmet, and the woman’s face is not clear. La Mauresque. In Algeria, the woman is shown as the mauresque (objet érotique) and also the prostitute in Morocco (the four inviting women positioned on the four edges of Bousbir, “quartier réservé de Casablanca”) in 1928. Other images are also related to the concubines. Inside “The Orient des Femmes”, there are numerous aesthetic representations: bare heads and semi-nudity, nudity, the image of an ideal feminine body, the imagination of the body, the “corps imaginal” (Palmier and Lavagne 2002). Asian sensuality. In Asia, we find images of sensual teenagers, either in photographs or in the paintings by Gauguin (e.g. Tahitienne, 1899): the “horizontal femme” in smoking in Saigon, sometimes with also a childish look, or the La Laotiènne (1967). In the 1970s, this image would be replicated by Charlie Hebdo with prostitutes in Saigon. There has also been a debate on how sexualisation has today become a “toxicity of exotism”, which can be traced back to the female images of Gauguin in French Polynesia (Staszak 2006), or the vision of women in the colonial Kasbah of Algiers (the recluse versus the “prostituée”), which will be also developed in the iconery of the harem, the hammam as icons and iconology of Orientalism. Folklorised subjects. Apart from these direct sexualised images, we can find other

The so-called Venus Hottentote was from the Cape of Good Hope. Her real name was Sarah Baartman. In 1810 she was presented to the public of London as the most wonderful phenomenon of nature. She had a disease (steatopygia), which results in a protuberance of the buttocks due to an abnormal accumulation of fat. Science had determined that Khoisan (“the Hottentots”) were the most ignoble group in the progression of mankind, purportedly to mate with the orang-utan (see Gordon Chimpere on the representation of Black Womanhood. See more on this history in Parkinson 2016). In London and Paris respectively, she was objectified as a monster. Sarah Baartman died on 29 December 1815, but she continued to be exhibited. Her body, fully moulded and then dissected at the Jardin des Plantes, would for a time join the comparative anatomy collections of the Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle until 2002 when she was finally taken back to South Africa (a request to this effect had been made by Nelson Mandela in 1994). 20

The absent image of women  75 examples like the hairstyles of African women, women and the folklorised traditions, Fatma, sujet domestique, the domestic black servant resting, the African woman grinding her millet in African villages. Other images show the proud African woman carrying her baby with a “yu-yu” on her wrist (1932), featured on the covers of French colonial magazines, but always showing her breasts. ● “Mother and child” as an iconical base. On the other hand, there is the vision of “indigenous maternity”, where we can place the classic combination of the “mother and child image” in history, which is here repeated as the symbol of the “mother and child” in colonial maternities. An example is the pervasive trope with the representation of black women holding their toddlers – rather than babies – or breastfeeding them. ● Participative ethnography. In contrast with other visualisations, photographs by Thérèse Riviere (1935–1936) show a difference from other ethnographies where women were portrayed as passive. In her photographs, women seem to play an active role, carrying out all kinds of tasks in the Aurès of Algeria (crafts, working in the fields, etc.). ● “We did not choose”. Regardless of the image, they still encourage the voyeuristic gaze of the passive target victimising the women portrayed; once more, the gender and race of the legitimised oppression: colonialism as an expression of sexual violence. In such a different mode, we can situate the photograph of Yamina Bouziane, “We did not choose” (Maroc 1993–1994), in which she situates herself as the photographer and the photograph of the odalisque. ● Going deeper into categorisation. Les rapprocher, les cataloguer, les comparer, c’est déjà comprendre, et comme posséder, cette diversité naturelle (Pierre-Jerôme Jehel, 1985). Les dessiner, les représenter, les photographier ressuciter leurs capacités fragilisées (in Achille Mbembe, Politiques de l’inimitié). Categories? The primitive, the indigène, the autochtone, the simple, etc. The whole negative attribution to each of these terms… and also the bestialised blacks. They are all embedded in migratory history: migration, circulation of goods, diplomatic and military, monuments, among others. However, in what way does the image block or function as a representation, and in particular how does the representation of categories work? The evolution of the archetypes of the “indigène” and “woman” are dynamic: they are structured and instrumentalised as images, which are part of the same foundation of French colonial thought. Such archetypes also correspond to a specific vocabulary, in colonised territories (following the invention of a lexical field linked to the colonial situation), but also in the “métropole”, as they will become the main ideological base for considering “the indigenous people” among metropolitan populations and their subsequent stereotypification. This late process is related to the way in which the images correspond closely to the description of the status of the native, and the French and European vision of it. Furthermore, such archetypes use images as a source that shows a corpus comprising several hundreds of photographs, largely heterogeneous, but which at the time constituted “isual collections of the various ‘human races’ delimited by anthropology. The images show the construction of the “Autre-exotic”, progressively all-pervading the meaning and sensitivity towards a common ideology in global terms. ● Fixity. As Stoler (2002) reminds us, we need to reflect on the rejections of the facile fixity of racial categories, despite our tendency to embrace fixities of others sorts. The

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real challenge, she adds, is still to account for the temporary fixity (2002: 206), of terms such as “white prestige”, “poor whites”, “métissage” and “bourgeois respectability”, in how they are conceived and later when they are refigured in any given colonial context (2002: 206). Communications. In a book on non-verbal communication among French and Indigenous peoples in the Americas, the cover portrays the French treatment of the native American in a gentle manner, in which his body is crosscut by an old map of America. Image of the violent state. In the pictures, Congo is always central (apart from the Algerian war) to the images related to violence, where all types of violence and humiliations are documented, even the image of the “Mongo as a degenerated race without vitality”. Visions of African men. We have viewed photos of African men, normally in a scenographic setting, on occasions as if it were the backdrop to a play. Some of them look surprised, others lost, brave or strong, and some appear to be expressing their anger against the colon. The tirailleur as historical stereotype. Le mythe du jovial tirailleur de Babania, reconnaissant envers la Mère-Patrie, repérable et contestable. The images depict the “débarquement de troupes indigenes à Marseille”, in 1939. It is important to give credit to the images of the massacre of the tiralleurs in Tharoye (near Dakar, 1944). The tirailleurs were West African soliders of the French Empire. The chic Black (jazz and Afro-Americans in Paris). With the arrival of jazz and Afro-Americans in Paris, the Black presence in advertising appears to undergo a revival and is portrayed also as part of chic Paris (Josephine Baker etc.). The métis. The images register the metis and the creole. Designs of the creole, men in the novel Texaco (Marie Sophie, descendant of a slave and a white woman in Fort-de-France). Also in the photos of the book by Emmanuel Saada (Les enfants de la Colonie. Les métis de l´Empire français entre sujétion et citoyenneté), where it was represented as the “fusion de races”, “mariages croisés”. However, in the Mediterranean, they were viewed differently, the races croisés are held in higher consideration in Algeria – they thought – as the mixture of three Latin races adapted to the Algerian climate. Invisible in Algeria, they were strictly problematised in Indochina, Madagascar, Afrique and the Nouvelle-Calédonie. This colonial age was also one when métissage was a form of degeneration for the colonial mentality. The Arab man and the violent portrait. According to Shepard (2017), and reflected in the photographs he published in his book, the discourse shifts from the Empire and Algeria to France itself, where the male Arab is represented as violent, “violeur, vorace, qui vient envahir la France par le bias de l’immigration […] à l’intersection de l’histoirie du colonialisme et de l’histoire de la sexualité”. The image of the Tuareg. We can mention here the illustration of “the invention of the Tuareg”. Duveyrier wrote that, if the Tuareg did not exist, they “would have to be invented”. Such an ally was necessary to meet French goals in the Sahara, for without them the deserts they inhabit and that separate the white race from the black race would prove impossible (Brower 2009: 230). At the bottom of the social ladder were the slaves (eklan) who served as domestics and concubines. A slave girl in the tent, Duveyrier wrote, “allowed mistresses of a good family to attend their pleasures with

The absent image of women  77 a freedom that is unknown to Arab women” (Brower 2009: 233). ● The harkis. Those images show the situation of the arrival in Marseille but also the related situation of the families in a state of abandonment in 1962. ● The pieds-noirs. The pieds-noirs (the Europeans of Algeria) are represented inside the hexagon, with the message to society asking to host them; les français d’Algérie (affiche, 1960). They are also featured on the cover of Paris Match, which shows the arrival of a ship: “the victims of decolonisation”. ● The rapatriés. the rapatriés are pictured at the moment of their arrival in the harbour of Marseille (“débarquant du LS Treux”, 1962, by Pierre Domenech). ● Décolonisation. In the images we see a process of décolonisation à la française with the presence of De Gaulle, the independences. The period of independence was also the time of Third Worldism (with the connections with PCF), and a message of an open attack on the capitalist system, from aid programmes to multinational corporations. Sequentially, after decolonisation came colonial migrations (and even before). Between 1975 and 1998 we received the images of the boat people (110,000 people would be received as refugees in France). One of the most famous pictures is the arrival of the refugees from Vietnam in Mai 1988, on board the “Mary”, when 400 people were rescued by Médecins du Monde. We can therefore explore the images from 1976, the change from the “temps des diasporas à celui de métissage”. We have also chosen a powerful image, that of the banlieues (teâtre colonial). The image of Le Grand Ensemble (by Mathieu Beraud), shows the ideal HLM construction as a functional and calm life on the urban outskirts. Many decades later, we witness what is today’s HLM, like the Parc Kalliste in north Marseille, one of the poorest neighbourhoods in France. We also see pictures of destruction of HLM in our contemporary times. Before all that, there was the time of the slums, as Sayad (2002) has shown in his photographs in the book Un Nanterre algérien, terre de bidonvilles with degraded housing and streets, even on the cover, which shows various men in this spot with one girl. It was the time of fighting for migrants’ dignity, when the bidonville was widely represented by Arabs, even though there were other nationalists there. ● Postcolonial times. We can refer to images that can be grouped into efforts of memory and restitution: ● With the help of the writings by bell hooks, which address political solidarity between women: “sorority” against the ideology of male supremacy (a common sexist oppression). This was against the division of women (sexism, racism, class divisions) who embrace feminism but acknowledge diversity. ● With the help of critical analyses of the images of postcolonial mythologies. Facing everyday decolonisation (see more in the postcolonial study reader by Aschroft et al., 2002).

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CONCLUSION: WEARING NEW LENSES?

How can we place new lenses over used ones? Malinowsky referred to “le passé dans le présent”, when the past gives us clues; in our case, new research clues for the present and the future. By historicisation, we refer to the process whereby events or other phenomena are given a place in a historical narrative. Within it, photography may be defined by the position that it occupies in a larger historical schema or an unfolding over time of technologies and practices (Wells 2004: 361). Emptiness endures the collapse of the perceptions of images. It is an invitation to take a long look and a sideways glance. Indeed, multiple images have invited us to find ways to suggest, index and evoke but with the perspective of the passage of time, despite shifting contexts. In this chapter, our interest has been driven by the blending of memory and traces, present in colonial history, but we also have tried to focus on the invisible, the lacunae, as a way of bringing to the fore hidden dimensions of images in the colonial and postcolonial times. Yet at the same time, we have tried to reflect on how such lacunae still pose central questions about representation in art, theory, politics or even in social sciences in general. It must be made clear that the aim here was not to speak about the common visual ground – others have done so eloquently and effectively – but instead to talk about emptiness. The exercise of emptiness, scrutinising the image of woman, brings oblivion, the unknown, the abstract, the invisible. When all is said and done, images are only a support. They help to decipher the forms of how the control of the colonialised territory has rooted a meaning that it proclaims itself. Images and their categorisation contribute to the educational view of this situation, particularly in metropolitan France. Yet we can also add here the “visitor’s gaze”, not only as people who feel the experience of “being there”, but as people who are themselves part, constructors of the same colonial project. In this ending we can see a part or limitations and a potential opening for further research lines. Turning firstly to the question of limitations, the chapter is naturally incomplete in at least three different ways. With regard to the categories, the sheer number probably has an overwhelming effect on the reader. The limitation here is the likely difficulty in obtaining a clear analytical perspective on all colonial processes. Further research would need to include group-specific types around strong terms in such a way as to show the extent of the process of constructing the view of this colonial world, as well as the clear social and mental impacts on society that still exist today. There are also limitations in terms of hidden violence. As images fail to show certain parts of reality, not only women, but other important issues, we acknowledge that is the scholar’s role to consider and fill this absence with words. Especially if violence in the colonial and postcolonial world is hidden (even though the images also exist but we have failed to capture them sufficiently), which can also reflect a result of censorship. The ethnocentrism is also limited. For all this, it is impossible to rid ourselves entirely of the ethnocentrism that dogs the search for so many categories, even if we take pains to consider the problem in increasingly refined ways (Comarroff and Comaroff 1992: 10). A second question is the opening up of new perspectives. How do we understand lines of future research considering the rationalising cosmology in regarding our present as a problem and a proper site for ethnographic inquiry (in the terms posed by Comaroff and Comaroff 1992)? We can, for example, open up ways of restitutions by reviewing different topics such as the legacy of racial Darwinism, social stigma (mental health explanation, biological determin-

The absent image of women  79 ism, etc.), and by also involving the activism of new figures. For example, through the impact figure of Kémi Séba as the “porte-parole” of the “afro-centrité”, using as base rastafarism (of Marcus Garvey), Pan-Africanism – as a unity of the diverse forms of Africanity – as a way to return to Africa and to return to the roots, the primordial essence that the diaspora needs to reconstruct. Restitution can also be achieved by introducing new works. For example, works of Pan-Africanism today such as the prolific work of Amzat Boukari Yabara (including his high-impact online site),21 where he refers to “colonialité” as the transfer of fears, to the hegemony of neo-colonialisme and to the general need to be engaged in a serious historiography of the legacy of “esclavage et la traite transatlantique”. Restitution is also to review properly what “esclavage” meant in term of deportation and gender: 12 million deported Africans. Besides, in this restitution, gender is also included in the search, visibilising the figures of the women in the Caribbean and Africa that fought the colonial forces. In addition, restitution of lacunae means assessing what the new strategies of art restitution involve, e.g. Mwazulu Diyabanza (stealing African art from European museums). New lines of research could also be a continuation of “Décoloniser le Quotidien”. To a certain degree, this is inspired by the title of Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo’s book entitled Decolonising the Mind (1986). From then onwards, we can consider multiple bases for such analysis, by reviewing the works of the anticolonial production,22 or alternatively the works of postcolonial literature, starting from the “founders” of the critique postcolonial,23 who have emerged in the last few decades together with the development of other movements (affirming agency and empowerment in supposedly discriminated categories as women, homosexual, ethnic minorities). Such critique faces two main fronts: one towards colonialism and other forms of domination (like gender/women domination, in the sense of Bourdieu, Deleuze, Foucault), and towards the “colonial situation” (in relation to totalitarianism in the sense of Arendt). In order to escape from nationalist ideology, colonial empires would then be labelled as a generic category of empires (in the sense given by Frederick Cooper; Bayart 2010: 67). Albeit to a lesser degree than in Anglo-Saxon literature, epistemology works written in French also address the idea of decolonising everyday practices, or better said “le quotidien”, as the spaces where contradictions are to be found. This space opens up the capacity of resistance, the place of violence, insults, stigmatisation, interpellation, discrimination. It is in this “quotidien” where one can find, on the one hand, freedom and control, and on the other, hospitality, rejection, order and disorder (Achille et al., 2020: 8). The persistence of See https://​amzatboukariyabara​.com/​en/​home​-2/​. Accessed 31/08/22. We can include here a wide list of references that, for example, in the case of Algeria, can range from La Bataille d’Alger, the film by Gilles Pontecorvo (1965), to the writings of Frantz Fanon, called the “Écrits algériens”, and all the production of the “cercle tiérmondistes”, “gauchistes”, as well as the American Black Panthers. The universalist representation of that time will be then very male oriented. We can also include academic works, which comprise a criticism of the history of France, such as Les Filles de noce, d’Alain Corbin (1979), the first volume of Histoire de la sexualité (1975) by Foucault, La Plus Haute de solitudes (1975), Tahar Ben Jelloun, L’Anti-Oedipe by Deleuze and Guattari (1972), and La Rumeur d’Orléans (1969). All these references are listed in Shepard (2017: 81). 23 We can here embrace a long list of influences. The Orientalism of Said, the Africanism of Mudimbe, the Mediterreanism of Herzfeld; the literary critics from India, the Caribbean and African regarding the British Empire; the philosophical “Western philosophy” based on French theory, the postmodern sociology of the 1980s, the “Black Atlantic” history regarding the study of slavery, plantation and socio-economic change; the double criticism of imperial historiography –from Cambridge – and the historiographic Indians from “subaltern studies” like Ranajit Guja (Bayart 2010: 10). 21 22

80  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration the colonial, is then among us, now and in our everyday lives, the well-known “rires bananies symboliques de l’infantilisation coloniale fleurissent toujours dans le paysage français, bien que modifies” (idem). “L’impensé de la race”, in the words of Achille Mbembe, is on the one hand the basis of the Republican model and the stumbling block of the true hospitality of the Republic (Achille and Moudileno 2021: 9). In these contemporary everyday representations we find modern mythologies (in the terms of Roland Barthes24), the naturalisation of ideologies in the quotidien, as an essential condition of the efficacy of myths. Lastly, a new research line can involve a wide construction of forms in colonialism exists as form of resistance, where gender issues are given priority. Here we conclude this long voyage, into a form of network which already exists, by looking at the forms of “Sortir du colonialisme” (as a réseau). This has already been put into practice and organised around issues like semaine anticoloniale, colonies and néocolonialisme, Algérie et Nostalgie Coloniale, Maghreb-Mackreck, Françafrique and post-colonials discrimination, all somehow showing the axes of postcolonial resistances in France.

REFERENCES Achille, E., Forsdick, C. and Moudileno, L. (eds) (2020) Postcolonial Realms of Memory: Sites and Symbols in Modern France. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Alloula, M. (1987) The Colonial Harem. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Angosto, L.F (2012) The omnivorous science: Jean and John Comaroff on the politics of anthropology, capitalism and contemporary states. AIBR: Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana, 7(3), 1–24. Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G. and Tiffin, H. (2002) The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge. Bard, Ch. et al. (2017) Dictionnaire des féministes. France – XVIIIe–XXIe siècle. Paris: PUF. Barthes, R. (1957) Mythologies. Paris: Seuil. Bayart, J.-F. (2010) Les études postcoloniales. Un carnaval académique. Paris: Karthala. Bentouhami-Moulino, H. (2015) Race, culture, identités. Une approche féministe et postcoloniale. Paris: PUF. Blanchard, P. (2011) La France noire. Trois siècles de présence des Afriques, des Caraïbes, de l’Océan indien & d’Océanie 1940–1956. Paris: La Découverte. Blanchard, P. et al. (eds) (2005) La fracture coloniale. La société française au prisme de l’héritage colonial. Paris: La Découverte. Blanchard, P., Yahi, N., Gastaud, Y., and Bancel, N. (2003) La France Arabo-Orientale. Treize siècles de Présences, du Maghreb, de la Turquie, d’Égypte, du Moyen-Orient et du Proche-Orient. Paris: La Découverte. Brahim, R. (2021) La race tue deux fois. Une histoire des crimes racistes en France, 1970–2000. Paris: Editions Syllepse. Brower, B.J. (2009) A Desert Named Peace. The Violence of the French Empire in the Algerian Sahara 1844–1902. New York: Columbia University Press.

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The absent image of women  81 Campt, T.M. (2012) Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diaspora. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Césaire, A. (1955) Discours sur le colonialisme. Paris: Présence Africaine. Césaire, A. (2000) Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. Paris: Présence Africaine (original edition, 1939). Césaire, A. (2005) Nègre je suis, nègre je restaire. Entretiens avec Françoise Vergès. Paris: Éditions Albin Michel. Césaire, S. (2009) Le grand camouflage. Écrits de dissidence (1941/1945). Textes de Suzanne Césaire réunis. Paris: Seuil. Colonna, F., and Rivière, T. (1984) Aurès, Algérie 1935–36. Photographies e Thérès Rivière. Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’homme. Comaroff, J.L., and Comaroff, J. (1992) Colonialism and modernity. In Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Cooper, F. (1996) Decolonization and African society: the labor question in French and British Africa. African Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Beauvoir, S., and Halimi, G. (1962) Djamila Boupacha. Paris: Gallimard. Sciences Humaines et Sociales. De l’Estoile, B. (2007) L’oubli de l’héritage colonial, Le Débat, 147(5), 91–99. Dorlin, E. (2009) La matrice de la race. Généalogie sexuelle et coloniale de la nation française. Paris: La Découverte. Duras, M. (1940) L’empire colonial. La vision de Marguerite Donnadieu (Duras) secrétaire du ministère des Colonies (mai 1940). At https://​clio​-texte​.clionautes​.org/​empire​-colonial​-vision​-marguerite​-duras​ -secretaire​-ministere​-colonies​-1940​.html (accessed 21/10/2021). Espinosa-Miñoso, Y. (2014) Una crítica descolonial a la epistemología feminista crítica. El Cotidiano, 184, March-April, 2014. Fanon, F. (2011) Peau noire, masques blancs. Oevures. Paris: La Découverte. Foucault, M. (1969) L’archéologie du savoir. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. Freud, S. (1983) (ed. 1891). Contribution à la conception des aphasies. Un étude critique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Gide, A. (2004) Voyage au Congo. Suivi de rele retour du Tchad. Carnets de route. Paris: Gallimard. Groupe de Recherche ACHAC (2021). https://​www​.achac​.com/​colonisation​-et​-post​-colonialisme/​ (accessed 28/10/2021). Haraway, D. (1991) Ciencia, cybors y mujeres. La reinvención de la naturaleza. Madrid: Cátedra. Original: Haraway, Donna (1991) Simians, Cyborgs and Women. New York: Routledge. hooks, b. (2007) Sororité. La solidarité politique entre les femmes. Feminist Review, original title, Sisterhood: political solidarity between women, http://​ ekladata​ .com/​ wr5vbjVooi2LLZ5l​ _19GPUfjguM/​bell​-hoolks​-sororitc3a9c2a0​.pdf, accessed 09/02/2022. Lombroso, C. and Ferrrero, G. (1896) La femme criminelle et la prostituée. Paris: Ancienne Libraire Germer Baillière. Lugones, M. (2008). Colonialidad y género, Revista Tabula Rasa Nro. 9. Bogotá: Universidad Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca. Parkinson, J. (2016). The significance of Sarah Baartman. BBC News Magazine, 7 January, https://​www​ .bbc​.com/​news/​magazine​-35240987 (accessed 21/10/2021). Pollock, G. (2013) After-effects/After-images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Feminist Museum. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Rioux, J.P. (2007) Dictionnarie de la France coloniale. Paris: Flammarion. Robineau, C. and Panoff, M. (1989) Tahiti métisse. Journal de la Société des océanistes, 90 (1990–1), 61–62. Saada, Emmanuelle. 2002. Race and sociological reason in the republic: inquiries on themetisin the French Empire (1908–1937). International Sociology 17(3):361–39.

82  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration Sayad, A. (1977) Les “trois âges” de l’émigration algérienne en France. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 15 June, 59–76. Sayad, A. and Dupuy, E. (2002) Un Nanterre Algerien, Terre de Bidonvilles. Paris: Autremont. Shiva, V. (2000) Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply. London: Zed Books. Sibeud, E. (2012) A Useless Colonial Science?Practicing Anthropology in the French Colonial Empire, circa 1880–1960 Current Anthropology, 53: 583–94. Staszak, J-F. (2006) Voyage et circulation des images. Du Tahiti de Loti et Gauguin à celui des voyagistes. Sociétés & Représentations, 2006/1 (n° 21), 79–99. DOI: 10.3917/sr.021.0079. At https://​www​ .cairn​.info/​revue​-societes​-et​-representations​-2006​-1​-page​-79​.htm (accessed 01/08/22). Stoler, A.L. (2002) Colonial archives and the arts of governance. Archival Science 2, 87–109. https://​doi​ .org/​10​.1007/​BF02435632 Stoler, A.L. (2010a) Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate Colonial Rule. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Stoler, A.L. (2010b) L’aphaise coloniale française e l’historie mutilée, in Nicolas Bancel et al. (eds), Rutpures postcoloniales. Paris: La Decouverte, 62–78. Stoler, A. (2016) Imperial Durabilities in Our Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tillion, G. (2000) Il était une fois l’ethnographie. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. wa Thiongʼo, Ngũgĩ (1986) Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: Heinemann; Portsmouth, NH: J. Currey. Wells, L. (2004). Photography: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge.

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Films Elise ou la vraie vie de Michel Drach Le cousin Harki L’Haine. Mathieu Kossovitz (dir.) 1995 Sous la bourqa

Images Base Ulyses, http://​anom​.archivesnationales. Culture​.gov​.fr/​ulysee.

Videos Aissa Maig, Par les damnes de la terre -1.#Décolonisations #Histoire #Libération Décolonisations: l’apprentissage – 1857 à 1926 | ARTE

The absent image of women  83 Films sur la colonisation française (ARCHIVES MMSSH, Aix-en-Provence) Chocolat Coup de torchon, 1981 India Song, 1975 Indigènes, 2006 L’Amant, 1992 Moi, un noir Nuit noire, 1961 Pépé le Moko

PART II LATIN AMERICA

5. Extractivism, forced gendered migration and resistance in Latin America and the Caribbean María del Carmen Villarreal and Enara Muñoz

1. INTRODUCTION Historically, Latin America and the Caribbean have been characterised by significant migration flows, both intra-regional and extra-regional, as a consequence of the high levels of poverty and inequality, the political instability, or the decline of the hegemonic development model that characterises the majority of Latin American societies. In recent decades, in addition to economic migration and traditional forced migration flows, there has been a growing migration driven by environmental reasons, such as the frequent hurricanes, heavy downpours, or droughts that batter the region. The relative stability of these flows are inserted in a regional migratory system within which structural factors operate, like the peripheric position of the region, the global inequalities, and the markets’ need of manpower; or intermediate elements like migration policies, the institutions that intervene in migration processes, and migrant people’s own agency (Carballo, Echart and Villarreal, 2019; Villarreal, Echart and Carballo, 2022). Furthermore, these migration flows must be understood within a wider context of social transformations in the world-system (Wallerstein, 1979; Martins, 2013), meaning, they are based on a historical structure that directly affects the configuration of the migratory system. This structure is maintained, and it reproduces asymmetrical relationships (economic, productive, and social) among the different geographical areas (Canales, 2011), and is reinforced by an unequal economic globalisation that has favoured certain countries and social groups while excluding or disfavouring others (Sassen, 2015, 2021). The peripheric and dependent position of Latin America and the Caribbean has made it so that their societies become a specific link in the commodity chains and in the world economy that stems from an agro-export model strongly characterised by extractivism, an accumulation model based on the exploitation of natural resources at a large scale for export purposes. Despite the profound transformations this agro-export model has experienced from colonisation times, it has prevailed, and it dictates the current economic and social dynamics, among which are migration flows (Carballo, Echart, and Villarreal, 2019). Lately, the progression of extractivism in Latin America and the Caribbean has led to profound consequences, like environmental degradation, the decrease in biodiversity, forced displacements, or the violence inflicted upon peasants and indigenous peoples, and has turned the region into a disputed territory. In line with a global trend (Engels and Dietz, 2017; Scheidel et al., 2020), since the 1990s, socio-environmental conflicts in the region have multiplied exponentially and have had a multidimensional impact (GRISUL, 2018; Echart and Villarreal, 2018, 2019; Gudynas, 2016; Svampa, 2019). Among the more serious effects of this phenomenon is the fact that Latin America and the Caribbean represent the most dangerous region in the world for environmental activ85

86  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration ists and land rights defenders (Global Witness, 2021). In recent years, the assassination of Honduran activist, Lenca leader, and Goldman Environmental Prize recipient Berta Cáceres, or the murders of environmental defenders Marcos Yanomami, Gloria Ocampo, and Amalia Morales Guapango in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico are just a few examples of this tragedy. Furthermore, the region is facing increasing challenges like neoextractivism, i.e., a renewed discourse and practices of the development model based on the exploitation of natural resources; a new geopolitical context, which implies various types of dependencies on the Global North and China; and multiple expressions of statal and parastatal violence (Gudynas, 2016; Svampa, 2019; Campanini, Gandarillas, and Gudynas, 2019). The expansion of extractivism and socio-environmental conflicts bears consequences, and it especially affects historically excluded and vulnerable peoples in the territories, such as Afro-descendants, indigenous peoples, peasants, and women (Gudynas, 2016; Svampa, 2019; Lugones, 2008; Icaza, 2018). Nevertheless, as we have proposed in previous works (GRISUL, 2018; Echart and Villarreal, 2018, 2019; Ojeda and Villarreal, 2020), these collectives are responsible for numerous struggles and resistances for the territories and life. The objective of this chapter is to analyse the relationship between extractivism, forced displacement, gender and resistance in Latin America and the Caribbean. Apart from this introduction, the text is divided into two parts. The first part explores the characteristics of extractivism and its ties to the migratory system and forced displacements in the region. The second part analyses gender impact and the role Latin American women play in the fight and resistance against extractivism, as well as the numerous pillars of sustainability of the life they promote. Finally, the conclusions drawn examine some of the challenges that the region faces within a context of renewed discourse about development and the promotion of worldwide green deals. On a methodological level, the chapter includes a revision of specialised literature, analysis of documents, and exploration of secondary data that include a study of 259 socio-environmental conflicts conducted by the International Relations and Global South Research Group (GRISUL) in 2018, based on the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJATLAS) database.

2.

EXTRACTIVISM, MIGRATORY SYSTEMS, AND FORCED DISPLACEMENT

Latin America and the Caribbean has historically been considered the most unequal region in the world, and the region with the highest concentration of wealth, land, and income (CEPAL, 2021). This happens in spite of the fact that, in the early 21st century, during the commodities boom, the region experienced a new phase of economic growth and redistribution, promoted in the context of progressive governments (Bringel and Echart, 2020; Ojeda and Villarreal, 2020). The progressive cycle made room for several social and economic advances, but also deepened and widened the extractivist practices through what has been denominated neoextractivism (Acosta, 2016; Gudynas, 2009, 2016; Svampa, 2019). Extractivism is an expanding and global phenomenon (Bond, 2017; Engels and Dietz, 2017; Arboleda, 2020; Riofrancos, 2020) carried out by both transnational corporations and states. Today, this mode of capital accumulation is an essential part of the global capitalist system’s dominant structure, and it is expressed via multiple ways of extraction and exploitation of mineral resources, manpower, data, and cultures (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2019). Its origins

Extractivism, forced gendered migration and resistance  87 in the region are historical–structural and are the result of Latin America and the Caribbean’s international insertion via a specific mode of accumulation: the primary commodity exports model. According to Acosta (2016), it is a mode of accumulation that started to be forged on a massive scale 500 years ago by phenomena such as the conquest and colonisation of the Americas, Africa, and Asia, and by the increasing demands of the metropolitan centres of nascent capitalism. In the author’s opinion, extractivism – or rather, ‘extractivisms’, given the different areas in which it is implemented – comprises activities that involve large quantities of natural resources that are not processed (or processed only to a limited degree), being removed from the developing countries, especially for export. These activities usually involve oil and mineral resources, as well as agricultural, forestry, fishery, and even touristic resources regardless of the sustainability of the projects or even the limitation of the resources being exploited (Acosta, 2016, p. 50). Extractivism, seen as the model for international insertion of the region, is also responsible for the subordinate position Latin America and the Caribbean hold in the world market (Dos Santos, 1998). As part of the periphery, the region specialises in the production of commodities and is dependent on central capitalist countries whose leaders organise the economic system, dictate the rules to be followed, and possess a high value-added industrial production that is exported to peripheric countries (Dos Santos, 1998; Acosta, 2016). This agro-export model, defined from colonial times, is strongly linked to the different migration patterns in the region (Carballo, Echart, and Villarreal, 2019), which conform to the demands of the market and the way it is organised. Furthermore, its environmental impact has deeply affected the Latin American population in many different ways. Despite the different cycles and transformations it has undergone, extractivism constitutes a permanent feature in the Latin American economies, which neither conservative nor progressive governments dare to change (Acosta, 2016; Gudynas, 2016; Svampa, 2019; Echart and Villarreal, 2018, 2019). As Bringel and Echart (2020) highlight, its continuity is also the result of extractivism being associated with diverse development imaginaries. Hence, in spite of the wide questioning of the classic conceptions of development in Latin America and the Caribbean, extractivism has not ceased to exist (Acosta, 2016; Svampa, 2019). Moreover, its discourse and practices have gained acute momentum since the early 21st century, thus intensifying the multiplication of extractivist projects hand in hand with a new concept: neoextractivism. According to Gudynas (2009), neoextractivism is a mode of appropriation of natural resources carried out by Latin American governments with varying degrees of progressiveness that retains characteristics of classic extractivism, but, unlike the latter, it is characterised by being key to developmentalist strategies and implies a more active presence of the state, whether that be through regulations, renegotiating concessions, and new tax policies; or by supporting, subsidising, or bringing state-owned companies to the forefront. Another key characteristic of neoextractivism is its ability to capture a larger proportion of resources, partly to finance social and redistributive policies that legitimise these same governments and extractivist projects (Gudynas, 2009). These elements, just like the use of new technologies, a more elaborate rhetoric on environmental issues, and the mitigation of some of its noxious effects via social responsibility policies, have allowed for the unprecedented advancement of this model, provoking an increasing re-primarisation of the Latin American economies (Acosta, 2016; GRISUL, 2018).

88  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration The progressive cycle was also linked to the increasing number of mega-projects in matters of transport, energy, and communications through the Initiative for the Integration of the Regional Infrastructure of South America (IIRSA), subsequently renamed the South American Council of Infrastructure and Planning (COSIPLAN) (Svampa, 2019: 34). The endeavour of the countries in the region to implement neoextractivism has resulted in their economies now being dependent on extractivist projects (mining, agribusiness, oil and gas drilling, etc.) and in the expansion of extractive frontiers and fracking. Nevertheless, the expansion of the extractive frontier has not gone unquestioned or without conflicts. On the contrary, as several authors highlight (Acosta, 2016; GRISUL, 2018; Gudynas, 2016; Campanini, Gandarillas, and Gudynas, 2019; Svampa, 2019), extractivism is intimately connected to phenomena such as corruption, illegality, and the corrosion of the rule of law and its subsequent violation of human rights and civil liberties. Whether in its classic or its neoextractivist iterance, this model produces numerous negative consequences, such as the pollution of natural resources, the loss of biodiversity, the deterioration of the health of the inhabitants, and numerous violations of human rights and civil liberties. Thus, one of the most visible consequences of this process is the multiplication of socio-environmental fights for the defence of the territories and life (Engels and Dietz, 2017; Echart and Villarreal, 2018, 2019; Gudynas, 2016; Svampa, 2019; Scheidel et al., 2020). These are the result of the states’ use of violence and repression, but also of the violence with which companies act through external agents akin to paramilitary organisations and organised crime. Furthermore, the growth in the criminalisation and repression of these conflicts in recent years has turned Latin America and the Caribbean into the most dangerous region in the world for land rights and environmental defenders. According to Global Witness (2021), 165 out of the total 227 murdered around the world for defending the land in 2020 were Latin American. Furthermore, 7 out of the 10 most dangerous countries to be an environmental activist are in the region: Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Peru. With regard to activities, the most dangerous sectors are logging, mining, and large-scale agribusiness (Global Witness, 2021). One of the most visible effects of extractivism is forced displacement. Although there is ample evidence of how extractivist projects produce forced displacement in Latin America and the Caribbean (IACHR, 2015; EJATLAS, 2021), there aren’t any official figures, and many countries in the region do not have laws that deal with internal displacement or protect displaced people (UNHCR, 2021). Nevertheless, there is an increasing need in the region to acknowledge the phenomenon, as well as an urgency to devise plans to prevent and reduce its impact. Apart from Colombia, which with its 8.3 million internally displaced people ranks number 1 worldwide in the number of forced displacements behind Syria with 6.7 million (UNHCR, 2021), we may mention Brazil, where, according to the Instituto Igarapé’s Forced Migration Observatory (Observatório das Migrações Forçadas, 2018), since the year 2000, at least 7.7 million people – 4% of Brazilians – have been forcibly displaced. Out of this total, over 6.4 million had to abandon their homes due to natural disasters and another 1.2 million were forced to leave their homes as a consequence of development projects. In the Americas, it is estimated that 1,545 million people have been displaced upon the threat of environmental hazards (IDMC, 2020), a migration worsened by inequality, since, as the UNDP indicates, ‘people in the lower quintiles of the income distribution were more likely to be affected by floods and landslides’ (UNDP, 2020: 159). The FAO (2019) also states that weather extremes are among the main factors driving the food crisis in the region.

Extractivism, forced gendered migration and resistance  89 Alternatively, the unequal distribution of the land is in turn a consequence of the advancement of extractivism and a cause of displacements, which in many cases are forced. In Latin America, ‘more than half of productive land in the region is held by the top one percent of the largest farms’ and, furthermore, there is a concentration of flex crops, plantations whose majority shareholders are multinational corporations (like ADM, Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus, who dominate the world’s food production with almost 75% of the world grain trade) to be distributed across the global markets, maximising their gains (Oxfam, 2019). This dynamic has intensified with the expansion of the extractive frontier. Aside from the figures, it is important to highlight that we are not talking about a novelty, but a widely explored issue within research on migration and development-induced displacement (Almeida, 1996; Satiroglu and Choi, 2015), ecological migrants (Wood, 2011), environmental migration (IOM, 2011; Villarreal, 2021), or expulsions (Sassen, 2015, 2021). Thus, this is a phenomenon that has historically characterised the migratory system of Latin America and the Caribbean. According to Carballo, Echart, and Villarreal (2019: 89), a migratory system can be understood as an identifiable geographic structure that persists in space and time (a long-term open system), made up of elements in constant interaction within a certain environment. The existence, survival, and alteration of the system is connected to numerous feedback loop systems in place in transnational spaces (dynamic ties between origin and destination contexts, decisions, migration flows, institutions, migration strategies and policies, migration experiences, etc.), and to the relationships between structure and agency.

There are three types of elements that interact in the configuration and transformations of the migratory system of Latin America and the Caribbean: the structural factors (the economic system, international relations, the environment), along with intermediate factors (institutions, migration policies), and migrant agency (either individual or collective) (Carballo, Echart, and Villarreal, 2019; Villarreal, Echart, and Carballo, 2022). Based on these elements, we may assert that the displacements (internal or external) caused by extractivist projects constitute a permanent feature of the Latin American migratory system, which acquires a new dimension within the context of neoextractivism and the unprecedented increase in disputes over territory. In other words, forced displacements caused by extractive activities are strengthened and deepened by other structural elements such as climate change and the conflicts affecting the region. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR, 2021), Latin America and the Caribbean is one of the regions with the most forced displacements in the world. Furthermore, it is estimated that there will be 17 million climate migrants by 2050 (World Bank, 2021). Throughout this process, as per the interpretive model of Carballo, Echart, and Villarreal (2019), we should also consider the intervention of intermediate factors (such as institutions, policies, and migration networks) that condition such displacements. These may be strengthened, as not all countries have laws to guarantee the protection of internally displaced persons, or the institutions of these countries are incompetent or inefficient when it comes to applying existing protection mechanisms. Addressing Ribas-Mateos and Dunn’s work (2021), these mobilities are immersed in global processes characterised by structural violence, unprecedented growth of controls and borders, as well as numerous practices that combine labour exploitation, legal exclusion, and a severe absence of human rights for migrants. Furthermore, as Sassen (2021) points out, in order to

90  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration have a comprehensive understanding of the characteristics of this process, it is necessary to consider the complex and systemic rationale that causes the expulsion of populations, which combines sophisticated financial ‘instruments’ with engineering and judicial knowledge. This, on the one hand, allows rich nations to acquire vast parcels of land in the Southern countries for the exploitation of their natural and human resources, and on the other, to hinder accountability and the acknowledgement of culpability in those promoting the depredation of the land and the communities. As per the model proposed by Carballo, Echart, and Villarreal (2019), the author also recognises that it is not without the resistance of migrant peoples and human rights activists, who fight for causes like mobility, that this process takes place (Sassen, 2021). In Latin America, such is the case of people suffering the consequences of the expansion of extractive activities in their territories, be they migrants or not. Therefore, next we will see how the women affected by the extractivist projects in the region act.

3.

LATIN AMERICAN WOMEN FACING EXTRACTIVISM: STRUGGLES, RESISTANCES, AND SUSTAINABILITY OF LIFE

As we have seen, the effects of extractivism on the environment and people are heterogeneous, but due to the structural characteristics of Latin America and the Caribbean, they have an impact in gender, colour and scale differences (GRISUL, 2018; Echart and Villarreal, 2018, 2019). In fact, these differentiated impacts are the result of the gender and race inequalities that prevail in the region (Escobar, 2020; Svampa, 2019), many of them inherited from colonisation times, as praised by internal colonialism1 (González Casanova, 2007), and the concept of coloniality of power2 (Quijano, 2000). At the same time, as Lugones (2008) specifies, we must consider the modern/colonial gender system that established the inferiorisation of colonised and racialised women, making white bourgeoisie women and their characteristics the hegemonic paradigm, thus excluding any intersectional analysis that might consider the multiple forms of violence and the forms of exploitation, exclusion, and subordination that other women have faced and still face. Therefore, the adoption of decolonial feminism as an analytical approach allows us to understand and learn from the social struggles and diverse forms of resistance that women in the Global South develop against predatory capitalism from multiple worldviews, methodologies, and practices (Icaza, 2018). According to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR, 2015), indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants, peasants, and women make up vulnerable collectives as they are more exposed to poverty and social exclusion, and extractivism worsens this situation by jeopardising their rights, especially their right to property and to farm. In the case of Latin This is a Marx-inspired category that explains how peoples, minorities, or nations colonised by a nation-state suffer conditions akin to those that characterise colonialism and neocolonialism internationally. Such relationships, based on the dominant ethnic elites’ domination and exploitation rationales, make up a structure of social control and domination over indigenous peoples and marginalised sectors, as are Afro-descendants, peasants, and inhabitants of peripheral urbanisations, internally reproducing the global dynamics of centre–periphery relations that perpetuate the accumulation of capital. 2 The aim of coloniality of power is to explain the domination and exploitation exerted by the central hegemonic system upon the dominated peoples, not through political and economic domination resulting from colonialism, but through a cultural and epistemic domination that has been reproduced until today. 1

Extractivism, forced gendered migration and resistance  91 American women, only 20% of agricultural units are owned by a woman (FAO, 2017). Women are also less trained and have less access to technologies; they also have less power and control over natural resources such as water. At river basin management councils or associations of irrigation water users, for example, their representation is scarce (CEPAL, 2021). Furthermore, their voice is considered less relevant, and they are often marginalised when decisions that have a direct impact in their lives are made. For illustrative purposes, it should be noted that it is common for companies linked to extractivism to negotiate with men, bypassing the decisions made by the community where women play a key role (IACHR, 2015). The inequalities are multi-faceted and are strengthened cross-sectionally when referring to poor women, indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants, or LGBTQIA+ people, among others. With regard to the inequalities specific to gender, it should be noted that these should not come down to land usage, water management, or political participation and representation, but that they are also manifested in the activities carried out and the time invested in them. In fact, ‘women carry out the majority of the domestic chores, like cooking or cleaning’ and, concurrently, they ‘are the main carers for girls, boys, and elderly people who need assistance’ (UN Women, 2018). In Latin America, the time spent on domestic chores or caregiving duties is above the world average: in the region, the total of unpaid hours worked by women is 2.8 in comparison to 1 hour of unpaid work done by men. These factors indicate that the consequences of extractivism, like water or land pollution, the decrease in crops and food insecurity, or health hazards, greatly affect women and their caregiving activities, overburdening them and exposing them to an even more vulnerable situation (CEPAL, 2021). The effects of the extractive activities contribute to exaggerating the gender inequalities in the region and impact their territories, their bodies, and their lives (Echart and Villarreal, 2019). The undertaking of extractive activities implies the militarisation and the occupation of territories, as well as the disintegration of the social fabric and the dismantling of the local economies, in addition to employing mostly men, thus contributing to consolidating traditional gender roles, the sexual division of labour, and the model of hegemonic masculinity prevalent in the region (IACHR, 2015; Echart and Villarreal, 2019; CEPAL, 2021). Such processes are directly linked to the increase of gender (physical, sexual, and psychological) violence, and of phenomena, such as (child and adult) prostitution, the trafficking of women and children, and the restriction of women’s freedom due to the multiplication of harassment and rape cases in the immediate area around the extractive projects (Solano Ortíz, 2015; FAU, 2017). Furthermore, as research indicates (FAU, 2017; Campanini, Gandarillas, and Gudynas, 2019), another factor that contributes to reinforcing multiple types of violence against women is the increase in alcoholism and drug consumption in men, which is directly connected to the development and spreading of extractive projects. Furthermore, before, during, and after the execution of extractivist projects, women are exposed to multiple (individual or collective) types of violence perpetrated by public and private actors that include workers, police officers, paramilitary organisations, or security guards. This violence is especially perpetrated during the processes of dispossessing people of their private or collective properties (IACHR, 2015; Echart and Villarreal, 2019). Moreover, one in ten murdered land rights defenders or environmental activists in 2020 were women (Global Witness, 2021). Although this number may seem low, it is worth recalling that they face threats, criminalisation, and specific types of violence, such as sexual harassment or rape. Furthermore, in the case of women, they are subjected to differentiated strategies such as verbal, psychological and physical abuse, moral condemnation, or stigmatisation towards

92  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration them and their families (IACHR, 2015; FAU, 2017). In addition to defending the land and the natural resources, women must also fight for their right to protest and to be heard in contexts where they are often marginalised, excluded from decision-making processes, or stigmatised if taking on leadership positions. We should add that women inherit the exclusive responsibility of taking care of their households after their partners have been murdered, which imposes an added burden to being a female environmental activist or land rights defender in the deadliest region in the world (IACHR, 2015; Global Witness, 2021). For the multiple reasons outlined above, women make up a high portion of and are often the majority among victims of forced displacements linked to extractive activities (FAU, 2017; EJATLAS, 2021). In addition, as violence rises and brings about high-risk situations and vulnerability, many women also end up leaving their homes (IACHR, 2015; Global Witness, 2021). However, apart from visibilising the forced displacement of peoples, what we mean to do is to visibilise how women are at the forefront of the fight for the land, the natural resources, and the sustainability of life in a context of increasing socio-environmental conflicts (see Figure 5.1). The cases presented in Figure 5.1 show a panorama where women lead numerous mobilisations, struggles, and resistances against extractivism and accumulation by land dispossession. Despite this structurally sexist context, which tends to relegate them to second place in the distribution of power and to exclude or to marginalise them in decision-making processes, the strategies they adopt are differentiated. As demonstrated by the experiences in Honduras (Women in Defence of the Valle de Siria), Peru (Conga), Brazil (Piquiá de Baixo), or Uruguay (Aratirí Project), the activities carried out by women range from organising demonstrations, cultural activities, awareness-raising campaigns, protests, and bringing the negative effects of extractivism to light (at local and international level), to compiling autonomous reports, alternative data, or organising referendums about the implementation of extractivist projects in their territories. The strategies in place to fight and resist may include extreme measures such as using their own bodies for vigilance and protection of the traditionally threatened territories. This is the case, for instance, of the Kichwa women of Sarayaku, a territory and a village in the southern Amazonian region of Ecuador that has been resisting oil exploitation for more than thirty years. The village’s women were the driving force behind pioneer mobilisations against oil extractivism; they are on the front row at demonstrations and get organised to mount guard in the forest, keeping the Armed Forces and unauthorised people away from their territories. Furthermore, under female leaders like Patricia Gualinga, the Sarayaku people denounced the Ecuadorian state to the IACHR with a delegation made up of 50% indigenous women. In 2012 the Court ruled in favour of this community and forced the Ecuadorian state to conduct a public act of acknowledgement of responsibility. This act of acknowledgement came two years later, in an unprecedented event in the country, and although the threats against this peoples’ territory persist, women still play a key role in its defence. Another example of the fights against extractivism led by women is the case of the Waorani people, also in the Ecuadorian Amazon. In 2020, TIME magazine named female leader Nemonte Nenquimo one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Nenquimo is the president of the Waorani organisation Pastaza (CONCONAWEP); and as their leader, she encourages the women in the community to come together to fight for their rights and against oil extraction. A highlight among the achievements of this community, where women play many leading roles, is the 2019 Pastaza Provincial Court ruling that said the Waorani people

Extractivism, forced gendered migration and resistance  93

Source: GRISUL, 2018.

Figure 5.1

Women’s struggles and resistances against extractivism in Latin America and the Caribbean

had not been properly consulted on the matter of their ancestral territory being exploited. Despite ongoing threats, this ruling suspended the extraction of crude oil in around 180,000 hectares of forest. Berta Cáceres, a renowned human rights and environmental defender, indigenous leader of the Lenca people, and general coordinator of the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), is another emblematic example of female protagonism in the struggle against extractivist projects. According to Front Line Defenders (2021), since 2009, Berta has been a beneficiary of precautionary measures granted by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and in 2015 she received the prestigious Goldman

94  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration Environmental Prize for her contribution to the struggle against the construction of the hydroelectric dam Agua Zarca, by Desarrollo Energéticos Sociedad Anónima (DESA) company, approved by the Honduran government after the coup without prior consent of the indigenous peoples, which would have caused the forced displacement of hundreds of indigenous Hondurans. Berta Cáceres was murdered on March 2, 2016. Despite the difficulties in getting justice for her murder, following her death, the Dutch Development Bank (FMO) and the Finnish Fund for Industrial Cooperation (FINNFUND) decided to withdraw their support for the Agua Zarca hydroelectric project. Cáceres’s death and the continuity of her struggle through her daughters and numerous organisations has given international visibility to the imposition of extractivism as the engine of the capitalist system and to the human rights violations faced by indigenous, Afro-descendant, and peasant peoples in Honduras and Latin America with the direct participation of states that guarantee impunity for transnational corporations and their allies. Due to international pressure, in 2018, the Honduran National Criminal Court convicted seven people for killing Berta Cáceres and determined that they had been hired by DESA company executives. In 2021, former CEO of DESA David Castillo was also found guilty of being co-collaborator in ordering the activist’s murder. The work women do to fight extractivism is also essential for sustainability and it is usually multi-faceted: they watch over the territories and the natural resources like water; protect the weak (especially children and the elderly), the sick, and the injured; manage and tend the seeds, and guarantee a higher diversity of crops against the threat of agribusiness; prepare food, and control or forbid consumption of non-ancestral drugs and alcohol; and manage and upkeep the campsites and the occupation of territories threatened by extractivism. Furthermore, one of their greatest strengths is their multi-layered networks and connections to women’s organisations and popular feminisms as is the case of Guatemala (e.g., El Tambor mining project), where the resistance of mestizo women and Maya Kaqchikel, of the San José del Golfo and San Pedro Ayampu communities, together with the Resistance La Puya and the Network of Women Defenders of Social and Environmental Rights succeeded in suspending the American company Kappes, Cassiday & Associates (KCA)’s El Tambor mining project.

4. CONCLUSIONS In a time where attention of those pushing for global change is focused on an urgent ecosocial transition, we need more studies on the impact that the development model reigning across Latin America and the Caribbean has on the territories and their inhabitants. In this regard, there have been more studies, and more attention has been drawn to the forced displacements brought on by environmental degradation. A step further would be to delve into the deeper roots of climate change, as the degrowth, the Capitalocene, or the world-ecology theories, strongly connected to the capitalist model, point to (Latouche, 2008; Moore, 2016; Acosta, 2016; Ulloa, 2017; Svampa, 2019; Escobar, 2020), and its effects on the configuration and feedback of migratory systems. Therefore, we need research to delve deeper, from a systemic point of view, into the weight these historical and structural factors have had on the configuration and feedback of Latin American migratory systems. Despite its global impacts, the environmental crisis does not affect everybody equally; on the contrary, they depend on the systemic, racial, or gender variables, where there is a clear relationship between global-scale capitalist accumulation, the inequality that it brings

Extractivism, forced gendered migration and resistance  95 about, and the ecologic dispossession, exposing several spatial fractures and causing conflicts throughout commodity chains (at extractive, transport, waste-generating points, etc.) (Martínez Alier, 2005). The current development model promotes not just the accumulation of benefits and capital through the dispossession or expropriation of territories, inducing large population displacements, but also accumulation in terms of waste, which is not paid for, but instead transferred to poor populations or to our future generations (Martínez Alier, 2005; Harvey, 2005). It is within this systemic context that the forced displacements ensuing from neo-colonial extractivist projects must be considered a great mechanism for population expulsion (Sassen, 2015, 2021), which is one of the constant structural characteristics of the Latin American migratory system. And it is in these analyses that the role of resistances in the territories, where women play an essential part, become particularly relevant. As we have pointed out, Latin America is a disputed territory, where socio-environmental conflicts are exponentially multiplied. Among the more serious effects of this phenomenon is the fact that Latin America and the Caribbean represent the most dangerous region in the world for environmental activists and land rights defenders (Global Witness, 2021). Whereas these conflicts may seem localised, a more systemic approach enables us to see them as part of what Martínez Alier (2005) calls ‘environmentalism of the poor’, a global fight for environmental and climate justice that questions the predatory exploitation of natural resources in the name of progress and economic growth, criticising the destructiveness of these practices, both for their ecosystems and for their inhabitants. In conclusion, during a time in which intense debate surrounds the possible ecosocial transitions, it is essential to see these fights and resistances as part of a wide global movement for the defence and care for the planet, to not see them as isolated cases, or as mere victims of extractivist projects, in order to fit their alternative proposals within the inspiring and necessary driving force behind the global transformation that we need towards environmental justice.

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Extractivism, forced gendered migration and resistance  97 Mezzadra, Sandro; Neilson, Brett (2019). The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Moore, Jason W. (2016). Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, Oakland, CA: PM Press. Observatório das Migrações Forçadas. Instituto Igarapé (2018). https://​igarape​.org​.br/​apps/​observatorio​ -de​-migracoes​-forcadas/​ Ojeda, Tahina, Villarreal, María (2020). Orígenes y evolución del pensamiento crítico latinoamericano sobre desarrollo. In: Ojeda, Tahina; Villarreal, María (eds), Pensamiento crítico latinoamericano sobre desarrollo, Madrid: Catarata. Oxfam (2019). Desterrados. Tierra, poder y desigualdad en América Latina, Reino Unido: Oxfam International. Quijano, Aníbal (2000). Colonialidad del poder y clasificación social. Journal of World Systems Research, 6(2), 342–386. Ribas-Mateos, Natalia; Dunn, Timothy (eds) (2021). Handbook on Human Security, Borders and Migration, Northampton, MA, USA and Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing. Riofrancos, Thea (2020). Extractivism and Extractivismo, Global South Studies: A Collective Publication with the Global South. https://​globalsouthstudies​.as​.virginia​.edu/​key​-concepts/​extractivism​-and​ -extractivismo (acccessed 10/12/21). Sassen, Saskia (2015). Expulsiones. Brutalidad y complejidad en la economía global, Buenos Aires: Katz Editores. Sassen, Saskia (2021). The predatory character of today’s economies: a focus on borders and migrations. In: Ribas-Mateos, Natalia; Dunn, Timothy (eds), Handbook on Human Security, Borders and Migration, Northampton, MA, USA and Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 102–110. Satiroglu, Irge; Choi, Narae (2015). Development-induced Displacement and Resettlement: New Perspectives on Persisting Problems, London: Routledge. Solano Ortíz, Lina (2015). Mujer, violencia e industria minera. http://​redulam​.org/​guatemala/​mujer​ -violencia​-e​-industria​-minera/​ (accessed 05/12/21). Svampa, Maristella (2019). Las fronteras del neoextractivismo en América Latina. Conflictos socioambientales, giro ecoterritorial y nuevas dependencias. Guadalajara: CALAS. Ulloa, Astrid (2017). Dinámicas ambientales y extractivas en el siglo XXI: ¿es la época del Antropoceno o del Capitaloceno en Latinoamérica? Desacatos, 4, 58–73. UN Women (2018). Hacer las promesas realidad. La igualdad de género en agenda 2030 para el desarrollo sostenible. Estados Unidos: ONU Mujeres, Estudios Sociales Contemporáneos, 2020, 1(22), 162–166. UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) (2021). Tendencias globales del Desplazamiento Forzado 2020, Copenhagen: UNHCR. Villarreal, María (2021). Migraciones ambientales. Marcos normativos y políticas públicas en América Latina y el Caribe. In: Nejamkis, Lucila; Conti, Luisa; Aksakal, Mustafá (eds), (Re)pensando el vínculo entre migración y crisis. Perspectivas desde América Latina y Europa, Buenos Aires: CALAS, CLACSO, pp. 141–164. Villarreal, María; Echart, Enara; Carballo, Marta (2022). La agencia migrante en el sistema migratorio de América Latina y el Caribe. In press. Wallerstein, Immanuel (1979). El moderno sistema mundial. La agricultura capitalista y los orígenes de la economía-mundo europea en el siglo XVI, Mexico: Siglo XXI editores. Wood, William (2001). Ecomigration: linkages between environmental change and migration. In Zolberg, Aristide; Benda, Peter (eds.), Global Migrants Global Refugees: Problems and Solutions, New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 42–61. World Bank (2021). Groundswell Part 2: Acting on Internal Climate Migration, Washington, D.C.: World Bank.

6. Women and punishment in Abya Yala Elisabet Almeda Samaranch, Clara Camps Calvet and Dino Di Nella

INTRODUCTION During the current phase of global, neoliberal capitalism, the processes behind the criminalization of the population have multiplied and diversified, with the number of individuals under punitive control and imprisoned increasing exponentially, as in no other period in history (Davis, 2003; Wacquant, 2004). Particularly during the last two decades, there has been an extremely high increase in the number of women deprived of their liberty around the world, surpassing the increase in the number of men in the same situation with each passing year. These processes have been particularly exacerbated in Abya Yala,1 where feminist critical criminology has witnessed, documented and condemned the phenomenon powerfully and on a continuous basis for years. However, the invisibilization of this reality in existing studies and research, including the statistical output, is alarming (in some cases such as Paraguay and Panama, the data are not even disaggregated by gender). With these limitations, and with a careful approach to the data that veers away from the predominant paradigm of quantitative statistics, these questions can still be recognized and analysed, at least on an approximate and descriptive basis, using two principal variables related to the number of women prisoners in a specific country: the proportion of prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants, and the percentage of female confinement out of the total prison population. However, from Abya Yala itself, a robust number of feminist decolonial perspectives (Cacopardo and Malacalza, 2019; Coba, 2015; Giacomello, 2013; Hernández, 2013, Segato, 2007), among many more, have gone against that trend. At a distance from Eurocentric approaches, these studies delve into more qualitative aspects, looking at case studies, life stories and biographies. Due to, and thanks to, this work, an opportunity exists to examine these distinguishing features and findings, as the authors of this article have done in recent years (Almeda Samaranch and Di Nella, 2017). The penal and penitentiary selectivity of women has become more acute in the last two decades, with an increasingly disproportionate incidence of women’s imprisonment related to the impact of the so-called ‘war on drugs’ on women (crimes against public health, smuggling of substances of abuse or consumption prohibited by the health authorities, among others), and the widespread erosion of their full status as citizens (foreign women, racialized ethnic minorities or oppressed peoples). Abya Yala is the term used by the Kuna Indians of Panama to refer to the two American continents as a whole (it means ‘land in its full maturity’). The term represents a demand on the part of the indigenous peoples that their indigenous villages, cities and regions not be subjected to names imposed by the colonial forces. However, except when otherwise stated, this article uses the term to refer to all the countries comprising Abya Yala, with the exception of the United States, Canada, the Bermudas and Greenland, not only for geopolitical reasons, but also because of the socio-statistical significance of the distinction, as will be seen below. 1

98

Women and punishment in Abya Yala  99 This study attempts to fill – albeit only partially and tentatively – these gaps, by scrutinizing these questions. To that end, the chapter presents and analyses the information in two tables created by the authors, but produced using data from a number of official databases published by the various Abya Yala governments, systematized and processed by the Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research (ICPR) (University of London). Specifically, Table 6.1 presents the general data from the fourth report issued by the ICPR, World female imprisonment list, on the female prison population in the world by continent (ICPR, 2017). Table 6.2 provides the more up-to-date indicators and data from the ICPR’s World prison brief online database for this group for all the Abya Yala countries studied. The most specific scientific output related to the topic is referenced throughout the chapter, which concludes with some final thoughts and the references used by the authors.

THE DISPROPORTIONATE IMPRISONMENT OF WOMEN AS A GLOBAL TREND As noted in the introduction, class, gender and race – along with the other classic variables of social stratification such as national origin, age, sexuality and ethnicity, with their various forms of intersection – interact simultaneously, configuring contexts of social and legal inequality for women. They directly affect their daily lives, influencing their access to their rights and opportunities as well as the situations of privilege, subordination or exclusion associated with them. These exclusions often entail the criminalization of their transgression, penal selectivity related to their status as women who are poor, migrants, foreign or racialized, and a variety of forms of severe punishment according to the global intersections of their oppressions. However, nowadays, it is still quite common to downplay the importance of this issue, a response to the omnipresent assertion that this reality has little or no statistical significance. The fact that jailed women are a small part of the total prison population would explain – or even account for – the almost complete omission of women prisoners from academic theorization, including feminist theory, in empirical–criminological studies and critical criminology, and from the consequent penal and penitentiary policies formulated for the imprisoned population in general. The fourth report issued by the ICPR, World female imprisonment list, notes that, in 2000, there were some 466,000 women and girls being held in prisons in the different penitentiary systems around the world, a number that had increased to more than 714,000 in 2017. In other words, between 2000 and 2017, the number of imprisoned women and girls jailed in the entire world increased by 53.3%, almost three times the 19.6% increase recorded for men during that same period. This differentiation continues to grow each year: in 2015, the number of imprisoned women increased by 50.2%, compared with 18.1% for men (see Table 6.1). In 2017, Abya Yala as a whole had 31.4 female prisoners for every 100,000 inhabitants, one and a half times more than Europe (12.1), almost three times more than Oceania (11.3), five times higher than Asia and almost ten times the number in Africa. Disaggregating the data for Abya Yala, there are 11 women per 100,000 inhabitants in southern Abya Yala, 9 in the Caribbean and 19 in central Abya Yala, the highest number when compared with the other regions, excluding North America, where the percentage is more than double. With 65.7 women prisoners for every 100,000 inhabitants, the United States has a higher percentage

100  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration Table 6.1

Female prison population by continent, 2017

Continent

Total female prison

% women out of total

Proportion of women

population

population

prisoners per 100,000

Asia

263,571

6.7

6.2

Europe

102,397

6.1

12.1 11.3

inhabitants

Oceania

4,550

7.4

Africa

35,606

3.4

3.2

Abya Yala

308,293

8.4

31.4

North America

214,626

8.7

30.4

The rest of Abya Yala

93,667

5.2

13

Notes: When this table lists ‘Abya Yala’, it refers to all the North, South and Central American countries together. However, as the aim is to identify the different realities for the female prison population between the North America countries, mainly the United States, and the other countries that comprise Abya Yala, the table also breaks Abya Yala down into three groups of regions: (1) Abya Yala, consisting of all the North, South and Central American countries together; (2) North America, including all the countries in the region, headed by the United States; and (3) the rest of Abya Yala, comprising all the countries in southern Abya Yala, the Caribbean and central Abya Yala. Source: ICPR (2017, p.13).

than any other country or continent in the world. There are also some important imbalances in each of these regions. Almost 30% of all these women (211,870 in absolute numbers) are in prisons in the United States, the country with the highest jail and prison population. The other women are primarily concentrated in a few countries, such as China (107,131, or 6.5% female prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants), followed by the Russian Federation (48,478, or 7.9%), Thailand (41,119, or 13.3%), India (17,834, or 4.3%) and Brazil (48,478, or 6.89%), respectively (ICPR, 2017). The percentage of women out of the total prison population is relatively homogenous: between 6.1% in Oceania and the highest percentage, 8.4%, in Abya Yala, although the percentage is 8.7% in North America and only 5.2% in the rest of Abya Yala, 3.7% in the Caribbean, 5.9% in southern Abya Yala and 6.2% in central Abya Yala, approximately. With only 3.4%, Africa has the lowest rate, almost half that of Abya Yala. The numbers of imprisoned women and girls have increased on every continent, but especially in Abya Yala (almost three times higher than the increase in the general population). For example, in the countries in central Abya Yala such as Guatemala, the number of imprisoned women and girls has increased fivefold since 2001, while the increase in El Salvador has been tenfold since 2000. In southern Abya Yala, Brazil has increased its female prison population by four and a half times since 2000 (ICPR, 2017). Finally, this must be contextualized in the system of the social control of women. The patriarchy has historically consolidated a variety of highly effective processes of female subordination in social models based on both capitalism and communism. This effectiveness has been underpinned by the deployment of mechanisms of informal social control (familyor community based, socio-economic, political, ideological, moral, deontological) that have made punitive or institutionalized repressive control completely unnecessary. The criminal sentencing of a single woman in a courthouse and her imprisonment in a penitentiary institution is, consequently, a rarity, almost a ‘miracle’. In this respect, using the so-called ‘low incidence’ of female prisoners as a percentage, in both absolute and relative terms, as an argument to detract from the social significance of the phenomenon is merely another expression of the

Women and punishment in Abya Yala  101 Table 6.2

Total prison population and female prison population: absolute and percentage, by country (Latin America and the Caribbean)

Country

Year

Percentage female

Total prison

Female prison

% women of

population

population

the total prison

prisoners per

population

100,000 inhabitants 9.8

Argentina

2019

109,405

4,413

4.4

Venezuela

2020

37,543

2,183

5.8

6.6

Colombia

2021

97,615

7,438

7.6

14.7

Peru

2020

89,760

5,258

5.5

15.8

Bolivia

2018

18,260 (2020)

1,478

8

12.7

Chile

2021

39,737

2,878

7.2

15.4

Paraguay

2018

16,804

866

5.9

12.6

(2019) Ecuador

2020

39,251

2,612

6.7

14.9

Brazil

2020

811,707

41,580

5.1

19.5

Uruguay

2020

13,021

635

5.4

18.2

Surinam

2012

1,000

28

2.8

5.3

(2014) Guyana

2018

1,884 (2020)

59

2.8

7.6

Nicaragua

2018

20,918

575

5.4

9.3

(2014)

(2014)

El Salvador

2021

36,663

2,710

7.4

41.7

Panama

2021

18,967

980

5.2

22.5

Guatemala

2021

25,298

2,820

11.2

15.6

Mexico

2021

220,393

12,397

5.6

9.5

Honduras

2020

21,675

1,160

5.7

13

(2018)

(2018)

Belize

2020

1,357

34

2.8

Costa Rica

2017

19,226

1,034

5.4

20

Dominican Republic

2019

26.600

727

2.8

6.6

Haiti

2021

11,500

459

4

4

8.5

(2020)

Source: Authors’ compilation, using data from a variety of official government databases, systematized and processed by the ICPR (2021).

antiquated fetishism of the quantitative statistical paradigm that contributes little or nothing to understanding the social reality. On the contrary, the idea that women, in the transgressive act of freeing themselves from racialized class and gender oppression, could circumvent all these informal mechanisms and, thus, ‘need’ social disciplining through the institutional penitentiary and penal system, defies all the explanatory power of each minuscule statistic about female penal selectivity around the world. Herein lies the significance of the fact that the highest numbers – 14.6 female prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants and 8.4% out of the total prison population – are found in southern, central and Caribbean Abya Yala. Table 6.2 presents the systematized data for the total prison population and the women’s population, in particular, for all the countries in southern, central and Caribbean Abya Yala, when sufficient studies of those countries have produced reliable data. As seen clearly in Table 6.2, the data on the prison population are not always disaggregated by gender for every year, complicating the possibility of comparing, tracing and homogenizing

102  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration the data. Obviously, and in violation of a number of international regulations, official penal and penitentiary data mining is biased on the grounds of gender, and the indicators that are derived from it cannot but be imbued with radical androcentrism from the outset (Almeda Samaranch and Di Nella, 2019). With these limitations in mind, this table shows that women represent an average of 6 to 7% of the total prison population, with the exception of Guatemala, where that percentage is almost double at 11%, and bearing in mind the fact that, in Argentina, the data are general and do not reflect the concentration of women in federal prisons, where they comprise almost 10% of the population (CELS, 2011). There are some variations in the percentages of female prisoners out of the total population. Haiti, with the lowest percentage at 4, stands out as an exception, as opposed to the largest group of countries, where women comprise between 9 and 14% of the population, above all in southern Abya Yala, and then Brazil and Uruguay, with around 20%. The final group comprises Panama and Costa Rica, with 20%, and, with by far the highest percentage of women, El Salvador, where female prisoners make up 40% of the total population. These three countries set the trend towards the consolidation of penal and penitentiary selectivity in central Abya Yala.

WOMEN: THE LAST STEP IN THE SOCIAL CONTROL OF DRUGS In the current framework of global capitalism, there is a process of criminal expansion promoted by extractivist capitalism that is criminalizing women defenders of land, nature and environmental rights, the majority of whom are peasant, indigenous and black women. However, the exorbitant imprisonment of women in Abya Yala, which is steadily increasing, is primarily due to the criminalization of women for crimes related to drug policies, a phenomenon recognized for decades at this point. Numerous researchers, criminologists, lawyers, educators, sociologists and anthropologists – all of whom have been women – have explained and analysed this from critical, feminist, decolonial, intersectional and situated approaches, placing it in the Latin American historical, political, economic, cultural and social context. Along with pioneers like Aniyar de Castro (1986), Olmo (1988, 1998), Lagarde (2005), Azaola (1995, 2008) and Antony García (2001), important contributions to this topic have come from Nari and Fabre (2000), Torres (2008), Aguirre (2010); Andersen (2010); Palma Campos (2011), Dorigo (2013), Giacomello (2013), Hernández (2013), Rodríguez Blanco (2015), Daroqui (2016), Coba (2015), Rodríguez (2018), Cacopardo and Malacalza (2019) and Ballester Martínez (2021), among many others. At the same time, human rights and feminist activism organizations have published a wide variety of institutional studies and/or action protocols related to women deprived of their liberty. These include studies issued by the Latin American and Caribbean Committee for the Defence of Women’s Rights (CLADEM) (2008); the Centre for Legal and Social Studies (CELS) (2011); and the Conference of Ministers of Justice of Ibero-American Countries (COMJIB) (2013); and diverse protocols from the cooperation programme for Social Cohesion in Latin America (EUROsociAL), which has been active in many Latin American countries, including Ecuador (Almeda Samaranch and Ballesteros Pena, 2015), Peru, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Argentina and Chile. All of these works analyse the reality of women’s prisons in Abya Yala, visibilizing the forms of penal and penitentiary androcentric institutional violence and developing mechanisms to expose the situation and protect women deprived of their liberty and facing the violation of their rights. Most are based on complying

Women and punishment in Abya Yala  103 with and respecting the 70 United Nations Rules for the Treatment of Women Prisoners and Non-custodial Measures for Women Offenders (the Bangkok Rules) (Organización de las Naciones Unidas, 2011). Above all, however, these publications contextualize the reality of women inmates within the framework of the so-called ‘war on drugs’. First launched by the United States from a punitivist and prohibitionist perspective, the war on drugs was adopted by almost all the Latin American countries as their own policy during the early 1990s. Many authors argue that the increase in women’s incarceration rates is largely due to this ‘war’, which heralded intense prosecution of infractions related to specific psychotropic substances and an exponential increase in sentencing. Women have suffered the worst consequences of this initiative. Above all, imprisoned women have been sentenced for crimes against public health, crimes related to the possession, sale, trafficking or smuggling of drugs. In Brazil, 60% of female prisoners are incarcerated for crimes related to narcotic substances, a number that rises to 70% in Venezuela and 75–80% in federal and border prisons in Mexico (Giacomello, 2013: 12–13). In Ecuador, that figure is almost 80% (Torres, 2008: 9), in Costa Rica, 64% (Palma, 2011: 246) and in Argentinian federal jails, almost 70%, where 90% of the prison sentences are related to drugs when the women are foreigners (CELS, 2011: 29–30). As a repeating pattern in recent decades, these crimes against public health are often directly related to ‘their men’, partners and spouses with whom they commit the crimes and are arrested. They also traffic drugs in jails, bringing them in under the cover of conjugal visits with their husbands or lovers. They are the ‘trafficking vehicle’, the body as object, whose vagina or stomach is used to carry the drugs required by their imprisoned men (Lagarde, 2005). These detained women become involved in this crime for family reasons – whether as girlfriends, wives, mothers or daughters – fulfilling the roles assigned them by asymmetrical gender relations (Torres, 2008). The women are imprisoned for being small-scale dealers of the illicit substances that they grow, harvest, prepare, hide, store or sell, playing limited, secondary roles in the great narco-trafficking network, ‘household duties’, in the words of Rosa del Olmo (1988, 1998). These women introduce drugs into their bodies and transport them around Abya Yala, in exchange for very little compensation, given the risk involved. This risk becomes even greater when the women cross the ocean with the drugs in their bodies or suitcases and are stopped at the airports of, for example, Madrid or Barcelona: Latin American women imprisoned in Europe for being ‘mules or carriers’ (Ribas et al. 2005). This ‘transportation’ is the most precarious, vulnerable, risky and criminalized stage in the division of the trade and the job of trafficking substances, and the women who do it are the most easily prosecuted, judicialized, punished and imprisoned participants. While narco-trafficking creates complex webs and social hierarchies that are basically male, Latin American women are pushed towards conflict with penal laws, on the most precarious and exposed margins of rigid punitive–repressive control. The general inequality and penal inequality increase after they are sentenced and imprisoned, and they are left in a state of total helplessness. Thus, not only is the transgressive poverty of Latin American women convicted, but that of their family and community networks as well (Aguirre, 2010; Coba, 2015). Moved to the lowest step in the chain of narco-trafficking, but condemned to long sentences for it, they serve as the perfect scapegoat for the inefficient anti-drug policies of Western countries. As if that was not enough, the status of the citizenship of many women exacerbates the situation, whether they are foreign, indigenous or simply arrested far from their communities

104  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration – communities where their full citizenship as humans is recognized (Giacomello, 2013). The following section focuses on this group of incarcerated females.

FOREIGN WOMEN: THE OTHER PRISONERS As far back as 2010, it was clear that women considered foreign by a state were overrepresented in jails around the world with respect to the size of each population. However, while the percentage of foreigners in the prison population is between 70 and 90 in countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and between 38 and 53 in almost all of Europe, in Abya Yala, it does not surpass 8 (International Centre for Prison Studies, 2010). This clearly shows that the foreign variable alone does not explain the situation in Abya Yala’s prisons. Rather, the processes of coloniality and the domination of the indigenous populations help to explain the reality and profile of the women who are currently held in the jails of Abya Yala. In this respect, a decolonial perspective seems to be the key to understanding the reality of women’s prisons in Abya Yala. This point of view makes it possible to go beyond the idea that, with the end of the colonial administrations and the appearance of the nation-states in the periphery, the world today is decolonialized and/or postcolonial (Castro-Gómez and Grosfoguel, 2007). Indeed, the world is still suffering from the consequences of relations of coloniality that have not disappeared and that also explain the reality of women’s jails in Abya Yala. It is, precisely, thanks to coloniality that, at this time, control over forms of subjectivity, cognitive perspectives, culture, knowledge and the modes of production are concentrated in Europe, under its hegemony. With colonization, the Europeans managed to spread the idea of modernity and rationality (Quijano, 2007). Cloaked in false humanitarianism, the prison always formed part of this modernity project (Foucault, 2009, 2010; Rusche and Kirchheimer, 1984). Moreover, the extension of Eurocentrism and European hegemony entailed the birth of the idea that race and racial identity were basic instruments of social classification. The rationality of European modernity involved a radical separation between the human ‘reason/ subject’ and the ‘body’. Thus, certain races were considered inferior because they were not rational subjects. From this Eurocentric perspective, it was possible for non-European peoples to be considered bodies that could be dominated, exploited or simply serve as objects of study (Quijano, 2007). The belief that some inferior races were closer to nature than to the idea of rationality grows even larger with the inclusion of a feminist, decolonial perspective that the colonizers also imposed and institutionalized new hierarchies between indigenous men and women. From this viewpoint, coloniality also involved gender, and sacrificing indigenous women to the lust of the conquerors became the only means of survival for the population. The genocidal logic of coloniality in terms of race was definitively imposed in terms of gender (Lugones, 2010; Icaza, 2017). The complete dehumanization of indigenous women was the result of this process of coloniality. The concept of the involution of non-white women lurks today in prisons around the world, where foreigners are overrepresented. Punishment, punitivism and abandonment, along with the militarization of borders, deportations and deaths at sea are all expressions of a neoliberal logic that goes beyond state borders (Ribas-Mateos and Dunn, 2021) and also expresses persistent relations of coloniality. As noted by Rita Segato (2007), the bodies of non-white women from indigenous and afro-descendant communities are overrepresented. The race

Women and punishment in Abya Yala  105 in prisons, which is non-white, reveals a position, a particular inheritance, the passing of a history, a highly fragmented burden of ethnicity, with a cultural correlate of class and social background. A feminist decolonial gaze thus becomes a necessary theoretical framework to delve into and understand the reality of these jails. The foreign women serving out terms in prisons often constitute diverse collectives with identities and profiles that differ from those of the native women. Specifically, the consequences of the offending act are usually different – and require very different reintegration approaches – for women, depending on whether they have stable, pre-existing settlement strategies in the country where they committed the crime. However, their operationalization as an analytical category has been constructed by the penitentiary agents in the jails (Andersen, 2010). Foreign women who already live in the country before being detained, sentenced and entering prison are usually identified as ‘migrants’, regardless of their administrative situation. These are commonly and chiefly Latin American women, whose social and community ties are in the country that has imprisoned them for crimes against property or crimes related to the sale of consumable substances prohibited by the health officials. On the other hand, ‘non-migrant’ foreign women (usually identified, strictly speaking, as ‘foreigners’) are detained at the border, usually in airports. They do not have pre-existing residency, because they did not go through a migration process to settle in the country where they committed a crime before being jailed, and came directly into contact with the police, judicial and penal subsystems. These women do not have a pre-established migration strategy or form part of a migration flow aimed at obtaining residency. Behind the disguise of the apparent scientific nature of the category – put at the service of penitentiary handling – this differentiation, as well as the distinction of the ‘national female inmate’, simply emphasizes the selectivity of the penal system and the xenophobic, discriminatory and racist practices that co-produce and reinforce the agencies of social control. This involves the police, with their selective detention, the judiciary, in its stigmatization of foreign women as ‘delinquent’, and the mass media, as a secondary criminalization agency, in the criminal construction of Latin American immigrants. Transborder immigration has very little impact on the commission of acts typified as criminal by the legislators in power at the moment, and is not even a criminal indicator, or factor per se. Rather, it is the social exclusion of women in the migration process (how they are handled socially, legally, politically, economically and criminologically, as well as in the media) that really has an impact on whether or not crimes are committed, and difficulties for eventual reintegration (Almeda Samaranch, 2010b). The production of the statistics reflect this, since in most countries, the foreign variable is not disaggregated, and certainly not by gender. Indeed, there are few or no data on the imprisonment of ‘non-white individuals’, and the little information that is available refers to indigenous women with an identifiable ethnic affiliation or women from black-majority countries, as in Colombia (Segato, 2007). These data are imprecise, based on the impressions of circumstantial observers, and there are no real census data in this respect. In the few countries that process and produce these data, imprisoned foreign women always comprise a much higher proportion of the total female prison population than foreign men within the male population. There are also significant differences between the countries, ranging from almost 2% in Colombia to 6% in Argentina and 18% in Panama (CLADEM, 2008). However, the need for greater disaggregation to develop more precise interpretations is clear. For example, in the case of Argentina, this disproportionality becomes more acute when

106  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration the federal penitentiary system in the country is more fully analysed, showing that, in 2015, foreigners made up 20% of the total prison population. Looking specifically at women, while native-born Argentinians comprise 12 inmates (per 100,000 inhabitants), at 35 (per 100,000), foreign women were three times more likely to be sentenced for a crime (Rodríguez, 2018, pp. 255–256). These data merely serve as an illustration, since a detailed study needs to be done before more solid conclusions can be drawn. However, they are sufficient to justly infer that, at least in southern Abya Yala, the status of national citizenship (foreignness) is not the determining variable in women’s incarceration in prisons, as seen in other countries, especially in Europe, where foreigners comprise 40% of the imprisoned population, and the numbers are almost always higher for foreign women, as found in a comparative study by Almeda Samaranch (2010a). There is no doubt that the sustained growth of the imprisoned foreign population in recent decades, especially with regard to women and Abya Yala, correlates with the global increase in incarceration rates. However, according to all the research consulted and cited here, while the general penal population is clearly trending towards stabilization, the number of foreign women in prison has been steadily growing for years. This marked increase in a ‘relatively small’ group (when compared with a not very numerous total) has an important, direct impact on the group itself at all levels. These circumstances highlight the importance of the phenomenon, and this underrepresented, diffuse category must be consolidated as a group worthy of institutional and academic attention. Foreign women – especially those linked to the migration processes of indigenous communities deprived of their liberty – constitute a particularly vulnerable, historically invisibilized group that faces enormous difficulties in gaining access to their rights in prison. The levels of vulnerability overlap and can only be analysed from decolonial and intersectional feminist perspectives that can explain how the variables of class, ethnicity and gender are juxtaposed. Moreover, the discrimination faced by all women deprived of their liberty is exacerbated by injustices specific to this group that further exclude them. These are diverse, and there is no room to examine them all here, but they include, most notably: a lack of visitors and obstacles to maintaining family ties; communication problems due to language barriers; inattention and a general lack of support from the consulates, embassies and governments of their countries of origin; significant difficulty in gaining access to the early release programme while serving their term, which means fewer prison leaves or delays in parole; forced expulsion, without knowing about the presence of immediate family in the country; and an almost complete lack of legal defence and the most minimal information about their rights (Andersen, 2010; Giacomello, 2013; Hernández, 2013, among other authors). Many studies have also shown that a large portion of foreign women are subject to physical and psychological violence during detention, especially if they are indigenous. Moreover, this is because discrimination by gender and nationality is often worsened by ethnic discrimination. Due to illiteracy in the ‘imperial languages’, a lack of support or their destitution, indigenous women are constantly exploited and abused (Olmo, 1998; Azaola, 2008; Coba, 2015, among others). Current neoliberal reforms in many countries like Brazil, Ecuador and Colombia have intensified their marginalization, forcing them to migrate north and, often, become involved in planting, producing or transporting psychotropic substances as an extreme form of survival. These women have most intensely suffered the consequence of these policies. Responsible for the family finances and imprisoned because of their participation in the narcotics trade, they

Women and punishment in Abya Yala  107 have to deal with the impact of the militarization of indigenous regions and the alleged war on drugs. Sexual and domestic violence continues to characterize their lives, now made worse by the spread of police and military violence (Hernández, 2013, p. 329).

FINAL OBSERVATIONS Around the world, prisons and the penal system as a whole are the product of a patriarchal society and, therefore, reproduce its logic and forms of violence. They create the ideal context for the amplification of sexist, stigmatizing stereotypes of women, because the punitive system is also based on a patriarchal pedagogy. Women deprived of their liberty are subjected to specific types of violence, due to the articulation of a prison discipline rooted in the patriarchal system. For that reason, they suffer the consequences of a social logic that does not value sexual and reproductive health, maternity or female sexuality, and although they are regulated and normalized in penal laws, no firm policy exists to ensure that these women can progress in decent conditions inside women’s prisons. Consequently, and as this study has shown, the women’s prisons in Abya Yala provide an excellent vantage point from which to observe new trends in the global punitive control of women jailed for crimes related to drug policies and the impact of citizenship and immigration, as well as the inconstant, arbitrary nature of penal and prison discipline. These situations can only be interpreted using a conceptual framework with a decolonial gender perspective, in which foreign women and women’s jails interact. For them, the only opportunity provided by the current neoliberal geopolitical state of affairs is detention in Abya Yala, in penal and penitentiary conditions that are much more severe and unequal than in jails in other parts of the world. All of this reveals how relations of coloniality endure and explains the reality of women’s imprisonment. Consequently, the facts surrounding the women in the prisons of Abya Yala blatantly expose the misery of the criminal justice system on a global level. It is, simply put, the tip of the iceberg below which gender, class and ethnic discrimination clearly lie, where the most clear-cut revelation of the injustices and disproportionate oppression of female poverty around the world is unambiguously visible.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aguirre Salas, Andrea (2010). Vivir en la fractura. El castigo y las resistencias en la cárcel de mujeres. Serie Magíster, volume 96, Quito: Ediciones Abya-Yala, Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar. Almeda Samaranch, Elisabet (ed.) (2010a). Execució penal femenina a Catalunya des d’una perspectiva feminista comparada. Debats, dades, indicadors i tallers participatius. Collecció: Dones i Sistema Penal. Número 01, Barcelona: Copalqui Editorial. Almeda Samaranch, Elisabet (2010b). ‘Privación de libertad y mujeres extranjeras. Viejos prejuicios y nuevas desigualdades’, in Añaños, Fanny T. (ed.), Las mujeres en las prisiones. La educación social en contextos de riesgo y conflicto, pp. 201–234, Barcelona: Gedisa. Almeda Samaranch, Elisabet, and Ballesteros Pena, Ana (2015). Protocolo de atención a mujeres privadas de libertad, nacionales y extranjeras, en Ecuador. Madrid: Programa EUROsociAL. Almeda Samaranch, Elisabet, and Di Nella, Dino (2017). ‘Mujeres y cárceles en América Latina. Perspectivas críticas y feministas’, PAPERS Revista de Sociologia, 102/2: 183–214. Almeda Samaranch, Elisabet, and Di Nella, Dino (2019). ‘Per unes dades, estadístiques i indicadors no androcèntrics de l’execució penal femenina’, in Cantalapiedra, Marginet Flinch, and Samaranch

108  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration Almeda, Elisabet (eds), Desigualdades y Cárceles de mujeres. Voces y debates desde el feminismo, pp. 133–159, Colección: Mujeres y Sistema Penal. Número 04, Barcelona: Copalqui Editorial. Andersen, María Jimena (2010). ‘Extranjeros e inmigrantes en el Servicio Penitenciario Federal. La gestión de las diferencias en las estrategias de gobierno intramuros’, in Grupo de Trabajo 8, Jornadas de investigación en Antropología Social: Agosto 2010, pp. 1–19, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Aniyar de Castro, Lola (1986). ‘La delincuencia femenina en Venezuela. Ideología de la Diversidad y Marginalidad’, in Aniyar de Castro (2002), La realidad contra los mitos. Reflexiones críticas en Criminología, pp. 101–122, Publicaciones de la Universidad del Zulia. Antony García, Carmen (2001). Las mujeres confinadas. Estudio criminológico sobre el rol genérico en la ejecución de la pena en Chile y América Latina. Santiago: Editorial Jurídica de Chile. Azaola, Elena (1995). ‘Prisiones para mujeres: un enfoque de género’, La Ventana, 2: 35–52. Azaola, Elena (2008). Crimen, castigo y violencias en México, Serie Ciudadanía y Violencias, FLACSO – MDMQ, Quito. Ballester Martínez, Virginia (2021). ‘Mujeres en resistencia. Estrategias subversivas en la cárcel de Santa Martha Acatitla, Ciudad de México’, Asparkía, 38: 149–169. Cacopardo, Ana, and Malacalza, Laurana (2019). ‘Resistencias carcelarias en clave feminista? Articulaciones y estrategias en dos protestas carcelarias’, Quaderns de Psicología, 21(3): e1535. Castro-Gómez, Santiago, and Grosfoguel, Ramon (2007). El giro decolonial. Reflexiones para una diversidad epistémica más allá del capitalismo global. Bogotá: Siglo del Hombre Editores. CELS (2011). Mujeres en prisión. Los alcances del castigo. Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno editores. CLADEM (2008). Violencia contra mujeres privadas de libertad. Sistematización regional Argentina, Brasil, Chile, Colombia, Paragua y Uruguay. Lima: CLADEM. Coba, Lisset. (2015). Sitiadas. La criminalización de las pobres en Ecuador durante el neoliberalismo. Quito: Flacso. COMJIB (2013). Programa modelo de género en contexto de privación de libertad para Iberoamérica. Viña del Mar: COMJIB. Daroqui, Alcira, et al. (2006). Voces del cencierrro. Mujeres y jóvenes encarcelados. en Argentina. Una investigación socio-jurídica. Buenos Aires: Omar Favale Ediciones Jurídicas. Davis, Angela (2003). Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press. Dorigo, María Eva (2013). Lineamientos para la implementación de las Reglas de Bangkok en el sistema penitenciario peruano. Lima: Defensoría del Pueblo. Foucault, Michel (2009). Vigilar y castigar. Madrid: Siglo XXI. Foucault, Michel (2010). La verdad y las formas jurídicas. Madrid: Gedisa. Giacomello, Corina (2013). Mujeres, delitos de drogas y sistemas penitenciarios en América Latina. London: IDPC. Hernández, Rosalva Aída (2013). ‘Del estado multicultural al estado penal. Mujeres indígenas presas y criminalización de la pobreza’, in Sierra, María Teresa et al. (eds), Justicias indígenas y Estado. Violencias contemporáneas, pp. 299–338, Mexico: Flacso. Icaza, Rosalba (2017). ‘Social struggles and coloniality of gender’, in Shilliam, Robbie, and Rutazibwa, Olivia (eds), Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Politics, pp. 58–71, London: Routledge. Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research (ICPR) (2017). World Female Imprisonment List, fourth edition, University of London: https://​www​.prisonstudies​.org/​sites/​default/​files/​resources/​downloads/​ world​_female​_prison​_4th​_edn​_v4​_web​.pdf (accessed 03/03/22). Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research (ICPR) (2021). World Prison Brief: WPB, University of London: https://​www​.prisonstudies​.org/​world​-prison​-brief​-data (accessed 03/03/22). International Centre for Prison Studies (2010). World Prison Brief 2010, King’s College London – School of Law, London: http://​www​.kcl​.ac​.uk/​schools/​law/​research/​icps (accessed 03/03/22). Lagarde y de los Ríos, Marcela (2005). Los cautiverios de las mujeres. Madres, monjas, putas, presas y locas. Colección Posgrado, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico. Lugones, Maria (2010). Towards a decolonial feminism, Hypathia, 4(25): 742–775. Nari, Marcela, and Fabre, Andrea (comps) (2000). Voces de mujeres encarceladas. Buenos Aires: Catálogos. Olmo, Rosa del (1988). ‘Droga y criminalización de la mujer’, Revista Nueva Sociedad, 93, January– February: 156–167.

Women and punishment in Abya Yala  109 Olmo, Rosa del (ed) (1998). Criminalidad y criminalización de la mujer en la región andina. Caracas: Editorial Nueva Sociedad. Organización de las Naciones Unidas (2011). Reglas de las Naciones Unidas para el tratamiento de las reclusas y medidas no privativas de la libertad para las mujeres delincuentes. Reglas de Bangkok, New York: Naciones Unidas. Palma Campos, Claudia (2011). ‘Delito y sobrevivencia. Las mujeres que ingresan a la cárcel El Buen Pastor en Costa Rica por tráfico de drogas’, in Anuario de Estudios Centroamericanos, Universidad de Costa Rica, 37: 245–270. Quijano, Aníbal (2007). ‘Colonialidad del poder y clasificación social’, in Santiago Castro-Gómez y Ramón Grosfoguel (eds), El giro decolonial. Reflexiones para una diversidad epistémica más allá del capitalismo global, pp. 93–126. Bogotá: Siglo del Hombre Editores. Ribas, Natalia, Almeda Samaranch, Elisabet, and Bodelón, Encarna (2005). Rastreando lo invisible: mujeres inmigrantes en las cárceles, in Colección ‘Migraciones’, Barcelona: Anthropos. Ribas-Mateos, Natalia, and Dunn, Timothy (2021). Handbook on Human Security, Borders and Migration, Northampton, MA, USA and Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing. Rodríguez, Sol Marina (2018). ‘Apuntes biográficos de una mujer migrante en prisión. Un espejo de la reina mala para el Estado-nación’, in Magliano, María José (ed.), Entre márgenes, intersticios e intersecciones, pp. 253–283, Córdoba: Teseopress.com. Rodríguez Blanco, Eugenia (2015). Diagnóstico de la Situación de las Mujeres Privadas de Libertad en Panamá. Desde un enfoque de género y derechos. Panama: UNODC-SECOPA. Rusche, G., and Kirchheimer, O. (1984). Pena y estructura social. Bogotá: Temis. Segato, Rita (2007). ‘El color de la cárcel en América Latina. Apuntes sobre la colonialidad de la justicia en un continente en desconstrucción’, Nueva Sociedad, 208: 142–160. Torres Angarita, Andreína (2008). Drogas, cárcel y género en Ecuador. La experiencia de mujeres mulas. Quito: FLACSO-Ecuador. Wacquant, Loic (2004). Cárceles de la miseria. Buenos Aires: Manantial.

7. Scientific mobilities in the twentieth century: Gustaf Bolinder’s photographs of indigenous women in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta1 Alexandra Martínez2

INTRODUCTION Scientific trips to America constituted a common practice in European expeditions; they were thought of as part of the development of science in modern times. Such trips have become more relevant since the eighteenth century, and have come to offer a set of tools for gathering information through images, statistical data, and collected objects belonging to the material culture and nature of the colonized territories, among others (Penhos, 2005). Many of the activities carried out by scientists, naturalists and artists in early modernity designated them as mediators between the representations of the social and natural reality of an unknown and mysterious world reproduced in their stories, within the framework of an enlightened scientific program focused on attaining universal knowledge. During the middle of the nineteenth century, a nascent photography was incorporated into the means of recording the observed reality by scientists. This intensified the arrival of anthropologists, photographers and missionaries, among others, who led in the creation of diverse images of the indigenous population that lived scattered in the dense forests, deserts, jungles and mountains of the newly independent nations. The collective imaginary that underpinned this collection of information was based on the ideals of civilization and progress of modernity, demarcating a space between the savage and the civilized, which the American elites reproduced in their nation-shaping programs, and which had an important impact on indigenous populations and their territories. These knowledge enterprises have been considered by contemporary historiography as subsidiary journeys for processes of “globalization, the expansion of capitalism, the advance of imperialism”, the formation of national states and the subsequent ideas that favored the configuration of American Republics (Sagredo, 2017, p. 744).

I thank Natalia Ribas-Mateos for the English revision of the text. This chapter is a product of the research project “Imágenes y usos públicos de la sociología y la historia: procesos de apropiación de memorias con los grupos étnicos del Valle del Sibundoy y la Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta”, funded by the Vicerrectoría de investigación de la Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (ID PPTA 7803, ID PRY 8018). A first version was published in RBSE, Revista Brasileira de Sociologia da Emoção, 19(56), pp. 49–61, August 2020. 2 I thank the project’s co-investigator historian Amada Pérez, PhD; the project assistants Ana Camila Jaramillo and Camilo Barreto; and the Sociology and History students and interns, Juan David Mahecha, Valeria Miranda and Edison Vergara. I also appreciate the help of the Arhuaco people of Gámake, from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, especially Mamo Juan Rácigo, his wife María Ruperta Arroyo, their daughters and their son. 1

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Scientific mobilities in the twentieth century  111 In this chapter, the analysis is based on a set of 12 images selected from the profuse visual archive of Gustaf Bolinder, a Swedish anthropologist who, in the company of Esther Bolinder, visited the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta (Colombia) between 1914 and 1915, and later in 1920, after being commissioned by the Gothenburg Museum to collect ethnographic and archaeological material from the region. The mission of the Bolinder couple in the country was one of the first to be carried out for anthropological purposes instead of political, commercial or religious goals; it was for the conformation of specialized rooms in the museum, which differentiated their job from the work of the naturalist traveler or the colonial official (Nino, 2010, p. 47). The analysis of these images is problematized, parting from the categories of otherness, gender and racialization, as they provide important elements for the analysis of the social and cultural differentiation that tends to occur during the unequal encounter between contrasting groups, or in this case, people belonging to the European world and post-colonial indigenous worlds (Poole, 2000). Thus, a perspective of intersectional analysis is taken into account, which destabilizes the modern subject and opens other epistemological horizons to understand hierarchies and inequalities that embody discrimination, but which, in this case specifically, allows us to understand the visual representations that science configured around the indigenous Arhuaco woman of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta (Cubillos, 2015; Viveros, 2016). The methodology is based on two proposals: an ethnographic approach, developed in Gámake via collaborative work, where the gaze of the Arhuaca3 community generated a resignification of the archive; and an approach from the perspective of visual methodologies that allows crossing outlooks between past and present when interpreting the images. Initially, it started based on previous research works, where a visual archive was configured.4 Later on, a collaborative and participatory work for the socialization and transformation of the archive was carried out. The images were intervened at workshops where the participants were guided through questions about observing and intervening, evoking their memories and leading them to reflect upon themselves as an indigenous group related to their historic life experiences. This procedure is distinctive of social museology, a collaborative and participatory methodology that consists of redefining the museum outside of hegemonic conceptions and colonialist views. This allows creating a new curatorship of the different forms and processes for recovering the collective memory and the cultural assets and goods of different social groups. In this way, it is not only about preserving objects, but also about understanding how subjects activate the remembrance of the objects and break hierarchies of power so they can emerge as new protagonists of their own memories (De Souza Chagas, 2018). Likewise, Bolinder’s photographs are examined taking into account assumptions such as their experiential multidimensionality, that is, the diverse imaginary relationships that an image can suggest when it is observed (Lizarazo, 2009), as well as bearing in mind an iconological analysis that understands “images

3 The indigenous Ika, Iku or Arhuaco people inhabit Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, in the northern region of Colombia. Their language belongs to the Chibcha family and their main settlement is Nabusímake, located in the Pueblo Bello municipality at 2,200 masl in Sierra Nevada. See map: https://​ www​.elinformador​.com​.co/​images/​stories/​revistas/​08nabus​_5​.jpg (accessed 20 August 2022). 4 Two previous research projects constituted the search and systematization of a set of images in nine cities of Colombia, between 1890 and 1930: Imágenes e impresos. Los usos y circulación de las imágenes en la construcción de la ciudadanía y de la diferencia. Colombia, 1890–1930 (Primera y segunda parte).

112  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration as social documents”, where the image, its context and social meaning are taken into consideration, and constituted as sociological and discursive data (Roche, 2012, p. 81). Finally, it is intended to offer the possibility of thinking about two problematics. On the one hand, to explore the way in which the relation between scientific mobilities, gender and racialization configures a Western colonial scientific thought that frames its idea of otherness within the “civilized vs. barbarian” dichotomy. In contemporary academic discussions, this issue has made it possible to elaborate, to a greater extent, the meaning and effect of colonial thought in the universalization of a Western perspective. On the other hand, there is the issue of considering images as sources with a double function, because, despite their multidimensional character in which a diversity of perspectives can be identified (when interpreting them, or when considering different modes of appropriation), we can find specificities of a visual narrative that expresses a way of seeing that is socially, culturally and historically situated, in this case, within the language of a modernity hegemonically promoted in the postcolonial societies of America.

IMAGES AND OUTLOOKS OF THE OTHER Modernity, expressed through rationalist ideas, science, capitalism, the state, and which, amid colonial processes, generated diverse experiences in other continents by subordinating the mindsets of the native populations (Rueda and Villavicencio, 2018), thus is undoubtedly an important key to understanding the way of seeing evidenced in anthropological photography at the beginning of the twentieth century. The appearance of photography defined a different way of relating to visual traditions due to the role it played in scientific, social and cultural grounds. Its use in scientific and artistic studies led to continuing “the homogenization of visual information”, which began with book stamps but was of restricted access due to the costs involved, allowing only small print runs. The creation of a visual industry that included photography amid the twentieth century broadened people’s access to it (Naranjo, 2006, p. 11, Mirzoeff, 2015), massively reproducing the genre of portrait that derived from painting. This also contributed to its development as an institution and as an aesthetic experience. Two situations generated by photographic studios were relevant to the market. One of them was the expansion of the photographic industry, which increased the supply of images. For example, Gisèle Freund explains that, during the nineteenth century, the rise of the middle and lower-middle classes produced a demand for studio photography (Goyeneche, 2009). On the other hand, the consumption of images led companies to expand their offer of catalogues portraying exotic characters, sending photographers abroad for documenting places considered to be the most remote of the planet, and taking advantage of the intercontinental mobility generated by colonial activity, photographing different human types. These activities produced a visual exchange in which “members of the embassies, or from commercial or military delegations” participated, together with religious missions, photographers and anthropologists who partook in universal, international or colonial exhibitions held in large European cities (Naranjo, 2006, pp. 13–14). A documentary use of photography was developed by comparative anthropology, which arose in the nineteenth century, with the intention of evidencing “in a reliable way” the racial character of humans. For example, photography was used for documenting the natural history of men, based on Thiesson’s photographs of botocudos exhibited at the French Academy of

Scientific mobilities in the twentieth century  113 Sciences (Serres, [1845] 2006). The documentary way of seeing observed in the images taken of the Kenak indigenous group in Brazil, standardized under the name botocudo, shows two forms of representing reality: one of them was the reconstruction through studio photographs of a natural environment (“savage”), including implements of daily life that denoted a traditional lifestyle based on cultural practices and gestures (making fire, removing lice, playing flutes, simulating hunting, etc.). Secondly, there were images of the group transitioning into a civilized life, where it appeared converted away from its customs and “pacified”. On one occasion, for example, the photographs of the people of the Kenak or Botocudo group, taken by E. Thiesson or Walter Garbe, were sent, together with some images of indigenous people, to scientific events in France (De Tacca, 2010). In summary, through photography, a dichotomous representation of native Americans that reinforced the modern racial discourse was reproduced. This discourse and these visualities, developed by academics and photographers, constructed a representation of the ethnically mythologized Other; in Giordano’s (2012) expression, as if they were a living relic of a world in extinction.

IMAGES OF THE SIERRA NEVADA DE SANTA MARTA The photographic corpus selected for this chapter consists of portraits of women from the Arhuaco people (Ika) in Pauruba, a place that adopted the name of San Sebastián del Rábago during the Capuchin mission and is currently called Nabusímake (Muñoz, 2017). It is important to clarify that the photographic work of Bolinder is much broader, including women, men, boys and girls, landscapes, domestic animals, objects of material culture, ritual objects, care practices, practices for disciplining children, among others. In context, it can be highlighted that the photographic corpus was commissioned by the museum and, therefore, played a fundamental role in the type of expeditions carried out at the time, as they responded to the expansion and formation of collections that gave an account of the evolutionary processes of man. Bolinder arrived at the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta for the first time in 1914, when the evolutionist presuppositions of anthropology were still hegemonic. His project comprised part of the interest that was awakened in ethnographers and photographers by the images of non-Western people considered primitive. Previously, his teacher Erland Nordenskiöld, a Swedish Americanist ethnographer, had carried out extensive fieldwork in Argentina, Bolivia and Paraguay during the beginning of the twentieth century, contributing to the constitution of the Americanist collections of the Gothenburg Museum (Muñoz, 2017). It is perhaps for this reason that, when Bolinder arrived to Santa Marta, his outlook seemed to be anchored in presumptions of progress and eugenics, as he was surprised by the precarious industrial development and material life of the city, thus expressing in his writings his racial prejudices. A majority of them are descendants of past times, of black slaves and their masters. There are not many who can flaunt having pure Spanish blood. The Italian, Chinese, Guajiro Indians and Syrian immigrants have not contributed in any way to the improvement of the race. Europeans and North Americans live well apart from them. The radiant Jamaican black people

114  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration who have immigrated in recent years consider themselves to be “English” (Bolinder, 1966 [1925], pp. 2–3, quoted and translated by Uribe, 1987, p. 4).5 The majority of Bolinder’s physical photographic archive is located in Nabusímake. Today, these images are used by some of the Arhuaco people for different purposes, as Muñoz (2017) explains. In fact, they recently incorporated them into narratives about their past, in social mobilizations where they claim for their cultural identity and legitimize assertions of autonomy. However, these photographs have not spread massively within the Arhuaco people, and, therefore, had not been seen before in Gámake, where this research was carried out. Although they are available on the Europeana collections website,6 the village does not have access to public services such as water, electricity, sewerage, communications, nor an internet connection. We arrived in Gámake for the first time in the beginning of June 2019, with the photographs taken by Capuchin missionaries and Gustaf Bolinder, and with the purpose of carrying out a series of workshops on Image, memory and resignification. According to the knowers of La Sierra, this population was founded in the sixties by families coming down from Nabusímake and other villages higher up in the mountains, who then began inhabiting the territory. Currently, it has 400 inhabitants, about half of which are children; it has one elementary school, so in order to give continuity to their secondary studies those families with enough resources send their children to a boarding school in Nabusímake, a steep one-hour journey by public transportation, or a two-hour walk from Gámake. The workshop presented 15 of Bolinder’s images and 15 others taken by the Capuchin missionaries. In 1917 the missionaries established the school-orphanage “Orfanato de las Tres Ave María” (Three Hail Mary Orphanage) in Nabusímake. There, they held children captive, taken away from their families for indoctrinating them, although some of them did assist with the consent of their parents. Some stayed while others fled, but, in general, the memories that are aroused from the images of the mission in Gámake spoke of a children hunt perpetuated by the missionaries with the consent of the police. This remembrance affected the appreciation of Bolinder’s photographs, even though his arrival was prior to the missions’ period, and despite his images being very different from those taken during that time. The way in which I initially observed the photographs of Arhuaco women and the aspects that caught my attention were related to categories of intersectionality (sex, race, ethnicity), to the identification of elements close to the photographic canon of the times, and to the masculine gaze of a foreign observer. This point of view is in accordance with those perspectives that situate the constitution of the relationships between the West and the Other, in this case the indigenous people, within a colonial project of modernity, which, in its encounter with the different, excludes it, impoverishes it, hierarchizes it and makes it invisible. From this angle, it is possible to recognize a relationship between visuality and knowledge (Penhos, 2005), that is, between the modern visual tradition of anthropologists and their notion of the relationship between the geographic space, the inhabitants of the Sierra Nevada, and their representation of Arhuaco women as a whole. The photographic canon expressed in these images, both in the scene and in the pose, corresponds to a studio portrait in which the montage was intended to communicate characteristics

Translated from the original in Spanish. See https://​www​.europeana​.eu/​portal/​es/​search​?page​=​2​&​q​=​who​%3A​%28Bolinder​%2C+​Gustaf+​ Wilhelm​%29​&​view​=​grid (accessed 20 August 2022). 5 6

Scientific mobilities in the twentieth century  115 of the people portrayed, using backdrops with backgrounds of landscapes, gardens and the interior of houses, intended to produce a resemblance between reality and representation (Alvarado, 2001; Goyeneche, 2009). When staging indigenous depictions, trees, dry leaves or straw were used to simulate stubble, handicrafts and domestic artifacts, and sometimes bows and arrows to show the wild nature of the portrayed. The photographs of the Sierra Nevada are, technically speaking, full-length portraits with central or lateral framings, taken in natural environments, establishing a contrast between the naturalness of the space and the pose that women adopted for the camera. It is accurate to highlight that these photographs combine the genre of portrait developed for studio photography and the exoticization of the indigenous American woman used in documentary photography. In turn, they offer a specific construction of the feminine, contrasting the femininities of the region with the Western representations of women, producing a representational superposition that transfigures, on the one hand, the diversity of the feminine, that is, the European woman as different from the indigenous woman, and, on the other hand, turning the feminine into a single image, that is, the image of a woman produced by modernity. That undoubtedly links this analysis with a critical reflection on the universality and uniqueness of gender (Butler, [1990] 2007; Casado, 2003). Although the first two images show two women from the same community, they embody two different depictions. Although in both photographs the women appear standing, the pose, the framing and the angulation produce two socially and temporally different embodiments in relation to the Western canon, and completely distant with respect to the Arhuaco people in general. The first one shows a young woman standing next to a house amid a space surrounded by nature. She is standing on a stone, as if she were on a pedestal; her hair falls over her face covering her eyes, revealing only her nose and mouth. Her right hand rests on the stones of the house and her left arm falls freely along her body (Figure 7.1). The photograph, which apparently had the approval of the portrayed, is very similar to Victorian-era bourgeois paintings or to studio photography of the same period. In those, young women were portrayed in domestic spaces, standing against a column decorated with flowers, or on stages with backdrops containing allegorical images of nature, representing a state of innocence and almost defenselessness. In the case of the Arhuaco woman, the title “Marian Beauty” is suggestive of a concordance with the portrayal of the Immaculate detached from the earthly and from motherhood (Roche, 2012). In turn, although her face is turned towards the camera, the photographer has deprived her of a gaze. The second image corresponds to a woman in the center of the frame, posing in front of the camera in a way that she seems to be playing with an object in her hands while observing it attentively (Figure 7.2). Behind her, we see the stone and adobe houses with thatched roofs, very well built and painted white, with the remains of paint still visible on the rock. The cobblestoned street evokes the buildings of the colonial period and gives the scene a picturesque appearance with a certain degree of urbanization. What caught my attention about this image was the similarity between the pose of the woman and some of the poses seen in North American advertising photographs from the seventies, analyzed by Goffman (1991). In those, the author identifies representations of behavior between sexes and the ritual language of such society, where the poses are exhibited in a hyper-ritualized way in order to idealize social behaviors with commercial purposes. The playing with her hands, as explained by Goffman, indicates retreating, and makes the woman lower her head in such a way that she can be seen in an attitude of submission.

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Figure 7.1

Marian Beauty, Pauraba; South America, Bolinder’s research trip to Colombia (1914–1915)

Figure 7.2

South America, Bolinder’s research trip to Colombia (1914–1915)

Scientific mobilities in the twentieth century  117 Furthermore, John Berger states that the reciprocity of vision is grounded in the fact that we always look at “the relation between things and ourselves”, so the image acts as an apparition that “has been detached from the place and time in which it first made its appearance” (Berger, 2002, pp. 9–10). In this sense, Bolinder’s images still affect us, as if time had stopped. However, today we recognize that this is a perspective that intersects with others, meaning that they are images that allow us to ask ourselves about their homogeneous completeness, their universality, and how, behind such completeness, behind their representation, there is something opaque, something that is not revealed immediately: the absence that the depiction evokes is made present by means of what it is hiding. This is why it is still interesting for us to inquire about the gaze of the Swedish anthropologist: there are no women there, but one woman, there are no differences, but homogeneity; it suggests a linear narrative towards which the indigenous woman of 1914 ideally leads. These women appear in front of a man who looks at them contemplating themselves while being looked at. In this way, the woman herself turns into an object, and, particularly, into a visual object, a vision (Berger, 2002). Consequently, the photographs (Figures 7.3 and 7.4) show women looking at each other while being observed, smiling at the camera in an uninhibited way. One of them holds her chin with her hand in a flirtatious gesture while the other sits on the grass, but both of them look at the (male) viewer and display their bare feet as part of the photographic composition, seemingly insinuating sensuality instead of precariousness. If compared with the depictions of the “savagery” of indigenous people from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Bolinder images seem to launch these women into “modernity” through his own outlook; although it is conceived from modernity, of course, where Western women are configured within a patriarchal model, more as objects of desire than as autonomous subjects. In this regard, it is likely that this idea of civilization that prevailed around the anthropologist had been expressed years later with a certain nostalgia, but, at the same time, as a desirable condition: It is said that Ijca’s [sic] culture, contrary to that of many others, has now been replaced by the true civilization. This is, to be sure, a very good thing for the Indians; however, it is a pity that their culture will soon be represented by a movie and a museum collection. (Bolinder, 1966 [1925], p. 27l, quoted and translated by Uribe, 1987, p. 5)7

IMAGE INTERVENTIONS Although for reasons of space not all the images addressed in the workshop are shown in the chapter, I will refer, in general, to what participants said about them. In this way, it is important to highlight some aspects of the exercise in order to understand the methodology employed. Twenty people attended the workshops, mostly men, since women were in charge of cooking and feeding tasks. Their reluctance to participate collectively in the workshops was interesting. In the cases where the groups were mixed up, men took the lead, while women refused to give their personal opinions regarding the images. For this reason, we had to redo the exercise with each one of them in a more personal manner. The photographs were printed out in a 20 × 25 cm format with the intention of making the images more visible to a greater portion of the group.



7

Translated from the original in Spanish.

118  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration

Figure 7.3

South America, Arhuaco (1914–1915)

Figure 7.4

South America; Bolinder’s research trip to Colombia (1914–1915), Arhuaco

Scientific mobilities in the twentieth century  119 On them, there were two transparent acetate films: one of them was used for writing down everything they observed, while on the other they noted down everything that they would change about the image, considering that the idea was to write or draw on it whatever was of their interest. On the other hand, it should be mentioned that not all the participants were proficient in writing, which is why, following their indications, they were assisted in this process. Observing the photographs gave rise to several feelings: initially, they were of detachment, a mixture of strangeness and curiosity; subsequently, once pointed out among their observations, remembrance took place. Remembrance, at first, appeared as an emotion derived from having found something that allowed the participants to identify a series of elements in the image linked to their experience. Later on, there was a reflective effect regarding the elements that were employed in the past and that were no longer present. In other cases, the memory was linked to the colonial wound produced by the presence of the Capuchin missions. This fact was significant for understanding the differences between the chronologies narrated by official Western history, and those understood from the perspective of indigenous people within the colonial experience. Such situation generated a reflective effect not only on the participants, but also on those of us who attended as researchers, since what we understood as colonial was not grasped in the same way by the Arhuaco people: they felt it to be a much broader phenomenon than what is recorded in official history books. In Figures 7.5 and 7.6, we see a woman outside a house (which could be hers), leaning forward with her hands placed on some rocks, while her face, directed towards the camera, shows no sign of comfort. The participants referred to the image as an episode of sexual abuse perpetrated by a missionary (cachaco), hence saying to themselves, aloud and not without bitterness, that they would have liked to know what happened. The recounted event was reconstructed as a painful story, one that had been witnessed by their children, who watched through an opening in the adobe wall. These signs of pain, which the Gámake villagers noticed, are indicative of the reciprocity of the image, as discussed above. Therefore, the representations of their women intersect the female experience in the context of a specific society, a patriarchy that, in contact with the Other, hierarchizes power and makes the Other invisible through that hierarchy, or through a form of power that, through representations, produces itself – and reproduces itself – as power (Marin, 2009: 136). This hierarchical and eugenic way of seeing is precisely evoked by Bolinder in his ethnography about the people of the Sierra: That Magdalenenses have degenerated as a race and that the character of their people leaves much to be desired, obeys greatly to racial mixing. The mixing between three or more nations fundamentally different from each other, as it is known, produces very poor results. In the North of Colombia, we have a huge center of racial degeneration. (Bolinder, 1966 [1925], p. 278 quoted and translated by Uribe, 1987, p. 4)8

Figure 7.7 is an intervention on Figure 7.2, analyzed above, in the light of the perspective that Goffman explains about the role of women in advertising images. Once observed by Arhuaco women and men, this image takes on a different meaning, since it is an image that awakens a feeling of proximity, because of its resemblance to their ancestors and the presence of elements of their culture that have already disappeared but are still preserved there. The girdle

8



Translated from the original in Spanish.

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Figure 7.5

South America: Arhuaco; bintucua; bintuk; bíntukua (1914–1915)

Figure 7.6

Intervention on photography 5, workshop at Sierra Nevada, 2019

Scientific mobilities in the twentieth century  121

Figure 7.7

Intervention on the photograph in Figure 7.2, workshop at Sierra Nevada, 2019

Figure 7.8

South America, Bolinder’s research trip to Colombia (1914–1915)

of black goat yarn already in disuse, the old natural beads of the necklaces, or the sole act of weaving, in fact, awakens in such observers the joy of recognizing themselves as a culture. Similarly, Figures 7.8 and 7.9 differ by means of the outlook that the participants constructed of women linked to their culture, and which completes the representation of motherhood with domestic animals, such as hens and pigs. This idea of integrating images of lone women with domestic animals, such as dogs, or with those used for work or transportation, such as donkeys, is recurrent in the participants’ resignification of the observed photographs: women are defined by the domestic animals accompanying them or by those representing labor.

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Figure 7.9

Intervention on the photograph in Figure 7.8, workshop at Sierra Nevada, 2019

FINAL NOTES The experience of collaborative investigation, where subjects contribute to shaping data through their subjectivity (in this case, Arhuaco women and men from La Sierra), allows recognizing, beyond what in social sciences is known as the “objective fact”; concerning the multiple ways of comprehending and fathoming the experience of knowledge in the context of gender and mobilities. When social actors look at the images, they compare perspectives, they situate them in a specific time and space within their experience, review their past, observe their present, thus, it reveals that our perspectives should broaden, and, in summary, that images, understood as representations, are multidimensional. Although the reflections presented in this chapter have attempted to open a door to the Arhuaco female world, it is still necessary to delve deeper into the origin of their outlook. This encourages new questions for future reflections: is the Arhuaco woman represented during the workshops as a woman detached from the patriarchal structure? What connections does this figure share with the colonial past preceded by the conquest? The comparison we have made evidences, within Bolinder’s images, a transformation of the way of seeing his own anthropological doing, insofar as these pictures are quite different from those used in anthropometric studies aimed towards giving an account of human physiology. In these, however, the idea of a sexualized femininity is configured, equating the body of the indigenous woman to that of the Western woman, which was already constructed in itself as an unequal Other, invisibilized and hierarchized. Nevertheless, in the case of the European images of women from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was a transformation in the outlook in which women were shaped conceptually as objects of desire and eroticism, which would later have a predominant expression in the world of advertising and cinematographic images during the twentieth century (Guzmán, 2007). Bolinder’s anthropological photographs, comprehended as social documentary sources for research, invite us to continue reflecting upon those scientific representations in which the Other is conformed visually within stereotypes configured in a colonial past. Therefore, the archive needs to be introduced within the multiplicity of subjective experiences in order to break the one single outlook, the linear timeline and the normalization of differences that prevent us from accessing beyond the opacity of the representations, allowing it to unveil

Scientific mobilities in the twentieth century  123 the ideological discourse behind, comparing it with the present permanence or absence of an image that can encompass certain hierarchies. Finally, I consider that collaborative methodologies broaden our horizons and help to build a gaze based on our differences, to the extent that it is not possible to think of a relationship with indigenous groups outside of indigenous knowledge itself.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alvarado, M., Mege Rosso, P., and Biez Allende, C. (2001), Mapuche fotografías siglos XIX y XX. Construcción y montaje de un imaginario, Chile: Pehuén Editores. Alves de Freitas Neto, J., et al. (2010), O salvagem e o civilizado nas artes, fotografia e literatura do Brasil, Campinas: Unicamp. Berger, J. (2002), Modos de Ver, Barcelona, España: Gili. Bourdieu, P. (2003), Un arte medio. Ensayo sobre los usos sociales de la fotografía, Barcelona: Gustavo Gili. Butler, J. (2007), El género en disputa. El género y la subversión de la identidad, Barcelona: Paidós. Casado, E. (2003), “La emergencia del género y su resignificación en tiempos de lo post”, Foro Interno, 3, pp. 41–65. Cubillos, J. (2015), “La importancia de la interseccionalidad para la investigación feminista”, Oxímora Revista Internacional de Ética y Política, 7, pp. 119–137. De Sousa, B. (2006), “La sociología de las ausencias y la sociología de las emergencias. Para una ecología de saberes”, in Renovar la teoría crítica y reinventar la emancipación social (encuentros en Buenos Aires), at http://​bibliotecavirtual​.clacso​.org​.ar/​ar/​libros/​edicion/​santos/​Capitulo​%20I​.pdf De Souza Chagas, M. (2018), Las geografías: Las identidades, las comunidades y el mercado cultural en Museos, Derechos y Nuevas ciudadanías [Conference session], Bogotá. De Tacca, F. (2010), “O indio na fotografía brasileira. Incursoes sobre a imagem e o meio”, in Miyoshi, A. (ed.), O salvagem e o civilizado nas artes, fotografia e literatura do Brasil (pp. 83–122), Campinas: Unicamp. Díaz, C., and Picón, G. (2010), “Del cuerpo dócil. Métodos de regulación de la conducta corporal ciudadana en el entre siglo XIX y XX venezolano”, Voz y escritura. Revista de estudios literarios, 18, pp. 79–98. Fernández, R., and Hermansen, P. (2009), “Aproximaciones metodológicas para una sociología visual a partir del estudio de prácticas de memoria colectiva en el espacio público de la ciudad de Santiago de Chile”, Cuaderno venezolano, 3(18), pp. 445–460. Giordano, M. (2012), “Fotografía, testimonio oral y memoria. (Re)presentaciones de indígenas e inmigrantes del Chaco (Argentina)”, Memoria Americana, 2(20), pp. 295–321. Goffman, E. (1991), “La ritualización de la femineidad”, in Los momentos y sus hombres (pp. 136–168), Barcelona: Paidós. González-Garzón, C. (2014), “Evangelización y exotismo. La representación del indígena americano en el Palacio de las Misiones de Barcelona” [1929], Boletín Americanista, 1(68), pp. 145–164. Goyeneche, E. (2009), Fotografía y Sociedad, Medellín: La Carreta. Guzmán, N. (2007), “La homogenización de la cultura de lo femenino y de la imagen de la mujer a través de la oferta televisiva estadounidense de los últimos cincuenta años”, Revista Realidad, 114, pp. 621–641. Lizarazo, D. (2009), Iconos, figuraciones, sueños. Hermenéutica de las imágenes, Mexico: Siglo veintiuno editores. Marin, L. (2009), Poder, representación, imagen, Prismas Revista de Historia Intelectual, 13, pp. 135–153. Mirzoeff, N. (2015), Cómo ver el mundo. Una nueva introducción a la cultura visual, Barcelona: Paidós. Miyoshi, A. (ed.) (2010), O salvagem e o civilizado nas artes, fotografia e literatura do Brasil, Campinas: Unicamp. Muñoz, C. (2017), “Moving pictures: memory and photography among the Arhuaco of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia”, History and Anthropology, 28(3), pp. 375–397. Naranjo, J. (ed.) (2006), Fotografía, antropología y colonialismo (1845–2006), Barcelona: Gustavo Gili.

124  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration Nino, J. C. (2010), “En las inmediaciones del fin del mundo. Los encuentros de Gustaf Bolinder y los chimilas en 1915 y 1920”, Antípoda, 11, pp. 43–66. Ortega, M. (2010), “Metodología de la sociología visual y su correlato etnológico”, Argumentos, 22(59), pp. 165–184. Penhos, M. (2005), Ver, conocer y dominar. Imágenes de Sudamérica a fines del siglo XVIII, Buenos Aires: siglo XXI editores. Poole, D. (2000), Visión, raza y modernidad. Una introducción al mundo andino de imágenes, Lima: Casa de Estudios del Socialismo. Roche, J. A. (2012), “Del cuerpo cósmico al cuerpo fragmentado. Análisis sociológico de las imágenes de la mujer en el arte occidental moderno”, in La sociología como una de las bellas artes. La influencia de la literatura y artes en el pensamiento sociológico, Barcelona: Anthropos. Rueda, E., and Villavicencio, S. (eds) (2018), Modernidad, colonialismo y emancipación en América Latina, Buenos Aires: Clacso, Sagredo, R. (2017), “Ciencia, exploración y representación en América Latina”, Historia mexicana, 67(2), Ciudad de México, October/December, http://​www​.scielo​.org​.mx/​scielo​.php​?script​=​sci​_arttext​ &​pid​=​S2448​-65312017000400741 (accessed 20 August 2022). Serres, E. R. ([1845] 2006), “Antropología comparada. Observaciones sobre la aplicación de la fotografía al estudio de las razas humanas”, in Naranjo, J. (ed.), Fotografía, antropología y colonialismo (1845–2006) (pp. 26–30), Barcelona: Gustavo Gili. Simmel, G. (2002), Sobre la individualidad y las formas sociales, Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes. Uribe, C. A. (1987), “Un antropólogo sueco por Colombia: Gustaf Bolinder”, Boletin Museo del Oro, 18, pp. 2–9. Viveros, M. (2016). “La interseccionalidad una aproximación situada a la dominación”, Debate Feminista, 52, pp. 1–17.

8. Embodying ethnic and labor relations: indigenous women and US–Mexico labor mobility circuits in the agrifood industry Laura Velasco Ortiz

1. INTRODUCTION Agrifood globalization has produced local spaces and mobile subjects connected to large value chains that articulate class, ethnicity–race and gender inequalities. The intersectional subordination of indigenous women places them at the lowest value of the chain, at the base of the industrial production of vegetables and fresh fruit. The productive reconversion of Mexican agriculture in the 1980s included the feminization of mobility circuits, production reorganization and labor exploitation mechanisms (Lara, 1995b; Barndt, 2007). This chapter systematizes research findings on the consequences of such feminization in the labor conditions of indigenous farmworker women. The reflection is empirically supported by a number of studies of transnational labor circuits in the agricultural industrial corridor of the Mexican Pacific that connects with agribusiness regions in the US Pacific, and takes in to account research on Mixteco, Triqui and Nahua female migrants in the Baja California Peninsula in which I have participated (Velasco, Zlolniski & Coubès, 2014; Velasco & Hernández, 2018), supported by studies carried out in Sinaloa and Sonora by Lara (1995b), and Lara and De Grammont (2003), and in California and Oregon, US, by Holmes (2013), Stephen (2007), and Krissman (2005).

2.

MULTIETHNIC MOBILITY CIRCUITS IN THE TRANSNATIONAL AGRICULTURE CORRIDOR

The agricultural corridor of vegetables and fresh fruit in the Mexican–US Pacific Coast became, as of the mid-20th century, a multiethnic transnational circuit under the Bracero Programs between Mexico and the United States. In the 1950s, Weber (2008) reports the participation of Purhepecha and Nahua individuals in agriculture in California, US, while in the 1960s, Besserer and Cruz (1999) account for the presence of Mixteco migrants in agriculture in Sinaloa, Sonora and Baja California, and their connection with agriculture in California. Since the 1970s, Zabin (1992, p. 6) pointed out the Mexican indigenous migration as part of ethnic replacement in California’s agriculture. The phenomenon became massive and visible by the end of the 20th century, in the form of a labor circuit associated with growing vegetables and fresh fruit for global commercialization, mainly with investments from US capital (Lara and De Grammont, 2003). The productive restructuring of the Mexican horticulture was characterized, among other things, by the reorientation of production toward non-traditional crops, diversification and concentration of agricultural production by large enterprises (Lara, 1995b, p. 22). The interest 125

126  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration of the firms in developing agroexport units in the region focused on the suitability of climate, intensive and unregulated use of natural resources such as water and land, and on an extremely flexible labor organization (Lara, 1995b; De Grammont & Lara, 2010; Zlolniski, 2019). According to Lara (1995b), in the 1990s, the sector was supported on labor force flexibility rather than on technology. Recent studies verify that large enterprises, which hypothetically have better access to technology, hire the largest number of workers and overwhelmingly benefit from labor flexibility, as they organize the workforce on the basis of ethnic and gender-based segmentation (Zlolniski, 2019; Escobar, Martin & Stabridis, 2019). Labor force flexibility implies its availability, stability and temporality. That is to say, over the various phases of the agricultural cycle, the enterprises have sufficient laborers thanks to long- and short-distance recruiters. This flexibility is clearly linked to labor intensity, reflected in wage modalities such as piecework or task assignment (a destajo), and extensive working hours. In 2015, in Comondú, Baja California Sur, 40% of harvesting day laborers and 65% of packers work on a piecework basis, while 45% of harvesters and 23% of packers were paid daily. Only 13% of the former and 11% of the latter received a fixed weekly payment (Velasco & Hernández, 2018). Almost all of harvesting day laborers, 90%, and 82% of packers worked seven days per week. This intensification varied according to region and crop; however, receiving a fixed income accounted for a minimal percentage (Velasco & Hernández, 2018, p. 253). For most of the workers, the labor relationship never lasted more than six months (Velasco & Hernández, 2018, p. 252). In order to ensure income over the year, workers unfold a strategy of constant mobility in the transnational circuit, or else, they settle down and combine various crops in the same place (Lara & De Grammont, 2003; Velasco, Zlolniski & Coubès, 2014; Velasco & Hernández, 2018). The geography of the Pacific transnational labor circuit overlaps the ethnical geography of Mexican poverty. The states of origin of the Pacific corridor workers concentrate higher percentages of indigenous population (see Figure 8.1) in comparison to national-level numbers (19.4%): Chiapas (37%), Oaxaca (69%), Guerrero (33%) and Veracruz (27%); at once are the four states with the highest percentages of poverty and extreme poverty in Mexico (Coneval, 2018). Meanwhile, Sinaloa, Sonora, Baja California Norte and Baja California Sur are the main destination in the Mexican agroexport corridor (Velasco, 2002; Lara, 1995b; Sánchez, 2008). They integrate into the transnational circuit with the US Pacific states: California, Oregon and Washington (Zabin, 1992; Mines, 2013; Holmes, 2013; Stephen, 2007). Mines (2013, p. 98) assumes that 3 out of 10 agricultural workers in California are indigenous Mexicans. In this way, the presence of Mixteco, Zapoteco, Triqui and Nahua in the transnational labor circuit as farmworkers does not seem random, but the result of a strategy to locate a poor and available labor force. Furhermore, such circuits had a degree of institutionalization, as proposed by Sassen (2000, p. 506), since they were not the result of a simple aggregate of individual actions. Mobility in the Pacific agricultural corridor is based on a masculinized system of labor recruiters, which operates through formal and informal relations with the growers, governments and, indirectly, the migrants’ networks (Sánchez, 2008; Zlolniski, 2016; Velasco & Hernández, 2018; Krissman, 2005), as a set of agents and institutional mechanisms that might encompass the concept of migration industry, as it is defined in the literature on global labor mobility (Hernández-León, 2013). During the 1980s, the massive incorporation of indigenous women in this corridor was part of the feminization of the agroexport industry (Lara, 1995b), linked to family migration.

Embodying ethnic and labor relations  127

Figure 8.1

Agroexport transnational Pacific circuit of indigenous mobility between Mexico and the US

However, female participation depends on the particular region and crops produced within the circuit. In the case of Sinaloa, for tomato growing, Lara and De Grammont (2003) document family migration, in which women account for about a half of the labor force. In a different place of the circuit (such as the Valley of San Quintín, Baja California, Mexico), 55% of resident women work in horticulture, particularly indigenous women (75%). Meanwhile, men’s occupations are more diverse and skilled (Velasco, Zlolniski & Coubès, 2014). In the middle of desert and isolated regions such as Comondú and Vizcaíno, in Baja California Sur, where asparagus, tomato and other vegetables are grown, women account for about 40% of the labor force living in the workers’ camps (Velasco & Hernández, 2018). According to a survey that covers various crops and regions in the agricultural circuit of the Mexican Pacific, 46% of the workers are women (Escobar, Martín & Stabridis, 2019). The analysis of indigenous women’s participation in this mobility circuit needs to consider that the conditions of their flexibility are not only materially linked to their position and conditions in social reproduction, but so are symbolically. Following Carrasco (2014), a binary approach to reproduction and production can be an obstacle in order to understand the role of women in the sustainability of life. The analytical proposal of this chapter is based upon pioneering research of Lara (1995b) in the Mexican Pacific circuit, which shows the influence of the gender ideology of domesticity to organize agricultural production in pursuit of greater productivity. Within this perspective, national ideology of indigenous inferiority adds analytical complexity to the feminization of the transnational agrifood circuit. An additional line of intersectional analysis considers the connection between the body and exploitative technology. Following the feminist work of Haraway (2016) and the transmigrant perspective of Besserer

128  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration (2005), this chapter focuses on how knowledge turns women’s bodies into a technology tool on the productive and reproductive chain.

3.

INDIGENOUS LABOR EXPLOITATION AND FEMINIZATION OF THE TRANSNATIONAL HORTICULTURE CIRCUIT

A comprehensive vision of the mechanisms of labor control and exploitation of indigenous women in agrifood capitalism must consider the life cycle and their position in domestic and community spaces. Both are strategic elements to understand how indigenous women embody multiple vulnerabilities. Following this idea, three characteristics of the indigenous feminization of agroindustry will be presented: individualization of female salary, labor segmentation and work intensification. These three aspects define flexible labor exploitation relationships in the frame of social exploitation, which means extracting value from women’s reproduction labor for the reproduction of society. 3.1

Family Mobility and Individualization of Women’s Salary

In the 1980s, studies on women’s migration focused on the effects of the rural household dynamics under the urbanization process in Mexico. Such a family-based viewpoint came from the analytical perspective of women subordination associated with indigenous peasant life, which was functional for the informal labor markets, such as domestic service in the cities (Benería & Sen, 1982). It was the case for a generation of Mixteco migrants in the 1980s and 1990s (Velasco, 1995), who began as domestic workers in Mexico City, before moving farther to the fields in the agroexport circuit in northwestern Mexico. The ideology of domesticity and male authority occurred not only in urban jobs; it was present as well in the agricultural market. Studies on Mixteco and Nahua women in migratory flows in Baja California and Baja California Sur showed that women were not directly paid, but via their husbands or parents during the 1980s (Velasco, 1995; Velasco & Hernández, 2018). Women’s personal autonomy, a result of receiving their own payment, did not exist as such, as a consequence of their subordination to male authority and domestic ideology in agricultural labor markets. Escobar, Martín and Stabridis (2019) in their interviews with agricultural female laborers from Guerrero report that they began working for a wage between 9 and 23 years of age, without stating whether they directly received their payment. This began to change after NAFTA in 1994, which conditioned Mexican exports on meeting a series of labor rights and verified their compliance via certifying agencies. Large transnational corporations soon adapted to the international rules with their implications in the individualization of female wages and suppression of child labor; not so did small and medium-sized enterprises in which family payment was more attractive, with a view on competing in more equal terms with the bigger businesses. Still in 2002, a young strawberry entrepreneur in the Valley of San Quintín, Baja, California, recounted that years ago he had to convince his father, the founder of the firm, about the disadvantages implied in hiring children and not paying women directly in terms of revenues for the firm: a child would never produce as an adult, while women would work harder if they received wages directly (personal communication, 2002). The fact that women received their wages directly has an important impact on their social status; nevertheless, it

Embodying ethnic and labor relations  129 was not accompanied by a decrease in their domestic workload, including the role of host for other migrants. Even more, piecework offered the opportunity for female farmworkers to make more money than men in the high season, by means of intensifying work in the field at the expense of their own bodies. 3.2

Organization of Productive Work: Segmentation and Ethnic and Gender Hierarchies

According to Lara (1995a), the Latin American agroexport sector started to take off in the 1960s, on the basis of a labor organization that included the sexual division of harvesting tasks, mainly in packaging and in the processing of vegetables, flowers and fruit. For this scholar, the feminization of the agroexport sector through the 1980s aimed to compensate the technological limitations in tasks as delicate as classifying tomatoes by size and color, or flowers by the stage of the opening of the bud, for instance, and even hand chopping vegetables for packing. Such naturalization of skills, deemed feminine, supports the productive reconversion and specific flexibilization of women’s labor. The tasks assigned to women are monotonous, done with bare hands or with very simple instruments, with little access to technology, though they ensure greater productivity. Indigenous workers consistently and largely are hired in the harvesting season, regardless of gender and region in the circuit. This ethnic hierarchization seems to be consistent in various places in the Pacific corridor, as a result of structural discrimination based on poverty and the colonial subordination of indigenous people. Studies in the San Quintín Valley with settled farmworkers, indicate there exists labor segregation for those of indigenous origin, who have lower labor mobility than the mestizo (mixed race) population, in particular indigenous women (Velasco, Zlolniski & Coubès, 2014). Since the 1980s it is possible to hear in the agricultural fields in Sinaloa, Sonora, Baja California, Baja California Sur and California, the denigrating term oaxaquitas to refer to indigenous farmworkers, regardless of the indigenous group to which they truly belong, in or outside the state of Oaxaca (Velasco, 2002; Velasco & Hernández, 2018). In 2012, the Oxnard School District (California), “prohibited the use of the denigrating terms oaxaquita and indito” (Martínez, 2013, p. 56). Interviews with technicians and managers from agricultural firms in Comondú, Baja California Sur, displayed a reasoning consistent with Holmes’ (2013) experiences in California in responses to the question, “Why do indigenous workers concentrate on harvesting?” Their responses referred to a racial condition: “Because they are short and find it easier to be crouching all day long” or “Because they are brown-skinned, the sun does not affect them so much” (Velasco & Hernández, 2018, p. 221). The naturalization process pinpointed by Lara (1995b) for assigning tasks for women in function of assumptions with regard to their female skills or the imaginary of their dexterities (Bee & Vogel 1997, p. 86) is reproduced for the indigenous labor exploitation, in a mix of what Bartolomé (2008) called the ethnic inferiorization and exaltation of physical effort for the working class. This process of ambiguous underestimation might explain why indigenous women have a less noticeable presence in packaging, whereas mestizo women from Sonora and Sinaloa are the majority in the states of Sinaloa and Baja California (Lara & De Grammont, 2003), and from Guanajuato in Baja California Sur (Velasco & Hernández, 2018).

130  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration 3.3

Labor Intensification: Physical Effort, Subjectivity and Body

Wright (2000) considers that control and exploitation of the labor force make up the base of industrial capitalism. In agribusiness, labor intensification is the most important mechanism of exploitation, which may be analyzed through the dominant wage modalities (piecework, task assignment and day labor) and employment seasonality. Piecework or task assignment is based on the physical capability of the worker to obtain the greatest amount of product or perform the greatest number of activities in the shortest possible time. This modality ensures high production in specific seasons and increases the workers’ wages during the peak period of the harvest at the same time, though it undermines their physical force and subjects them to cyclical labor instability. In the region of Comondú, in Baja California Sur, workers harvest for between eight and ten hours per day, six or seven days per week, during high season, with a mean of 52–56 hours weekly, as compared with the 48 hours defined by the Mexican Federal Law on Labor (Velasco & Hernández, 2018). This intensification is accompanied with wage instability over the year. In the 1990s, case studies in the Valley of San Quintín, Baja California, demonstrated that a woman working in the harvest of strawberry may work 12 hours per day, for six to seven days weekly in peak season, dropping to six or eight hours daily, three or four days per week in the low season. So, she had to combine other jobs outside agriculture such as trade or else apply for seasonal workers programs, H2A, within the California circuit (Velasco, Zlolniski & Coubès, 2014, p. 138). Furthermore, Benería and Sen (1982) underscore the importance of observing the intensification of women’s labor linked not only to capital accumulation, but also to social reproduction. Intensification has different consequences on men and women because the labor shift of the latter tends to be assessed in the light of domestic work and community demands, which entail, among other things, voluntary work to build schools, processing water and electricity services, as well as cleaning tasks in the workers’ camps. Life cycle and position in the family are key factors in social reproduction. The first refers to the chronological age of women’s bodies that translates as amounts of labor energy utilized in a survival logic by the working families, though at the same time it adds to agricultural production and entrepreneurial revenues. The second is related to responsibilities and workloads, mainly associated with childcare. In the early 1990s, Lara and De Grammont (2003) found that female day laborers decrease their participation in agricultural activities in what they call a generational replacement so that women at reproductive ages enter the labor market and “old” women stay at home taking care of the children and infirm in the workers’ camps in Sinaloa. Simultaneously, women’s labor life adjusts their maternity cycles, leaving and joining the agroexport labor market in western Mexico (Escobar, Martín & Stabridis, 2019). Furthermore, women’s social position within the household is used as a criterion for selection and valorization (Barndt, 2007), based on the idea that women are more responsible than men due to domestic workloads. This idea of domesticity of the women’s body is functional for productivity and labor exploitation of women. These mechanisms to intensify reproductive labor seem to aggravate because of their migrant condition, since, according to Chávez and Landa (2007), in sending and recipient localities in the Pacific circuit, working days and workloads noticeably increase at the destinations, with a women’s self-perception of greater wear. The findings are consistent with the study by Palacios and Moreno (2004, p. 290) of the health conditions of 488 farmworkers in Sinaloa. They found there is higher disease preva-

Embodying ethnic and labor relations  131 lence in women than in men: 13 of 19 symptoms were more frequent in women, and anemia was six times more prevalent, detected through blood tests (54.9% of women vs 15.4% of men). Possible explanations include menstrual bleeding, a diet poor in iron and the presence of parasitosis. Furthermore, the authors remark, “in adult women, physical exhaustion is added due to the double working day, which would require a high energy input” (Palacios & Moreno, 2004, p. 291). The intensification of paid and reproductive work will now be considered from the standpoint of the entire women’s life cycle. As research by Chávez and Landa (2007) and Palacios and Moreno (2004) shows, rural women start earlier both in domestic and paid work (though not always are directly paid), hence it has to be seen as accumulated intensification. One of the conditions that aggravate women’s health, and which has opened a feminist approach to the embodiment subordination, is violence against women farmworkers; these studies describe the domestic and labor violence, particularly sexual harassment, experienced by women in the field while harvesting or in the packaging areas in Baja California, Sonora and Sinaloa (Arellano, 2014). This topic was one of the claims from the most emblematic agricultural farmworkers’ strike in Baja California in 2015, who later forged an alliance with farmworkers in Washington. In both cases, the movement had an important indigenous component of Mixteco and Triqui day laborers, working for subsidiaries of Driscoll’s in Mexico and the United States.

4. CONCLUSIONS Vegetable and fresh fruit agribusiness is one of the most dynamic sectors in Mexican economy, even considering the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The exporting success of this sector, however, contrasts with the life conditions of farmworkers, particularly indigenous women and their families. Analysis of the feminization of the industry has focused on production organization overlooking the meaning of wage individualization and labor intensification, which are two of the dominant accumulation strategies of the global agribusiness model. For indigenous women, receiving their wage into their own hands meant greater autonomy in decision making; albeit that this condition is linked to the labor intensification demanded by the agribusiness, which turns into constant pressure to produce as much as possible in the shortest time possible so that they improve their incomes in harvesting peak season and perform various activities when working seasons end. Besides labor intensification, domestic work, relating to reproduction and childcare, worsens in conditions of migration and violence, undermining the physical and emotional conditions of women. There is enough knowledge of ethnic, racial and gender differentiation and hierarchy in the global agriculture labor relations. A feminist research agenda that improves our understanding of the gender structure of precariousness must consider the connection between specific conditions of labor exploitation and the physical and mental energy needed to perform reproduction and care. Moreover, there is the role of technology to turn on the female body as the object of exploitation. This agenda requires an interdisciplinary and multidimensional approach, with longitudinal and multi-sited studies to capture the social ruptures that mobility and labor migration have brought into the lives of non-privileged women and their families who sustain global agroexport circuits. The agenda must integrate the symbolic dimension that questions

132  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration the normalization of savage exploitation as a natural condition of the categories constructed as culturally inferior.

REFERENCES Arellano, C. (2014), “Violencia laboral contra jornaleras agrícolas en tres comunidades del noroeste de México”, Región y Sociedad, 26 (4), 155–187, accessed 30 November 2021 at http://​www​.scielo​.org​ .mx/​scielo​.php​?script​=​sci​_arttext​&​pid​=​S1870​-39252014000600007 Barndt, D. (2007), Rutas enmarañadas. Mujeres, trabajo y globalización en la senda del tomate, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Unidad Xochimilco. Bartolomé, M. (2008), “La diversidad de las diversidades. Reflexiones sobre el pluralismo cultural en América Latina”, Cuadernos de Antropología Social, 28, 33–49, accessed 30 November 2021 at https://​www​.redalyc​.org/​articulo​.oa​?id​=​1809/​180913915002 Bee, A., and I. Vogel (1997), “Temporeras and Household Relations: Seasonal Employment in Chile’s Agro-Export Sector”, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 16 (1), 83–95, accessed 30 November 2021 at https://​www​.jstor​.org/​stable/​3339639 Benería, L., and G. Sen (1982), “Class and Gender Inequalities and Women’s Role in Economic Development: Theoretical and Practical Implications”, Feminist Studies, 8 (1), 157–176, accessed 30 November 2021 at https://​doi​.org/​10​.2307/​3177584 Besserer, F. (2005). “El cuerpo transnacional”, Revista de investigación Social, I (1), verano, 17–30. Besserer, F., and M. Cruz (1999), La historia de un transmigrante, Culiacán, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Sinaloa. Carrasco, C. (2014). “Introducción”, in C. Carrasco (ed.), Voz propia. La economía feminista como apuesta teórica y política, Madrid: La oveja roja/Viento Sur, pp. 15–25. Chávez, A., and R. Landa (eds) (2007), Así vivimos, si esto es vivir. Las jornaleras agrícolas migrantes. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México-Centro Regional de Investigaciones. Coneval (Consejo Nacional de Evaluación de la Política de Desarrollo Social) (2018), “Medición de la pobreza 2008–2018”, accessed 30 November 2021 at https://​www​.coneval​.org​.mx/​Medicion/​MP/​ Paginas/​Pobreza​-2018​.aspx De Grammont, H., and S. Lara (2010), “Productive restructuring and ‘standardization’ in Mexican horticulture: consequence for labor”, Journal of Agrarian Change, 10 (2), 228–250. Escobar, A., P. Martin, and O. Stabridis (2019), Farm Labor and Mexico’s Export Produce Industry, Washington, D.C.: Wilson Center-Mexico Institute, accessed 30 November 2021 at https://​www​ .wilsoncenter​.org/​publication/​farm​-labor​-and​-mexicos​-export​-produce​-industry Haraway, D. (2016). “A Cyborg Manifesto. Science, Technology and Feminist Socialism in the Late Twentieth Century” in Manifestly Haraway (Posthumanities Book 37), Minnesota: Minnesota University Press. Hernández-León, R. (2013), “Conceptualizing the Migration Industry”, in T. Gammeltoft-Hansen and N. Sørgen (eds), The Migration Industry and the Commercialization of International Migration, London: Routledge, pp. 25–45. Holmes, S. (2013), Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Krissman, F. (2005), “Sin coyote ni patrón: Why the ‘Migrant Network’ Fails to Explain International Migration”, International Migration Review, 39 (1), 4–44. Lara, S. (1995a), “Introducción”, in S. Lara (ed.), Jornaleras, temporeras y bóias frias: el rostro femenino del mercado de trabajo rural en América Latina, Caracas: UNRISD/Editorial Nueva Sociedad, pp.  7–12, accessed 30 November 2021 at http://​paginaspersonales​.unam​.mx/​app/​webroot/​files/​4369/​ Publica​_20160609213234​.pdf Lara, S. (1995b), “La feminización del trabajo asalariado en los cultivos de exportación no tradicionales en América Latina. Efectos de una flexibilidad salvaje”, in S. Lara (ed.), Jornaleras, temporeras y bóias frías. El rostro femenino del mercado de trabajo rural en América Latina, Caracas: UNRISD/ Editorial Nueva Sociedad, pp. 15–34, accessed 30 November 2021 at http://​paginaspersonales​.unam​ .mx/​app/​webroot/​files/​4369/​Publica​_20160609213234​.pdf

Embodying ethnic and labor relations  133 Lara, S., and H. De Grammont (2003), “Jornaleros agrícolas y migración temporal en las empresas hortícolas mexicanas”, Este País, 148, 63–68, accessed 30 November 2021 at https://​archivo​.estepais​ .com/​inicio/​historicos/​148/​14​_Ciencia​_Jornaleros​_Lara​.pdf Martínez, S. (2013), “Oaxacalifornian Urban Youth Spaces: Los Autónomos”, in J. Fox, G. Rivera-Salgado and J. Santiago (eds), Voices of Indigenous Oaxacan Youth in the Central Valley: Creating Our Senses of Belonging in California [Research Report No. 1, July], Santa Cruz, CA: University of California-CCREC, pp. 48–56. Mines, R. (2013), “Jornaleros mexicanos en California. El cambiante mercado laboral agrícola”, Carta económica regional, 25 (110–112), 87–111. Palacios, M., and L. Moreno (2004), “Diferencias en la salud de jornaleras y jornaleros agrícolas migrantes en Sinaloa, México”, Salud pública de México, 46 (4), 286–293. Sánchez, K. (2008), “Intermediarios laborales tradicionales. El acceso al trabajo y vínculos con el campo empresarial”, in J. L. Seefoó (ed.), Desde los colores del maíz. Una agenda para el campo mexicano, Zamora, Mexico: El Colegio de Michoacán, pp. 577–606. Sassen, S. (2000), “Women’s burden: counter-geographies of globalization and the feminization of survival”, Journal of International Affairs, 53 (2), 503–524. Stephen, L. (2007), Transborder Lives: Indigenous Oaxacans in Mexico, California, and Oregon, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Velasco, L. (1995), “Migración Femenina y estrategias de sobrevivencia de la unidad domestica. Un caso de estudio de las mujeres mixtecas en Tijuana”, in S. González, O. Ruiz, L. Velasco and O. Woo (eds), Mujeres, migración y maquila en la frontera norte, Mexico: El Colegio de la Frontera Norte/El Colegio de México, pp. 37–64. Velasco, L. (2002), El regreso de la comunidad: migración indígena y agentes étnicos. Los mixtecos en la frontera México-Estados Unidos, Mexico: El Colegio de Mexico/El Colegio de la Frontera Norte. Velasco, L., and C. Hernández (2018), Migración, trabajo y asentamiento en enclaves globales. Indígenas en Baja California Sur, Tijuana, Mexico: El Colegio de la Frontera Norte/Comisión Nacional para el Desarrollo de los Pueblos Indígenas. Velasco, L., C. Zlolniski, and M. Coubès (2014), De jornaleros a colonos. Residencia, trabajo e identidad en el Valle de San Quintín, Tijuana, Mexico: El Colegio de la Frontera Norte. Weber, D. (2008), “Un pasado no visto: perspectivas históricas sobre la migración binacional de los pueblos indígenas”, in L. Velasco (ed.), Migración, fronteras e identidades étnicas transnacionales, Tijuana, Mexico: El Colegio de la Frontera Norte/Miguel Ángel Porrúa, pp. 119–139. Wright, E. (2000), Class Counts: Studies in Marxism and Social Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zabin, C. (1992), Migración Oaxaqueña a los Campos Agrícolas de California. Un diálogo, University of California San Diego-Center for U.S.–Mexican Studies, accessed 30 November 2021 at https://​ www​.escholarship​.org/​uc/​item/​06k7j89k​.pdf;origin​=​repeccitec Zlolniski, C. (2016), “Sistemas de intermediación laboral en una región agroexportadora del noroeste mexicano”, Eutopía, 9, 101–112. Zlolniski, C. (2019), Made in Baja: The Lives of Farmworkers and Growers behind Mexico’s Transnational Agricultural Boom, Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

9. Desértica Feminista: collision of theories, identity, and [im]migrant–border encounters Ma. Eugenia Hernández Sánchez and Cynthia Bejarano

1.

INTRODUCTION: BORDER COMMUNITIES, DESERT ENCOUNTERS

Feeling and thinking about the U.S.–Mexico border urges one to inhabit a particular space of constant re-elaboration. The border region is a complex cultural and geopolitically significant area that predates nation-states. As this is one of the most unequal borders in the world (Relaño Pastor, 2006), it is a challenge to develop conceptual frameworks that include both the long history that weaves together border communities and the fractures they face, due to current migration policies, security interventions, and the oppression of shared land. Varying migration processes between the U.S. and Mexico have been represented by different historical waves of migration and changing protocols. At times, there has been an emphasis on policing territories; through other periods the focus has shifted to developing long-term policies to reflect a future where control over people’s bodies is desired. Other times still, its focus has been the detention of people and their deportation. These are cyclical and episodic tendencies used to create hyper-vigilant, antagonistic, and confrontational affirmation of a migration crisis. U.S. and Mexican nation-states claim to share an agenda to curb migration, yet this agenda is one that paradoxically deepens transborder experiences, and that, colliding with the desert, nation-state policies, and bodies in movement, creates an Affective Border Community with reverberating consequences. Research on migration shows how “one of the strong impacts of globalization is the increasingly precarious conditions for workers worldwide, which has [a] huge effect on the conditions [in which] contemporary mobilities take place” (Oso & Ribas-Mateos, 2013, p. 3). Our concern is to situate analysis from the specific U.S.–Mexico border to weave with lived experience and knowledge from other regions with a global lens. The increased interest in women, children, and youth who migrate links their harrowing journeys to their countries’ histories, and this includes their precarious arrival at their intended destination, for oftentimes they are left near the border, at a deportation site, or abandoned at some precarious place not unlike the place from which they desperately fled. For activists, researchers, and especially for personnel of both government and non-government shelters on either side of the border, this is neither a new nor a recent phenomenon (Hernández Sánchez, 2011). The man-made construction of the border, its very concept, has acquired different historical meanings for Mexico and the U.S., one that corresponds to each nation-state’s project of empire-building and claims to sovereignty. According to González Herrera (2008), For the United States, the border became a process of imperial self-affirmation with political, cultural, racial, sanitary, economic, and military traits[. F]or Mexico, the border, in spite of its northern origin based on powerful men from the new regime, remained foreign [and] atypical, and mainly continue[d]

134

Collision of theories, identity, and [im]migrant–border encounters  135 to be seen as a space of separation and distance from the powerful neighbor [, creating] a protective vacuum [to safeguard itself from the U.S.]. (p. 15)

This historical construction helps us to understand different dimensions of inequality, as a characteristic naturalized between Mexico and the U.S. These characteristics also contribute to the justification for surveillance and exclusion (Bejarano, 2010). From this multilayered interaction of inequalities (Bustamante, 2000), we cannot avoid asking: what system(s) develop under such contradictory, yet relational inequality? And how can we explore intersecting socio-ecological systems to interrogate the possibilities of life and its threats? At the border, inequality is socially constructed and maintained via xenophobic exclusionary practices naturalized through unequal historical relations built on notions of fear of the unknown, fear of the foreigner, and fear of a hypothetical future in which identification of people’s every move occurs, even more so than it already exists. Considering “the U.S. / Mexican border … without doubt [as] one of the most contradictory geopolitical lines in the world—a militarized border with a ‘good neighbor’” (Cantú, 2015), we present three intersecting discussions to question and re-imagine the study of the border via collisions of theory, collisions of identity, and migrant–border encounters.

2.

DESÉRTICA FEMINISTA AS DESERT GUIDE: INTRODUCING BONDS BETWEEN ECOFEMINISM, BORDER THEORIES, AND AFFECTIVE CARTOGRAPHY

Desértica Feminista is the collision of intimate relations within a system of institutionalized violence, which can be observed in the crossing of the desert, in its risks and opportunities, in the agency to look for a better life and survive. Desértica Feminista helps us understand spatial multi-species relations and to gain a communal consciousness of our surrounding environment to resist oppression. Desértica Feminista works as a guiding concept that interrogates and provokes analyses concerning the relationship between the institutions of [im]migration that work to obstruct women’s agency and mobility (i.e., border patrol, U.S. customs and border protection, U.S. and Mexican military), and the institutions that help foster said agency and mobility ([im]migration advocacy groups). From a Latinx critical perspective, “institutions produce, circulate, and maintain the dominant culture’s norms, values, language, policies, and ideologies” (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2012, p. 80). As such, we conceptually link Desértica Feminista to the ever-evolving Chihuahua desert. We consider its symbolic landscape, its biodiversity, its socio-historical context as a border space; how it juxtaposes the obstruction of people’s movement by security apparatuses across its landscapes (i.e., border patrols) against border communities and other networks of people who advocate for migrants. Both sets of networks (security apparatus versus migrant advocacy and resistance) are embedded within an Affective Border Community that collides and ignites political tensions as the groups work to advocate for or against migrants’ movements across borders. The Affective Border Community materializes into tension and conflict, advocacy and agency, in a landscape unfairly singled out as dangerous and barren by those who fail to recognize the hope and support migrants receive and provide here. Desértica Feminista identifies the locus of this collision by thinking about desert archetypes (a land to continuously dominate), tropes (dangerous, empty, death), and the individuals

136  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration within these tropes. Said individuals either institute these understandings within the stratification of border vigilance systems or work to care for migrants and advocate for their rights in open opposition to nativist narratives of sovereignty. This places desert archetypes and the people encompassing these tropes within a framework that describes the complexities involved in migrant crossings and Affective Border Communities’ division. Therefore, the aim of Desértica Feminista is to contribute to discussions regarding the dialectics of the desert; while popular discourse would paint the desert as a harsh, unsafe landscape, filled with systems of surveillance, it is simultaneously a welcoming place for migrants who re-signify it by traversing its ecology and who meet people within networks that work to care and guide them. Together, these systems of contradiction—embedded in desert cultures and landscapes as they are—coalesce as institutions of [im]migration, working either for or against migrants. Desértica Feminista connects with “a theory in the flesh … where the physical realities of our lives—our skin color, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longings—all fuse to create an attempt to bridge the contradiction in our experience” (Moraga, 1981, p. 23). Desértica Feminista establishes a dialogue between ecofeminism (Cardona, 2016; Adams & Gruen, 2014; Perales Blanco, 2010) and border theory (Bustamante, 2000; Elenes, 2011; Bejarano, 2010) from a lived experience position that describes the desert as a guide between these tropes, as it draws from affect (Ahmed, 2010; Ahmed 2015; Gandhi, 2006) the constant tension between border communities, migrants, border agents, and the desert environment. Drawing from a feminist anti-oppressive research (Brown & Strega, 2005) in which knowledge is socially constructed “that accepts ambivalence and uncertainty” (pp. 255–264), we articulate the challenges presented between the natural environment of the desert and the built environment (McDowell, 1999) of nation-states, and how gender, migration, and landscape interlock (Razack, 2008) to explore a process of both alliance and collision.

3.

EXAMINING COLLISION ONE: ECOFEMINISM AND BORDER THEORIES

The crux of Desértica Feminista is the collision between desert ecology and [im]migrant institutions, which is where women have stood at the forefront, challenging the archetypes and tropes at the border. Historically, women have addressed [im]migration, climate change, and other political crises including the exploitation of labor. A paradigm shift in ecofeminism makes its thinking from a perspective of a planet and not only the world. A planet is an ideal place where we acknowledge the connectivity of multiple species [and landscapes]. Contrarily, the world is a place of separation. In this tone, Haraway (2016) challenge us to think “ecojustice, which can also embrace diverse human people, it is high time that feminist exercise leadership in imagination, theory, and action to unravel the ties of both genealogy and kin, and kin and species” (p. 102). Vivar-Arenas (2015) argues, “Ecofeminist positions examine asymmetries [that occur] due to the institutionalized imbalance in the power relations between men and women[,] but also those power relations that are affecting the weak ecological balance that endangers the habitat” (n.p.), thus connecting the social dynamics with place. In this sense, ecofeminism and border theories share a commitment for understanding forms of relational knowledge that stem from the natural environment (the desert in this case) and the built environment (manmade borders) that often go ignored or overlooked. “Ecofeminism emerged as a new strand in feminism and works also for improving [the] living conditions of

Collision of theories, identity, and [im]migrant–border encounters  137 women and humanity in general without destroying the environment” (Sruthi & Mukherjee, 2020, n.p.). Ecofeminism recognizes the interaction between the oppression of nature and the oppression of women, while border theories focus on the importance of border communities’ lived experiences to reclaim the material and symbolic meaning of the desert, in spite of the man-made borders designed to separate its people. For Coral Díaz (2016), [Ecofeminists] all share the idea that the hierarchy and exploitation that has accompanied women has the same cause and therefore the same link that precedes environmental harm. In this sense, this association is not accidental. The explanation has its origin in patriarchy. (p. 23)

Ecofeminism in Latin America critiques the colonial system, the institutionalization of patriarchy, and the historical exclusion of indigenous and Afro-descendant women as the root of violence both in nature and against women. Thus, the reproduction of oppression relates to “an accumulation scheme on the bases of the rupture with nature throughout human history: Capitalism, Patriarchy and Colonialism” (Peredo Beltrán, 2019, p. 60). Similarly, for Gallardo, “These feminisms speak about the materialist relationship between land, body, law and history, and express clearly anti-colonialist and anti-capitalist positions and demands for the right to a plural education, all fundamental to understand[ing] ourselves as Latin Americans” (in Ruiz-Navarro, 2019, p. 619). Furthermore, ecofeminists in Latin America emphasize how liberation theology has criticized patriarchal and the hierarchy regarding monotheistic religions (Ruether, 2000 in Triana, 2016). In “Latin America (Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Argentina, and Chile) the relationship between environmental degradation [is] related to climate change and migration” (IOM, 2017 in Felipe Pérez, 2018, p. 15). Finally, a significant problem for ecofeminism in Latin America is to connect the long history of extractivism (Gabbert & Lang, 2019; Sebastián Aguilar, 2019; Silva Santisteban, 2018) as foreign based in a continuum with the more recently economic model known as hyper-extractivism (Peredo Beltrán, 2019) where the exploitation is exercised via national interests. Thus, exploitation of natural resources in Latin America changed from exploitation by foreign powers to, in the present, exploitation by government-based industries, which results in an interrupted process that endangers both the environment and the communities who inhabit it. However, national interest builds a discourse based on local control as different from extractivism when the only difference is who exercises the damage. This environmental complexity relates to border theories. Border theories also seek to explain how entire cultures are stigmatized and oppressed by regimes of control for a few to have power over whole regions. Bustamante (2004) uses border theory to explain cultural vulnerability as a set of values, ideas, prejudices, ideologies, xenophobia, and racism generated by a host society. The host society, concerned about foreigners and [im]migration, in turn causes structural vulnerability for them. Within this tradition of thought, Elenes (2011) explores border epistemologies by deconstructing archetypes associated with Mexican womanhood to establish “the meaning people make of their own lives in relation to structural forms of oppression and resistance” (p. 49). The ideas promulgated by border theorists align with the work of ecofeminists, who aim to bring back the importance of landscape and species to current socio-political tensions. In addition, ecofeminists complement the work of border theorists by offering conceptual frameworks to end the abuse of transnational communities, migrants, and border populations. Ecofeminists also work “to remedy a perceived problem in feminist

138  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration theory, animal advocacy, and environmentalism, which is their lack of attention to the intersecting structures of power that reinforce the ‘othering’ of women and animals and contribute to the increasing destruction of the environment” (Adams & Gruen, 2014, p. 1). Desértica Feminista aims to explore the tensions created by the collision between border communities and security technologies and agents, and to bring this together to the stories of women who migrate across desert landscapes. 3.1

Placing Affective Border Communities

Affective Border Communities know first-hand the intensity of the ecology they inhabit, as well as the socio-political tensions that affect them. To clarify, Affective Border Communities are discussed here as communities where micropolitical events explain how they “are always falling apart” and being reconfigured (Bertelsen & Murphie, 2010, p. 140). We argue that Affective Border Communities manage to distance themselves from binaries between nation-states and ecology through their very spatiality; their location at the intersection of nation-states and desert landscape makes it possible to address the tensions created by being wedged between these spaces, as well as acknowledging the unequal geopolitical powers present. According to Caderlof and Sivaramakrishnan (2006) (cited in Meierotto, 2020): Ecological nationalism can manifest itself in multiple ways, for example, by building a national pride in wilderness areas, and perhaps even using nature reserves as a way to buffer the impact of unwanted [im]migrants. In this way, the landscape becomes the place of contested identities. (p. 28)

Affective Border Communities also must deal with nativistic claims of belonging that work to exclude [im]migrants. This forces these communities to witness the abuse of [im]migrants [by surveillance agents] under the apparent justification of nativist national interests (which oftentimes does not represent the Affective Border Communities’ values). Thus, fear permeates encounters across the border, as “emotions work to align bodily space with social space. It is not that fear begins in a body and then restricts the mobility of that body … the response of fear is itself dependent on particular narratives of what and who is fearsome that are already in place” (Ahmed, 2015). Due to this lived experience, empathy emerges from the Affective Border Communities towards the stranger, as witnessed in migrant advocacy networks. For Gandhi (2006), “Friendships toward strangers or foreigners, in particular, carry exceptional risks, as their fulfillment may at any time constitute a felony contra patriam” (p. 29). Therefore, even though a power imbalance exists among them, the connections between Affective Border Communities and the more vulnerable [im]migrants (such as women and children) can create a sense of belonging, arguably caused by their mutual understanding of separateness. Despite this power imbalance, a condition of reciprocity and compassion emerges. A constant and permeable power imbalance exists within Affective Border Communities. On the one hand, they have the lived experience to understand the [im]migrants who want to travel across their lands, who suffer the evident hardships of multiple border crossings; on the other, they have the ecological knowledge of living in a politicized landscape. However, despite this imbalance, when familiar conditions of violence materialize, Affective Border Communities act to protect the interconnections of all life forms. For example, they find connection with the more vulnerable [im]migrants (such as women and children) because many

Collision of theories, identity, and [im]migrant–border encounters  139 of them were immigrants themselves, creating in them a sense of temporal belonging. And it is through this empathetic attitude that a condition of reciprocity and compassion emerges.

4.

EXAMINING COLLISION TWO: DESERT AS GUIDE/ COLLISION OF IDENTITIES

Our intention is to situate the desert at the intersection of nature and border transnational encounters, taking the tensions and contradictions evident as paths between different species in dialogue with each other. We interrogate the negative tropes of the desert as empty, incomplete, barren land, and instead analyze the desert from a standpoint of symbolic constructions and constitutive knowledge via the lived experience of Affective Border Communities and the identities that inhabit them. The ecological rhythms of the desert recognize the need for animals to migrate—human and other than humans—despite the possibilities of danger that can manifest through the journey. The desert has the capacity to lend itself as a desert guide if one knows how to read it. The desert is constantly being framed as other, as foreign, as inhospitable, and dry. The narrative concerning the desert and its people as ‘savages’ in need of civilization or in need of extermination is a colonialist ideation (Léon García & González Herrera, 2000). People in the desert are also taught not to see biodiversity nor to appreciate what the desert offers because of how the desert is conceptualized. We (as inhabitants) are taught to desire an antithesis, a utopian landscape of tall trees and greenery, eager to abandon the barren lands in favor of anywhere else. The militarization of the border impacts Affective Border Communities, the migrants that pass through the desert, and the very ecology of the land. The desert trope in current militaristic times (with the further construction of the U.S. border wall, for example) represents a permanent state of vigilance and erasure, a threat to the coexistence of multiple living organisms in favor of preserving a sole national identity. This rhetoric of safeguarding the nation-state and border security means the obstruction or extermination of the Mexican migrant, the Mexican grey wolf, the border ocelot, and other organisms. The man-made border wall and the evident institutionalization of violence for humans and other than humans make evident how desire for a different landscape begins to vanish. Within the desert, people experience identity as the “affect alien” (Ahmed, 2010), where collision of identities allow us to ask questions. For example, how did I learn to reject the immigrant when I come from an immigrant family? How does my historical subjectivity naturalize detention of children? The collision of identities emphasizes both historical and contemporary racial stigmas. And though such a complex analysis would go beyond the scope of this chapter, it’s important to highlight that the role of internalized racism (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2012) “forced changes in behavior to ensure psychological and physical safety and to gain access to resources” (p. 113) as a mechanism that reproduces the alienation of one’s cultural group despite the sharing of an ethnic heritage. This parallels how national identities are built through opposition against other nationalities, where culture is reconfigured as a division of lands, as something foreign, foreign like the bodies that move through the land that nation-states denominate as “other”, foreign like the migrant women who travel through the desert to care for their children. Twine (2014) reminds us,

140  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration [Ecofeminists] have consistently argued that an important intersection between the exploitation of animals and racism is found in the way in which animals and notions of animality have been brought into the process of racialization, i.e., the marking out of “race.” The animalization (to represent as, to compare with, other animals) of some people in the process of racialization and dehumanization is a longstanding trope that simultaneously constructed the racially unmarked category of “white” as “human” and “civilized.” (In Adams & Gruen, 2014, p. 195)

Desértica Feminista thus questions how women and animals have been mutually categorized as “other”, with both being diminished in their standing as lesser than men. Men in this sense being used both as a gender and as a representation of the human species. Consequently, Desértica Feminista reclaims the value of coexistence between humans and animals, as well as the importance of relational dependency, arguing against all forms of violence enacted on species who inhabit or cross the desert’s ecology. 4.1

On Desert Identities: The Savage (Land) and the Civilized (Law)

In the case illustrated below, we discuss how [im]migrants become affective/discursive objects used by civil society, NGOs, volunteers, border enforcement agents, and others as examples to further their own political agendas (Bejarano & Hernández Sanchez, 2021, p. 74). The [im]migrants thus become political–spatial collisions of subjectivities where the scales of “the vast range of responses toward migrants” is revealed. This case story underscores our argument that [im]migrants, especially women and girls, are viewed as “other”, and that when they collide with border enforcement agents it creates a specific savior narrative. In 2021, the local El Paso, Texas news broke a story of two Ecuadorian girls, 3 and 5 years old respectively, who were crossed from Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua and dropped over the border wall into Sunland Park, New Mexico on March 30, 2021. U.S. surveillance video shows how smugglers climbed a ladder to drop the two girls several feet from the ground across the border wall; as the children fell onto the U.S. side, the two smugglers fled from the scene. The apparently neat pathos of the case—with the “savage” smugglers and abandoned girls—was used by the border patrol as propaganda to reinforce the idea that they needed more efficient, more severe surveillance technologies. They did this, rather than addressing the heightened dangers posed by those very security reinforcers to the migrants they were claiming to protect. The El Paso Border Patrol Sector Chief, a Latinx woman in charge of this case, stated, “I’m appalled by the way these smugglers viciously dropped innocent children from a 14-foot border barrier last night” (KVIA ABC-7, 2021, 1:10 min.). We can see in display the interlocking identities of a Latinx woman in power, the El Paso Border Patrol Sector chief, who represents both the U.S. security apparatus as well as a foil to the two migrant girls who were being used to justify the reproduction of relational asymmetries (Bustamante, 2000). Invariably, the Mexican smugglers were vilified, and the Ecuadorian mother demonized. “Where was she?”, people asked. The paternal grandfather of the girls was interviewed saying, “[The parents] wanted to be with them, their mother suffered a lot, for that reason they decided to [smuggle them]” (Mongelli & Salo, 2021, n.p.). Regardless, the Ecuadorian mother was blamed for placing her daughters at risk, while the female border patrol chief was photographed kneeling with the two girls, offering them potato chips (Mongelli & Salo, 2021) performing, through a display of caring and nourishing, a type of institutional care, implying that this woman was doing for the two girls something that their mother was not.

Collision of theories, identity, and [im]migrant–border encounters  141 Table 9.1

Desert collision of identities: subjectivities for children and adults in narratives of desert crossing

Body

Child

Adult

Immediate found relationship

Sister/s

Border agent

Type of perceived gender

Female

Female

Type of perceived ethnicity

Latina

Latina

Type of legal status

Migrant

Citizen

Agency response

Risk-movement

Enforcement-

Type of social network

Families, smuggler network

Migration management by institutions

Selected territoriality

Ecology of Chihuahuan desert

Political geography of the nation-states

stagnation

This case created a spectacle that the border apparatus needed. They questioned the mother’s actions, they questioned the smugglers’ actions, yet no one questions the 14-foot border wall that exists in the middle of the desert. Had the wall not been erected, had there been a consistent and humane way of addressing the economic migrants or a guarantee of reunification for asylum refugee children, then events surely would’ve played out differently. Movement for survival becomes criminalized, where “[M]ovement emerges as a ‘technology of citizenship,’ where the movement of certain subjects is deemed free and desirable, while the movement of others is considered excessive and subject to punishment and regulation” (Beltrán, 2020). The risks that migrants take for their survival, and the further criminalization of their movement, perversely promote the savior narrative that border enforcements promulgate. In this case, the two Ecuadorian girls were “othered” by the border patrol propaganda—they were placed in the custody of the state having been abandoned by their male smugglers. Table 9.1 presents how collision and othering is the result of a shared experience. It is not intended to describe the identities in their entirety but to highlight attributes that expose how “emotions respond to the proximity of others … through affective encounters that objects and others are perceived as having attributes, which ‘gives’ the subject an identity” (Ahmed, 2015, Kindle location, 1267). Although canonical traditions of thought would urge us to think of this rationally and not emotionally, as though these were incompatible, Desértica Feminista would argue that simultaneity is not only possible but necessary. We must react emotionally to this case—and others like it—regardless of how this violent incident was later politicized and rationalized. This is not acceptable. For border communities, this story is about failures and desperation, about their not-too-distant memories of failed migrations, about border people and their [im]migrant histories. In deconstructing this incident, we can observe through the surveillance camera the two children by themselves, abandoned in the desert—harrowing enough. Yet it is not until we add the border patrol chief, her interview, her photograph, that the narrative changes to one where she—and consequently, the whole border industrial complex—becomes the savior. For Rosaldo (2000), “The questions of national identity appear, therefore, not only as collective fictions, but also as fields of negotiation, discussion and conflict” (p. 291). In this way, the Ecuadorian migrant girls are constructed as icons representative of countries that are in an eternal developmental stage. In opposition, the border patrols come to represent the civilization that rescues/saves the “savages”, fixing their ways. Adichie (2009) tells us, “the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but incomplete. They make one story serve as the

142  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration only story” (12:49 min.). We ask ourselves: Who’s silenced through this savior narrative? And how do desert crossings articulate contradictory notions of womanhood?

5.

EXAMINING COLLISION THREE: INTRODUCING “AFFECTIVE CARTOGRAPHY”

Migration and border crossings are usually addressed with specific nationally based territories. Changing the notion of territoriality and beginning with the shared ecological environment via affective cartography can elaborate different interpretations based on connections that include “stories in which multi species players, who are enmeshed in partial and flawed translations across difference, redo ways of living and dying attuned to still possible finite flourishing, still possible recuperation” (Haraway, 2006, p. 10). The study of cartography allows us to investigate our cultural attachments to place, space, and land through encounters both foreign and familiar. The space turn (Soja, 2010) establishes how “the links between space and justice have been explored in parallel by the so-called environmental justice” movements (Astudillo & Sandoval, 2018, p. 306). Perhaps it is too ingenuous to contend here that the Affective Border Communities of the U.S. and Mexico endure through their solidarity to each other, despite being represented by dual nation-states, and despite, as well, of the expected asymmetry of power relations (Bustamante, 2000), as showcased by the present cartography we illustrate below (Figure 9.1). The figure explores how the weaving of cultures (and cultural knowledge) become imperative when the communities live under obsessive policies of separation, and when vigilance of the land leads to the inhumane inspection of [im]migrant bodies. Anarchy mapping practices (Firth, 2014) takes place in micro-spaces (and micro-experiences), “like walks [that] lead to conversations and mutual learning together in the territory” (p. 166). We acknowledge that “there will always be some unevenness in the geographies we produce” (Soja, 2010, p. 71), but instead of looking for common interests, proximity, or frequency together, we ought to elaborate a decolonial process by disrupting the separation between knowledge and culture (Mignolio, 2005) by mapping desert encounters: locating spaces of the deaths, crossings, inspection-vigilance, unexpected alliances, a minute of the desert’s biodiversity. We must challenge the narrative that has been presented by nation-states of the diversity—both human and ecological—that resides in the borderlands. 5.1

Chihuahua Desert

By situating the desert cartography in the ecology of the Chihuahua desert, we methodologically reclaim the desert as a land that protects, provides for, and confronts humans and animals. We work via “self-representation, self-recognition and [the] analysis of concrete information” (Barragán-León, 2019, p. 146) to probe the policies and areas of vigilance (border enforcement agents, surveillance cameras, and checkpoints), as well as the encounters with people who maintain networks of trust through generations. We interrogate the policies that create potential danger to humans and animals alike as in this case of “military officers [that] have tasked soldiers with putting up lethal concertina wire on fencing near border towns, creating a permanent potential for harm to any human or animal who goes near the wire” (Beltrán, 2020, p. 102). As such, the once porous contour of the desert’s ecology along the Chihuahuan

Collision of theories, identity, and [im]migrant–border encounters  143

Source: Cartography elaborated in part with data from Greenwald et al. (2017).

Figure 9.1

Desert affective cartography

desert (which spans well past the U.S. side of the boarder, and where multiple species interact), is now endangered due to the border wall (Greenwald et al., 2017). The cartography included above allows us to connect multiple species and multiple resistance. It also allows us to explain the separation of the U.S.–Mexico border not as a nation-state division but as an area in tension with its ecology. We want to unite the generational knowledge of a complicated region and challenge nationalistic methodologies that discuss borders without crossing them, without interacting, engaging, or recognizing the complexities of the desertic landscape. 5.2

Serpents and Crosses; Death and Healing

In the present cartography, you might’ve noticed the serpent, the rattlesnake, the variety of crosses. It is common to encounter rattlesnake signs alerting [im]migrants of potential dangers.

144  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration For the past forty years, these signs have been used to pay respect to the women who’ve died in Ciudad Juárez. The feminicides. On the other hand, the artwork on the border wall testifies to the memory of the fallen [im]migrants, the memory of their harrowing journeys. Both, feminicides and [im]migrant deaths, create a space of permanent tension. A space where merely being a woman—a woman who is trying to survive—is to be surrounded by the possibility of death. However, it is what is claimed as a source of danger that we want to challenge. For example, danger is often represented by the signs of the rattlesnake yet for some Affective Border Communities ingesting a dry rattlesnake as a condiment is a powerful ingredient that can nourish you for months (which is valuable knowledge when crossing the desert). Since the serpent changes skin to renew itself and keep moving, these communities credit the rattlesnake with healing powers. The same symbol is experienced as both the threat of extinction and a source of healing. For outsiders, the environment of the desert might be presented as dangerous, but this would disregard the social context of the area. It is the very policing [im] migrant bodies that in many ways fuels the tension, not the reptiles in the desert. This desert affective cartography incorporates the materiality of death, but at the same time it interrogates the construction of the source of danger. As stated earlier, one sign (a rattlesnake) might mean death to some and hope to others. 5.3

Tumbleweed Crossings, Cameras, and Resistance under the Sun

Tumbleweeds are not native plants of the region, but they remain as part of the Chihuahuan desert ecology. These plants grow, die-dry, and move to spread their seed. Movement is their way of being. The tumbleweed symbolizes the movement of border crossings and how it weaves with Affective Border Communities, resisting policies like Operation Gatekeeper (OG) in San Diego and Operation Hold the Line in El Paso, Texas and other border regions. These operations flood the border area with cameras that claim to follow the river, but that end up following [im]migrants. Operations such as OG “further the material and ideological institutionalization of the boundary—the existence of which is an absolutely necessary condition for the existence of the immigration-related illegality and, more important, of the United States as a nation state” (Nevins, 2002, p. 13). Finally, the symbol of the sun is included in our cartography to symbolize how, despite these over-surveilled places, [im]migrants still manage to illuminate these areas as they move back and forth, seeking brighter futures for themselves and their loved ones. Although they encounter monumental obstacles, they connect with Affective Border Communities, creating a locus where “feeling … is emotion modified and cultivated[. They represent] the paradigm in human experience of the integration of reason and feeling, thinking, and doing” (Curtin, 2014, p. 46). [Im]migrants, thus, embody an important resistance in this cartography as they connect to civil organizations, legal advocacy, and transnational families. Affective Border Communities, however, rely on trust bonds, many of these with fellow [im]migrants, and this makes it possible for women and children to cross, to survive, and to resist the barriers that obstruct their movements.

Collision of theories, identity, and [im]migrant–border encounters  145 5.4

Felt Desert: Final Thoughts and Further Questions

We want to close by contemplating some questions that are possible when feminist ecology, border theory, and Affective Border Communities connect. For instance: How does the historical-symbolic construction of the Chihuahuan desert serve to create a narrative of control over territories and [im]migrant bodies? In what ways do narratives of women and children [im]migration and survival occlude the current nation-states crisis? The desert has been constructed through a colonial imagination (Pérez, 2007) as a barren land where indigenous communities are portrayed as “savage” in their interaction with the “civilized” non-native population (León García & González Herrera, 2000). This single story (Adichie, 2009) creates narratives of justified “logic” out of illogical, nativist, and stereotypical representations. In Desértica Feminista, we explore how a reality composed of stereotypes has real consequences to real living beings, both human and non-human. We explore the idea of the desert as an ecological area where diverse species meet—and have met throughout generations; where unexpected alliances occur; where knowledge of the land is passed on, regardless of notions such as nationality. Furthermore, we establish how the desert is a place of simultaneous energies, welcoming and deadly, foreign, and familiar. And still, how the desert remains home. Desértica Feminista maps how the lived experiences of Affective Border Communities incorporate a dialogue with multiple species to construct meaning concomitant with the materiality of border vigilance and policies of separation. “Protected areas along the U.S.–Mexico border are one of the most explicit sites of the expression of military supremacy, and while it may seem that this is a relatively new phenomenon, it has been going on for decades” (Meierotto, 2020, p. 27). Desértica Feminista invites us to consider the Chihuahua desert as the space that brings us together in transcendent but ephemeral ways. It reveals how separation is not the end of the single story, but the beginning of different possible encounters, reminding us, as well, that in moments of abrupt separation it is important to notice someone else—human and non-human—is always there. In the end, Desértica Feminista shows how taking care of something so fragile and uncontainable as the tumbleweed companion, can become the trigger for radical encounters.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We would like to thank Fatima Oliveros and Sebastian Romero for their assistance with the elaboration of this chapter.

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10. Women’s mobilities: a blacklight on gender and care in the Amazon José Miguel Nieto Olivar, Fabio Magalhães Candotti and Flávia Melo

THE AMAZON BORDER The Amazon is not merely a natural region circumscribed by multiple state borders. It is a grandiose political and mythical colonial invention. It is a place that has been (and is) discursively, territorially, and emotionally conceptualized, managed over the last five centuries by and through various processes of globalization and nation-building that situate the Amazon as a radically exotic alterative to civilization. This relationship spectacularly and simultaneously reproduces both the long-standing modern separation of nature and culture, as well as the gendered, eroticized, racialized, and aestheticized framing of the colonial encounter. The Amazon is portrayed as a virgin, wild, seductive, treacherous, and cursed land that must be cleared, penetrated, subjugated, fertilized, integrated, civilized, whitened, rationalized, etc. The economies engendered by the different nations that have “cleared” the Amazon were (and still are) fundamentally thought of as masculine. They are necessarily conceived from outside as heroic frontier expansion resulting in settlement, national reproduction, and urbanization. Thus charged with a heavy mytho-conceptual load (Serje, 2005), the processes through which the Amazon is constantly reinvented and (re)conceptualized produce a series of specific and diverse intersectional arrangements. These arrangements are effects of – and implicated in – historical processes of colonial occupation and economic expansion as well as forms of resistance. Consequently, they can also be thought of as complex, multiscale, and intensive “mobility regimes” (Glick-Schiller & Salazar, 2013; Olivar, Cunha & Rosa, 2015) that produce and compose the region. From the 1970s to the 1990s, social scientists and geographers studied the Brazilian Amazon under the rubric of “frontiers and fronts of expansion” and in terms of the “authoritarian capitalism” (Velho, 1976), spearheaded by the alliances constructed between the region’s various states and large corporations. These studies uncovered a newly accelerated process of urbanization and surplus raw material extraction through the persistent use of violence that pushed migrant workers and native peoples to new extremes of exploitation and to long-distance commuting. The Amazon was defined during this period as an “urbanized forest” (Becker, 1985; Browder & Godfrey, 1997) and as signifying a kind of limit for humanity (Martins, 1997). In the early 2000s, a new interdisciplinary field emerged focusing on migrations and national borders in the Amazon, built on these earlier studies. This field, as analyzed by Ribas-Mateos and Dunn (2021), has been largely followed the global hegemonic agenda of post-9/11 national border studies. Scholars began to spotlight transnational displacements, understood to be problematic from the point of view of the nation-states and other agencies that govern populations (including the organizations involved in drug trafficking, smuggling, human trafficking, irregular immigration, and illegal mining and logging). It was this new 148

Women’s mobilities: a blacklight on gender and care in the Amazon  149 generation of researchers in the Amazon that connected the global security agenda to concerns regarding Pan-Amazon integration and regional development, emphasizing new transnational migrations in contexts marked by illegalities (Machado, 2000; Becker, 2005; Rodrigues, 2006; Aragón, 2009; Silva, 2011; Castro & Hazeu, 2013; Machad, Ribeiro & Monteiro, 2014; Jakob, 2015; Oliveira, 2016). As we have presented elsewhere (Olivar, Melo & Tobón, 2021), the recent forms of governance and production of the Amazon (particularly in Brazil) paint a picture of intensification of historical and colonial reduction, (post)colonial necropolitics, and expansion/destruction of what is understood as nature. This is a framework based on increased expulsion processes (Sassen, 2021, p. 285) and geopolitical abjection that has only intensified during the Covid-19 pandemic. In the face of this, we have emphasized the urgent need to escape the cognitive devices that associate the Global South with poverty, hard and dangerous borders, ethnic and sexual minorities, and which situate Southern women as simply the subjects of processes of victimization and violence. Our work is thus an entreaty to pay attention to the cosmopolitical forms (following Isabelle Stengers’ proposition (Stengers, 2018)) through which the Amazon(s) is(are) understood as, governed by, and produced from the non-hegemonic multiplicity of relations that inhabit and make up the territory. Over the past decades, we have been engaged in several collaborative projects that have resulted in affective relationships and political alliances with people on the move – that is, with women engaged in ordinary mobility processes: women and trans youth engaged in transborder sex markets; women entangled by and fighting against the prison system; and indigenous women in transit between communities and cities expanding their presence and strength in spaces and movements historically dominated by men.1 Through this, we have endeavored to promote a shift in how the Amazon is imagined and described. This has led us to work to escape a colonial framing of the exotic and of the methodological nationalism and regionalism (Wimmer & Glick-Schiller, 2002) that tend to fuel criminalizing, securitizing, misogynistic, transphobic, and racist governmentalities, bordering processes (Lois, 2014; Grimson, 2003), and schemes for controlling population movement (Olivar, 2015, 2016, 2018; Olivar, Cunha & Rosa, 2015; Melo, 2018, 2020; Olivar & Melo, 2022; Melo & Olivar, 2019; Candotti, 2022; Candotti, Melo & Siqueira, 2017). Our proposal in this brief chapter is to advance research on mobilities (not exactly migrations), gender/race/ethnicity, and region/nation in the Amazon, based on the protagonistic intellectual engagement of people/women whose bodies and thoughts are marked by centuries of genocide, expulsion, and survival along the global-colonial routes of capital in the Amazon. These people(s) have been experiencing the end of the world for half of a millennium now. We seek here to strengthen a series of interventions: cosmopolitical disputes (Stengers, 2011, 2018; De la Cadena, 2019; De la Cadena & Blaser, 2018), shadow economies (Sassen, 2000), and the blacklight these groups emanate (Silva, 2017, 2019) that highlights their diverse and often aberrant networks, movements, and alliances (Lapoujade, 2015). We seek to significantly expand our understanding of the current complexity of power relations that make up the many different Amazons in their human and non-human relations with the planet and in their shifting and unfolding connections that leak out and, in a certain sense, unmake the region. Since 2010, we have been researching and working in the Brazilian state of Amaonas, particularly in the cities of Manaus, Tabatinga, and São Gabriel da Cachoeira. The last two of these are along the upper Solimões and Rio Negro rivers, on Brazil’s borders with Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela. 1

150  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration Ultimately, this is an agenda driven by an allied, impure, implicated, and reflective politics of knowledge in a time when (as some indigenous intellectuals have pointed out (Krenak, 2019; Kopenawa & Albert, 2015; Costa, 2021a, 2021b) “white people”, faced with a global health crisis, share a sense of “the end of the world”. In this chapter, we focus on the two socio-economical contexts with which we have worked: prison systems and sexual economies. These contexts are blended by the movements of those who compose them and traversed by relationships of care, capitalism, and cosmopolitics (Stengers & Bordeleau, 2011; Stengers, 2015; Olivar et al., 2021). Prisoners’ Families and Sex Workers in Movement With regards to men along the Amazon border, one of the most deep-seated and long-standing mythical–historical concerns has been the threats that men (as natives, “savages,” foreigners, “colonos”, and “frontier heroes”) from and in the Amazon pose to the nation. This concern currently plays out in reflections regarding “organized crime” and its associated drugs, weapons, money, and networks. On the Brazilian side, these are mapped as “routes” in a “war on drugs” that has been strengthened over the last two decades. The first consequence of the growth of this “war” as the pillar of state policy has been a reinforcement of the narratives surrounding uncontrolled, dangerous, stateless borders (Candotti, Melo & Siqueira, 2017) where indigenous people, river dwellers, and women are “lured” and victimized by drug dealers. The most entrenched and representative forms of state authority in the region intensified during this period, manifest in an increased military presence by both the Armed Forces and armed and militarized police agents. One of the most profound effects of this process (alongside the economic dominance of the illegal markets, the frightening increase in homicide rates, and the expansion of vigilantism (Candott, Pinheiro & Alves, 2019)) has been mass incarceration. In Manaus alone, in the brief period from August 2019 to June 2021, more than 20,000 people2 were imprisoned at some point: at least 1% of the city’s population. Those who coexist with the prison system in Brazil realize that it is not merely a means of maintaining exclusion and stasis. Rather, it is best conceived as a form of flow management, daily controlling who comes in and who goes out of/ into the region. It forces poor, Black, indigenous population to circulate indefinitely through an archipelago of housing and work spaces (Mallart, 2019) that are interconnected by these lives and by the omnipresence of police and criminal violence. These spaces include “invasions,”3 city squares, “cracklands,”4 poor outlying neighborhoods, juvenile facilities, lockups, treatment communities, forensic mental hospitals, sorting and referral centers, temporary detention facilities, state and federal prisons, etc., not to mention the network of government-based legal, 2 The number of people seen by a representative of the Manaus Public Defender’s Office in said period. There were also a number of others represented by private attorneys, and still others who have no representation whatsoever. 3 This is the term used in Manaus to describe land on which poor people illegally squat. These settlements are the first stage of favelas and poor outlying urban neighborhoods. The city’s population was estimated to have grown more than 20% from 2010 to 2020, an expansion mostly attributed to this form of land occupation. 4 This is the term used in Brazil for specific areas where poor people gather to consume crack. They may be highly visible places (like urban streets with heavy traffic) or more discreet (like favela alleyways) (Rui, 2016).

Women’s mobilities: a blacklight on gender and care in the Amazon  151 social work, and community work institutions. These spaces and institutions are sometimes situated in different cities and even countries. It is not only prisoners who are forced to endlessly circle in and out of these spaces. Those who have the right to visit said spaces face the same revolving door as well. A vast majority of women become “prisoners’ family member” once they enter the circuit of filing in and out of prison administration offices (where they beg for medical attention to be given to their relatives), imposing court buildings (where they seek information and submit documentation), and police stations and prisons scattered across distant cities (where they wait for hours on end under the relentless sun and rain of the Amazon, carrying provisions and medicines, being subjected to the most humiliating searches and pat-downs, just so they can spend sometimes what turns out to be a few minutes of face-to-face time with their relatives (Godoi, 2017, 2021; Lago, 2019)). “Being a family member is torture,” Conceição5 explains. She is of slight build, dark-skinned, and has straight hair and “indigenous” features, the granddaughter of a Peruvian man who fled to Manaus to escape “political problems.” Conceição’s first encounter with the prison system was not in Manaus, but in Lisbon, Portugal, where she lived from 2000 to 2010, three of those years in prison. Conceição had gone to Portugal at the invitation of a friend to work in hotel housekeeping. She ended up imprisoned after she was accused of theft, and this snowballed into an investigation of her illegal occupation of public housing. Conceição was pregnant when she was locked up and returned to Manaus two years later, free, with a two-year-old son. Years later, her boyfriend Julio (born in the Colombian city of Letícia, an indigenous man from an ethnic group she can no longer recall) was imprisoned for the second time while under house arrest. He wore a permanent ankle monitor that banned him and Conceição from heading across “the border.” Julio had been caught transporting 10 kilos of cocaine from the border to the state capital of Manaus on a ten-day canoe trip. This is what led to his first arrest. The second time, the police had planted drugs in the house where the couple lived. Conceição was tortured and detained before being released. Since then, a considerable part of her life and her mobility has been governed by the prison system. She was forced to legalize her relationship with Julio in order to visit her partner. On these visits, she had no other choice but to use her rent money (no small sum, either). Conceição has moved three times since 2019, calculating her (dis)placement in relation to the distance to the prison facilities where her (now) husband has been assigned. She currently lives in an “invasion” on the far outskirts of Manaus, not too far from Julio, but even closer to police operations. During the Covid-19 pandemic, unable to find gigs as a waitress or cleaning lady and barred from visiting Julio (on account of the preventive measures put in place by the prison administration), Conceição set off to work as a cook in an illegal gold mine near the Venezuelan border. Two weeks into her job, after the Federal Police had bombed the mining operations, she heard on the radio that the mine was located within an Indigenous Territory and that she had been working for the newly expanded business operations of a criminal faction that had emerged from the São Paulo prisons in the 1990s. She just barely saved herself from being convicted for “association with organized crime.” Five days later she was in Manaus, having made her way back on money borrowed from another woman, a friend who is also politically active in the association for prisoner family members.



5

Fictitious name.

152  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration It is within this social movement in Manaus, through a politics of mutual care and shared suffering, that Conceição and another hundred women turn the category of “prisoners’ families” into one of “women warriors.” This care flows into the prison complex as well. It is through these women that money, food, medicine, documents, building materials, and children circulate within and without the prison’s walls. The practice of listening and giving words of encouragement and comfort allows the women to build a rare and politically powerful bond. It was through this association that Conceição began to see herself as Black, learning to employ the language of human rights and finding the courage to confront the police who run the Amazon prison system and rule the streets. It was through the association that she earned the respect of male and female drug dealers who had once looked upon her with mistrust. In “fighting the fight,” Conceição met women from all over Brazil who were “suffering” in similar fashion and who could share the stories of “family members” in comparable predicaments all over the world. Her words and narratives grew to be the base of national and international outcries and formal complaints regarding the torture to which prisoners and she herself had been subjected. Conceição is now actively producing a new knowledge about penal abolitionism that overflows the abstract discourses of the academy. By moving and mobilizing “amidst this terror, from it and in spite of it” (Lago, 2019, p. 210), Conceição forged another way to be a woman less characterized by the prison system and its gender technology (Padovani, 2017), which try to reduce her to the intensely eroticized condition of “wife of a thug.”6 The colonial and Eurocentric tradition of fantasizing, sexualizing, and eroticizing women from the (time and again refabricated) border territories like the Amazon is well known. With the advent of modernity (Martínez & Rodríguez, 2002; Rago, 1985), these fantasies have been regularly and creatively expressed and played out through the word prostitution and through policies on sex work. Prostitutes are sent to the frontiers and to the national borders (Martínez & Rodríguez, 2002). Prostitution is seen as one of the creative key borders of modern sexuality (Foucault, 1988); prostitution zones functions as internal borders within cities (Helène, 2017); “prostitutes” and sex workers are seen as a constant presence on the edge of expansion processes (Restrepo, 2002; Martínez & Rodríguez, 2002); and, finally, maritime, aerial, and terrestrial borders are conceived of as privileged spaces for trafficking “whites” – first “white women” then “white people,” and, ultimately, racialized poor women from the Global South (Guy, 1991; Kempadoo, Sanghera & Pattanaik, 1995; Kempadoo, 2004; Piscitelli, 2008, 2013). Whether associated with hypersexualization or with an overarching victimization, these fantasies come together in a unique area of research at the intersection of migration, humanitarism, the global economy, and gender within the context of the global campaign to stop human trafficking. In this short text, there is not enough space to delve into the extensive and heterogenous criticism of the anti-trafficking discourse and campaigns of the last 20+ years introduced by specialists in a range of countries and sex worker / migrant organizations (Kempadoo, Sanghera & Pattanaik, 1995; Kempadoo, 2004, 2015, 2017; Agustin, 2007; Piscitelli, 2008, 2011, 2013; Piscitelli & Lowenkron, 2015; O’Connell Davidson, 2012, 2017; Blanchette & Silva, 2012, among others). Criticism of the moral panic surrounding human trafficking has brought to light the transnational circulation of dubious agendas, agents, and money under the reasoning of a global “transfer” and homogenization of policies and 6 Regarding the invention of prison abolition social movements over the last two decades in Brazil, see Telles et al. (2020).

Women’s mobilities: a blacklight on gender and care in the Amazon  153 discourse. In this sense, anti-trafficking discourse has enabled shifts of viewpoints in a hegemonic political–conceptual apparatus that regulates gender, migration, international government funding, and philanthropic capital. It reifies the lives of racialized female subjects in/from the Global South as victims, extremely vulnerable, and as stripped of agency. In thinking about research agendas for investigating mobility and gender in the upcoming years, it has become fundamentally important for us to better understand the capillary circulation of discourses, agents, and money globally linked to and mobilized by anti-human trafficking campaigns. Anti-trafficking campaigns and their associated discourses have grown substantially throughout Brazil and the Amazon since the late 2000s. From 2014, the Catholic Church has been the primary spokesperson for these campaigns, mobilizing European funding, agents, and institutions around the cause. Following the 2019 Synod of Bishops for the Pan-Amazon region, the Vatican assumed a leading role in the transnational construction of an Amazon as a natural region that needed to be defended, together with its female victims of human trafficking and sexual exploitation. As explained elsewhere (Olivar & Melo, 2022), the ways in which “human trafficking” and the Amazon have been institutionally associated over the last 10–15 years imply an amplification of (Eurocentric, white-supremacist, civilizatory, evangelizing, and military-securitarian) racist relations and colonial interventions in/on/over Amazon bodies, networks, relations, and territorialities. When we theoretically and methodologically return to the bodies, eyes, and epistemes of/ from these subjects and their networks, other forms of knowledge become possible. Indeed, much of the afore-noted criticism has been built upon relationships of enormous proximity and partnership with female sex workers, their families, their support networks, and their social and political organizations. This is not a traditional ethnographical project: it involves the establishment of epistemic and political partnerships with radicalized groups, networks, and knowledge forms in processes of colonial/global (in)subordination. Sex work and the sex trade in the Amazon certainly take place in contexts structured by the contemporary dynamics of expulsion, capitalist hyper-extractivism, and destruction. However, by following the daily lives of cis and trans women (and young gay men) active in the sex markets along the triple border between Brazil, Peru, and Colombia, and by embracing elements of the theoretical–political agenda of Brazilian and international sex worker organizations, complex perspectives emerge (Olivar, 2017, 2019). This is the case of SODIREITOS, a political–academic project based in Belém, the capital of the state of Pará in the Brazilian Amazon. In the early 2000s, SODIREITOS actively engaged in “confronting trafficking of women” (SODIREITOS-GAATW/REDLAC, 2008), adopting the hegemonic global rhetoric regarding the phenomenon and thus reifying the mytho-conceptualization of the Amazon as especially vulnerable/dangerous region for human trafficking (Olivar & Melo, 2022). Through carefully building partnerships with local women who migrated to Suriname and then the Netherlands to work in the sex trade, this collective changed its hegemonic anti-trafficking point of view (Hazeu, 2011). SODIREITOS’s actions came to be guided by the experience of these woman and of their more localized and embodied demands. This pushed the collective to abandon its “trafficking” paradigm to instead focus upon the human rights, violence, and violations associated with these women’s systemic and varied experiences of mobility and migrations (SODIREITOS, 2011). Moreover, our work with people actively engaged with sexual economies in and through the Amazon, has enabled us to think up four points for a research agenda; this shares aspects with

154  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration the categories prisoner-family-member, indigenous women, and refugee mobilities as well. We detail here the four key research angles. First, the Amazon and its borders extend as a space not only traversed from one side to the other in the cruel search for leftover scraps of capital (such as we see in the classic metaphor of forced migrations, expansions, and trafficking), but as spaces of presence, habitation, and active/affective construction. There are countless examples of this to be found in the region, such as the cis and trans sex workers from Brazil and Colombia about whom Olivar (2015, 2016, 2017, 2019) has written. Perhaps the best-known and emblematic example of this point, in the case of sex work, is the life of Brazilian prostitute and activist Lourdes Barreto (Calabria, 2020). Lourdes migrated from another state to work selling sex in the mines of the state of Pará during the middle of the military dictatorship in the period of the greatest mining/ logging expansion along the Amazonian border. She then became a professional sex worker and, over the next 40 years, raised a big family and created one of the most active social movements of sex workers in the world (the Brazilian Network of Sex Workers), engaged in fighting for women, sex workers, and migrant rights in the capital city of Belém in the Brazilian state of Pará. Second, these mobilities are multi-scalar and multimodal (over air, land, and rivers), crossing, producing, and involving several borders. They occur across the transcontinental borders of Brazil (for example, Brazil, Suriname, and then to the Netherlands); or between cities and towns of different scales and over varying distances (among these Cali, Colombia, Tabatinga, Brazil and Iquitos, Peru, passing through small riverside towns, for example; or among Tabatinga, Manaus, and the megalopolis of São Paulo); between trans/national regions (e.g., between the Amazon and the Caribbean, or between the Andean region of Colombia and the Brazilian Amazon); over large transborder spaces (like the space between Brazil, Peru, and Colombia); and also within Amazon cities and communities over a range of work or commercial spaces and structures. A denser, comparative, and detailed comprehension of these mobilities could be part of a collaborative research agenda over the next several years. Third, in opposition to the images of super-victimization, enslavement, forced migration, and “trafficking,” what we see in the mobilities and presences associated with sexual economies is the enormous and constant autonomous mobility of trans and cis adult women through networks of kinship, friendship, and precarious work. Data consistently show that sex workers in various cities, countries, and regions use communication networks to keep apprised of laws, places to work, working conditions, strategies for moving about, warnings, and violence. These networks are also made up of localized third parties, friends, and relatives (Olivar, 2019). Furthermore, information on the dynamics of deceit, document confiscation, and unlawful imprisonment within the context of these mobilities in the Amazon is always hard to come by, problematic, and scarce. There is more consistent information about situations of violence, deceit, and exploitation when it comes to underage – often indigenous – women in organized relationships that are often exploitative. The relationships sometimes involve the rape of girls under the age of 12 by men who are usually older, white, and in a position of local power: businessmen, politicians, high-ranking military officials, and religious leaders. Fourth, the sexual mobilities of cis and trans women in, from, and out of the Amazon are also social and have political implications. Women engaged in these ordinary and intense mobilities confront poverty and the most intimate and local structures of patriarchy (strongly manifest in the many forms of gender violence in domestic and public spaces). Through these dynamics of movement (that often last for years), women from and in the Amazon present

Women’s mobilities: a blacklight on gender and care in the Amazon  155 themselves as political and sexual subjects, as economically independent women, and as having knowledge of different languages, currencies, countries, and people. Through these mobilities, they distance themselves from the positions of extreme poverty, exoticism, or victimization externally imposed upon their bodies. Many of these women nomadically traverse the region, living a structural condition of being expelled, sometimes covering thousands of kilometers in search of the riches of the Amazon, and other times leaving the Amazon to “make a living abroad.” As they move, these women maintain and strengthen bonds with/in their villages, poor outskirt neighborhoods, and small towns. Through their travels, sex work, experimentation with gender, and remittances, they affirm themselves as good mothers. Their sons and daughters grow up in better conditions and enjoy more stable homes (Nóbrega, 2016; Olivar, 2019). Through the practices of transborder–transnational/local money circulation in which they actively participate, they also construct and reinforce linkages to local economies (funding small family enterprises) that help postpone the end of the world or temporarily keep in check dynamics of impoverishment and expulsion.

SHADOW POLITICS AND THEIR BLACKLIGHT When the first news of Covid-19 reached us in February 2020, Flávia Melo and José Miguel Olivar were in São Gabriel da Cachoeira, well known as the most indigenous city in Brazil (more than 70% of the city population is composed of people from 23 ethnic groups of 4 major linguistic families), in the northwestern Brazilian Amazon, engaged in ongoing research on and work with indigenous women. Fabio Candotti was in Manaus strengthening political partnerships that ultimately led to a social movement for prison abolition. In the weeks that followed, we all experienced (to different degrees, under different severities, and for different durations) illness and mourning and the feeling that worlds were ending. This feeling was not cast in the almost fictional general terms of “humanity” or in terms of any sort of epidemiological quantification, but in relation to specific territories, peoples, and groups that had become the targets of intensified civilizatory and necropolitical projects (Olivar et al., 2021).7 Contrary to generalizing assumptions about the isolation of the Amazon and the possibility of the Amazon acting as a natural barrier to biological risk, the “distant” threat reached us quickly. Within weeks, the state of Amazonas became one of the epicenters of the pandemic in Brazil and the world. Not surprisingly, from that point on, we witnessed the tireless engagement of our allies caring for their own in the villages and cities, on the streets, and in the prisons. For them, it was all about the continuation and intensification of processes of resistance, self-organization, and care. In 2020–21, while states governments suspended visits, inspections, and supplies to prisons across the country we followed, from Manaus, the strengthening of a translocal network of prisoners’ families actions, which positioned incarceration subject in both demonstrations on the streets and countless debates on social media. This was an assemblage weaved by a few women of different regions and religions (Catholic, Evangelical, and Afro-Brazilian), which cared for hundreds of thousands of prisoners in the distance. Through their testimonies and theories, they showed how the policies of “health” can be a perverse management of the limits between life and death, management of suffering; 7 Regarding the pandemic in São Gabriel da Cachoeira and in Amazonas, see Olivar et al. (2021), Costa (2021a, 2021b).

156  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration and how Covid-19, despite its real danger, became one more justification for innovations in a regime of torture. On another battlefield, we also witnessed an enormous mobilization in response to the Covid-19 pandemic led by indigenous women of the Rio Negro. In this mobilization, ancestral knowledge, biomedical–scientific knowledge, individual and collective trajectories of struggle marked by gender, myth-cosmological references, non-human agencies (plants, animals, and spiritual beings), and political alliances with humanitarian and international environmental groups were reinforced and (re)constructed. Mobility, conversation, and healing practices were activated in order to protect bodies and territories. Based on Isabelle Stengers’ propositions (2011, 2015, 2018; Stengers & Bordeleau, 2011), we understand these mobilizations as a cosmopolitics of care (Olivar et al., 2021), capable of appropriating reduced biopolitical and sanitary resources, but going far beyond these to strongly confront necropolitical trends. This pluriversal and ontological policy (De la Cadena, 2019; De la Cadena & Blaser, 2018) is based on the experience of deep knowledge and deep distrust of the state, of the nation and of “white,” colonial, multilateral economies and policies cloaked in legality and institutionalism. These politics are enacted by connecting the most diverse actors across multiple borders engaged in dismantlings. The research agenda we are trying to develop thus grows from some aberrant alliances with shadow and racialized economies that fall outside categorization and a single, unbending concept. It grows from shadow politics too. The alliances we seek to construct are alliances neither with the white Eurocentered academic field, lit by white light, nor with the colonial and benevolent forces of international humanitarianism (Fassin, 2011). They are also not alliances with the more masculine, punitive, and whitewashed progressive camp mobilized by ideas of industrial economic “development.” Our investment is in the transformation of the points of view from which, in a hegemonic way, the social sciences, public health, and humanitarianism have read these peoples, processes, territories, and relationships. It centers on seeking to build a research agenda that is theoretically and methodologically nurtured and guided by relationships from the shadows, from knowledge, bodies in alliance (Butler, 2015), and experiences that are hegemonically read only as victims, suspects, and problematic – ultimately as only killable or salvageable. Finally, freely inspired by Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Black Feminist Poethics, we desire an agenda in which colonial micropolicies make themselves seen and felt under the blacklight emitted by these shadow politics. As Silva points out, “Blacklight does not illuminate: it makes things emanate or shine”; it is “a black feminist device for tracing correspondences that can expose how juridical and economic architectures of colonial/racial violence enter into the very construction of the analytical tools available to critiques of global capital” (2017: 244). In this way, we seek to learn to recognize, within heterogeneous and disjunctive sets of alliances and sets of knowledge, a valid and necessary vantage point, one that is blacklighted. We see this as essential for reflecting on and “reading” gender, racisms, mobilities, and capitalism from countercolonial (existent and [un]common) positionalities that are brimming with futures (Stengers, 2011; Silva, 2019). This allows us to better understand “transformations of gendering, in women’s subjectivities, and in women’s notions of membership” (Sassen, 1996: 12) and of resistance, struggle, and inhabitation in the Anthropocene and through chronic processes of “expulsion” (Sassen, 2014, 2021). In this sense, not only are the structures of violence and expulsion linked to global migratory regimes illuminated with a certain blacklight,

Women’s mobilities: a blacklight on gender and care in the Amazon  157 but so too are the civilizatory (and thus potentially colonial) demands implicit in the most common Eurocentric analyses. In summary, our proposal consists of three “positions”: an initial theoretical frame, a kind of onto-epistemological implication of our points of view, and a methodological prospect. First of all, we are developing a theoretical position about power, personhood, and relations in a contemporary post/neocolonial world, which is influenced by relational theories in socio-anthropology in a frame built over decades (such as Foucault, 1980, 1995; Deleuze & Guattari, 1980; Strathern, 1991; Butler, 1999; Haraway, 1991; McClintock, 1995; Latour, 2005), by some de/anti-colonial theorists (such as Kopenawa & Albert, 2015; Rivera Cusicanqui, 2010; Mbembe, 2003; Fanon, 1986) and by the feminisms that have emerged over the last 40 years: intersectional, Chicano, Black, puta, trans, and penal abolitionism (such as Silva, 2019; Gonzalez, 1988; Anzaldúa, 1987; Davis, 2003). This approach is also related to “shifts” that conceptualize movement and mobility as something beyond migration and stasis managed by nation-states, and thus as something more (or less) than the result of expulsions and inhumanities, even for those who live on the run from hunger and the police. Thinking about movement means paying attention to micropolitical regimes of mobility and presence (Glick-Schiller & Salazar, 2013; Olivar, Cunha & Rosa, 2015), including transborder mobility, presences, and creation (Iglesias-Prieto, 2014). At the same time, “movement is itself the inhabitant’s way of knowing” (Ingold, 2011, p. 154). Thus, we can think about it as a function of territorialities, relatedness, and knowledge, a composition of multiple worlds where we find suffering, but also a kind of care and protection that is not in humanitarian governmentality framings. Secondly, we are interested in emphasizing an onto-epistemic perspective. We position ourselves in a political and epistemic alliance (Strathern, 1991) with those who have experienced expulsions, who live lives and build societies in the “shadow economies,” on the border between the legal and illegal (Telles, 2010), from beneath the wounds of colonialism and racism (Kilomba, 2019; Silva, 2019). Old-school participant observation doesn’t fit us anymore and our allies are not “natives,” let alone “our natives.” Research has become just a part of our practice as we follow and collaborate with their fights and projects for the future. This means that we are implicated and forced to reflect on our own bodies, territories, movements, and words, that also cross and make borders (Melo, 2020; Candotti, 2022). Finally, we adopt a theoretical–methodological per/prospective. Given our backgrounds and our labor and working spaces and requirements, if we can (re)claim “ethnography” – this old and strange practice – it is only as a relational and situated arrangement of knowledge practices with people on the move and only not as a method (Strathern, 1991). From there, we are working on something that, amidst cosmopolitical and de/anti-colonial debate, gradually becomes “impure” epistemology, forged “along the border, in the in-between” (Melo, 2020, p. 57; Anzaldúa, 1987).

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11. Lack of opportunities for indigenous young women in Guatemala: forced mobility and absence of social protection systems Aracely Martínez Rodas, Ángel del Valle and Ramón Zamora

THE GUATEMALAN CONTEXT Located in Central America, Guatemala is a developing country and 65% of its 15 million inhabitants are younger than 30 years. Guatemala is also one of the most diverse countries in the region, with 44% of the population self-identifying with any of three indigenous groups (41.7% Maya, 1.8% Xinca, 0.2% Afro indigenous and 0.1% Garifuna) and 56% self-identifying as Mestizos or Ladinos (INE, 2019c). According to the latest national census (INE, 2019c), women represent 51.5% of the population and face disproportionate disadvantages, compared with their male counterparts; an increase according to residence (rural vs urban), age (young vs older populations) and ethnicity (indigenous vs non-indigenous). Although the national average in educational attainment is 6 years, women display an average of 5.3, while indigenous women report only 4 years. Guatemala’s economy grows an average of 3.1% annually, but poverty continues to have disproportionate effects on the indigenous population. At a national level, 75% of indigenous population live in poverty, compared with 36% of the Mestizo population, reflecting the unequal access to education and concentration of services in urban centers (INE, 2019c; ICEFI, 2021a, 2021b). Despite the striking levels of poverty, Guatemala ranks as the 10th country with the lowest public income and the third in Latin America. This is a consequence of a historical reduction of tributary load and tax evasion, inefficient tributary administration, contraband, and a tributary structure that depends mainly on indirect taxes (ICEFI, 2021a). The COVID-19 pandemic contributed to amplify inequalities for the most disadvantaged populations, bringing an important loss of livelihoods for the poorest households, affecting mostly lodging and food services, transportation and storage, construction, and disrupting education services. Consequently, there is a projected decline in the Human Development Index to 0.663, increased inequality and overall poverty (3% increase at all levels), and a significant increase in extreme poverty conditions (United Nations, 2021). Combined, the inequalities that affect the population depict a country that reproduces poverty and lack of opportunities for all and challenging upbringing conditions for youth. In this context, indigenous youth struggle to find opportunities to meet their aspirations for better futures, leading to unsafe mobility from their communities to rural areas from a young age.

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Lack of opportunities for indigenous young women in Guatemala  163

METHODOLOGY This chapter examines the lack of opportunities for indigenous youth in Guatemala, providing confirmation that the lack of opportunities can lead young people to find alternatives for better futures in internal mobility and international migration. The data we used in this chapter are part of a qualitative study conducted by the Population Council in 2019, in collaboration with Universidad del Valle de Guatemala, to examine the range of opportunities that municipal governments offer to indigenous youth, with a gender perspective. Domains of analysis included perceptions of budget allocation to municipal programs for indigenous youth, descriptions of the projects and programs that offer opportunities for young indigenous women, and perceptions on forced mobility, social protection systems and gender perspectives. In-depth interviews were conducted with 69 local government officers and community leaders that work across the areas of education, gender, health and youth in seven mainly-indigenous municipalities (see Figure 11.1). According to the 2018 national census (INE, 2019b), the population of these municipalities self-identifies as indigenous, ranging from 62% in San Luis, Petén, to 100% in Nahualá, Sololá. Informants were selected using a snowball convenience sample, resulting in the selection of 35 women and 34 men who were between the ages 24 to 68, with 54% of participants self-identifying as indigenous and 46% as mestizo. For each municipality, the sample was planned to include a minimum of eight informants. Municipalities were selected based on preexisting relationships with the Population Council through the implementation of the Abriendo Oportunidades program. The interview instrument included questions related to existing youth programs in each municipality, including projects or activities that engage indigenous youth in the areas of education, gender, employment, recreation, sexual and reproductive health services (SRHS), human rights, prevention of gender-based violence (GBV) and comprehensive sexuality education (CSE). Participation was voluntary and all interviews were conducted in Spanish. We used the qualitative software Dedoose to analyze verbatim transcriptions of all interviews and document findings in analytic memos that identify themes and patterns. Data were coded using pseudonyms, following procedures approved by the Population Council’s IRB (protocol #895). The following sections present highlights of the perceptions shared by local government officers and community leaders on the opportunities that exist for indigenous youth.

GENDER AND YOUTH A decade ago, the Human Development Report for Guatemala (UNDP, 2012) highlighted that Guatemalan youth (ages 15 to 29) faced significant challenges to achieve their full potential, such as lack of access to secondary education and vocational training, a weak road infrastructure that disconnects rural communities from urban centers, and low access to health and justice services. This situation is particularly challenging for young indigenous women, whose life trajectory is characterized by late entry to school, grade repetition and early dropout around age 12 (Hallman et al., 2006). Some years later, the Population Council published an updated version of the landmark report “Investing When It Counts” (McCarthy et al., 2016) advocating for increased public investments on very young adolescents (ages 10–14), whose futures depend on how success-

164  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration

Figure 11.1

Location of municipalities included in the study

fully they negotiate the transitions to the roles of citizens, spouses, parents and workers. For young indigenous girls, early adolescence is a critical window that determines a successful or challenging transition to adulthood. In modern societies, this conceptualization of youth is related to the extension of education and the homogenization of social ages, but in Guatemala, as in other underdeveloped countries, poverty and social exclusion heavily press families and communities and limit their access to opportunities, pushing minors to unsafe labor markets, migration, and other survival strategies (UNDP, 2012). In the opinion of all informants, in all municipalities, budget allocations to youth programs are scarce and limited to sports and cultural events. In the opinion of a female Maya Kaqchikel municipal officer, working on sexual and reproductive health initiatives, this is a reason that explains the high rates of maternal mortality and adolescent pregnancies among indigenous women. A Mayan male officer agrees with this limitation of resources and adds that the national government does not offer enough resources to prioritize youth programs,

Lack of opportunities for indigenous young women in Guatemala  165 [t]o find ways and look for whatever resources are available, because we don’t have a national fund for reproductive health. Most actions focused on health and reproductive health are not spent because of the lack of presence from government programs in rural communities. (Maya Kaqchikel, female municipal officer, Patzún, Chimaltenango) Our municipal government doesn’t have enough resources to reach all youth. We have an allocation of GTQ 33 million (4.1 million USD). It is impossible to allocate enough resources to youth with such limited budget. (Maya Mam, male municipal officer, San Juan Ostuncalco, San Marcos)

Access to basic opportunities such as the right to identity, health, security, education, access to technology, work, leisure time and civic participation are key for indigenous youth. The 2012 UNDP Report classified such opportunities into four categories: the opportunity to live, the opportunity to learn, the opportunity to participate, and the opportunity to enjoy. Although the report shows clear evidence that links access these opportunities to enhanced development outcomes, life for young indigenous women continues to be characterized by exclusion and limited access to basic entitlements. According to Gregorio Gil (1998) (considering Dominican migration), girls are born to gender inequalities that become entrenched in households, where women’s tasks are organized as productive or reproductive, and their access to resources is undermined. Power relations that maintain this distribution of gendered roles and opportunities as normalized practices have shown to be detrimental to the wellbeing of young girls and boys. Immersed in a reality of lack of opportunities, migration becomes a household survival strategy for those with less resources (Kearny, 1986), with different exposure to risk according to gender and residence (Monzón, 2006; Glockner, 2021). As reported by informants, access to education continues to be a disadvantage for rural youth. Informants identified a clear divide in opportunities offered in urban centers and rural communities that favor urban youth. Ideas that favor boys over girls and costs associated with education, particularly at the secondary level, play against parent’s perception of the value of education. Along with social norms, challenging access to rural communities is reflected in the low quality of education that discourages parents from sending their children to school. The urban center offers more opportunities. In some rural communities we don’t even have secondary schools. If young boys and girls want to continue their education, they must pay for transportation, and due to poverty, they are only left to dropout. (Maya K’iche’, female municipal officer, Patzún, Chimaltenango) Education is not of good quality because teachers don’t show up to teach with consistency in our communities. Some teachers don’t even come. Therefore, people think education is a waste of time. (Maya Q’eqchi’ female community leader, Chisec, Alta Verapaz)

Also, sexual education programs are scarce due to conservative views. Given the importance of access to SRHS for girls and young women, we asked about municipal programs that offer CSE. As described by both male and female municipal officers, conservative societal views at all levels are a critical funding challenge to implement programs on CSE and SRHS that are intertwined with conservative views and negative social norms that favor boys over girls. In our communities men believe that a woman is cheating [her husband] if she looks for family planning methods. (Mestizo female municipal officer, San Luis, Petén) Sexuality education should be a priority given that we see adolescents as young as 12 and 14 having children. Parents still believe that sexuality education will lead to more pregnancies and sexual

166  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration activity among youth. We wish for an education that includes sexuality education, so young people can pursue their dreams without limitations. (Maya K’iche’ female municipal officer, Totonicapán, Totonicapán) We see that boys move more freely. They can go and stay with relatives to pursue their education, and their families support them. But it is not the same with girls. They are not allowed to leave the house because of machismo, and that restricts their access to education. (Maya K’iche’ male social workers, Patzún, Chimaltenango)

FORCED MOBILITY According to Tognetti and Jackson (2017), forced migration worldwide rose from 39.9 million in 1997 to 65.6 million in 2016. By 2021, this trend adds up to 82.4 million due to different causes, usually interconnected and mutually reinforced, including protracted crises, conflicts, food shortage, increased poverty and vulnerability, and climate change related events and disasters (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees [UNHCR], 2017). In Latin America, as Coraza de los Santos (2020) states, forced mobility has been a long tradition as well as a political mechanism of exclusion in the 20th century, not only resulting in the involuntary displacement but also affecting the countries’ social network and development. In this context, Coraza de los Santos highlights the consequences of precarious economies that have been added up to violence of different sources, including the State, creating a complex system that leads families to choose migration as a strategy in a negotiated scenario. This scenario includes social networks, resources available to deal with border control mechanisms and other obstacles to move to the chosen destinations, which can be internal or international. According to Glockner (2021), in less developed countries with highly fractured societies, migration becomes indubitably fate instead of choice. As a multi-layered reality, forced migration is connected to different forms of violence (criminal, structural, gendered, etc.) that can be considered drivers of migration. The term can also be equivalent to displacement of forced migration (IOM, 2019), and can be distinguished from other types of mobility in the sense that individuals engage in a complex social dynamic between the desired/undesired or voluntary/involuntary movement in response to a detonating event (Coraza de los Santos & Arriola, 2017). Forced mobility is also related to the possibility and capability to move and has a close connection to concepts like agency and the ability to negotiate options for coping with crises and survival strategies (Sassen, 2003; Ikuteyijo, 2020). The latter is another crucial element in an intersectional analysis, given that people’s lives frequently depend on mobility as a strategy, but individuals and families require minimum resources to move, including money, information about the journey and the destination city life, employment possibilities, social networks, etc. For young people growing up in challenging contexts, there might exist a sense of urgency within the decision to move and there is a state of vulnerability enhanced by the irregular travel and lack of recognition or inclusion in a protected status (Coraza de los Santos, 2020: 139). The characterization of forced migration has been used to describe the decisions that lead to the movement of refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaced populations, climate migrants and politically persecuted persons. Critical voices such as Gzesh (2008) expanded the concept to include economic migrants into a form of forced mobility; and Wets (2007) discusses that

Lack of opportunities for indigenous young women in Guatemala  167 forced migration and migration without choice are fueled by violence, persecution, lack of wellbeing, food and income shortage, unemployment, and daunting economic opportunities. A holistic look at the theory of forced migrations seems to describe the reality of young indigenous women who decide to migrate. The report Girls on the Move: Adolescent Girls and Migration in the Developing World (Temin et al., 2013) described challenging and unsafe patterns of internal mobility for young girls in contrast to their motivations to migrate: looking for education, increasing economic opportunities with stable and paid work, and/or escaping violence. The report suggests that urban centers and cities should be prepared to support girls and young women as they move, equipping them with personal, social and economic assets before they migrate. Finally, the report calls for more and better evidence on the diversity of migrant girl’s experiences. Data collected in this study indicate that opportunities for indigenous youth are limited to precarious and low-paid jobs. Informants shared the perception that indigenous young women are confined to unsafe jobs as domestic workers or low-paid jobs in textile production. To access these unsafe opportunities, boys and girls must travel to other cities. In communities where families can’t afford these costs, girls stay at home and are left with alternatives such as marriage. Informants did not offer much information on international migration, as it was not common to see young people migrating because of the high cost to pay for a “guide” or “coyote”. However, they did recognize the positive impact that remittances can bring to households. Girls come to the urban center to look for a job as domestic workers. Most of them don’t have enough years of education, so they can’t access other jobs that require administrative or sales skills. They also work at tortillerias and corn shops. (Mestizo male municipal officer, Totonicapán) Adolescents have to contribute to their family’s income. So they migrate to the capital to find jobs as domestic workers. (Maya Mam female municipal officer, San Juan Ostuncalco, San Marcos) Girls have to work as domestic workers and care after children, as nannies. They move to the capital to look for work but are employed as domestic workers. This is the only alternative they have to improve their lives. (Maya Kaqchikel male municipal officer, Patzún, Chimaltenango)

SOCIAL PROTECTION AND HUMAN RIGHTS Human rights are intrinsically attached to a person and are strongly linked to the concept of development as a multidimensional process of improving the quality of human lives. Human mobility and migration fit in this spectrum of social guarantees, safeguarding the right to remain in one’s place of origin with access to basic social development conditions or migrating through secure and protected channels. The concept of social protection also aligns with human rights (Cecchini et al., 2014), as it is considered a mechanism that contributes to the acquisition of social and economic rights and ensures that countries advance towards achieving the development goals included in the Millennium Development Goals (2000–2015) and the Sustainable Development Goals (2015–2030) (Cecchini et al., 2014). In a similar line, the International Labour Organization (ILO, 2011) conceptualizes the enforcement of social protection guarantees as “sets of basic social security guarantees that should ensure as a minimum that, over the life cycle, all in need have access to essential health care and to basic income

168  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration security which together secure effective access to goods and services defined as necessary at the national level.” A review of governmental actions in Guatemala covering social protection from a historic perspective starting in the mid-20th century, Martínez Franzoni (2013) shows that the effects of the internal war (1970–1996) produced civil unrest that resulted in the displacement of millions as refugees to Mexico or internally. Although the national Peace Accords (1996) recognized the demands for inclusion and attention to indigenous populations, indigenous youth continue to lag behind global development goals. In general terms the State has not fully accomplished these Accords to date, keeping millions of its citizens in conditions of social exclusion and aggravated poverty. According to the National Statistics Institute (INE, 2019a), in the most recent economic survey the minimum wage for the formal sector was the equivalent US$480 per month, while in the informal sector it is US$222 per month. Even though the formal minimum wage is increased every year, this increase does not correspond with income inequalities between economic sectors, and barely covers the basic food basket price for 2019 (US$472). The same survey indicates that 70% of the economically active population works in the informal sector in the rural areas, with majority of indigenous population, who usually work without a formal contract, and lack social security or employment benefits (INE, 2019a). With the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a 3% loss of formal jobs, contributing to the increase of poverty and deteriorated conditions for social protection (United Nations, 2021). Adding to the large proportion of informal workers in the national labor market, families without any support reflected on the lack of public programs at local levels. This is especially more impacting on girls and women in rural areas, whose opportunities are very few. The challenges for local municipal governments to comply with the demands for the inclusion of youth have yet to be studied and documented in more depth and detail, but can be observed in the following quotes: Right now, the Health Center is under construction, which I believe is great, but at the community level, there are no health posts. In some communities there has been minimum health coverage, but it is a minimum, so there are not many services for women, who usually have to travel to urban areas to access health services. (Maya Mam female municipal officer, San Juan Ostuncalco, Quetzaltenango) With migration there are more opportunities to overcome financial hardships, and more access to education. When they migrate, youth can pursue professional careers that are not an option in their communities of origin. (Maya Kaqchikel male nongovernmental organization officer, Patzún, Chimaltenango)

CONCLUSION Qualitative evidence collected from local government officers in indigenous municipalities shows that opportunities for indigenous youth are characterized by lack of public funding and different types of social exclusion for rural youth, particularly for young girls. When access to education and resources is not available in rural communities, migration follows. As a consequence, the mobility of indigenous youth is unsafe and leads to low-paid jobs that disproportionally expose females to domestic work and commercial exploitation. During the research, there was consensus among informants that cities and urban centers offer more opportunities to study and work, but poor rural households cannot afford to pay for

Lack of opportunities for indigenous young women in Guatemala  169 the costs associated with their children’s pursuit of opportunities in cities. Although internal migration in Guatemala has existed historically, the search for opportunities from an early age for young indigenous youth, particularly for indigenous girls, fits the definition of forced mobility described in the theoretical framework of this chapter. In rural indigenous municipalities, forced mobility results in different experiences for males and females, and, in general terms, creates more nuanced disadvantages for indigenous girls. Although informants and interviewees did not offer much information on international migration, challenges reported for in-country mobility show that international migration would be far more complex to manage for young indigenous boys and girls. The combination of negative gender norms, exclusion from public investment and lack of opportunities in rural communities seems to be the norm in the life trajectories of young indigenous girls. Young people’s search for better futures is unsafe due to the weak social protection systems enforced at the national and municipal levels. As confirmed by informants, low investment in youth programs, along with conservative views on gender norms that affect girls from a young age, translate to lack of social protection. Although there are government institutions implementing programs that target youth, their budget and/or personnel are limited, and their impact is very low. Derived from the lack of public services, protection programs and income sources, young women are forced to engage in strategies such as internal or international migration. Moreover, as access to social media expands, transnational information becomes more available, making it possible for more indigenous women to migrate in irregular channels with their children to the United States, even being aware of the dangers that this journey implies. However, in both types of migration, young indigenous women are exposed to different forms of violence and abuse. If Guatemala continues to undermine education and job opportunities for indigenous youth, forced mobility will increase and will lead to wider risks due to international migration. The risks related to forced mobility and unsafe migration weaken national and municipal protection systems and deprive indigenous youth from reaching their full potential, perpetuating social and gender inequality. In order to disrupt this trend, it is urgent to increase public investment in youth programming across rural municipalities, ensuring that resources are available for children and youth. If the mobility and migration trends continue to be overlooked, consequences can be deadly for young people who decide to migrate in search for better futures. On December 9, 2021, a trailer with approximately 150 irregular migrants from Central America and other countries in the region, overturned in a road near Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas, Mexico, killing more than 50 men and women, including minors. Most of the migrants from Guatemala came from poor and indigenous communities. In this scenario, forced human mobility requires a holistic approach with a gender and intersectional perspective, in which public policy strengthens investment in rural and impoverished areas, considering social protection and security against uncertainty and crises.

REFERENCES Cecchini, S., F. Figuera & C. Robles (2014). Sistemas de Protección social en América Latina y el Caribe. Una perspectiva comparada. Serie Políticas Sociales, 202. Santiago de Chile: CEPAL – Naciones Unidas.

170  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration Coraza de los Santos, E. (2020). ¿De qué hablamos cuando nos referimos a las movilidades forzadas? Una reflexión desde la realidad latinoamericana. Estudios Políticos, 57, 128–148. Coraza de los Santos, E. & L. Arriola (2017). La movilidad forzada vista desde la frontera sur mexicana. Universidad Pontificia Comillas: Observatorio Iberoamericano sobre Movilidad Humana, Migraciones y Desarrollo (OBIMID). Glockner, V. (2021). Niñez Migrante. Migración, Ceja, I., S. Álvarez Velasco & U.D. Berg (eds). Buenos Aires: CLACSO. Gregorio Gil, C. (1998). Migración femenina: su impacto en las relaciones de género. Madrid: NARCEA Ediciones. Gzesh, S. (2008). Una redefinición de la migración forzosa con base en los derechos humanos. Migración y Desarrollo, 10, 97–126. Accessed November 11, 2021 at https://​www​.redalyc​.org/​articulo​.oa​?id​=​ 66001005 Hallman, K., S. Peccara, J. Catino and M. J. Ruiz (2006). Multiple disadvantages of Mayan Females: the effects of gender, ethnicity, poverty, and residence on education in Guatemala, Policy Research Division Working Paper no. 211, New York: Population Council. ICEFI (Instituto Centroamericano de Estudios Fiscales). (2021a). La migración forzada en Guatemala: algunas reflexiones económicas y fiscales. Guatemala: ICEFI – Plataforma Migración y Desarrollo – DVV International. ICEFI (Instituto Centroamericano de Estudios Fiscales). (2021b). Mujeres de Guatemala: un análisis de sus condiciones económicas y sociales. Guatemala: ICEFI – European Union. Ikuteyijo, L.O. (2020). Irregular migration as survival strategy: narratives from youth in urban Nigeria. West African youth challenges and opportunity pathways: gender and cultural studies in Africa and the Diaspora, McLean, M.L. (ed.). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Accessed October 30, 2021 at https://​ link​.springer​.com/​content/​pdf/​10​.1007​%2F978​-3​-030​-21092​-2​_3​.pdf ILO (2011). Social protection floor. Accessed July 5, 2021 at https://​www​.ilo​.org/​secsoc/​areas​-of​-work/​ policy​-development​-and​-applied​-research/​social​-protection​-floor/​lang​-​-en/​index​.htm INE (Instituto Nacional de Estadística) (2019a). Encuesta de Empleo e Ingresos: principales resultados, Guatemala. Accessed September 10, 2021 at https://​www​.ine​.gob​.gt/​sistema/​uploads/​2020/​01/​15/​ 202001​15173246FC​RG98JyTWVA​tsV4Lmtyn4​3QFgTufmZg​.pdf INE (Instituto Nacional de Estadística) (2019b). XII Censo Nacional de Población y VII de Vivienda. Resultados Censo 2018. Guatemala: Instituto Nacional de Estadística. INE (Instituto Nacional de Estadística) (2019c). Principales resultados Censo 2018. Guatemala: IN/ FAO/UNFPA. Accessed September 25, 2021 at https://​www​.censopoblacion​.gt/​archivos/​Principales​ _resultados​_Censo2018​.pdf IOM (International Organization for Migration) (2017). Encuesta sobre Migración Internacional de Personas Guatemaltecas y Remesas 2016. Guatemala: IOM. IOM (International Organization for Migration) (2019). Glossary on migration. International Migration Law, 34. Geneva: IOM. Kearny, M. (1986). From the invisible hand to visible feet: anthropological studies of migration and development. Annual Review of Anthropology, 15, 331–361. Martínez Franzoni, J. (2013). Sistemas de Protección social en América Latina y el Caribe: Guatemala. Santiago de Chile: CEPAL – Naciones Unidas. McCarthy, K., M. Brady & K. Hallman (2016). Investing when it counts: reviewing the evidence and charting a course of research and action for very young adolescents. New York: The Population Council Inc. Monzón, A.S. (2006). Las viajeras invisibles: mujeres migrantes en la región centroamericana y sur de México. Guatemala: Project Counselling Service. Sassen, S. (2003). The feminization of survival: alternative global circuits. In M. Morokvasic, U. Erel and K. Shinozaki (eds), Crossing borders and shifting boundaries. Wiesbaden: Springer, pp. 60–77. Temin, M., M. Montgomery, S. Engebretsen & K. Barker (2013). Girls on the move: adolescent girls and migration in the developing world. New York: The Population Council, Inc. Tognetti, S., & J. Jackson (2017). Forced migration and protracted crises: a multilayered approach. Guidance Note. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. UNDP (United Nations Program for Development) (2012). Guatemala: ¿un país de oportunidades para la juventud? Informe Nacional de Desarrollo Humano 2011/2012. Guatemala: UNDP.

Lack of opportunities for indigenous young women in Guatemala  171 United Nations (2021). Análisis Común de País: actualización 2021. Guatemala: United Nations. Accessed October 25, 2021 at https://​guatemala​.un​.org/​sites/​default/​files/​2021​-07/​CCA​%20update​ %20summary​%202021​.pdf United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNCHR) (2021). Global trends in forced displacement, 2020. Copenhagen: UNCHR Global Data Service. Wets, J. (2007). El valor de los nexos “emigración y desarrollo” y emigración por elección frente a emigración por necesidad. Global Forum on Migration Development.

PART III ASIA

12. A study of the lives of internally displaced women after the Fukushima disaster Anne Gonon

The Fukushima disaster on 11 March 2011 led to widespread displacement, as is always the case when an earthquake or tsunami occurs. Yet studies show the ways in which this disaster, which can be called environmental, was unique and led to displacement in various forms: both lasting internal migration and international immigration, striking in Japan, a country where the last wave of immigration dates to circa 1945. Japan is accustomed to managing natural disasters but in this case was confronted with a nuclear disaster that experts have called “unforeseeable”. What makes this internal migration process interesting to study is that it was driven by mothers, a phenomenon that researchers have richly studied too (Brettell 2016), but moreover it is its occurrence in a developed economy, a situation not studied as often as the usual environmental migrations. Studies of displacement caused by environmental disasters focus on risk management as prevention of economic, health or social problems, or plans for returning to normalcy. The case of Fukushima shows that these forms of disaster management may not be appropriate for some drastic disasters that prevent return to devastated areas unless human rights are denied in the name of an immoderate belief in technology. This chapter seeks to show how the vulnerabilization of the population displaced by the Fukushima disaster came about. We will base our analysis on Estelle Ferrarèse’s definition of vulnerability, which is useful in grasping not only the vulnerabilization process at play in the political management of the disaster, but also these displaced persons’ position in regular social welfare programmes and the system of norms that the situation disrupted (Ferrarèse 2019). Our hypothesis is that the unique aspects of the Fukushima case can provide tools for understanding the social and individual implications of internal migration for all societies, whatever their degree of wealth, and whether or not they apply the convention on environmental refugees.

1.

KEY FIGURES

Displacements due to environmental disaster can be broken down into international migration and internal migration. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs observed an increase in international immigration, from 74,679 people in 2011 to 97,223 people in 2017; closer analysis of the decision-making process would be needed to understand whether there were pre-existing personal plans to immigrate that the disaster may have precipitated, but one recent study focused on Japanese immigrants to Australia, the second destination for Japanese after the United States, who made this choice for environmental reasons (Oishi & Hamada 2019). In terms of internal migrations, the detailed comparative study by Abe (2014) shows the population movements that occurred between 2011 and 2014. What makes this research especially relevant is that it analyses the demographic conditions of the three prefectures 173

174  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration (Fukushima, Miyagi and Iwate) affected by the disaster, including the earthquake, the tsunami and the nuclear accident that caused extended radioactive contamination; it also includes the regular birth rate and the death rate, and the numbers of incoming and outgoing inhabitants for the prefectures during this period. In conclusion, a migratory flow was observed not only during the months of 2011, but continuing over the years that followed, leading to a decrease in population, in addition to the ageing of the local population. Differences can be seen between prefectures and depending on location, with the Fukushima prefecture most affected by outgoing flows. The population of reproductive age left definitively, a phenomenon that has not been observed at the time of a previous tsunami in the early 20th century (Fukkoshô 2021). This figure is incomplete to the extent that some households have not informed the municipalities of their change of residence, but in 2021, there were still 28,226 displaced people living outside the Fukushima prefecture. The scale of the displacements by region shows that people tended to give preference to regions located near the prefecture they were leaving – Kantô, 176,855; Tôhoku, 4,969; Hokkaidô, 835 – but nearly 30% of them also chose to settle a good distance from the prefecture hit hardest by contamination – Chûbû, 4,247; Kinki, 1,167; Kyûshû, 685; Chûgoku, 484; Okinawa, 134; Shikoku, 88.

2.

THE DEBATE OVER HOW TO QUALIFY DISPLACEMENT

With regard to the term “refugee”, nanmin, used for people who leave their country for political reasons, two other terms have been used for the displacement of people after the nuclear disaster, hinansha and hinanmin, with hinan meaning to take refuge. In the United Nations text on displaced persons translated into Japanese, it is the term hinanmin that is used, whereas the Japanese government’s texts simply refer to them as displaced persons, hinansha. This choice of term translates an ideological position, but also introduces a theoretical framework: in opting for the term “sha”, the government shows its decision to treat these people as individuals and not a group, thereby emphasizing the personal decision that they made. This distinction is related to the debate on the fundamental questions around how to insert the notion of climate disaster (natural and human-made) into political refugee law, and to recognize the same rights to health and economic welfare for people who have had to flee their homes because of a natural or human-made disaster (Mérenne-Schoumaker 2020). In this domain, the countries of the Global North are reluctant to apply the same considerations on the issue of refuge when it comes to their own population. The case of Japan is representative of this stance in that it illustrates this reluctance, and the debate in Japan around the Fukushima disaster is informative as to the motivations for not recognizing “environmental refugee” status, wherein the way the disaster is qualified, the State’s ability to accept responsibility, and the financial framework for relief for displaced populations are all factors of interest in analysing this matter of displacement. According to the High Commissioner for Refugees (HCR) definition in the text entitled Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, “Internally displaced persons are persons or groups of persons who have been forced or obliged to flee or to leave their homes or places of habitual residence, in particular as a result of or in order to avoid the effects of armed conflict, situations of generalized violence, violations of human rights or natural or human-made disasters, and who have not crossed an internationally recognized State border” (UNHCR 2001). The evacuation measures implemented during the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident led

A study of the lives of internally displaced women after the Fukushima disaster  175 to many people fleeing their homes and their place of residence to take refuge in designated places. In addition to these forced displacements organized by the Japanese government, there were also so-called “voluntary” displacements of people who did not live in the areas officially classified as contaminated with radioactivity, but who nonetheless left their homes and places of residence out of fear for their health and safety. Under pressure from non-profit organizations and the political world, the government in June 2012 passed a law entitled “Law on the Promotion of Measures to Support for the Daily Life of Nuclear Accident Victims, Especially Children”, sometimes called the Children’s Support Law. The text clearly acknowledges the existence of danger and therefore recognizes the possibility of choosing to move. Article 9 lists the forms of support that will be provided: guaranteed housing, help finding work, and support for the schooling of children. However, a lack of publicity on the law and the conservative Abe administration’s reluctance to specify the zones covered by the law, delayed the implementation of the material and financial measures (Higuchi 2021). The government never made any reference to the HCR text, even though dialogue with the United Nations Commission on Human Rights began in 2012. Notably, two assessments of the policy implemented after the accident have been conducted by this Commission: the first report by HCR emissary Anand Grover was done in 2012 (Grover 2012), and in 2021 another report drafted reaffirmed that the nuclear accident must be understood as an environmental disaster and, as such, treated as a humanitarian matter (UN experts 2021). It laments the fact that the Japanese government does not always recognize victims of the Fukushima disaster as having the status of internally displaced persons, and does not fulfil its obligations with regard to the international human rights conventions. In response, the Japanese government used a different register: rather than acknowledging that these were environmental displacements, it employed the usual register for evacuations decided during regular disasters, such as earthquakes, which are resolved by a return to the evacuated zones once the physical living conditions have been restored. In its policy for managing the disaster, the government established a ranking of displaced persons to define two types of compensation, and then, claiming to have cleaned up the zones that had been contaminated by radioactivity, urged people to return to their original place of residence (Takezawa 2020). There are several problems with this. First, the level of radioactivity the government deemed as normal to allow people to return was 20 mSv per year, which far exceeds the level of 1mSv/year recognized by the International Commission on Radiological Protection. Even more serious is the discontinuation of resettlement aid for people who, refusing to return, preferred to settle in another region, and this despite the principles laid out in the 2012 law, stating that returning cannot be forced. The lawsuits filed by displaced persons against the company managing the Fukushima plant, Tepco, and the government are based on these principles, which the government refuses to recognize. While it continues to support persons forced into displacement by offering them material and financial incentives for resettlement, the government has completely discontinued aid for those considered as voluntarily displaced. It is this latter group that has filed most of the lawsuits in various cities across Japan: Maebashi, Chiba, Kyôto, etc. In 2018, more than thirty collective actions were counted, representing some 10,000 plaintiffs, and these lawsuits served to define various compensation according to two types of zones (Ishibashi 2018). The Maebashi District Court found the State and Tepco liable and ordered them to pay damages on the grounds that the nuclear accident infringed upon the right to lead a “peaceful life”. This recognition of the State’s responsibility in this infringement on a human right had an influence

176  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration on the subsequent lawsuits. In 2017, the Chiba lawsuit went even farther, advancing a new notion: the loss of homeland. It raised fundamental questions about the spirit in which the notion of environmental refugee is intended, but the verdict denies the human aspects of this form of displacement (Tanabe 2020). It is based on data that are considered certain: the levels of acceptable and unacceptable radioactivity according to which the government imposed the evacuation, and the weather conditions and forecasting, justifying the evacuation in the name of protecting the populations living in these contaminated zones. In consideration of what remained a high level of radioactivity, and thus an epidemiological factor in risks of cancer, the Chiba District Court found that the refusal of forcibly displaced persons to return to live in their “homeland” was justified. But this precautionary attitude, which involves some scientific uncertainties about the effects of prolonged exposure to radioactivity, no longer holds in the case of voluntarily displaced persons: the court finds no objective scientific basis for their behaviour. The Chiba court’s ruling suggests that the choice of voluntary displacement is based solely on irrational elements such as emotion, fear and worry, and cannot be treated as forced displacement. This legal rationale is based on the sole epidemiological knowledge provided by statements by the government and official experts. In short, there are two opposing rationales: one based on risk, which is assessed according to scientific data, and the other based on care. It was in the Kyôto trial that the issue of voluntary displacement was examined from the perspective of care.

3.

GENDER IN MIGRATION

According to Ferrarèse’s thesis (2019), it can be said that the State institutes vulnerability through a symbolic act – this classification into two categories, forcibly displaced persons and voluntarily displaced persons – that has very tangible, real-world consequences for the lives of the displaced. Trials are an appeal for justice against the effects of this classification that institutes vulnerability; at the same time, trials also self-institute vulnerability in that the plaintiffs proclaim it themselves. At the heart of this dual movement are the normative expectations of the displaced persons – whether or not they file lawsuits for recognition – regarding the value of the lives of children and families. Surveys have been conducted among groups of displaced persons, notably in preparation for the lawsuits filed by these persons in different cities. Making implicit reference to environmental refugee status, these surveys covered all the problems of daily life faced by people distanced from their usual place of residence and family, including change in economic conditions, loss of family and social relationships, and stress examined from the perspective of PTSD (Tsujiuchi 2019; Takezawa 2020). Research on forced migrations within a developed country is in its infancy, and the concept of expulsion (Sassen 2019) is quite appropriate as the common thread in the analysis of strategies. In Fukushima, as we often see in cases of severe environmental damage, the forced evacuation policy caused a similar displacement effect, of whole towns and city neighbourhoods, which moved to locations determined by the government. However, the migration of “voluntary refugees” primarily involved nuclear families, mainly mothers who made the decision to leave, unlike with Chernobyl where the evacuation concerned the entire population living in the contaminated territory. Thus, this so-called environmental disaster allows us to examine the phenomenon of displacement from two angles: the displacement perceived more as an

A study of the lives of internally displaced women after the Fukushima disaster  177 individual “choice” than as an evacuation order, and the role that women played in deciding on this displacement. The word “choice” is ambivalent. In fact, the decision-making progress took time; the unknown aspect of the situation created disordered, distraught attitudes as previously unknown symptoms appeared (nosebleeds in children), which finally led to progressive perception of the dangers of irradiation. Thus in many cases, this was not an impulsive choice but rather a process that evolved over time (months, years), according to the people interviewed (Higuchi 2021; Yoshida 2016). Leaving gradually came to be seen as inevitable. At the same time, the consequences on material life in exile were not underestimated in the final decision, nor was the fact that leaving might have an impact on relationships with relatives (Yoshida), although the cases of marital separation, divorces, and severed ties with in-laws and friends were not anticipated (Takezawa 2020). Unlike in their usual lives, displaced people were forced to prioritize the health of their children over loyalty to extended family: children’s health became the ultimate priority. Although displacement often involved family units, one characteristic of this internal migration is that the vast majority of displaced persons are women. These women hence were subjected to a double structural vulnerabilization resulting from the matter of domicile, and a social welfare system that pauperizes single women. 3.1 Domicile Whereas caring for the health of one’s children became urgent immediately, it was also a long-term battle. Mothers and families sought to create a new living environment to ensure a normal upbringing for their children in the years to come. By placing these people in the voluntary displacement category, qualifying their displacement as the result of a personal choice, the authorities made the choice about more than just leaving; as voluntarily displaced persons, these women were excluded from the support system set up to encourage returning. They therefore had to deal with the consequences of the voluntary nature of their situation, registering (declaring domicile) in their new place of residence in order to find work, have access to the healthcare system and enrol their children in school. The fact is, however, that the people who were displaced, whether voluntarily or not, did not give up residence in their place of origin, nor did they necessarily transfer their domicile, for various reasons such as wanting their children to be eligible for the thyroid cancer risk monitoring set up in the three prefectures affected, attachment to the place they consider their home, and wanting to preserve ties with family and friends so as not to appear to betray them. These women therefore have maintained their official domicile in the affected prefectures and do not have access to healthcare services in their current place of residence, except when certain municipalities have allowed them to register as displaced persons. Some women, however, refuse to obtain this status, which they see as degrading. The repercussions of this refusal and the impossibility of being registered in two different places at once complicates the enrolment of children in schools: some women have juggled multiple addresses in order to allow their daughter to attend school somewhere safe from both radioactivity and discrimination at school (Higuchi 2021). This categorization has also impacted the economic conditions of the women concerned: while married women have been able to continue receiving the wages that their husband continues to earn in the affected prefectures, the situation has been catastrophic for married couples displaced together, or for women who became heads of household. Testimonies reveal professional downgrading between their former life and the new life. Due to specific characteristics of the

178  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration Japanese labour market, women, more than men, over age 30 and often lacking professional experience can only get precarious work. Even more problematic, as Nancy Fraser analysed about the United States, is that women are not in and of themselves the subject of social welfare measures; these measures organize a framework in which the woman is either placed at the centre of a family structure and thus dependent on a husband who supports the family, or else placed outside the conventional framework and subject to restrictive measures as a person without resources (Fraser 1987). 3.2

Conclusion: The Pauperization of Female Heads of Household

It is the same in Japan, where the poverty of single mothers is the cause of one of the highest child poverty rates among OECD countries (Matsumoto 2017). The main reason for this is that in the name of “self-reliance” the Abe government overhauled the social welfare system with cuts to budgets for sustenance benefits. This same notion is used in the classification of voluntarily displaced persons, as a mechanism for expelling mothers from the regular healthcare system and forcing them to be treated via the system of sustenance benefits, usually reserved for the most under-resourced people – treatment that seems both unfair and humiliating. The Fukushima disaster reveals the obsolete nature of a social welfare system set up primarily according to the familialist model in which the husband financially supports the family (Ehrenreich & Hochschild 2003). This is perhaps what worries the government because the breakdown of this model should make it necessary to reconsider not only the welfare system, but also the overly rigid way in which the labour market operates. 3.3

Maternal Thinking or Family as a Normative Expectation?

Considering all the problems that come with internal migration, one can only agree that “immigration is a mother’s issue”. Motherhood is a matter of care given to the child, according to the definition of care given by Joan Tronto (2012, p. 22): “Care is not just a feeling or disposition, and it is not just a set of actions. It is a complex set of practices, ranging from very intimate feelings such as ‘maternal thinking’ to extremely broad actions, such as the design of public education systems.” The situation of internal migration creates a paradox: as an ideology and a foundation of the social order, maternal thinking is praised and promoted by the authorities, but it is not acceptable to them when it risks destroying the family. In order to protect their children from radiation, mothers have accepted to be separated (temporarily or permanently) from their husbands, but the distress of women who are deprived of the daily presence of their husbands and must alone shoulder the responsibility of raising their children, shows that this situation is experienced not as an emancipation but as a failure, due to the impossibility of living the model of family life they had chosen. In this way, the disaster brought to light the continuous tension between two social logics. On the one hand, there is a process of expulsion from contaminated areas in order to protect the population, followed by a policy to reincorporate these places given that, in Japan more than elsewhere, leaving an area unpopulated is inconceivable because of the country’s limited surface area. Moreover, to rebuild the area after an environmental disaster is an act of defiance against the danger of nuclear energy, opening the path to an economic potentiality, wherein the contaminated area becomes a place of experimentation, where new agricultural, architectural

A study of the lives of internally displaced women after the Fukushima disaster  179 and even social technologies will be developed. And on the other hand, a deliberate and structural process of expulsion of families that refuse this reincorporation out of the same concern, i.e. the health and safety of individuals. Based on the example of Fukushima, we can therefore hypothesize that in developed countries, as in Japan, an environmental disaster will be less easily dealt with within the framework of international law and agreements on climate refugees, and rather be subject to classic crisis management measures, because it leaves complete freedom in the management of people and land. But above all, the case of the Fukushima disaster reveals that an environmental migration is an act driven by care values, and that for an environmental refugee convention to be effective, all creative opportunities in the event of such a displacement need to be explored, including resistance in the form of lawsuits (Sassen 2014), but also feelings of failure with regard to a chosen model of family life, which can be a source of trauma and even relational problems within family units. Only in fully understanding these elements can the treatment of environmentally displaced persons, which is becoming increasingly urgent, avoid adding to the vulnerability of these populations.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abe, Takashi (2014), “A Follow-up Report on Population Movement in the Damaged Areas in the Tohoku Region after the Great East Japan Earthquake Disaster”, Science Reports of the Tohoku University, 7th Series(Geography), 60–62: 83–95 (in Japanese). Brettell, Caroline B. (2016), Gender and Migration, Cambridge: Polity Press. Ehrenreich, Barbara, & Hochschild, Arlie Russel (eds) (2003), Global Women: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy, New York: Metropolitan Books. Ferrarèse, Estelle (2019), “Institution de la vulnérabilité, politique de la vulnérabilité”, Raison Politique, 76(4): 77–92. Fraser, Nancy (1987), “Women, Welfare and the Politics of Need Interpretation”, Hypatia, 2(1): 103–121. Fukkoshô (Ministry of Reconstruction) (2020), National Survey on Displaced Persons, August 11 (in Japanese). Grover, Anand (2012), Report of the Special Rapporteur on the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, accessed 2 September 2022 at http://​hrn​.or​ .jp/​wpHN/​wp​-content/​uploads/​2015/​11/​A​-HRC​-23​-41​-Add3​_en​.pdf Higuchi, Kenji (2021), Abandoned People of Fukushima – A Witness to History: The Never-Ending Nuclear Accident, Tokyo: Hachigatsu shokan (in Japanese). Ishibashi, Kanami (2018), “The Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement”, in Tokyo University of Foreign Studies Area and Cultural Studies, 96 (in Japanese). Kinoshita Miyuki, Hori Kumi (2017), “Use of the Earthquake Disaster Records by Women in Disaster Prevention Policy from Gender Perspectives: Focusing on the Information Dissemination after the Great East-Japan Disaster in March 2011”, Bulletin of Osaka Ohtani University, 51: 37–51 (in Japanese). Matsumoto, Ichirô (2017), Children’s Poverty in Question: From a Family and Gender Perspective, Hôritsusha (in Japanese). Mérenne-Schoumaker, Bernadette (2020), “Les migrations environnementales: un nouvel objet d’enseignement”, Géoconfluences, juillet (in French), accessed 2 September 2022 at http://​geoconfluences​.ens​ -lyon​.fr/​informations​-scientifiques/​dossiers​-thematiques/​changement​-global/​articles​-scientifiques/​ migrations​-environnementales Oishi Nana, Hamada Iori, “Silent Exits: Risk and Post-3.11 Skilled Migration from Japan to Australia”, Social Science Japan Journal, 22(1): 109–125 (in Japanese). Sassen, Saskia (2014), Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

180  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration Takezawa, Shôichirô (2020), “The Life of the Volunteer Evacuees of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident”, Ebisu, 58, 249–270 (in French). Tanabe, Yasuo (2020), In response to a series of High Court decisions (Shogyo, Gunma-Chiba): Prospects for the fight at the Osaka High Court. Tronto, Joan (2012), Le risque ou le care? Care Studies collection, Paris: PUF. Tsujiuchi, Takuya, & Masuda Kazudaka (2019), Medical Anthropology in Fukushima: Fieldwork on the Nuclear Accident and the Aid System, Enmi shobo (in Japanese). UN experts (2021), “Japan must step up efforts to solve human rights fallout from Fukushima disaster” (press release), accessed 2 September 2022 at https://​www​.ohchr​.org/​en/​press​-releases/​2021/​03/​japan​ -must​-step​-efforts​-solve​-human​-rights​-fallout​-fukushima​-disaster​-un UNHCR (2001), Guiding Principles in Internal Displacement, accessed 2 September 2022 at https://​ www​.unhcr​.org/​protection/​idps/​43ce1cff2/​guiding​-principles​-internal​-displacement​.html

13. Chinese internal migration dynamics as a way of understanding globalization and gender1 Amelia Sáiz López

INTRODUCTION The policy of opening and reform initiated by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the 1980s marks a political shift towards post-socialism, the Chinese version of its encounter with global neoliberalism, which began at the same time in the world’s most economically developed countries. To this end, China proposed an economic–social program that, as during Maoism (1949–1976), was based on the extraction and transfer of rural resources for industrial development located at cities. The countryside and the city formed two distinct spheres; the former was inhabited by peasants, the latter by workers in state enterprises. The hukou, a system of household registration established in 1958 – inherited through the mother’s side until 1998, and permanent, except for the rural population who entered the army or university –, ordered and located the population geographically, in a very rigid way, according to place of birth, assigning a fixed place of residence to each person, whether in a rural or urban area. In each, the population was subject to different management systems of social reproduction: rural areas were self-reliant for all their necessities, in contrast with urban residents subsidized by the state through the danwei or units responsible for allocating work, housing, food, education, health care and pensions to their workers, among other social services. Living conditions in rural areas were unequal and generally inferior to those in urban areas, and few people had the same social benefits of urban population. Therefore, with rural hukou, life in the city was practically unviable, because without access to the official urban productive system, it was not possible to have the basic means (e.g., food, housing or health) to ensure survival. The geographic–social demarcation of the country during the Maoist period was altered by various political campaigns involving movements from rural to urban areas during the period officially known as the “three years of disaster” – popularly called the Great Famine (1959–1961) – and especially from urban to rural areas in the 1957 anti-rightist campaign, the later mobilization of urban youth sent to the countryside, the Third Front and the Cultural Revolution, mainly in the 1960s. The political directionality of these population flows indicates the centrality of the rural population in the Maoist project. Since the meeting of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in Zhunyi (1935) during the Long March (1934–1935), the peasantry has emerged as the revolutionary class par excellence, the most oppressed class and support of CPC, whose struggle was aimed at their liberation from exploitation, along with that of women. Thus, the harsh conditions of rural life were symbolically compensated by the political value that the rhetoric of the CPC and the discourse of the Maoist government

1 This chapter is part of the R&D project, New socio-cultural, political and economic developments in East Asia in the global context (PID2019-107861GB-I00), Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Spain.

181

182  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration attributed to the revolutionary capacity of the peasantry, a model for the urban “revisionist” citizens to follow. The end of Maoism implies a geographical, human and discursive displacement in the new scenario of economic development and modernization. It is not by chance that the speech of the four modernizations – agriculture, industry, defence, and science and technology – in the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the CPC in 1978, politically inaugurated the era of reform. From the geographical point of view, displacement implies internal mobility for economic reasons within the country despite the persistence of the hukou system. This system has necessarily reduced its limitations over the years, allowing rural population to stay in urban or developing areas by “buying” temporary residence permits, giving rise to the so-called “floating population”, people who temporarily reside in places other than their places of origin (Solinger, 1999).2 From the human point of view, displacement implies a shift in the main population in the government’s new political agenda, from the peasantry to the urban residents who will eventually make up the so-called middle class in China. The discursive shift emphasizes the consolidation of socialist civilization, key to the nation’s modernizing project, leaving behind the values of revolution, equality and social justice. Indeed, suzhi, usually translated as “quality” as applied to the population, although its meaning transcends this concept, appeals to the new moral and governance code that guides China in its socio-economic development (Anagnost, 2004). The suzhi discourse, based on the shaping of an intellectual, technical and morally prepared population to address the challenge of socio-economic development, justifies and legitimises the great structural inequality in post-socialist China produced by the new policies undertaken in the 1980s, with the help of Maoist elements that are maintained in the renewed Chinese social organization. On the other hand, the strong nationalist component that has accompanied economic reform meant the redefinition of gender roles by the post-socialist state as a function of the country’s economic growth (Xu, 2000).

RURAL/URBAN RELATIONS IN POST-SOCIALIST CHINA In this new context, the conformation of the global city, as the space that frames the modern subject, establishes another symbolic frontier for people of rural origin, since the rural environment in Chinese neoliberal globalization represents backwardness and poverty and its inhabitants are crossed by all the elements that distance them from the “quality” (urban) protagonists of 21st-century China. In the new post-socialist rural/urban relationship, the countryside represents a spectral space that prevents young rural women from becoming protagonists of modernity (Yan, 2003). Therefore, symbolically, rural migration to the cities is a way to access the possibility of moving towards a contemporary subjectivity: In the discursive context of post-socialist development in China, these three statements register a dramatic rejection of the countryside as it is considered a field of death for the modern subjectivity

In accordance with the 2020 census, the “floating population” was 375 million in total: 125 million inter-provincial, and 250 million intra-provincial (Communiqué of the Seventh National Population Census (No. 7) National Bureau of Statistics, 2021-05-11). 2

Chinese internal migration dynamics  183 desired by young women, who imagine the spaces of hope for such subjectivity to be somewhere else, in the city. (Yan, 2008: 40)

In this sense, the migration of young rural women can be interpreted as a path towards “the space of modernity to fashion a new identity for themselves” (Yan, 2008: 64). As a prerequisite for economic globalization, a series of Special Economic Zones (SEZ), sites of neoliberal experimentation in the country, were established in the 1980s. Originally located in geographical corridors connected with the capitalist system (Macao, Hong Kong in the 1980s), other places were gradually opened to foreign investment in the 1990s, such as the Pearl River Delta Economic Zone (Guangdong province), the Xiamen–Zhangzhou–Quanzhou Triangle in South Fujian province, Shandong Peninsula, Liaodong Peninsula, Hebei and Guangxi provinces in 1985, the Pudong New Zone in Shanghai, and more cities in the Yangtze River valley. Since 1992, many border cities and all the capital cities of inland provinces and autonomous regions have been opened too. The first SEZs received foreign investments to create the industrial logistics that would turn China into the “world factory” (Pun, 2005). In need of abundant labour, the industries located in these territories took in the huge migrant labour force provided by the rural areas of the country. Thus, internal economic mobility arises, and for the first time in the history of the PRC is also made up of women. The new economic reality of the country generates differentiated spaces for production in urban areas and reproduction in rural areas, leading to the (semi-)proletarianization of peasant-workers (Pun and Lu, 2010) and the emergence of a new class: the migrant workers, first in SEZs and then in urban areas, a population with rural registers that limit their status as citizens – as city residents – and who are therefore central to the Chinese modernizing project of the post-socialist socio-economic system that feeds on the low costs of production and reproduction of this new class. In this sense, the dagongmei – young migrant women workers – constitute the paradigmatic Chinese version in the intersections – class, gender – of the cartographies of globalization (Sassen, 2000).

WOMEN MIGRANT WORKERS Dagongmei women work and live especially in the light industry factories of China’s southeast coast, particularly those located in Guangdong province – one of the provinces with the highest levels of international and internal migration3 –, with a special focus on the global city of Shenzhen, where the first rural women workers arrived at the beginning of the economic reform. However, working in and residing in the factories does not imply being part of the modern global city. The hukou system and the dormitory labour system prevent this. With the former, there are mechanisms of exploitation and appropriation of rural labour in the cities. The distinction between permanent and temporary residents allows the state to avoid its obligation to provide housing, job security and welfare for rural migrant workers. Thus, the state has played a very important role in shaping labour markets, regulating labour mobility from rural to urban industrial areas, and in providing housing for migrant workers. It also controls migrant workers’ wages and hinders their upward occupational mobility in cities (Au and Nan, 3 Guangdong province had a population of 126 million in 2020, of whose members 30 million were described as a “floating population”.

184  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration 2007). With the Chinese dormitory labour system, accommodation is available to workers and industries regardless of factory conditions. The wide availability of industrial dormitories also facilitates labour mobility. Thus, hierarchies and spatiality differences have been fundamental to create the dormitory labour system, one of the key elements of the global capitalism in China. At the beginning of industrialization, the state offered dormitories for rent to factory owners.4 As housing for families is not provided, the companies profit from the use of the labour of migrant workers on temporary contracts by controlling the day-to-day reproduction of their labour force. In addition, dormitories with rooms shared, for the most part, by young migrant women workers, not only facilitate the temporary incorporation of labour into the companies, but also the massive circulation of labour, which keeps wages low, and long working hours, since work and living space were integrated. A transient labour force has been created, circulating between the factory and the countryside. This labour force is dominated by employers’ control over housing needs, and state controls over residence permits, and this keep women workers separated from the city “they are still deprived of the legal and social right to reside in the city or to set up their own working-class community” (Pun and Lu, 2010: 497). Moreover, gender is central to this system, since in light industry three quarters of the workforce are young migrant women workers. They are an ideal workforce because they are cheap and flexible. In the early stages of the dormitory labour system, recruitment was done by company managers visiting rural areas to recruit young women, or a company worker would initiate a recruitment network in or around his or her village. The managers organized work groups according to origin, which indirectly influenced pressure among the female co-workers by reproducing the relationship patterns characterized by the social control of rural communities. This organizational model was very beneficial for the factory owners because it masked their labour exploitation in the gender relations of the original communities of the female employees and their foremen. If, on the other hand, young women worked in factories or enterprises without peasants, it was possible for them to acquire certain skills and experience, and improve their job qualifications (Lee, 1998). As single women, the factories did not need family planning departments or the infrastructure for nursing mothers required by law; they are alone, without family, and therefore defenceless, and occupational turnover makes it easier for them to remain in the company on a temporary basis (Pun, 2005). All this characterizes the dagongmei as a group with little or no conflict, manageable and productive due to their long working hours. In short, and as we have seen, Chinese globalization is based on a triple oppression suffered by migrant women workers, global capitalism, state socialism, and familial patriarchy that work hand in hand to produce particular labour exploitations along lines of class, gender, and rural-urban disparity. These triple oppressions – political, economic, and sociocultural – reinforce one another as they present new configurations specific to Chinese society at the opening of the socialist system to global production. (Pun, 2005: 4)

Several documentaries have been produced on this phenomenon in China. Perhaps one of the best known is China Blue, directed by Micha X. Peled in 2005: see https://​www​.youtube​.com/​watch​?v​=​ Hpns87​_ZSic, accessed 14 July 2021. 4

Chinese internal migration dynamics  185 It is true that this triple oppression is a characteristic feature of global capitalism, but China’s particularity lies in the speed with which it has adapted its socialist social and productive structure to capitalism and accepted the exploitation of migrant workers for the nation’s development. Temporariness guaranteed the constant renewal of the young workers, who after a few years mostly returned to their provinces of origin to get married. Temporary labour mobility was a rite of passage for them, an abundant labour force at the end of the last century. Nowadays, the existence of the “second generation of migrant workers, who entered the labour market in the late 1990s and 2000s to work to boss in industrialized towns and cities” is already apparent (Pun and Lu, 2010: 495). Unlike the previous migrant workers, due to the increase in the social cost of the social reproduction of work – housing, education, health, food, etc. – they consider it unfeasible to return to their communities of origin, and express their desire to remain in the city, but not as salaried workers but as self-employed entrepreneurs, especially in successful businesses (Pun and Lu, 2010).

FROM THE FACTORY TO THE SALONS: PROSTITUTION AND THE BEAUTY SALONS The feminization of survival experienced with economic globalization points to the large economic contribution of women at the household and governmental level. Saskia Sassen (2000) locates this feminization primarily in institutionalized “cross-border circuits” where businesses can also earn income illicitly. As argued, in the Chinese case borders do not only refer to the borderland but also apply to the internal boundary produced by the hukou system and the nationalist project of economic and social development, the latest version of which is the “Chinese dream” of a harmonious society, proclaimed by President Xi Jinping in 2013.5 Thus, the expansion of rural migration has also taken place to other urban territories where young rural migrant women have joined the service and entertainment sector as a way to stay in the city, an action that Smith and Pun (2018) consider an act of resistance to the status of rural workers. In this sense, the transit of rural female workers from the factory to the service sector has been assumed as an itinerary of occupational mobility that, by taking place in urban confines, is presumed to be an upward social mobility. The entertainment industry offers escort services ranging from bar to karaoke, with or without sexual exchange. The sex industry is part of the growing economy of sexuality (Zurndorfer, 2016), an area in which many rural migrants participate, hiding both their origin and their activity in order to increase their options to feel urban, which brings them closer to a subjectivity that also places them as participants in China’s socio-economic development, neutralizing the double social stigma of rural women who engage in an illicit activity, from which the country benefits economically and sexually and emotionally (Ding, 2012; Zheng, 2008). The service sector has grown alongside industrialized and technological cities, especially in southern China. Some studies (e.g., Liao, 2016) describe the new urban spaces of consumption, with a large offer for a practice of the ideal of feminine modernity accessible to migrants, 5 Governance model proposed in his closing speech at the annual session of the National People’s Congress (NPC) on March 17, 2013.

186  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration women consumers of products that can transform a rural worker into a cosmopolitan citizen, professional wage-earner or successful entrepreneur. Massage and beauty parlours, flourishing businesses in Chinese cities (Xu and Feiner, 2007), have emerged as the ritual centres that operate this conversion in a double process, despite the fact that many of the young women working in the service sector identify themselves as dagongmei, a term that in the 21st century refers to a collective identity that marks the social hierarchy position of rural migrant women workers – i.e. with lower suzhi than urban women workers – in Chinese cities (Chan, 2012). Each of the rural workers who comes to the beauty salons as a client transforms her working woman’s body into another one that is the reflection of the cosmopolitan professional body recurrent in the women’s magazines that circulate in the country, in which white and silky skin and hands are the most prominent indicators of the embodiment of beautiful urban femininity. The white skin constitutes the quintessence of the civilized beauty historically embodied in the family of the literate, both men and women, always protected not to redden their skin; therefore the specific beauty treatment that removes facial dirt, also “cleans” the rurality associated with the epidermis that has been rather toasted by the effect of contact with the sun, wind, etc. It seems that peasant women and their incapacity and ignorance – backwardness – do not allow them to beautify themselves. The soft hands, without calluses or protuberances, evoke the absence of manual work, or dagong; that is to say, it is a sign of carrying out a qualified work. In short, white skin and soft hands make up two features of the quality body of the Chinese urban middle class. That said, the beauty salon workers exemplify a change of labour sector, leaving the dormitory labour system and what this entails in the reality of labour exploitation and in their imaginary of being a young rural woman. Beauty salons are feminized work spaces in which the gendered labour hierarchy of the factory system does not operate. Specific hair and body beauty treatments require a higher level of specialization and decision-making that is impossible to achieve in the assembly work of the light and textile industry. The working hours marked by the different shifts and the circulation through the different locations of the franchise business produce a feeling of greater flexibility – a trope of the neoliberal professional ethos – and freedom in their relationship with the company and the clients. The beauty salon represents for its owners the materialization of a work itinerary that crosses the “frontiers” of rurality, migration and unskilled work; that is, semi-proletarianization. Running the beauty business allows these women to access the status of wives and to reconcile the world of work with the family, an impossible condition in the dormitory labour system. All this contributes to articulating an identity of modern working women without the need to give up motherhood and family, thus the work of beautifying rural women workers is also emotional labour given the characteristics of the service sector (Chan, 2012), and an extension of reproductive labour (Liao, 2016). However, the labour relations operating in beauty salons do not escape of the neoliberal production system: low wages, long working hours, job mobility and insecurity, etc. Moreover, “Beauty is consumable on the individual level: beauty work requires a constant supply of young, fresh bodies to maintain the alluring mask of aspiration and glamor” (Liao, 2016: 149). The working conditions in beauty salons are not dissimilar to those in factories, investigated since the 1990s and denounced especially since the tragic suicides of young workers at Foxconn in 2010 (Pun and Chan, 2012). However, they remain more hidden both to the workers themselves and to scholars and social workers because this mode of labour obscures the gendered oppression of migrant women workers insofar as beauty work condenses the discourse of female urban normality.

Chinese internal migration dynamics  187 The desire to embody the quality of the modern global subject keeps the system of production and reproduction – including baomu, rural migrants for domestic service – separate, and ensures a permanent flow of rural women workers into Chinese cities. The combination of both systems reinforces the social, not only geographical, distance between work and motherhood, and thus reproduction means care and service work performed for urban citizens. However, the resignification of ideal Chinese femininity – from the worker to the beautiful woman – allows rural women workers to symbolically overcome structural barriers from the margins of the production system. On the one hand, salon entrepreneurs can sell ideal femininity; on the other, rural women can take on the appearance of urban women, at least when they are not working. In both situations, rural women have the opportunity to represent and/or embody Chinese modernity.

REFERENCES Anagnost, Ann (2004). “The Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)”, Public Culture, 16(2): 189–208. Au, Loong-Yu and Nan Shan (2007). “Chinese Women Migrants and the Social Apartheid”, Development, 50(3): 76–82. Chan, Michael (2012). “Social Identity Dynamics and Emotional Labour: The Multiple Roles of the Tuina Masseuse in the Shenzhen Spa”, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 15(5): 519–534. Ding, Yu (2012). “Negotiating Intimacies in an Eroticized Environment: Xiaojies and South China Entertainment Business”, International Journal of Business Anthropology, 3(1). DOI: https://​doi​.org/​ 10​.33423/​ijba​.v3i1​.1176 Lee, Ching Kwan (1998). Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women. Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press. Liao, Sara Xuetug (2016). “Precarious Beauty: Migrant Chinese Women, Beauty Work, and Precarity”, Chinese Journal of Communication, 9(2): 139–152. Pun, Ngai (2005). Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Pun, Ngai and Lu Huilin (2010). “Unfinished Proletarianization: Self, Anger, and Class Action among the Second Generation of Peasant-workers in Present-day China”, Modern China, 36(5): 493–519. Pun, Ngai and Jenny Chan (2012). “Global Capital, the State, and Chinese Workers: The Foxconn Experience”, Modern China, 38(4): 383–410. Sassen, Saskia (2000). “Women’s Burden: Counter-geographies of Globalization and the Feminization of Survival”, Journal of International Affairs, 53(2): 503–524. Smith, Chris and Ngai Pun (2018). “Class and Precarity: An Unhappy Coupling in China’s Working Class Formation”, Work, Employment and Society, 32(3): 599–615. Solinger, Dorothy J. (1999). Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migrants, the State, and the Logic of the Market. Berkeley, CA, and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Xu, Feng (2000). Women Migrant Workers in China’s Economic Reform. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Xu, Gary and Susan Feiner (2007). “Meinü Jingji/China’s Beauty Economy: Buying Looks, Shifting Value, and Changing Place”, Feminist Economics, 13 (3–4): 307–323. DOI:​10​.1080/​13545700701439499 Yan, Hairong (2003). “Spetralization of the Rural: Reinterpreting the Labor Mobility of Rural Young Women in Post-Mao China”, American Ethnologist, 30(4): 578–596. Yan, Hairong (2008). New Masters, New Servants: Migration, Development, and Women Workers in China. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Zheng, Tiantian (2008). “Commodifying Romance and Searching for Love: Rural Migrant Bar Hostesses’ Moral Vision in Post-Mao Dalian”, Modern China, 34(4): 442–476. Zurndorfer, Harriet (2016). “Men, Women, Money, and Morality: The Development of China’s Sexual Economy”, Feminist Economics, 22(2): 1–23.

14. Shifting migrant categories and recast boundaries in China: transnational women in family migration Chieh Hsu

1. INTRODUCTION In the recent special issue ‘New Modalities of Chinese Migration’ of the journal International Migration, scholars indicated that, concomitant with the decade-long diversification of streams, social class backgrounds and mobility patterns among Chinese migrants, Europe has moved on to embrace the presence of student, highly skilled, professional, investment-oriented and entrepreneurial migrants (Thunø and Li, 2020), many of them stemming from China. The country’s rise as a global economic and political (potentially cultural) hegemony provides a critical context in which these new migration modalities are embedded. In this chapter, however, I argue that such contextual shifts of political and economic dynamics in China and Europe (the Western world) have contributed equally to long-standing and extant modes of migration that specifically pertain to Chinese women. Drawing from literature that probes the diversified yet relatively ‘discrete’ modes of migration in which Chinese women are involved, I further apply a new conceptual lens that incorporates a temporal perspective into their experiences. The subtext of these existing studies and my own research on skilled Chinese-speaking female family migrants point to the often-neglected fact that Chinese female migrants may very well transition from one ‘status’ to another while carrying traits that characterise a multiple range of migrant categories. For those entering as students, the possibility of becoming professional migrants or marrying a native upon graduation, hence becoming marriage or family migrants, underscores the ‘continuity’ of and ‘blurred boundaries’ between categories. These transitions are moreover often entangled with gendered connotations—cultural norms that govern campuses, the workplace, intimate relationships and households in the host society—which affect Chinese women’s lived experiences. Whereas a reappraisal of Chinese migrant women’s ‘places’ in this ‘chain of migration’ is offered, I urge additionally a reconsideration of how China’s emergence and established global position interacts with existing imagination of cultural hierarchy that informs the pursuits of opportunities, human capital, social mobility and even happiness realised often through migration. The chapter is arranged as follows: I begin with a review of Chinese student migration, usually taking place in the earlier stages of the ‘chain of migration’; this is followed by a brief sketch of the gendered implications in the work transition or patterns of professional migration. I then turn to Chinese women’s family and marriage migration, primarily focusing on those who are educated and professional and in interethnic relationships. I tease out specifically the individual-level motives behind this mode of entry. The last section incorporates the gender and temporal perspectives to assess the spectrum of Chinese women’s migratory experiences. I also call for a reconceptualisation of and more research on Chinese women’s 188

Shifting migrant categories and recast boundaries in China  189 transnational migration in the upcoming era, in which the traditional North–South dynamics and cultural hierarchy are challenged.

2.

STUDENT MIGRATION AS A STARTING POINT

Numerous studies have looked into the motivation behind, patterns of and family strategies involved in Chinese overseas student migration (Kajanus, 2015; Lan, 2020; Li et al., 2019; Martin, 2018; Tu and Nehring, 2020; Waters, 2005). Closely linked to a capital accumulation and enhancement logic, scholars have clearly indicated that wealthy and middle-class Chinese parents are predisposed to financially supporting their (likely) only child’s advanced studies (Kajanus, 2015; Tu and Nehring, 2020), and adjusting to transnational living arrangements that generally require family dispersal to facilitate such pursuits (Waters, 2005). Yet, pertinent to educated talents’ maximisation of the utility of their skills and capital, scholars have in addition examined Chinese students’ decision-making with regard to post-graduation career plan and trajectory. In comparison with destinations—such as Australia—with better immigration policy pipelines that aid status transits to skilled employment or permanent residence, the UK is rarely considered a place for long-term settlement by Chinese students (Tu and Nehring, 2020: 49). Nonetheless, aside from established institutional frameworks that regulate students’ mobility patterns and talent circulation, the gender factor deserves to be singled out when approaching and understanding newly minted Chinese graduates’ transitional planning and processes. Often, women’s career trajectories are ineluctably tied to life stage developments, particularly those of marriage and family formation. Chinese young women, encouraged by their parents to partake in higher education and expand their horizons abroad, are nevertheless subject to context- and location-specific gender discourses back home that prescribe their circumstances, decisions and professional aspirations, notably as the women who are left behind – that is, ‘leftover women’ (shèngnǚ, 剩女) (Kajanus, 2015) and married women ‘following the chicken’ (jià jī suí jī , 嫁雞隨雞) (Li and Findlay, 1999) narratives. Hence, despite the cosmopolitan premium they have garnered from overseas experiences and enhanced power positions associated with their changed physical and social locations (Kajanus, 2015: 83; Mahler and Pessar, 2001), female student migrants are merely in a ‘zone of suspension’ that temporarily removes them from trite life course scripts (Martin, 2018). In the long run, those discourses that pervade Chinese society—where women’s age and fertility are ever-present alongside the discussion of their work-related choices and life developments, and their husband’s career takes precedence—could still retain their potency for overseas Chinese female students and introduce a ‘gendered’ layer of concern not met by men. From another perspective, however, intimate relationship as a route to transfer one’s migrant status is also a ‘gendered’ affair. As Kajanus elucidates, whereas Chinese male student migrants’ foreign education bestows them privilege along with obligations, the fervent wish for their female counterparts to find qualified partners is inscribed in the ‘Chinese models of kinship and gender’ and aligned with women’s designated ‘social roles’ (2015: 168–169). While by no means diminishing or denying that female students’ autonomy, renewed value system and goal orientation cultivated during their studies abroad could lead them to detach from traditional gendered expectations, the prospects of a suitable marriage still ‘socially’ affect women more than men. The ‘ideals of hypergamy’ (Kajanus, 2015: 169), similarly

190  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration become a common notion seemingly reserved for Chinese female student migrants. Along the same vein, Tu and Nehring (2020) have advised that intimate relationships, both co-ethnic and intercultural, can be conceived as another channel to acquire permanent residence or citizenship in the host country. In any case, international scholarship and statistics have afforded us the insight that family migrants are predominantly women (see Chapters 1 and 2 in this book). Considered conjointly, they unequivocally point to the fact that, in the backdrop of post-study status transition, intimate relationships and related deliberations are prone to centre more in female students’ experiences and signal a path to transferal less taken up by men. 2.1

The Transition to Professional Migrants

When we turn to the study-to-employment transition, aside from a newly minted graduate’s pragmatic calculations going into determining the location that best ameliorates capital conversion, the practical hurdles entail landing the right job contract with an above-average income level in the sector deemed coveted by the government of the host society. This type of governance ultimately differs from that of marriage or family migration, which primarily concerns ‘intimate relationships’ in the private domain. Whereas it is less justifiable to cap those arriving for family reunification with an annual numeric quota due to its nature, professional migration or the transferal from student to worker status more broadly reflects the orientation of national migration regimes, making it susceptible to the political climate and policy fluctuations. How destination societies conceptualise talents they aim to attract or retain, then, greatly shape international students’ intention to transition and their actual transitional trajectory. Nonetheless, such ‘two-step migration’ (Hawthorne, 2010) could be a gendered process for Chinese female graduates owing to the potential cleavage between their fields of specialisation and labour market demands. As scholars (Kajanus, 2015; Lan, 2020; Martin, 2018) have emphasised, studying abroad is also in large part a ‘self-transformation’ project that transcends purely the accumulation of human capital, though a foreign degree does effectively fulfil Chinese parents’ expectations. To many Chinese students, it is the ‘immersive experience’ of combining ‘leisure activities’ and education in another culture that counts (Lan, 2020) and not necessarily about enrolling in studies that would yield the highest return to education. Yet, viewed in conjunction with female students’ lower enrolment rate in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) academic disciplines (Lim et al., 2021) and the high, albeit skewed, demand for work in ICT industries worldwide (Hawthorne, 2010), Chinese female students might experience marginalisation in their job search and fall victim to the gendered occupational segregation ingrained in most labour markets. Their likelihood of adopting the student-to-employment pathway can therefore be severely compromised.

3.

FAMILY AND MARRIAGE MIGRATION

Scholars (Guerassimoff, 2006; Ryan, 2002) have urged the recognition of Chinese women’s agency in transnationalism and their migratory patterns triggered by commercial ventures and other pursuits, which are theoretically treated by both ‘Chinese and Western migration paradigms’ as male-dominated (Ryan, 2002). Just as we need to acknowledge that Chinese women are actively initiating and engaging in labour, business, professional and education-oriented migration, I would even contend that women undertake family and marriage migration at

Shifting migrant categories and recast boundaries in China  191 times with no less degree of rigour, circumspection and knowledge of immigration policies before deciding on the entry system best disposed to their circumstances. Furthermore, the underlying factors driving this mode of migration, its strategies and actual practices, are distinctively female phenomena that merit analysis and deciphering. I will nevertheless limit my discussion to marriage or family migration in the context of intercultural relationships for one obvious reason. As numerous studies have demonstrated, women of Chinese ancestry in co-ethnic unions when confronted with migratory decisions are prone to submit to family priorities under patriarchal norms by valuing their husband’s career development above that of their own despite outstanding educational or professional qualifications (Cooke, 2007; Man, 2004; Yeoh and Willis, 2005) and by trailing as ‘dependants’ and staying mobile to safeguard the integrity of the family (Lee et al., 2002; Li and Findlay, 1999; Wei, 2013).1 Such voluntary decisions to become secondary migrants despite many women’s high level of credentials are usually prompted by a sense of spousal duties and the hope to advance their husbands’ pursuits, underscoring considerations on the household level. These differ fundamentally, say, from the rationale of some women who ‘individually’ opt to bypass employment-based entry paths altogether. Not only does family reunification or marriage migration provide a ‘comparatively’ less cluttered process in women’s favour, the lack of mechanisms in the host country to validate women’s accreditation and facilitate their gainful employment also act as ‘severe deterrence’, potentially directing many away from work-related channels. It is thus beyond the constellation of co-ethnic couples and on women’s ‘personal choices’ grounded in cross-cultural gender dynamics that I focus when exploring Chinese women’s decision to embark on the journey of family or marriage migration. While love and romance are easily the go-to explanation that propels family or marriage migration, Constable (2005) has perspicaciously cautioned that, even in the frequently stigmatised form of ‘mail-order brides’ from Asia, where women are perpetually depicted as passive victims, individuals’ strong will to seek various types of ‘upward mobility’ and much more should be brought to the fore. Scholars (Farrer, 2008; Liu and Liu, 2008) have also dismissed the facile interpretation of viewing Chinese women’s transnational marriage as financially motivated. It is essential to take into account that ‘cartographies of desire’ (Constable, 2003: 28)—namely how global power hierarchy associated with geographic locations produces patterns and imagination of desirable relationships—are also embedded in decisions about cross-cultural intermarriage. In line with hitherto-introduced literature and concentrating on educated or professional Chinese women, studies have alternatively illustrated that interethnic romance and subsequent marriage migration could be spurred by conscious efforts to escape gender ideologies and societal constraints and to embrace new status and lifestyles. Zurndorfer’s (2018) research on transnational romance has revealed that selecting a foreign partner can be the strategic result of unmarried or divorced Chinese women who are ostracised by toxic discourses revolving around their marriageability and age. Reflecting To’s (2013) investigation on the ‘leftover women’ phenomenon, both studies found that lingering traditional views that dictate, judge and discriminate Chinese women’s marital choices, co-exist

The irony here is that women are constantly making ‘sacrifices’ for the ‘welfare’ of the household. They are the protagonists of ‘astronaut families’ that relocate with their children for overseas education to accumulate their offspring’s human capital, weathering through family dispersal (Waters, 2005). They are also the ones who put their own career on hold to accomplish the endeavours of their husbands, even when they themselves have an equal level of educational attainment. 1

192  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration with the call for women’s economic achievements, championed by the classic ‘individualisation’ thesis of modernity (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2001; Yan, 2009). ‘Going foreign’, then, becomes an effective means to break free and rise above such patriarchal frameworks that regulate their intimate relationships. The premise of Chinese women marrying foreign men for the purpose of hypergamy is another aspect that deserves scrutiny, particularly given its convoluted relationship with ‘upward mobility’. Global hypergamy typically refers to ‘marriage mobility’ exercised by women in less developed areas or economically disadvantaged situations and their move to affluent and more developed regions in the world (Constable, 2005: 10). As Jeffreys and Pan (2013) have suggested, the majority of Chinese-foreign marriages before 2010 are ‘intracultural’ unions between Mainland Chinese women and men from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Nonetheless, it is to be noted that the prevalence of more qualified and educated Chinese women marrying older men in less privileged social positions, sidelined by the marriage squeeze in Hong Kong, resembles more the concept of ‘spatial hypergamy’ (Constable, 2005). Rather than moving up the ladder of socioeconomic status, it is the ‘geographic mobility’ that promises improved living standards and economic opportunities that captivates and induced these marriages. This notion of ‘decoupling hypergamy from pure material gains’ learned from cases of ‘intracultural’ marriages may be further applied when examining Chinese women’s ‘authentic’ international and interethnic marriages. Often conjuring highly contradictory connotations, intermarriage with Western men in China is simultaneously ‘glamorised and vilified’ (Hu, 2016: 2). While likely a foreboding of cultural and ideological clashes for Chinese parents, Western men’s ‘open-mindedness’ and non-adherence to male dominance or chauvinism (To, 2013: 10) are exactly the qualities that appeal to achieved and highly educated Chinese women. In other cases, marrying a foreign men can be seen as a springboard to flexible overseas travel, education abroad and even a ‘service’ to wealthy Chinese women’s business ambitions or professional advancement (Liu and Liu, 2008: 258). Meanwhile, Hsu (2020a) cited narratives from skilled Chinese-speaking family migrants married to German husbands, showing that European countries are generally depicted in Chinese societies as fairy-tale lands with castles and mansions (the so-called ‘pink bubbles’ imagination) and envisaged to be espousing gender-egalitarian attitudes, where patriarchal constraints on women are portrayed as non-existent. Overall, spatial mobility to Europe in the context of intermarriage for Chinese women connotes hypergamy in the sense of an equal partner, a destination with more progressive values and a more carefree, paced and competition-free lifestyle. ‘Upward’ mobility, then, in the case of professional and skilled Chinese women’s intercultural relationship and marriage migration deviates from the quintessential notion of global hypergamy and concerns primarily the opportunity to liberate from conservatism and to lead a less ‘restricted’ life. Nevertheless, the incongruities between post-arrival reality and pre-departure illusion should not be understated. On the one hand, just as Western masculinity is homogenised as less domineering, hence desirable among qualified Chinese women, the categorical ascription of tenderness and docility to Asian women is equally hackneyed. Such disparity in false presumptions about culture and gender presages troubles in dyadic interactions, especially when experienced in the country of the husband. On the other hand, scholars (Hsu, 2020a, 2020b; Hu, 2016; Kim, 2011; Zurndorfer, 2018) have stressed that accomplished Chinese women in intermarriages, upon entering family life within Germany and the UK, were startled to find their qualifications devalued and themselves reduced to ‘housewifery’. Often compelled to

Shifting migrant categories and recast boundaries in China  193 conform to the host countries’ dominant single-male-breadwinner gender norms that permeate not only the private sphere but also institutions such as the welfare system (Hsu, 2020a), they came to realise that their significant others were quick to slither into the traditional division of labour that approximates to patriarchy in China. The lustre of cross-cultural relationships, a symbol of ‘cosmopolitan social capital’ if set against the background of ‘global Shanghai’ between an expat and skilled Chinese women (Farrer, 2008: 26), can be immediately lost when transnational settlement occurs.

4.

GENDER IN CHINESE WOMEN’S MIGRATION: CONCLUDING REMARKS

Candice Hiu Yan Andrade’s (2020: 13) study on young Chinese female migrants who began transnational relationships or formed households during their sojourn as students or holiday workers in the UK accentuates the significance of temporality and the ‘complex interplay between intersecting modalities of socially constructed time’. She disclosed that Chinese young women, while choosing to go abroad at a time of their transition to adulthood, are very much regulated by the UK’s stipulated duration of stay and minimum period of co-habitation (institutional time frame) and age-sensitive marital expectations for women endorsed by norms and the Chinese state. Intensified by the notion of women’s ‘biological clock ticking’, the juncture of multiple time regimes causes a temporal double-bind and determines young Chinese women’s marital decisions and migration trajectories. In Lee et al.’s (2002) study on Chinese women and their family lives in Britain, they revealed three subgroups who entered as overseas brides, migrated together with their co-ethnic spouses as a household, and move as independents. Whereas their motives of relocation differ, respectively for a better life, for keeping the family intact and for self-fulfilment, what manifested more starkly is their varied situated experiences in the family and with the host society. The once-solo independent migrants, who started families in Britain often after their studies, are the most linguistically proficient, financially secure, socially integrated and resourceful, all lending leverage to negotiating family demands and sidestepping family constraints (e.g., co-habitation with extended families). These insights underscore that, while many Chinese women may share the same status as ‘marriage or family migrants’, the temporal development of their migratory trajectories differentially forges their gendered experiences in the host country. Moreover, the social fields one is in contact with as a student, a worker and a wife abroad are drastically different. Accordingly, the social positions and the ‘gendered expectations’ associated with each identity vary. Yet, as Piper and Roces remind us (2003: 7), migrant women’s identities ‘as workers, wives, mothers, and citizens’ are never neatly demarcated, which easily requires the concurrent juggling of roles and reconciling opposing and incompatible expectations as they go through different life stages and status transitions. A revisit of Chinese women’s transnational migration from a chronological perspective has revealed how mobility is constantly tied to individual prospects, status transitions and even selective mating strategies. Most importantly, regardless of their life stage, whether fledgling young women in search of higher degrees, intellectual stimulation and the cosmopolitan experience or more established professionals looking for a viable transition or starting a family, gender discourses at home targeting women (i.e., age-appropriate marriage, leftover women) hardly relinquish their grip. While affirming that spatial mobility creates new ‘gender geog-

194  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration raphies of power’ (Mahler and Pessar, 2001) to some extent, instead of being ‘transported’ seamlessly to a new hierarchy and social position in the host society, Chinese women are more accurately caught in conflicting, if not outright contradictory, value systems and cultural models as they retain transnational ties and acquaint themselves with destination norms and customs. As Andrade’s (2020: 3) article illuminated, the broader mobility patterns among Chinese youths cannot be detached from the ‘historical time of unprecedented economic development’ in China. Liu and Liu (2008: 256) also pointed out that political and economic factors of both China and destination societies have collectively contributed to the ‘“leave-the-country fever” (chū guó rè, 出國熱) through transnational marriage’. Yet, at a time when international hierarchy is much altered and China’s hegemonic position in the global economic and political order much cemented, it is only apt to revisit the situation and deliberate as to whether this logic still holds true when reappraising the modalities of Chinese women’s migration. A few critical questions that may guide future research are whether student-to-professional migrant worker transition is still desired given China’s economic prosperity, whether intercultural marriage between Chinese women and Western men is continually regarded as an escape or route to some form of ‘hypergamy’ or ‘upward mobility’, and whether the look to ‘the West’ as superior destinations that proffer accreditation, cultural cultivation and progressive values is at all challenged by China’s rising eminence. As Thunø and Li (2020: 15) cautioned, Chinese migration to Europe has long surpassed an ‘outdated’ South to North mobility path and should rather be viewed ‘in the context of a highly globalised and economically powerful “home country” and European “receiving countries” in economic and political distress’. China with its stellar ‘mid’- or ‘post’-pandemic economic rebound and solid consumer power in particular has ‘reaffirmed’ itself as a much sought-after market and destination in the eyes of its Western counterparts. Chinese nationals and ethnic Chinese, too, are likely to be acutely aware of how the tables have turned when it comes to the forces China projects. Furthermore, individual decisions to move and cross borders in a circular fashion have also been mired in or instructed by state-administered or state-orchestrated national strategies that aim to conceive ‘China’s transnational diaspora as a crucial human geopolitical asset’ (Thunø and Li, 2020: 6). Simply put, it is no longer a unidirectional aspiration of upward social mobility that defines movement from China to Europe. This view when applied to marriage migration and intimate relationships is particularly crucial as it adds texture to gender dynamics encapsulated within intercultural unions. From geographical/spatial hypergamy to the stereotypical image of docile, subservient Asian women married to European Caucasian men (Constable, 2005), typical South to North intermarriages are accompanied by power imbalances as a result of putative notions about race/ethnicity, gender, and geographical and developmental order. Even the finding of ‘leftover women’ seeking foreign men as partners who are assumed to espouse more egalitarian attitudes hints at the European continent’s liberal or cultural ‘superiority’ and European men’s latent racial privilege, jointly conjuring a dual allure for women situated in Asia. Nonetheless, as argued, China’s ascent in cultural, economic and political dominance inevitably confronts this script. When the global order is flux and cultural hierarchy also in reshuffle, we need to take into account ‘the hybridity of old and new ideals’ not just within China, as Zurndorfer laid bare (2018: 501), but rather on a global scale to truly grasp the motivations and patterns of Chinese women’s transnational movements.

Shifting migrant categories and recast boundaries in China  195

BIBLIOGRAPHY Andrade, C.H.Y. (2020), ‘Negotiating the modalities of time – individual and institutional, migratory and marital: A temporal “double-bind” for Chinese migrant women in the UK’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies: 118. DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2020.1839399 Beck, U., and Beck-Gernsheim, E. (2001), Individualization: Institutionalized individualism and its social and political consequences, London: SAGE. Constable, N. (2003), Romance on a global stage: Pen pals, virtual ethnography, and ‘mail-order’ marriages, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Constable, N. (2005), ‘Introduction: Cross-border marriages, gendered mobility, and global hypergamy’, in Constable, N. (ed.), Cross-border marriages: Gender and mobility in transnational Asia, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 1–16. Cooke, F.L. (2007), ‘“Husband’s career first”: Renegotiating career and family commitment among migrant chinese academic couples in Britain’, Work, Employment and Society, 21: 47–65. Farrer, J. (2008), ‘From “passports” to “joint ventures”: Intermarriage between Chinese nationals and Western expatriates residing in Shanghai’, Asian Studies Review, 32: 7–29. Guerassimoff, C. (2006), ‘Gender and migration networks: New approaches to research on Chinese migration to France and Europe’, Journal of Chinese Overseas, 20: 134–145. Hawthorne, L. (2010), ‘How valuable is “two-step migration”? Labor market outcomes for international student migrants to Australia’, Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, 19: 5–36. Hsu, C. (2020a), Family migration and the path to an occupation: The (early) experiences of skilled Taiwanese and Chinese ‘wives’, London: Routledge. Hsu, C. (2020b), ‘Germany’s integration politics in practice: Lived realities of Chinese-speaking skilled female family migrants’, Migration Studies. https://​migrationresearch​.com/​item/​germanys​-integration​ -politics​-in​-practice​-lived​-realities​-of​-chinese​-speaking​-skilled​-female​-family​-migrants/​579258 Hu, Y. (2016), Chinese–British intermarriage: Disentangling gender and ethnicity, London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Jeffreys, E., and Pan, W. (2013), ‘The rise of Chinese–foreign marriage in mainland China, 1979–2010’, China Information, 27: 347–369. Kajanus, A. (2015), Chinese student migration, gender and family, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Kim, Y. (2011), Transnational migration, media and identity of Asian women: Diasporic daughters, New York: Routledge. Lan, S. (2020), ‘Youth, mobility, and the emotional burdens of youxue (travel and study): A case study of Chinese students in Italy’, International Migration, 58: 163–176. Lee, M., Chan, A., Bradby, H., et al. (2002), ‘Chinese migrant women and families in Britain’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 25: 607–618. Li, L., and Findlay, A. (1999), ‘To follow the chicken or not? The role of women in the migration of Hong Kong professional couples’, in Boyle, P., and Halfacree, K. (eds), Migration and gender in the developed world, London; New York: Routledge, pp. 172–185. Li, W., Zhao, S., Lu, Z., et al. (2019), ‘Student migration: Evidence from Chinese students in the US and China’, International Migration, 57: 334–353. Lim, J.H., Wang, Y., Wu, T., et al. (2021), ‘Walking on gender tightrope with multiple marginalities: Asian international female students in stem graduate programs’, Journal of International Students, 11: 647–665. Liu, L., and Liu, H. (2008), ‘Boundary-crossing through cyberspace: Chinese women and transnational marriage since 1994’, in Kuah-Pearce, K.E. (ed.), Chinese women and the cyberspace, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 249–270. Mahler, S.J., and Pessar, P.R. (2001), ‘Gendered geographies of power: Analyzing gender across transnational spaces’, Identities, 7: 441–459. Man, G. (2004), ‘Gender, work and migration: Deskilling Chinese immigrant women in Canada’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 27: 135–148. Martin, F. (2018), ‘Overseas study as zone of suspension: Chinese students re-negotiating youth, gender, and intimacy’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 39: 688–703.

196  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration Piper, N., and Roces, M. (2003), ‘Introduction: Marriage and migration in an age of globalization’, in Piper, N., and Roces, M. (eds), Wife or worker? Asian women and migration, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, pp. 1–21. Ryan, J. (2002), ‘Chinese women as transnational migrants: Gender and class in global migration narratives’, International Migration, 40: 93–116. Thunø, M., and Li, M. (2020), ‘Introduction: New dynamics of Chinese migration to Europe’, International Migration, 58: 5–21. To, S. (2013), ‘Understanding sheng nu (“leftover women”): The phenomenon of late marriage among Chinese professional women’, Symbolic Interaction, 36: 1–20. Tu, M., and Nehring, D. (2020), ‘Remain, return, or re-migrate? The (im)mobility trajectory of mainland Chinese students after completing their education in the UK’, International Migration, 58: 43–57. Waters, J.L. (2005), ‘Transnational family strategies and education in the contemporary Chinese diaspora’, Global Networks, 5: 359–377. Wei, W. (2013), ‘My home is where my husband is: Chinese wives’ attitudes towards family migration to the United Kingdom’, Families, Relationships and Societies, 2: 115–127. Yan, Y. (2009), The individualization of Chinese society, Oxford: Berg. Yeoh, B.S.A., and Willis, K. (2005), ‘Singaporeans in China: Transnational women elites and the negotiation of gendered identities’, Geoforum, 36: 211–222. Zurndorfer, H. (2018), ‘Escape from the country: The gender politics of Chinese women in pursuit of transnational romance’, Gender, Place & Culture, 25: 489–506.

15. Qualified Brazilian migrant women in Dubai: constraints, agency, and change in the migratory process Raquel Nazário Motta, Marcos Linhares Goes and Jorge Malheiros

1.

INTRODUCTION: THE PATRIARCHAL CONTEXT

In a classic capitalist society of Jewish–Christian tradition, the roles of women within the domestic sphere are those of daughter, mother, housewife, and, depending on the marital status, “dedicated” wife. Outside the home space, the role assigned to women corresponds to that of an increasingly qualified salaried person who earns less when working the same workload as men, in addition to carrying out domestic activities (Saffioti 1976). In this social context, the patriarchal framework associated with capitalism weighs down on women. It requires them to be productive outside home and to have various roles in the domestic space of social reproduction, maintaining limited social power notwithstanding the progress towards a greater gender equality evidenced over the last few decades. By internalizing all these functions within the scope of their personality considered not in an isolated but in a dynamic and contextually related way, women, namely qualified women, are influenced by the entrepreneurial context in which they work, which demands of them competitiveness and success through the use of their skills (Killian and Manohar 2016; Ryan and Mulholland 2014). However, by occupying professional positions often marked by the volatility and fierce competition that characterize the neoliberal labour market, in which a patriarchal logic still prevails, women experience situations of emotional ambivalence and discontinuity in which gender conflicts and the limiting contradictions of women’s power are accentuated. Women are a minority in high-ranking positions in public and private institutions, and society still tends to value the roles of housewife and mother to the detriment of other roles, namely professional (Carvalho 2021). Thus, the neoliberal individual, in the present case of the female sex, seeks alternatives to change its reality, one of which is the migratory process (Safatle et al., 2019). Although the migration of women is a historically documented process, its specificity and social visibility in migration studies only lately began to be recognized (Morokvasic 1994). Until the 1960s and 1970s, analytical research considered essentially a passive woman, often focusing on “the man who migrates and the woman who follows him,” which corresponded to a logic dominated by male migration followed by that of a family reunification led by women (for more detailed information about detailed trends, see Chapters 1 and 2 in this book). By stating that women migrate to regroup with men (husbands, brothers, fathers) and assume the role of caregivers, McGoldrick and Carter (2001) deduce that women with this role become invisible in public life, an issue that results from a “subsidiary” migratory route and the form of integration at the destination. In the same line, Zlotnik (1993) suggests that migrant 197

198  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration women, when leaving so-called public activities, that is, when positioning themselves in the private sphere, are regarded in a stereotyped way due to the lack of public consideration for the migratory status of women at the social, economic, political, and cultural levels. Such circumstances lead to the invisibility of these women in migration studies. Fortunately, from the 1980s onwards, feminist approaches have sought to emphasize the specific experiences of women at different stages of the migratory process and highlight the meaning of gender and power relations in migration. Boyd and Grieco (1989) and Miranda and Horta (2014) suggest that, in many cases, women are proactive and set the migration process in motion, determining where the migration will take place and for how long. Assuming the specificity of qualified women in migratory processes, the present work focuses on the migratory process of Brazilian women in Dubai (United Arab Emirates, UAE), exploring the extent to which women’s decisions regarding mobility are determined by structural constraints associated with the organization of labour markets, cultural models, and the family roles. In an alternative to this structuralist perspective, the chapter also aims to see the meaningfulness of the agency of women in migration and verify how (and if) this impacts on the processes of emancipation and empowerment. The Brazilian emigrant women leave a country of continental scale, where economic, social, and cultural diversity is significant. Depending on the region of origin in Brazil, women have lower or higher education and are subject to different levels of patriarchal control that influence their condition in both the domestic sphere and the labour market. For its part, the context of the destination country (UAE), which is culturally and socially very different from Brazil, demands new tasks or functions and implies a multifaceted adaptation that requires integrating or accommodating to a new culture, learning a new language (or more than one), understanding or relearning the institutions that govern the social and work worlds, coexisting in schools, leisure, and even in religious temples, and readjusting to a framework where patriarchy is even more accentuated. All of this often results in a position of greater vulnerability than the one existing in the country of origin (King 2012). Furthermore, the identification of a group of women who leave active positions in the Brazilian labour market and undergo a traditional migratory process marked by family reunification linked to the almost exclusive role of family caregiver, contributes to accentuating their dependence. After a brief theoretical–conceptual discussion about the migratory process of qualified women and its constraints, the empirical component of this chapter briefly presents the global migratory scenario of Brazilian women and explores the construction of the decision to migrate and the implementation of the migratory movement. These are related to the socio-spatial context of origin and the agency of the migrants themselves, considering motivations, options, and constraints in the family and professional domains.

2.

QUALIFIED WOMEN AND THE DECISION TO LEAVE

One of the consequences of globalization has been the precariousness of work relationships around the world. It affects those who migrate and the conditions in which contemporary mobility takes place, making women increasingly important protagonists within this process (Catarino and Oso 2011; Oso and Ribas-Mateos 2013). When women move across borders, they are part of the globalized and segmented production system, appearing to be over-represented in strongly feminized roles within the frame-

Qualified Brazilian migrant women in Dubai  199 work of the social division of labour associated with the contemporary phase of capitalism, of which biological reproduction and reproduction of domestic work are paradigmatic (Truong 1996). The former refers to the articulation between production and reproduction: reproductive or sexual work (Agustín 2007; Kempadoo et al., 2005), which is indispensable for the reproduction and care of people, being dominated by less qualified jobs (Killian and Manohar 2016). In the latter, migrants assume the role of caregivers, integrating themselves into the structure of global care chains, which Hochschild (2000, p. 131) describes as “a series of personal connections between people around the world based on paid or unpaid care.” In this perspective, the insertion of migrant women into less qualified segments of the labour market function is a key supplementary element in the globalized system of providing care and well-being. However, there are also qualified migrant women who play an important role in caregiving labour markets, mainly in the field of health: nurses, doctors, psychologists, geriatric technicians. Although there is no single definition that encompasses all skills and dimensions that characterize skilled or highly skilled migration, for reasons of homogenization and international comparison highly qualified people are those who have so-called tertiary education – that is, those who have a university degree or equivalent (OECD 2016). Since the beginning of the 21st century, there has been significant growth in the global attendance in higher education, which grows faster among women than among men, with women accounting for more than 50% of students in all developed countries and in half of the developing countries.1 Brazil has been no exception to this process, with women representing more than 50% of Brazilian university students (55.1% in 2013, according to the IBGE, the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics). However, and according to the same source, women occupy only 44% of job vacancies in Brazil and are 29% of unemployed people, which reflects a situation of discrimination compared with men and reinforces the factors that contribute to stimulating international migration. Despite this situation, there is still an underrepresentation of women in research on skilled migration, as this form of mobility is associated with specialized activities in organizational and technical terms; these require a high decision-making capacity, something that appears to be linked to predominantly male social representations (Kofman 2014). However, these circumstances have been changing; an example of this is the Spanish IT sector (Ramos and Lander 2013), where women are migrating in greater numbers than men even if they occupy positions in work environments dominated by those (Proni and Proni 2018). Economic facts and psychological laws of production govern the above-mentioned characteristics of the female world of migration. Psychological design is present among them. It is socially constructed and internalized, and simultaneously influences and is influenced by relationships with others and with the world. Thus, personal or professional actions of highly skilled women are guided by a business model of performance, investment, profitability, and positioning. Within the scope of this business model, work relationships were psychologized so that relational conflicts could be better managed (Foucault 2010). Despite the relational evolution that has taken place within the framework of many institutions, many women continue to face situations of discrimination that make them decide to get free and invest in themselves, to use the language of the mockumentary mini-series, I, Entrepreneur, in search of better opportuni-

1



See https://​unstats​.un​.org/​unsd/​gender/​downloads/​Ch3​_Education​_info​.pdf

200  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration ties abroad (Safatle et al. 2019). When women are in the process of migrating, in an individual (Harbison 1981) or family project (Mincer 1978; Sandell 1977), they manifest their interests and outline a migratory plan that can be interpreted as an act of entrepreneurship. Qualified women can thus understand mobility as a solution to counterbalance processes, conflicts, and suffering caused by the contemporary neoliberal culture. This includes phenomena such as loneliness, dissolution of boundaries between personal life and work, precariousness of professional and social ties, increase in the logic of competition, and an almost absolute time availability for work. All of this entails limits to the pursuit of professional careers (which inequality in parenting, more demanding for women, accentuates), and ultimately leads to greater risks of psychological suffering. In the context of family migration, the literature has often positioned the primary decision to migrate as within the scope of male heads of households, shifting the role of women to the reproductive component linked to the creation of the family (Mincer 1978; Shauman 2010). Recently, however, studies have emerged on men who are followers of the migration project, which reverses traditional roles (Gallo 2006; Shaw and Charsley 2006). In highly skilled migrant couples, the negotiation of “who follows whom” does not escape the processes of cultural insertion and implies an assessment of the social and professional opportunities for the partner (Kõu and Bailey 2014). In fact, some studies on couples in which both work have examined to what extent the needs of the female partner are taken into account in the decision-making processes of family mobility (Abraham et al., 2010; Hardill 2004). In this context, career and personal characteristics often overlap with the implementation of careful plans about establishing a family. According to these studies, the couple evaluates and negotiates family and professional issues together, with women having influence in the decision-making. For example, the work of Yeoh and Khoo (1998), addressing expatriate women in Singapore, points to the presence of negotiation in the couple, with women assuming an active role in the couple’s placements even though they are in a subordinate position in the couple. Furthermore, the agency of migrant women, whether highly or less qualified, often leads them to develop adaptation processes that imply transforming stereotypes and prejudices into resources that can be valued in the context of the migratory process. This happens with the traditional position of women in the scope of domestic work and family system, which opens doors to a range of more or less qualified functions centred on the domestic space and care genderized roles. In the case of Brazilian women, attributes considered specific that to a large extent correspond to stereotypes, such as being affectionate or communicative, exotic, and eroticized (Padilla 2007; Machado et al. 2010), are mobilized as resources that contribute to success in business, as Malheiros and Padilla (2014) evidence for female Brazilian immigrants involved in the beauty industry in Portugal.

3.

METHODOLOGICAL PROCEDURES

In empirical terms, the first step of the chapter intends to provide the global context of Brazilian international migration, tracing the sociographic scenario of Brazilian migrant women worldwide and, in particular, in OECD countries based on data from international statistical sources, complemented with statistical data from Dubai.

Qualified Brazilian migrant women in Dubai  201 The second step aims to trace the professional and family profiles of skilled Brazilian women in Dubai and, above all, to show the migratory context of departure and its influences. Attention is given to the way by which the decision to migrate is negotiated and formulated, especially in the institutional environment, and the relevant work and personal relationships that explain the choice of Dubai as the migration destination for the interviewees. For this purpose, quantitative and qualitative data were analyzed, the former obtained from international statistical sources, namely the Migration Statistics of the OECD (2021) and the International Migration Stock of the United Nations Population Division (2020). Qualitative data were obtained through individual semi-structured interviews carried out with an illustrative sample of 27 qualified Brazilian women who migrated to Dubai, 15 of whom were married, 4 were divorced, and 8 were single. The selection of women who comprised the sample resulted from an intentional strategy supported by a snowball technique (during 2020–22).

4.

THE CONTEXT OF BRAZILIAN MIGRANTS IN THE WORLD AND IN OECD COUNTRIES

According to the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Population Division (DESA, UNPD),2 in 2020 there were 1,897,128 Brazilian migrants residing abroad, of which 57.7% were female, which confirms the relevant level of feminization of this migratory contingent. Figure 15.1 shows that the main destinations are to North America, namely the USA, Western Europe, with emphasis on the Iberian Peninsula and Italy, Japan, and, at a lower rate, China and South America, namely Paraguay and Argentina. It should be noted that the levels of feminization of Brazilian emigration are more pronounced in Europe and North America when compared with most other destinations. As the main migratory destinations correspond to OECD countries, it is possible to use this source to provide more details regarding Brazilian female migration. According to the Migration Statistics (OECD 2021), in 2017 there were 407,444 Brazilian women migrants aged between 15 and 60 years. The focus of emigration was the three main migratory destinations identified above. The main reasons of migration to the United States are the large job market opportunities and the high income. To Portugal, work opportunities are combined with the reminiscence of the colonial heritage and the web of social relations that have been maintained for several centuries. Concerning Spain, the extension of structured connections within the Latin American framework and the similarity between Portuguese and Spanish languages play a decisive role. Finally, in the case of Japan, what prevails is the pattern of “return” migration by the descendants (third and fourth generations) of Japanese people that formerly migrated to Brazil. Countries that display robust and attractive labour markets, a low level of urban violence, and socio-cultural and historical proximity are more appealing to migrants, including the most qualified ones (Czaika and Parsons 2017). Additionally, the constitution of migratory networks involving family members and fellow citizens stimulates migration to certain destinations, an example of which is the Brazilian emigration to the USA (the oldest and most consolidated destination), but also to Portugal (Carneiro et al. 2007).

2 This data may be found at https://​www​.un​.org/​development/​desa/​pd/​content/​international​-migrant​ -stock. Accessed 3 September 2022.

202  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration

Source: UNDP 2016.

Figure 15.1 World distribution of Brazilian migrants, 2019 Brazilian emigrant women who have higher education work as executives, higher-level technicians in various sectors, and self-employed professionals. The level of employability of these women in jobs compatible with their training is around 20%, which points to disqualifying forms of labour market insertion, if not unemployment. However, the figure regarding employability of all Brazilian emigrants with higher education is 9%, which makes more robust statements difficult (OECD 2021). Among the high-income countries and regions of the world, the Persian Gulf region has emerged as a space for skilled migration. The presence of female migration has grown, which increasingly involves Brazilian women albeit in a lower number than that of men and clearly lower than in the destinations highlighted above.

5.

THE CONTEXT OF BRAZILIAN FEMALE MIGRATION TO DUBAI

5.1

Sociographic Characteristics, Challenges in Professional Insertion, and Origins in Brazil

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is a country that attracts skilled migrant women to its labour market. The structure of qualification of immigrant women in UAE is higher than that of immigrant men. Effectively, while among employed immigrant women aged over 15 the proportion of those who have completed higher education reaches 58.5%, among immigrant men in the same situation, this figure drops to 32.2% (DSC 2019). Despite such a strong proportion of skilled women among adult immigrant women, many of these are not in the labour market, as 43.9% are not economically active, the vast majority

Qualified Brazilian migrant women in Dubai  203 of them classified as housewives (78.7%).3 Although the data reflect skilled and low-skilled women, they demonstrate the difficulties that women face when they want to enter the job market in the UAE. This ultimately translates into a process of professional devaluation and an increase in dependence on male spouses for many women, who migrate together with their husbands or reunite with their families afterwards. Dubai is a cosmopolitan and planned metropolis ruled by Islamic monarchs and committed to a liberal vision of the economy. Notwithstanding the recent processes of valuation of women’s education and promotion of laws that foster a greater participation of women in the labour market and a greater wage equality between both genders (Bel-Air et al. 2013; Grant et al. 2007), there still prevails a society based on values strongly marked by the traditional family, which strongly values female roles oriented towards caring for children and their families. The Western perception of Middle Eastern countries is largely constructed by what the media portrays: there is an emphasis on oppression against women, namely Asian immigrant women employed as domestic servants, whose number is substantial in many Gulf countries (Pranav Naithani and Jha 2009). However, in some countries such as the United Arab Emirates, Western women immigrants seem to be finding work opportunities (Harrison and Michailova 2012). This demonstrates that, despite the difficulties of labour insertion and the high proportion of non-active people, there is a group of Western migrant women who choose this professional and organizational environment as an option for qualified work, and who often succeed in this project. Latin Americans constitute 0.1% of the population of the UAE, which corresponds to approximately 90,000 people (GRC 2021). According to the Brazilian Embassy in Abu Dhabi, the population of Brazilian immigrants is about 10,000 individuals. The Brazilian Embassy estimates that the male population is larger than the female population, a feature that is similar to the case of several other groups of immigrants in Dubai. Likewise, in Dubai, it is estimated that the number of Brazilian women immigrants in higher education positions is also lower than that of the male population, since the majority of self-employed professionals or highly qualified Brazilian workers in the UAE are male. Qualified Brazilian women, in common with all migrant women living in Dubai, have a residence permit because they were recruited in Brazil by multinational companies or due to family reunification under labour guardianship linked to their husbands (GLMM 2015). The UAE’s national statistics office and the Brazilian Embassy have insufficient data on these women: their origin in Brazil, their marital status, the form of recruitment, and their family structure are not known. The interviews carried out in this study aim to contribute to providing some information about these components. The analysis of the some sociodemographic characteristics of the women interviewed shows an equitable distribution between young people and mature women, since among those who declared their age, ten are under 40 years old and 11 are in an age group between 41 and 52 years old. Breaking it down by marital status, there are fifteen married, eight single, and four divorced women. When we cross marital status with working status, there are 19 active workers, one student, and seven housewives, all of whom are married. This illustrates a profile of qualified Brazilian women who negotiate the migration process to Dubai with their partners 3 Information provided by the Dubai Statistics Center for 2019: https://​www​.dsc​.gov​.ae/​en​-us/​ Themes/​Pages/​Labour​.aspx​?Theme​=​41. Accessed 3 September 2022.

204  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration

Source: Interviews with highly skilled Brazilian migrants in Dubai, 2020.

Figure 15.2

Highly skilled women migrants from Brazil who migrated to Dubai

and accept staying out of the job market, thus interrupting their professional careers, reinforcing their dependence on their husbands, and assuming the role of family care, but benefiting from relevant increases in family income and important material benefits. Despite the importance of this profile, most women interviewed are not in this situation, since the majority are active (17 out of 27). It is true that most of them are single or divorced (11 out of 17), but there are six active married women, four recruited in Brazil (three of these arrived single and got married in Dubai with non-Emirati partners) and two that got jobs in Dubai (Figure 15.2). This means that, in the family context, some skilled Brazilian women assume positions in which the roles of mother and support to the family are combined with their professional activity, which is negotiated with partners within the framework of the migratory process itself, assuming a dual participation in the UAE labour market from the outset. Actually, there are exceptional cases in which the primary migrant is the woman: C – At the beginning of 2014, a colleague of mine was fired together with me in Brazil. He came to Dubai and started his new job; as he started to work and [did] well, he [began] to get stable here. In 2015, a position opened up to a job opportunity – the same job that I was doing in Brazil. He told me this job could fit me very well and that I should apply for it. I needed to do all the recruitment process again as a new employee, going through interviews and exams again. After 3 months, my husband came to Dubai to visit me and looked for a new job.

Furthermore, among the six Brazilian women migrants who had already procured a job in Dubai or started a business activity there, half are married, which shows an emancipatory logic beginning in the emigration context that emanates from the proactive role of some women. C – I sent my CV to a friend who was working in a company. When she saw that I was a native Portuguese speaker she realized that I could apply to a job in her company because they needed someone [who] could communicate and work with Angola. After[wards], I applied and to continue the process – I did an interview with a Indian employee (a lot of times I asked him to repeat what he was saying and if he understood me). Then, I just needed to do two more exams, reply [to] some e-mails, and I passed.

Qualified Brazilian migrant women in Dubai  205

Source: Interviews with highly skilled Brazilian migrants in Dubai, 2020.

Figure 15.3

Origin regions of the interviewed skilled women migrants from Brazil who migrated to Dubai

The interviewees migrated from different regions of Brazil – the most urbanized regions and those that concentrate more population in the Southeast and South of Brazil predominate (Figure 15.3). In these regions, there is a great clustering of commercial, industrial, and technological activities, concentrating 65% of the Brazilian Gross Domestic Product (Carvalho 2021). Despite being small and illustrative, this study’s sample reflects the inequality between Brazilian regions, since the migratory process is to a large extent directed towards people with access to income and education, and Brazilian women who migrated to Dubai came from regions where income and education are higher. Another characteristic of the mentioned

206  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration regions is the prevalence of white people in relation to mestizos and blacks, which is also reflected in the studied sample. 5.2

Motivations, Family Constraints, and Mobility Experiences of Brazilian Women in Dubai

Addressing the main motivations that led Brazilian women to immigrate to Dubai, single women tend to highlight the development of professional careers in an international context. Single women were selected by transnational companies and transferred from Brazil to work in the UAE, highlighting the dissatisfaction with the job market in Brazil and the search for better professional opportunities and a career with an international component and more freedom of life: S2 – Before I came, maybe I would have chosen to go back to Europe, but since I had a student visa I didn’t want to go [to Europe] anymore; I don’t have an European passport and it would really be a problem to find work in my area; I didn’t want to go, I did it when I was 22, it was an adventure, right?

Consequently, they continued to seek new work opportunities to develop a career outside Brazil, exploring and discovering possibilities to achieve this goal. Most women in the survey were proactive in the search for qualified jobs, especially single and divorced women, which highlights processes of moving out of professional and cultural “comfort zones” by exploring more challenging migratory destinations such as Dubai. These challenges soon emerge with the process of obtaining and unlocking work visas, which are more difficult for migrant women than for migrant men, and also involve the need to be financially able to travel internationally (Kõu and Bailey 2014). Gender circumstances are present in the interviewees’ discourse about their migratory process negotiation, their descriptions of conditions, and their professional issues. The analysis of migration decision-making is full of questions about who got a job in the UAE, highlighting situations related to inequality between men and women, whose asymmetry in power relations deprives women of negotiation ability when they have to discuss the process with their partners. If on the one hand single women are recruited in the same way as single and married men, on the other hand married women with children are mostly the protagonists of family reunification processes determined by their husbands, essentially assuming the role of mothers and family caregivers. It is worth noting that single qualified women present a clearer discourse on motivations regarding career. In addition, when asked about their parents’ education, there is a social class disparity in comparison with married women. Effectively, single women came from families with less formal education than married women, suggesting attitudes of greater proactivity and greater support from social networks (friends, ascending relatives, and even boyfriends) to achieve their work positions and possibly social mobility (Table 15.1). When women decide to migrate, their motivations may arise in the context of an individual project that stems from frustrations felt in their country of origin and opportunities for personal and professional development glimpsed abroad. Mobility decisions also involve family issues, and it is necessary to negotiate, especially in the case of women who depend on family structures, when they are raising children and developing their careers in moments their family life demands more of them. As women’s positions in the life cycle are different, they play different

Qualified Brazilian migrant women in Dubai  207 Table 15.1

Father

Mother

Educational level of the parents of highly skilled Brazilian interviewees that migrated to Dubai Single

Married

Divorced

Primary

1

1

0

Secondary

3

3

0

Tertiary

4

10

3

Unknown

0

1

1

Primary

3

5

1

Secondary

2

6

1

Tertiary

3

4

2

Unknown

0

0

0

Source: Interviews with highly skilled Brazilian migrants in Dubai, 2020.

roles throughout their life trajectories. This has implications in the way they conceive of and negotiate the migratory process. It is not the same to be single or married, a mother with small children or teenagers, and to be at an initial or more consolidated and stable phase of a professional career. Thus, the migration decision process involves individual issues and structural elements related to the family context and the opportunities of the labour market. And this is not the same for men and women: the sample makes it clear how gender characteristics, which imply networks of beliefs, personality traits, attitudes, feelings, values, behaviours, and activities, differentiate both genders through a process of social construction that actively interferes in their life contexts and the migratory process. In Dubai, when faced with a job market with different characteristics, skilled Brazilian emigrant women have to adapt their skills and develop others that are more suited to the local environment. Divorced women and women with families, often subordinated to male partners in their mobility strategy, had to be able to deal with obstacles to restart their careers or discover other possibilities. In addition, a disappointing experience, causing conflicts and challenges between different roles such as that of mother and a woman’s standing in the professional sphere, associated with a career built over the years, may generate tension and uncertainty, as the interviewees reported: A – I received a company offer with a nice salary, but it was the worst job that I have ever had in my life. […] I worked so much that it could be called a slavery job. I didn’t have time for lunch, they mistreated me and humiliating… I got sick, [and] after that I decided to change for a new job[.] I spen[t] one year to recover myself from that. J – My boss asked me to go out with him after work and the first time I got shocked and I told him that I didn’t think that is was appropriate and he changed his behaviour with me, being aggressive, humiliating me. It lasted for 10 months until I got a new job, which changed my life because I met my husband there.

In short, the women interviewed here planned mobility strategies with their partners; however, their incorporation into the local labour market posed more challenges and was more complex in some respects than expected. Despite this, proactive attitudes marked many of the women’s behaviours. The Brazilian women interviewed did search for jobs, adapted their work skills, acquired language skills, and validated professional credentials that allowed them to practice a profession in Dubai in jobs which, in a small number of cases, were found some time after settling in the UAE.

208  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration

6.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

Dubai, as other Gulf countries, has become a major migration destination both for low-skilled and for highly skilled migrants. Although men still constitute the majority of the migrants, the presence of women migrants is increasingly relevant. Indeed, the skill structure of foreign women in Dubai is higher than the skill structure of foreign men, athough a large percentage of the former are not involved in the labour market. Despite the recent trends towards increasing gender equality, this is in line with the prevalence of traditional patriarchal structures both in the domestic and labour spheres. As mentioned in the analysis, almost 44% of the non-Emirati women aged 15 years or over residing in UAE in 2019 were not participating in the country’s labour market and the majority of these were housewives. This exploratory chapter focuses on the migratory experience of highly skilled Brazilian female migrants in Dubai analyzing the constraints and strategies of negotiation developed by these women when building their migration process and establishing their career and family plans, considering their life paths and eventual moments of inflexion. Assuming a gender perspective on migration, we position the geographical mobility decisions as well as the professional ones within the structural frameworks of patriarchy and professional and entrepreneurial structures, exploring both the condition of vulnerability of these women migrants and their agency. Although coming from the most urbanized and developed regions of Brazil, possessing tertiary education and often some professional experience, several of these women migrants experienced vulnerability in their origin places due to existing patriarchal structures that often limit their opportunities in local labour markets (e.g., lower wages in comparison to males, more difficulties with careers). This becomes more significant when women have to combine motherhood responsibility with professional activity. With this in consideration, migration emerges as a challenge but also as an opportunity to develop their professional careers internationally, outside the Brazilian patriarchy system that they already know and with which they are already familiar. As international professional mobility is often assumed as an opportunity for professional career development, especially the youngest and single women interviewed follow this model and migrate to a society where patriarchal principles are even more marked than in Brazil. According to their statements, the professional goals of these women are partially attained in this migratory process (high wages, professional experience that facilitates future employability, etc.) but because they face a male-dominated society and labour market, they must adapt their behaviour to this new context in order to succeed. Additionally, in order to ensure the professional route of success, these women must ignore or postpone their parent roles. As far as married women are concerned, their migration process is subject to more constraint and often requires a complex negotiation with their male partners. Approximately half of the interviewees with this marital status arrived in Dubai via family reunion and do not participate in the labour market, which points to a family negotiation where the domestic role as mothers and wives seems to prevail over professional career and success. Several of the women in this situation leave their work and suspend temporarily or permanently their professional careers. The high wages paid in Dubai are a relevant input for the decision-making, but this combines with the traditional principles of the male-dominated culture – if several women follow men in this migratory endeavour and abdicate from their own personal career and professional

Qualified Brazilian migrant women in Dubai  209 success, the opposite situation (men following women in their migration process leaving their work and assuming a position in the domestic space) is extremely rare. If this aggravates the dependency situation of many highly skilled Brazilian migrants, to assume these have only a passive voice in the migration process corresponds to a very narrow perspective. Not only have these women negotiated and influenced the family migration process, but in several cases, once in Dubai, they assume a proactive attitude, looking for and finding jobs or starting businesses. At the end of the day, this exploratory research unveiled elements about the migration process of highly skilled Brazilian women and how to combine their productive and reproductive roles. Although life in a migration context can reproduce or even strengthen traditional roles supported by patriarchal structures, as the position of several married interviewees showed, it can also promote emancipation. In fact, international mobility can open new work opportunities and release women from patriarchal control that also exists in the regions of origin in Brazil. By assuming a proactive attitude, implementing strategies to adapt to the labour market of Dubai and renegotiating their family roles, these women demonstrate that they are not passive migratory subjects, even in a culturally very distinct migratory destination where informal and even formal norms are strongly marked by patriarchy.

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16. In the eye of the storm: Afghan women and girls navigating displacement Mandana Hendessi

PREAMBLE Afghan women’s and girls’ migration and internal displacement is a woefully under-researched topic in the field of gender and migration, despite the enormous impact migration has had on Afghan women’s lives and livelihoods in the last decades. For Afghanistan, a country known to have had one of the largest refugee crises in the world, where 76 per cent of its population have experienced displacement during their lifetime (Lopez-Lucia 2015), it is astonishing that so little attention has been given to the more specific causal factors and effects of displacement on the lives of women and girls (Danish Refugee Council 2017). Moreover, migration figures presented in much of the literature available to date lack sex-segregated data and little attention has been given to violence against women and girls as a trigger to their displacement. This chapter aims to fill this gap to some extent by giving voice and visibility to women’s experiences of migration and displacement in Afghanistan, articulating the link between gender-based violence and women’s migration. However, more thorough research into Afghan women’s displacement is called for, in order to upgrade knowledge, to enrich the discourse on gender and global migration, and to induce more nuanced responses to this important theme in international development policy and programming.

AFGHANISTAN MIGRATION AND DISPLACEMENT IN CONTEXT The world’s displaced population is on the rise, as reported by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). By June 2021, the agency recorded over 84 million displaced people around the world, an increase from 82.4 million at the end of 2020 (UNHCR 2021). Historically, Afghanistan has seen the largest refugee crises in the world, notably that associated with the Afghan–Soviet war (1978–1989), ranking the fourth in the UNHCR’s index, below World War II, and India’s partition and Bangladesh Liberation War (UNHCR 2000). During the previous decade, Afghanistan’s refugees and asylum seekers numbered the third largest in the world with 2.8 million people, below Syria (6.8 million) and Venezuela (5.4 million) (World Vision 2020). In the absence of sex-segregated data in much of the research on Afghan migration, accurate figures for women’s and girls’ migration and displacement are currently unattainable. However, from more recent information, we may deduce that, while the Afghan refugee populations from the Afghan–Soviet war included entire families moving across the borders, primarily to the neighbouring countries of Iran and Pakistan, the population movements since have been mainly fluid and internal with women and children outnumbering men (Lopez-Lucia 2015). This is reflected in the current figures, with the latter making up the majority (80 per cent) of the four million internally displaced people (Siegfried 2021). 212

Afghan women and girls navigating displacement  213 Before the Soviet occupation of 1979, migration from Afghanistan mainly comprised male breadwinners in search of a livelihood, notably in Iran and Pakistan. The decades of 1960s and 1970s were characterised by a low industrialisation growth and a general lack of employment for the Afghan population of working age (Marchand 2014). While male migrants were engaged in arduous occupations such as construction, farm and factory labour in both countries, their female relatives, as few as they were then, took up domestic jobs in households (Rostami-Povey 2007). The first wave of Afghanistan’s refugee migration began with the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in 1979. In the decade that followed, 2.9 million Afghans crossed the border to settle in Iran, fleeing from bombing and combat (Abbasi-Shavasi 2006). They were given access to food, education and healthcare, having been recognised as ‘religious refugees’. While a small number – 5–10 per cent – were housed in refugee camps, the majority resettled among the host communities in urban and rural areas of Iran’s eastern provinces, though they were still confined to performing low-wage labour (Abbasi-Shavasi 2006). Around 1.5 million Afghans crossed the border to Pakistan during the same period (UNHCR and Government of Pakistan 2005). In contrast to those who had migrated to Iran, these refugees were housed in camps, clustered close to the border with Afghanistan, which bore its own risks and ramifications. Many Afghan men there fell prey to the ideologies propagated by radical Islamist parties – catalysed by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami and Burhanuddin Rabbani’s Jamiat-e-Islami political movements, funded and supported by the US and Saudi Arabia with billions of dollars channelled through Pakistan. These political parties recruited and trained them to smuggle arms into Afghanistan for the Mujaheddin fighting against the Soviet army (Marchand 2014). A long and bloody struggle that eventually led to the withdrawal of the Soviet army in 1989 and the removal of Afghanistan’s communist regime in 1992. Not only did it cost Afghanistan dearly in respect of the loss of lives and infrastructure, it portended to the veneration of Salafi-jihadist ideologies in Afghanistan’s mainstream culture. With significant financial support from Saudi Arabia, the Salafi school of Islamic jurisprudence, a more stringent Islamic sect advocating a return to what is perceived as the ‘original’ and ‘purest’ form of Islam at the time of the Prophet Mohammad, cascaded across the region, influencing not only Afghan culture and religious landscape but also those in the rest of the Muslim world to varying degrees (Milke et al., 2017). It provided a fertile ground for the emergence of new and more ominous forms of political extremism in the region, marked by their notorious misogyny, personified in the insurgent groups such as the Taliban, al-Qaeda and ISIS. Their effects on gender relations in Afghanistan were devastating, destroying all the gains Afghan women had made in advancing women’s rights and narrowing the gender gap in the preceding decades. These gains included the expansion of girls’ education in both urban and rural areas, women’s enrolment in higher education and their entry into professions such as medicine, law and engineering, previously exclusive to men. Its onslaught on women’s rights is evident today with the consolidation of customary laws in Afghanistan that go further than the Sharia Islamic laws in respect of confining women to the domestic sphere, removing their rights in marriage, divorce, child custody and inheritance, narrowing their social space and punishing those who raise their heads above the parapet, as featured strongly in the dark years of the Taliban rule, 1996 to 2001. Between the withdrawal of the Soviet army in 1989 and the Mujaheddin seizure of power in 1992, the ensuing civil war that lasted four years and the Taliban regime 1996–2001, migration

214  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration took a more fluid pattern in terms not only of people moving in and out of Afghanistan, but also of internally displaced people. The 2001 US invasion led to 300,000 people fleeing the country (Agah 2015). However, with the fall of the Taliban regime, following the invasion led by the US and its Western allies, and the signing of the Bonn Accord in 2001, leading to the setting up of an interim government and a new constitution, an estimated number of 5.7 million Afghans returned with hopes for a stable and prosperous Afghanistan (Lopez-Lucia 2015). Hopes that were subsequently dashed in the ensuing years, due to the poorly planned and -financed nation-building engineered by the US, marred by the misuse of funds and an endemic corruption. In 2020, Transparency International ranked Afghanistan as one of the most corrupt countries in its corruption index, 165 out of the 180 countries (Transparency International 2020).

ECONOMIC DECLINE AND THE EMERGING HUMANITARIAN CRISES Throughout the twenty years of the US intervention in Afghanistan, the country remained deeply dependent on foreign aid. Back in 2008, international assistance to Afghanistan constituted 90 per cent of the country’s public expenditure with the US as the largest contributor (Waldman 2008). Although this was reduced in later years to 75 per cent, foreign aid did little to incentivise the country’s resilience to socio-economic crises and self-dependency, failing to channel investment into strengthening the country’s infrastructures. The effects of this under-investment were especially evident in the rural economy, on which the majority of Afghans rely for their livelihood (Mashal 2019). About 74 per cent of Afghanistan’s population live in rural areas (2.96 million) and are mostly dependent on agriculture for their livelihood (The World Bank 2020). Although Afghan women make up a sizeable proportion of the rural workforce, only as few as 10 per cent own land (Campbell 2017). Therefore, the impact was especially felt by rural women, most of whom work in the informal sector, often unpaid or on a meagre wage (UNFPA 2021). In 2019, the country’s annual revenue of $2.5 billion was nowhere sufficient to cover its $11 billion public expenditure budget (Mashal 2019). A low-income country, Afghanistan’s gross domestic product (GDP) per capita stood at $2,152.36 in 2019, amongst the lowest in the world (The World Bank 2019). Most of the US financial assistance was spent on the war effort. Between 2001 and 2020, the US spent $2.3 trillion on the war with the Taliban, which also included the training and maintenance of the 352,000-strong Afghan National Defence and Security Forces (Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs 2021). In comparison, only a fraction of the US funds – $130 billion – was spent on reconstruction, economic and social development (Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs 2021). Although the country made some advances in social development during these two decades, these were rather modest. The most significant of all were in girls’ education, where their school enrolment rose to 82.85 per cent; the maternal mortality rate, which was halved by 2020; and life expectancy at birth, which was increased by 10 years for women and 8 years for men (The World Bank 2021). With regard to women’s rights, progress has been rather slow and fragmented. Although 27 per cent of the seats in the lower House of Parliament were occupied by women, women’s waged participation in the labour force accounted for only 21.76 per cent (UN Women 2021). Nearly half of the population – 47.3 per cent – live below the national poverty line (Asian

Afghan women and girls navigating displacement  215 Development Bank 2021). Child marriage is still commonplace; according to figures published recently by UN Women, 28.3 per cent of Afghan women aged 20–24 years were married before the age of 18 (UN Women 2021), although the true figure for underage marriage is probably much higher than this, since most marriages in Afghanistan – 91.2 per cent – have not been officially registered (UNICEF 2018). The adolescent birth rate is still considerably high, standing at 62 per 1,000 women aged 15–19 in 2014 (UN Women 2021). According to the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), Afghanistan has a significantly high incidence of violence against women and girls, including forced marriage (AIHRC 2015). It is estimated that up to 87.2 per cent of women have experienced at least one form of physical, sexual or psychological violence, or forced marriage in Afghanistan; more than 60 per cent of women have experienced multiple forms (Manjoo 2015). In August 2021, the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan after 20 years of war, as the US and NATO forces started to withdraw, adhering to the agreement President Trump had signed with the Taliban earlier in February of that year. This agreement marked the start of a new, though foreboding, era for Afghanistan, one that would usher back into power, not long after the agreement was signed, a regime that was ironically overthrown by the US and its allies back in 2001.With near record highs of war casualties – 241,000 in total, the majority of whom (97 per cent) were Afghan nationals, civilians, as well as security forces and opposition fighters, the protracted armed conflict had taken a heavy toll on Afghan people, posing a major threat to their safety and well-being (Crawford 2019). The new Taliban regime has inherited an economy deep in crisis. The rapid economic decline, triggered by a persistent and severe drought that has blighted Afghanistan’s agriculture for the last decade and a reduction in international grants, has led to a sharp increase in poverty and macroeconomic instability (The World Bank Overview 2021). Even long before the collapse of President Ghani’s government, Afghanistan’s economic growth had slowed down, reflecting weak investors’ confidence amid a rapidly worsening security situation. In addition, Afghanistan experienced a third COVID-19 wave starting in April 2021. Infection rates soared to record highs, with less than 5 per cent of the population fully vaccinated (The World Bank 2021). In 2020, Human Rights Watch reported that the increase in COVID-19 infection rates has led to a sharp increase in girls dropping out of school. The disruption in girls’ education has in turn increased their risk of numerous abuses: child marriage, child labour, early pregnancy and gender-based violence (Human Rights Watch 2020). The sudden halt in donor and government expenditure, following the Taliban takeover, trade disruptions and a dysfunctional banking sector portend to a sharp contraction in output and a catastrophic rise in poverty, food insecurity and displacement in the months to come (The World Bank 2021). The UN has currently classed Afghanistan’s humanitarian crises as close to the worst in the world, worse than South Sudan, Syria and Yemen with over half of the population – 22.8 million – destined for acute hunger and 7.8 million at emergency levels by the first quarter of 2022 (World Food Programme 2021).

AFGHAN WOMEN AND DISPLACEMENT SINCE 2000 As mentioned earlier, women and children make up the majority of the four million internally displaced populations in Afghanistan (UNHCR 2021; Amnesty International 2020). However, not all have been displaced by armed conflict and food insecurity. Many have been enduring

216  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration years of displacement, fleeing family violence, forced marriage and harmful traditional practices, though no statistical data have been available on this to date. The two major triggers to Afghanistan’s migration and population displacement in the 20 years that followed the ousting of the Taliban regime in 2001 are commonly identified as armed conflict and food insecurity induced by climate change and the successive governments’ neglect of agriculture (Abdelkhaliq 2018; International Crisis Group 2016; Stites 2011; Rostami-Povey 2007). Not long after the ousting of the Taliban, Afghanistan woefully saw their resurgence and the start of the 20-year conflict, having regrouped along the border with Pakistan. Less than ten years after their ouster, the Taliban began taking back territory in Afghanistan. By 2016, one-fifth of the country was either controlled or contested by the insurgent group (Roggio 2016). While the conflict with the Taliban has been given considerable attention in the world media as the main cause of Afghan migration and displacement, little has been reported on the effects of climate-induced drought and the collapse of Afghanistan’s rural economy. Not only has this phenomenon caused mass poverty and food insecurity, especially for women, it has also been a source of communal conflict in Afghanistan. Yet little has been said about the scope and devastating effects of communal violence, even though it has constituted 80 per cent of Afghanistan’s conflicts (Jones 2020). Disputes and communal tensions over land, water and agricultural resources that have become progressively scarce with the steady rise in temperature and the fall in water resources since 1950, have marred communal relations in rural Afghanistan for decades. The drought that has peaked since 2018, has threatened the livelihood of 13.5 million Afghans (Jones 2020). The confluence of both sets of conflict have led to large-scale migration and displacement. Since 2012, a third of Afghans have migrated or become internally displaced (Jones 2020). While billions of dollars were spent on the war with the Taliban, little attention was paid to the communal conflict, despite its severity. Aside from the most common reasons – poverty, food insecurity and armed conflict – violence against women and girls is a key causal factor for women’s displacement in Afghanistan, though, as mentioned, woefully under-researched to date. This can take many different forms: violence of various types – physical, emotional, sexual, financial, food deprivation, home incarcerations – perpetrated by spouse or other family members, forced marriage and harmful traditional practices (Manjoo 2015). Studies published recently throw more light on the connection between women’s displacement and gender-based violence in Afghanistan (Sultani-Haymon 2018; Ahsan-Tirmizi 2021). Furthermore, in 2017, Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission published a report, raising concern about the displacement experienced by women and girls who have run away from home, citing numerous cases they had dealt with in the preceding year. Many of the 108 cases referred to the Commission then were of runaways who, having been disowned by their families, had ended up displaced with no or little prospects for reuniting with their families and reintegrating in the community (AIHRC 2017). The following case, cited in the report (translated from Farsi), illustrates such a predicament: A 22-year-old girl from a province under cover, came to our Kabul office and described the reason for her running away from home thus, ‘I was forced by my family to get engaged [to] a 59-year-old man in return for a large sum of money. I tried hard to dissuade my family from this, but failed to do so. I had no option but to run away from my father’s home and seek help from someone. This person suggested I seek AIHRC’s assistance.’ She asked for our cooperation, saying that she doesn’t want to marry her fiancé and returning home was no option because if she did, she would be murdered by

Afghan women and girls navigating displacement  217 her father or the fiancé’s family. She wanted us to refer her to a women’s shelter. AIHRC’s women’s section referred her to a women’s shelter to resolve her case. Our joint effort resulted in the revocation of her engagement but her family still didn’t accept her and she continues to live at the women’s shelter indefinitely. (AIHRC 2017)

Similar cases were cited in AIHRC’s report the following year where 112 runaway cases had been registered with the organisation (AIHRC 2018). These are, however, the tip of an iceberg, since many displaced women in a similar predicament refrain from seeking assistance from the police and other state institutions due to the stigma attached to survivors of violence and the fear of prosecution for the crime of “zina” (Sultani-Haymon 2018), risking further abuse by state officials who ironically are responsible for protecting them (Ahsan-Tirmizi 2021). In 2016, half of all women in Afghanistan’s prisons and about 95 per cent of girls in juvenile detention centres had been arrested and detained on charges of ‘moral crime’, zina (Human Rights Watch 2016), many of whom were runaways. Zina in Islamic legal tradition is defined as illicit sexual intercourse between a man and woman (Mir Hosseini 2010). In some cases, as reported by Human Rights Watch, displaced women and girls who had been raped were charged with zina, alongside their rapists (Human Rights Watch 2016). Moreover, police and prosecutors often charged displaced women with the intention to commit zina to justify their arrest and incarceration for rejecting a spouse chosen by their families, fleeing domestic violence or rape, or eloping to escape forced marriage (Human Rights Watch 2016). Whether in prison or in a women’s shelter, these women suffered the label of outcast and prolonged displacement. In a recent publication, Pious Peripheries: Runaway Women in Post-Taliban Afghanistan, Sonia Ahsan-Tirmizi describes the plight of Afghan women who run away from home to escape abuse as ‘left at the mercy of state officials who subjected them to more abuse’ (2021: 59). To illustrate this point, she cites the case of Fawzia, who had run away from an abusive father and was later stopped by the police and brought to a police station. Having undergone the mandatory virginity test, which not only the police but also women’s shelters were required to conduct on runaway women and girls, she was told her hymen was not intact. Following the test result, she was taken to the house of a police official, where she was raped by a series of men. The next day, shelter managers who had been called to pick her up from the police station found her unconscious (Ahsan-Tirmizi 2021). Some of the displaced women have fled traditional marriages known as baad and badal (UNICEF 2018). In the case of the former, the woman is given in marriage as a compensation for non-payment of a debt or as a retributive act for a crime committed by a male family member, ranging from murder to damage to property. Badal (exchange) marriage involves two daughters of roughly the same age exchanged with each other as wives for their brothers. In some cases, fathers exchange their own daughters to get new wives for themselves. Violence against women in such marriages is commonplace (Smith 2011). Displacement removes women and girls from the community-based protection structures to which they’ve been accustomed. It is indeed during displacement that their need for protection increases, as they become more vulnerable to gender-based violence (Sultani-Haymon 2018). Sultani-Haymon in her ground-breaking research on women’s displacement in Afghanistan found that many women in displacement camps or settlements lived in fear of rape and sexual assaults as neither the government nor the international aid agencies were providing protection services. One of the respondents from the Hosain Khil settlement in Kabul voiced a shared concern, though somewhat guardedly, during a focus group discussion she conducted in 2017:

218  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration We don’t have security; we are scared at night time that a thief might break in. There are perverted men walking around, stealing and attack[ing] the homes. At night, if you call the security people to help you, they would not come because they are scared for themselves. (Sultani-Haymon 2018: 19)

CONCLUSION The perspective presented in this chapter is rather unique, as it, for the first time, highlights how gender-based violence has been a cause as well as an effect of displacement for women in Afghanistan, a factor that has been hitherto overlooked in much of research on gender and migration in Afghanistan. Although much has been written about the adverse effects of domestic violence, child and forced marriage on Afghan women’s health and well-being, restricting their access to education, employment, and limiting their involvement in social and political life (Skaine 2008; Smith 2011), the analyses have largely overlooked its connection with women’s migration and displacement. This has effectively invisibilised gender-based violence in the debate on gender and migration in Afghanistan, though in reality it has played a major role. This oversight has effectively narrowed the scope of social policy addressing the issues of displacement pertinent to women and girls. The rise in poverty, the intensification of a humanitarian crisis compounded by the withdrawal of girls’ rights to secondary education and women’s rights to employment since the Taliban seizure of power in August 2021, are highly unlikely to reverse the current migration and displacement trends. While thousands of Afghans have since fled the country to the west or neighbouring states, the remaining majority are facing a collapsed economy and famine, with families enduring prolonged periods of displacement and many resorting to selling everything including their daughters to the highest bidder to make ends meet (Silk 2021). More recent research, though woefully few and far between, has given voice and visibility to women’s migration and displacement in Afghanistan, as a result of employing a holistic qualitative research methodology, tailored to the circumstances and needs of the respondent group (Sultani-Haymon 2018; Ahsan-Tirmizi 2021). This has involved first and foremost the researcher familiarising herself with the women in their own environment, whether in a displacement camp or in a women’s shelter, engaging directly with them as they go about their daily lives. The direct engagement has consequently removed the barrier between the researcher and respondent, fostering a trusting relationship between them and creating a safe space for the respondents to articulate their experiences of gender-based violence. Given the entrenched and pervasive nature of gender-based violence – a taboo subject invoking feelings of shame and dishonour for Afghan women – this approach has nevertheless enabled us to collect more pertinent data to inform social policy and programming. It is through research methodologies like these that we can properly unravel and analyse the issues of gender and migration in Afghanistan and other countries with similar social and cultural worldviews.

REFERENCES Abbasi-Shavasi, M., and Glazebrook, D. (2006), Continued Protection, Sustainable Reintegration: Afghan Refugees and Migrants in Iran, Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit. Abdelkhaliq, N., et al. (2018), Experiences of Female Refugees & Migrants in Origin, Transit and Destination Countries: A Comparative Study of Women on the Move from Afghanistan East and West

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Afghan women and girls navigating displacement  221 Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs (2021), Costs of War, Brown University, August, https://​watson​.brown​.edu/​costsofwar/​search​?query​=​Afghanistan​&​section​=​All, accessed 6 October 2021. The World Bank (2020), Rural Population (% of Total Population) – Afghanistan, https://​data​.worldbank​ .org/​indicator/​SP​.RUR​.TOTL​.ZS​?locations​=​AF, accessed 8 October 2021. The World Bank (2021), Our World in Data: Afghanistan, https://​ourworldindata​.org/​country/​ afghanistan, accessed 6 December 2021. The World Bank in Afghanistan (2021), Overview, 8 October, https://​www​.worldbank​.org/​en/​country/​ afghanistan/​overview​#1, accessed 11 October 2021. World Food Programme (2021), Afghanistan Sets to be World’s Worst Humanitarian Crisis, Report www​ .wfp​ .org/​ stories/​ Warns, Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, 25 October, https://​ afghanistan​-climate​-crisis​-drought​-wfp​-hunger​-cop26​-ipc​-un, accessed 3 December 2021. World Vision (2020), Forced to Flee: Top Countries Refugees Are Coming From, https://​ www​ .worldvision​.org/​refugees​-news​-stories/​forced​-to​-flee​-top​-countries​-refugees​-coming​-from, accessed 21 October 2021.

17. Gender conflict and forced migration in India: human rights perspectives1 Rita Machanda

PROLOGUE In April 2021, a 14-year-old Rohingya Muslim girl, ‘Rokeya’2 (all names changed), whom Indian border authorities were attempting to deport at Moreh on the India–Myanmar border, got a reprieve when Myanmar immigration authorities refused to open the gates, saying that the situation is ‘not appropriate for any deportation, currently.’ Apparently, the Indian Foreign Ministry had thought this appropriate – notwithstanding the Covid lockdown, the violent tumult within Myanmar following the February military coup, or the girl’s entreaties that she be reunited with her family residing in a Bangladesh refugee camp and not be sent back, orphaned to confront the situation of violent persecution from which she had fled. Rokeya, a likely victim of cross-border trafficking, was denied refuge. Without a passport and valid visa, she was deemed an ‘illegal migrant’ in violation of the Foreigners Act 1946 and thereby at risk of deportation (Hindustan Times, March 2021). She would have been another statistic alongside the 40 Rohingya women, men and children who have been deported and the 300 Rohingyas locked up in detention centres facing deportation following the Indian Supreme Court’s order allowing their deportation (LiveLaw.in 2021). The above vignette foregrounds the complexity of mixed migration flows3 and of the blurring of distinction between regular and irregular migration, especially when globally hostile entry regimes drive desperate people fleeing violent conflict and persecution, and dreaming of safety and a better life, seek the support of human smugglers and traffickers. It draws attention to the unworkability of binary legal categories and status determination of voluntarism and coercion, irregular and regular migration, and even of trafficking (Chimni 2009; Wilson 2011). Rokeya’s story reveals the persisting gender gap with regard to inattention to guidelines regarding family separation and multiple violations of India’s obligations under the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). It exposes that India’s lack of a national refugee law places women and girls at disproportionate risk of trafficking due to their physical, economic and legal precarity. Rokeya’s vulnerability reveals serious flaws in the framing of India’s anti-trafficking bill 2021 in addressing non-nationals. This is despite UNHCR’s recommendation that the law include ‘specific safeguards for persons in need of international protections … and de-penalise [their] irregular entry and stay’ (UNHCR 2018). The bill decrees This chapter is based on an earlier version, ‘Contesting Infantalisation of Forced Migrant Women’, in N Behera (ed.), Gender Conflict and Migration, Sage, London (2006), 205–226. 2 All names have been changed. 3 Gaining increasing currency, the term ‘mixed migration’ ‘captures the intertwined and multifaceted drivers of movement of all people, regardless of status. While the crossing of national boundaries is commonly classified as either “forced/involuntary” or “voluntary,” the reality is much more complex and nuanced’, https://​www​.migrationdataportal​.org/​themes/​mixed​-migration (accessed 15 December 2021). 1

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Gender conflict and forced migration in India  223 repatriation in the case of non-citizens, indifferent to the causes propelling forced migration and the impracticability of return (wcd.nic.in Draft2021). Rokeya’s story, indeed the focus on girl/women refugees, emphasises the condition of ‘rightlessness’ of the refugee as non-citizen. As several authors have analysed, the feminisation of the refugee subject naturalises disempowerment and denial of agency (Callamard 2002; Crawley 2017: 18). It provides the moral logic for what Heather Johnson contends are three shifts in the imagination of the refugee subject, ‘racialisation, victimisation, and feminisation’, within a discourse of de-politicising and naturalising (2011: 1016). Building on Chimni’s critique of the ‘myth of difference’ of refugees from Afro-Asia (1999), Johnson argued that each shift contributed to changing practices and policies of the international protection regime from the ‘preferred solution’ of integration and resettlement to one of return and repatriation (2011: 1023). Drawing upon the representation of the female refugee subject as passive, dependent and devoid of agency, I want to join scholars inspired by Christine Sylvester (2013) and researchers such as Michelle Wiggett, who posit the need to recover women’s political agency by considering the experiences of these refugee women as ‘more than just victims, but people looking to carve out their own identity’ (2013: 20). In particular, I draw upon the perspectives and experiences of refugee women in India to question the tendency on the part of protection and humanitarian agencies to use cultural explanations of consent norms for subjugation, and the default practice of ‘Going through the Men’ to silence voice, deny agency and increase vulnerability. I argue for visibilising the empirical evidence of the agency of women refugees, an aspect that UNHCR’s implementing partners in India tend to overlook as they foreground humanitarian over human rights claims (personal interviews with Rohingya refugees, Delhi, 5/11/21). Also, a recurring theme is the agency of refugee rights activists and their organisational mobilisation in solidarity with Indian human rights activists, lawyers’ collectives, NGOs and parliamentarians in challenging and even overturning discrimination, stigmatisation, detention and deportation. The chapter follows with a contextual mapping of the contradictions in India’s ad hoc refugee policy/praxis, which I suggest is structured around the politicised binary of ‘good refugee, bad refugee’, fractioning the universal de-historicised humanitarian subject. Next, I use a gendered analysis to unearth the irrelevance of the distinction made between refugees and migrants, and to problematise knowledge and policy bias in confronting the emerging conditions of exit of economy, violence and discrimination. Finally, I contest the victimisation, feminisation and infantilisation of the refugee subject.

INDIA: ‘GOOD REFUGEE, BAD REFUGEE’ The binary term ‘good refugee, bad refugee’ emphasises the ambiguity of representation of refugees and the dependence of their moral human rights and humanitarian claims on political interests (Wilson and Mavelli 2016). It invokes the overlapping discourse of ‘good Muslim, bad Muslim’ and draws attention to the global master narrative of Islamophobia in shaping the imagination of the refugee in global north discourses (Szczepanik 2016). Arguably, it is in India that religion has emerged as the primary characteristic determining the country’s responses towards refugees and asylum seekers (Siddiqui and Ali 2021). At this contemporary moment of ascendant Hindu right populism and extreme ethno-religious nationalism, the marginalisation of religious minorities has reached a new threshold in the formalisation of prej-

224  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration udices and practices into law as evidenced in the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) 2019. Meant to fast-track citizenship for persecuted religious minorities from neighbouring Muslim majoritarian states of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh, CAA specifically excludes persecuted Muslim minorities. Consequently, Muslim refugees find themselves conflated with ‘illegal migrants’ and targeted by Hindu propagandists and official agencies as a security threat. Legally all non-nationals come under the Foreigners Act 1946 because the country has no national refugee law to regulate the status, entry, rights and rehabilitation of refugees. Practices towards refugee communities that have been ad hoc, arbitrary and discriminatory, and driven by foreign policy and national security considerations (Samaddar 2003; Bose and Manchanda [1997] 2005) are now driven by ideological considerations. The legal precarity of refugees, stateless and asylum seekers has made for vulnerability to multiple human rights violations, including arbitrary arrest, detention and even deportation (Bose 2020). India’s present hostile practices are in contrast to the country’s generous history of providing refuge to large and diverse populations – 14 million Partition ‘migrants’; 9 million persons fleeing armed conflict in East Pakistan (Bangladesh); 100,000 Tibetans who followed the Dalai Lama from China to India through the Himalayas from 1959 onwards; 300,000 Sri Lankan refugees who came to India between 1983 and 2012 during the Eelam war; Afghan refugees who have been streaming since the 1979 Soviet invasion; Burmese refugees since the pro-democracy upheavals and the influx of ethnic Christian Chins and Muslim Rohingya fleeing persecution in Myanmar. Currently India has a refugee population close to 228,000. Notwithstanding that significant statistic, India has not signed the Convention on the Status of Refugees 1951 or the 1967 Protocol. India’s ambivalence regarding the role of the international refugee protection agency UNHCR (Oberoi 2006) has not prevented India from becoming a member of its advisory Executive Committee and cooperating with its protection role regarding refugees from Afghanistan, Myanmar, Somalia and Middle East. Indian government agencies directly manage Tibetan and Sri Lankan refugees. The country prefers negotiating bilaterally the region’s refugee challenges, as in the case of Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. Consequently, UNHCR’s mandate in India is limited, focused largely on facilitating humanitarian assistance through its nine NGO partners. It is only since 2019 that protection obligations have been shared with select NGOs. Refugee rights activists are critical about UNHCR’s reluctance to intervene on arbitrary detention of refugees. MASUM, an NGO in West Bengal, critiqued the insufficiency of UNHCR’s dialogue with paramilitary security forces (BSF) on the controversial ‘shoot at sight’ policy to prevent smuggling and illegal migration from Bangladesh (Gill et al. 2012). It was only after the killing of Felani Khatun (age 15) triggered widespread protests in Bangladesh, that the BSF’s use of lethal force was challenged. Felani was shot while illegally re-entering Bangladesh from India. Stuck on a barbed wire fence for 5 hours, she bled to death. The accused constable was acquitted. Nine years later, with MASUM’s support, the Supreme Court took up her father’s plea for a fresh investigation (Dasgupta 2020). Refugee rights activist Tapan Bose asserts, ‘If refugees have received any legal protection it has happened essentially because of the committed intervention of human rights NGOs and the Indian judiciary’ (personal interview, Delhi, 02/11/21). The judiciary has compensated for legal ambiguity by invoking constitutional provisions and the country’s obligations under international law (Bhattacharjee 2008). The courts affirmed the rights of all persons within the

Gender conflict and forced migration in India  225 Indian territory to have access to basic entitlements. In November 2021, the Supreme Court issued notice to the government to provide free food to refugees/asylum seekers facing severe distress on account of the pandemic and lack of proper livelihood (Jain 2021). Importantly, on legal protection, the courts upheld the principle of non-refoulement through various case laws (Samaddar 2003). That foundational principle has come under increasing pressure with the ascendancy of the Hindutva political regime. Since 2017 there has been a shift in refugee practices, particularly targeted at Rohingya Muslim refugees (Dote and Ritumbra n.d.). The government classified the country’s estimated 40,000 Rohingya as ‘illegal migrants’ and criminalized them under the Foreigner’s Act. Law enforcement agencies were ordered to initiate deportation processes (Chaudhury and Samaddar 2018). The Supreme Court in 2018 and 2021 declared non-refoulement did not apply and allowed deportations (Siddiqui and Ali 2021). This was regardless of the fact that over 18,000 Rohingyas possessed UNHCR-issued blue refugee card and allegations impugning terror links of Rohingya refugees have been repeatedly refuted by official agencies (Dote and Manuvie n.d.). Ironically, the same Rohingya refugees were part of the basket of refugees who were beneficiaries of the Indian government’s accommodative policy of Long Term Visa. Deepening diplomatic, security and economic relations with Myanmar’s governments have produced pragmatic ambiguity towards the victimisation of the Rohingyas fleeing torture, mass rapes and brutal killings. Ideologically persecution of Rohingya in India is driven by ‘othering’ of Muslims (citizens and non-citizens). Accordingly, Hindu and Sikh Afghan asylum seekers are fast tracked by government agencies.

MISSING WOMEN Refugees have been imagined as an undifferentiated collective, with the prototype being the male refugee (Jensen 2019; Edwards 2010). But with women and girls making up more than 50 percent of any forced migration population group of refugees, IDPs and stateless, that statistical reality has driven institutional attention of human rights and humanitarian agencies. Feminist scholar-technocrats and transnational women’s advocacy groups with headquarters in the global north challenged the male paradigm of refugee/asylum law (Edwards 2010: 23; Hall 2019: 643–656) and humanitarian practices (Crawley 2017). Gender mainstreaming policies focused on bridging the absent category of woman in the 1951 refugee convention and accommodating gender specific human rights abuse, especially sexual violence in conflict. Translating the legal recognition of sexual violence as a politically motivated public violation into operational protocols for filtering asylum requests at the Delhi field office of UNHCR has proved challenging, as Agnes (aged 19), an ethnic Chin asylum seeker, discovered. She had fled her village in Chin state, Myanmar and crossed the border to India in 2000. Chin state has been the site of severe military repression. According to online civil society sources, an estimated 40,000–70,000 undocumented Chin refugees had crossed over to the co-ethnic border state of Mizoram, India (Kumari 2012: 2). By 2011 UNHCR had recognised some 8,800 Burmese refugees in Delhi, of which nearly 7,000 were women and children. Agnes’ brother had been active in student politics. When the army came and found he had escaped, they turned on the family, especially Agnes. She was raped by an army captain in retaliation for her brother’s anti-national activities. As several reports evidenced, sexual violence by

226  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration the army was widespread in Chin state (WLB Report Breaking the Silence cited by Kumari 2012: 4). Agnes applied to UNHCR for refugee status. Her request was rejected. She was too traumatised to detail the violation. Only on the second appeal interview did Agnes satisfy the legal Officer (Saibaba, The Other Media cited in Manchanda 2006). It would take a decade before there was appreciation of the trauma of reporting such violations, as reflected in the 2015 IASC Gender-based Violence Guidelines, which stated, ‘All humanitarian personnel ought to assume gender-based violence is occurring and threatening affected populations’, and they should take action ‘regardless of the presence or absence of concrete evidence’ (quoted by Jensen 2019: 1). Notwithstanding these policy exhortations, the trivialisation of the experience of sexual violence at every stage of the displacement process persisted, including refugee settlements. Multiple complaints were filed by urban Chin refugees whose cultural otherness marked their continuing vulnerability to targeted ‘racialised and sexualised’ abuse. ‘More disturbing’, as researcher Sheena Kumari in her study of Burmese Refugee Women in India found, was ‘the perceived nonchalance on the part of authorities and the IPs (Implementing Partners) to look into their cases and the sense of passivity which accompanies women refugees fear of sexual assault’ (2012: 19). Kumari quoted Mang Doi Tial, ‘I requested help from SLIC (Socio-Legal Information Centre) and UNHCR’s Women Protection Centre but there was no response. Maybe it is because we can’t identify the culprit. But it is a common problem so maybe that is why it is neglected’ (Kumari 2012: 20). Kumari interviews of Chin women challenged the flattening of the female refugee as helpless and demoralised and visibilised the need to ‘reconceptualise their identities as multiple and fluid’ as they acknowledged ‘the freedom of expression they enjoy, the ability to freely practise their faith and freedom of movement’. Although vulnerable in their host country, the Chin women took pride in their activism, and the building of social interconnectedness (18 women’s groups, 11 refugee community organisations) by which they were able to inculcate consciousness of women’s rights and ethnic belonging (2012: 11–14; Jops et al. 2016).

MULTIPLE MEANINGS: GLOBAL NORTH–SOUTH CONTRADICTIONS While there is a fundamental understanding of women’s fear of violence and experiences of violations as evidenced in gendered advocacy on asylum, I suggest that this understanding gets muddled when influential northern scholars and professionals bring in cultural specificity to explain subjugation and oppression. For instance, an early generation of policy advisors, Dupree, Haq and Christensen, in addressing multi-layered gendered-based vulnerability of Afghan women refugees in Pakistan, located violence against women in the cultural fabric of refugee communities, focusing on cultural norms of consent and passivity in imposing meanings for human rights abuses that arguably elided meanings that the victims attached (Afghanistan Studies Journal (7) 1999, cited by Saigol 2000). I am indebted to the Congolese scholar Ngarsungu Chiwengo’s for his insights into ‘how cultural imaginaries of specific contexts such as of conflict affected Congo (DR), derived from the colonial ethnological grid of naturalised darkness, violence and primitivism, frames the crisis, imposing meanings on mass rapes and mutilation of Congolese women which elide meanings that the victims attach’ (2019: 356).

Gender conflict and forced migration in India  227 In the context of Afghanistan, what meanings did the UNHCR legal officer in Delhi attach to Fariba Hakimi’s claims for protection as a victim of domestic violence? As told to the online media portal wire.in (Aswani 2021), Fariba (30), a mother of four daughters had fled Herat, Afghanistan and reached Delhi in 2017 with two small daughters. She was a victim of an abusive husband, a drug addict who was affiliated with the Taliban. Deeply indebted to feed his drug habit, he gave away their elder daughter Farishta (14) to a warlord to pay off a debt of 500,000 Afghanis (£4,225). A couple of years later, her 11-year-old daughter disappeared to pay off more debts. This time Fariba complained to the police. Her enraged husband attacked her. After failing to get her husband arrested, Fariba fled with her two daughters, fearing to lose even them. While in Delhi, the Taliban sent her a message: ‘They want my third daughter as my husband has taken money for her,’ she said. Fariba’s application for refugee status was rejected by UNHCR. Her form for an extension of asylum seeker status has been pending since June 2021, delayed by the pandemic. Will her plea of life-threatening vulnerability and violations be explained as customary usage in a socio-cultural milieu that sanctions such sale/marriages and views girls/women as expendable commodities (Olivius 2017)?

EMERGING CONDITIONS OF EXIT: ECONOMY, VIOLENCE AND DISCRIMINATION The complex web of factors that underlie women moving across borders within and from the South Asia region have blurred the distinction in refugee/migration policy between life threatening and livelihood threatening. Samaddar, an early critic of the rational choice framework of voluntary versus forced migration, argued, ‘if refugees are escapees from violence, what of migrants like women sex workers from Bangladesh or the women workers engaged in various forms of sweat labour who have to leave Bangladesh for fear of endemic violence by husbands and males, from unorganised garment industry, the village and society as a whole’ (Samaddar 1997: 104). Feminists analysing labour migration in South Asia have observed trends of ‘feminisation’ in conflict-affected labour-sending countries such as Nepal and Sri Lanka. NGO reports on Chin women refugee movements emphasise the intertwining of ethnic persecution and the army’s predatory targeting of women and of the deteriorating situation of women’s economic and personal rights, forced marriages, high maternal mortality rates and lack of health infrastructure (ALTSEAN Burma Briefings, ‘No Safe Place’, cited by Kumari 2012: 4). The stories of refugee women of Rahima from Myanmar challenge legal categories. Rahima, a Rohingya refugee/migrant came to Karachi with two small children in 1998. As told to Khandekar of the Dhaka-based Refugee Migratory Movements Research Unit (RMMU), ‘The army took away my husband as porter. For two weeks he got no food. He died of beatings and starvation. I had a house with three acres of paddy land. The government took it away and gave it to the Maghs (Rakhine Buddhists). You are not our people, they said. I had relatives in Pakistan. I decided to join them’ (Khandekar and Haider 2000). The situation of exit was an option that held out the possibility of security, a life of dignity, economic prospects, independence, and realisation of self-worth. However, where the refugee–migrant dynamics gets muddled and poses a dilemma is when desperate women, men and children escaping persecution follow the same migratory routes

228  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration as labour migrants, turn to the same international smuggling operations to secure transport and cross borders, face the same enforcement measures, and live mixed together in the same communities in their countries of destination (Wilson 2011: 3). The vulnerability of women separated from their social community, the increasingly oppressive conditions in the camps, the wilful indifference of the ‘protecting’ government and the lures of the recruiting agents, all create the situation of exit. ‘We’re scared about the traffickers but we can only leave it to God. We don’t want to hire traffickers but we have no options,’ Zakir Hussain (29), a Rohingya refugee, told Al Jazeera when asked about his wife’s journey from a refugee camp in Bangladesh (08/05/19). According to Rohingya rights activists in India, both refugees and the traffickers are using the India–Myanmar border crossings to journey to Thailand and Malaysia (Hindustan Times, 15/05/19). One route documented by Fortify Rights is overland from Myanmar to Bangladesh, India and back into Chin state and through Mandalay, Yangon and the Myanmar–Thailand border crossing onwards to Malaysia (Ahmed 2019). Many Rohingya women are trafficked from the refugee camps itself for forced marriages and many are trafficked from makeshift settlements amidst local communities. In India there are no response mechanisms available for the identification and referral of victims of cross-border trafficking, which should include access to asylum-seeking process (UNHCR 2018). The (anti-)Trafficking Bill 2021 covers foreign nationals and stateless persons resident in India at the time of the commission of offence, including ‘trafficking in persons with crossborder implications.’ Art 3 (20f) baldly states, ‘They shall be repatriated.’ Consent of the victim shall be irrelevant and immaterial in the determination of the offence of trafficking in persons, in line with the presumed denial of agency in refugee regime. Policy researchers have observed that the absence of a refugee law and the presence of arbitrary measures towards refugees intersects with border control laws and anti-trafficking measures to create and/or exacerbate their situations of vulnerability, foreclosing the possibility of legal protection in many cases (Wilson 2011: 9–10). Nepali, Rohingya, Sri Lankan Tamil and other refugee populations have faced sexualised violence and trafficking risks while trying to navigate Indian immigration requirements (United States Department of State 2018). While UNHCR refrained from involvement, it is Indian human rights activists who have cooperated with community refugee organisations such as Rohingya for Human Rights to rescue Rohingya women from the clutches of traffickers and the police on the Indo-Bangladesh and Mizoram–Myanmar border areas.

CONTESTING VICTIMISATION, FEMINISATION AND INFANTILISATON The poster image of the refugee is that of an Afro-Asian woman with clinging children, desperate, destitute and helpless, powerful for motivating humanitarian assistance but disempowering from a human rights perspective as it reinforces traditional gender stereotypes about women’s inherent vulnerabilities, innocence and lack of political agency. It is important to remember that women refugees are represented as vulnerable and dependent not only because of their gender, but because they are refugees as well (Wiggett 2013). Within refugee studies, critics such as Roger Zetter have argued for problematising the denial of political agency within the international refugee regime. ‘The concept of sanctuary coupled with loss of

Gender conflict and forced migration in India  229 familiar economic and social support systems and individual autonomy combine to construct a powerful image of dependency and the need for assistance,’ he observed (1999: 74). Further UNHCR protocols and procedures deny subjecthood to refugees as reflected in the procedure of officials representing refugees. Refugees, non-citizens in the nation state, are rendered speechless in a process wherein their decision-making power is appropriated. Bringing in the variable of gender highlighted how gender intersects to de-politicise and entrench helplessness. The feminisation of the refugee subject naturalises victimhood and ‘victimisation removes political agency from the figure of the refugee by establishing a condition of political voicelessness’ (Johnson 2011: 1028). In 1991, UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Sadako Ogata, enunciating the policy on Refugee Women, iterated precisely this stereotype of victimization and disempowerment, stating, ‘the cycle of hopelessness created by an impoverished mother raising a family on her own must be addressed as an issue of highest priority’ (quoted by Johnson 2011: 62). This imaginary was epitomised in the visual portrayal of the refugee as womanandchild, an amalgamated image of collective vulnerability. I argue that the representation of the refugee subject as disempowered and dependent is reinforced by the emphasis on ‘cultural specificity’ of traditional societies and the flattening construction of refugee women as ‘vulnerable’ and passive ‘victims’. Its corollary is the policy of ‘going through the men’ (Saigol 2000). This is not to defend the imposition of liberal modernising of gender equality humanitarian aid programming. Policy researchers such as Olivius (2014) have warned against practices that promote gender equality but are imbued with colonial humanitarian practices of civilising and empowering women of backward orthodox cultures. My concern is over the reluctance to problematise culture or tradition, and of ignoring the varied experiences of women’s resilient agency. Olivius suggests that, in practice, such approaches to the problem of violence against women ‘den[y] refugees a role as agents in the transformation of their own communities’ (2017: 73). Assistance programmes for Muslim Afghan and Rohingya women refugees in South Asia follow the policy template of ‘going through the men’ – that is, the male elders. Seeking allies within the community was important. However, as Pakistani feminist researcher Rubina Saigol contended, ‘When women are helped in ways that reinforce an oppressive status quo the only people helped are the powerful males of the group’ (Saigol 2000). Drawing upon interviews with Afghan refugees in Pakistan, Saigol reminded that ‘culture and tradition are not permanently fixed’, alluding to resistance of Afghan refugee women like Rahima who dared to question interpretations of Pushtoon culture on re-marriage. ‘Pakhtuns have no tradition that obliges a woman to leave her children and marry another one. He (brother-in-law) used to beat my children. He asked me to marry him. I told him I already have five children. I don’t want to ruin my life …. I don’t want another husband to own me’ (Saigol 2000). Two decades later, the default practice of going to the men of a traditional society to speak for Rohingya women continues to inform protection and humanitarian assistance policies in India. Activists with the Rohingya Human Rights Inititative contend that such an approach marginalises the more progressive voices of youthful women and men within the community. Journalist Neha Dixit’s (2021) cluster of interviews with refugee women in cluster settlements in urban Jammu revealed a variety of struggles to define an independent identity and break the cycle of vulnerability. There is Mumtaz Begum (22), who refuses to be a passive victim, thereby shocking her neighbour Mehrunissa (60), who is convinced Mumtaz practises Black Magic. ‘Else which kind of girl survives a dead family, a runaway husband and still paints her nails red?’ The entrance to Mumtaz’s shanty is adorned with sequin embroidery patches,

230  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration an advertisement of her needlework skills. It has got her a contract from a local boutique. She earns her own living in defiance of the community’s expectation that, as an abandoned childless wife, she live on community’s handouts (Dixit 2021). Access to livelihood opportunities made a difference, stated Ravi Hemadari, Director of DAJI, contrasting the agency and passivity of women in Jammu and Nuh, Haryana (personal communication, Delhi, 05/11/21). Jobs in walnut extracting factories in Jammu were exploitative, but they empowered Mariam and Ayesha to speak up and shape independent lives (Dixit 2021). It should be added that resilience is ambivalent when survival strategies involve child marriage, transactional sex and child labour in the IDP settlements in South Asia of Assam, Waziristan and Kabul as revealed in monographs of Women’s Regional Network (WRN 2016).

CONCLUDING REMARKS The situation of the forcibly displaced in India is representative of the political and ideological factors that drive ad hoc practices of care and protection in South Asia, elide the human rights of the refugee subject, and reinforce cycles of precarity. Generalised as a victim, passive, dependent and de-politicised, refugees, especially refugee women, belonging to traditional patriarchal societies have been denied voice and choice. The recovery of the varied experiences in India of refugee women from traditional patriarchal societies surfaces their struggles, capacity, and agency to carve out independent identities and social political selves. Our analysis of gendered refugee agency in India throws up fresh and renewed emphasis on research questions such as, Should refugees be directly enabled to advocate for refugee rights with the host/country of settlement? Should it be UNHCR (contractual IPs) and government agencies who speak for the refugee? An under-researched area, important in the Indian context, is the impact of the interplay of divergent national and border state praxis that makes for constraints and opportunities. The above Indian narrative of refugee experiences has alluded to the significant role of the collective activism of refugee rights groups, including that of distinct refugee women’s groups, especially Afghan and Burmese/Chin, though Rohingya women organising for rights has been resisted by the community. As iterated refugee groups organising in India for UNHCR’s attention, access to basic entitlements, education and healthcare, and judicial interventions against harassment, sexual violence, detention and deportation, have depended heavily on the support of India’s vibrant culture of broad-based social movements. Solidarity campaigns for protection and survival have involved national and transnational rights activists and faith-based groups, civil society groups, legal aid cells, media, NGOs and political leaders. These developments indicate new directions in refugee research. In particular, there is a need to analyse the implications for the continuing vitality of such solidarity campaigns in view of India’s punitive approach to dissent (conflated as anti-national), and the ideologically driven discourse of ‘good–bad refugee’. In an ‘obstructive’ civil society environment much will depend upon the capacity of rights activists and social movements to make connections, such as linking the creation of statelessness in Assam, India and making the Rohingya stateless in Myanmar. The research agenda needs to shift emphasis towards the study of the strategies for collective solidarity action that strengthens the voices of refugees, especially those of refugee women.

Gender conflict and forced migration in India  231

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18. Remittances, migration and economic abuse: ‘invisible in plain sight’ Supriya Singh and Jasvinder Sidhu

REMITTANCES ARE A MORAL GOOD PARTICULARLY DURING A GLOBAL PANDEMIC In most societies of the global South, money in the family most often flows two ways – from parents to children as well as from children to parents. A ‘good parent’ helps a child in need. In patrilineal families when a couple migrate together, a ‘good son’ sends or gives money to the parents as a filial duty. The gender of money is changing, and at times a ‘good daughter’ also sends money home, particularly when she is working and single. It is this morality of money that underlies remittances within and between countries. International remittances also become important as a currency of care, as the children across borders are often not able to give face-to-face care to their parents. In 2021, formal international remittances to lower- and middle-income countries (LMICs) were estimated at US589 billion. Remittances are now more than three times official development assistance. And except for China, remittances to LMICs in 2021 were estimated at 50 per cent more than foreign direct investment (Ratha, Kim, Plaza, Seshan, et al. 2021). It was feared remittances to LMICs would decline precipitously during COVID-19 by 7.2 per cent in 2020. Instead, remittances declined in 2020 only by 1.6 per cent and in 2021 increased by 7.3 per cent. Migrants did without, as financial need increased during COVID-19 for their families in the country of origin. Informal remittances became difficult because of border closures, leading to the greater use of digital channels. Migrants returned with savings. At the same time, currencies in some developing countries fell. The closure of the Hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia released savings that could be sent home to countries such as Pakistan and Bangladesh. India has been the largest recipient of remittances since 2008. In 2021, India received an estimated US$87 billion, followed by China and Mexico (Ratha, Kim, Plaza, and Seshan 2021; Ratha et al. 2020; Ratha, Kim, Plaza, Seshan, et al. 2021). Remittances also go from parents to children in the country of destination. There are less data on these remittances, but they are at the centre of the growth of Indian international students in Australia. Parents take out loans and sell assets to fulfil their duty to help their children in a timely manner. After education, money continues to flow to the children for buying houses and establishing businesses (Singh and Cabraal 2014). In this chapter, we write of remittances as a moral good but unlike the traditional approach to remittances we also examine remittances as a medium of abuse. We write of how remittances during COVID-19 increased because of the morality of money and because of economic abuse. This comes to the fore when we focus on the effect of COVID-19 on economic abuse in the migrant population in high-income countries. We write firstly of our approach to migration, remittances, and economic abuse. Secondly, we focus on why economic abuse through 233

234  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration remittances has remained hidden. We elaborate on this through our qualitative research, before and during COVID-19.

STUDYING MIGRATION, REMITTANCES, AND ECONOMIC ABUSE This chapter draws mainly on 34 open-ended interviews conducted between May 2016 and September 2017 in Australia – 17 women in the Indian community who survived family violence, and 17 community leaders and service providers. It was part of a larger project on money, gender, and family violence across cultures, based on 47 interviews, including another 13 Anglo-Celtic victim–survivors. Ethics permission was granted by RMIT University and Federation University. These data have been supplemented by early insights from two interviews with service providers/community leaders and two interviews with victim–survivors from an ongoing project, ‘COVID-19, Money, Gender and Economic Abuse’. Ethics permission was granted by Federation University. Fifteen of the seventeen interviews with victim–survivors in 2016 and 2017 were conducted face to face. One was a phone interview, and another was based on email responses. The interviews in 2021 were conducted face to face, on the telephone and on Zoom. The participants were recruited through personal and professional networks. The interviews were conducted wholly in English, or in a mixture of English, Hindi, and Punjabi. The interviews were transcribed and coded using NVivo, a computer program for the analysis of qualitative data. This involved sorting and coding the data, noting memos, writing an analysis, building matrices to uncover patterns in the data, and checking for negative cases.

REMITTANCES AS A MEDIUM OF ECONOMIC ABUSE ARE ‘INVISIBLE IN PLAIN SIGHT’ Remittances are lauded as a filial act and a medium of care in families and in migration literature. Remittances as a medium of economic abuse have been ‘invisible in plain sight’. Economic abuse, like emotional, sexual abuse, and other controlling and coercive behaviours, are seldom recognised as coercive control at the centre of family violence. Economic abuse takes place when a man (most often) exercises coercive control by denying his intimate partner money, appropriating her assets, leaving her with coerced debt, and/or sabotaging her paid work. It is a malevolent pattern of behaviour designed to deny a woman freedom and human rights (Postmus et al. 2018; Sharp-Jeffs 2015; Stark 2007). It is difficult to recognise remittances as a medium of abuse because in India and the global South, they are seen as a moral act and a medium of care. However, when the man is seen as the head of the family and household, he is also morally obliged to provide for his wife and children. It is when these two moralities of money collide that remittances can change from a medium of care to become a medium of economic abuse. This clash of moralities of money becomes particularly potent when money changes gender across generations and countries (see Singh 2019, 2020, 2021; Singh and Sidhu 2020). The stories below show that the ‘good son’ can use remittances to deny his wife money and prevent her from sending money to her parents. He can appropriate the gifts of money sent

Remittances, migration and economic abuse  235 by her parents and sequester money overseas so that it does not become part of the communal property divided at separation or divorce. This chapter thus highlights that remittances can be both moral and immoral. A man can present himself as a ‘good son’ while being an abusive husband, if he sends money to his family in the source country, without consulting his wife and considering the needs of his family in the country of destination.

DENYING THE WOMAN FREEDOM TO SEND MONEY HOME Money in the Indian patrilineal family has traditionally been male. The husband or the husband’s father in a joint family, control the money. Money in a patrilineal and patrilocal household is seen as belonging to the husband and his family (Singh and Bhandari 2012). Daughters are legally entitled to an equal share of the ancestral property of their parents, but in practice these rights can be subverted so that the property goes to the son (Agarwal 1994). This male gender of money is changing, particularly in metropolitan cities and in the diaspora. Indian parents borrow money to send their daughters and sons to study in Australia. The daughters, like the sons, try to repay these loans once they are in paid work, and often continue to send money home (Singh 2016; Basu 2005). The gender of remittances remains mostly male, though the ‘good daughter’ is emerging. Women are sending money home, but remittances continue to be seen as money that a son sends to his parents. The talk is of the ‘good son’ sending money home. Remittances are seldom about the ‘good son and daughter-in-law.’ Asha (all the names are pseudonyms), 32, a software designer, came to Australia as an international student. When she began working, she sent AUD$1,000 home to help her father repay the loans for her education. Soon after, her father had a stroke, and she continued to send money home. She told her future husband she would continue to support her parents. She also charted a plan to have some joint money, with the rest to be managed separately. But two months after they married, her husband objected, saying, ‘Why are you sending this money to your father? You are married to me … so you should be giving all your money to me. You are now [a member] of my family.’ Suffering economic, emotional, and physical abuse, she realised her husband wanted control over her. She got out of her marriage within two years. Sending money home for married daughters may have become more contentious during COVID-19. Neha, in her thirties, with a professional education and in paid work, feels vulnerable because her husband has taken all her savings, including money her parents gave her. She covers half the costs of the household from her earnings. He sends whatever money is left from her earnings to his parents and two sisters in India. He also bought them two air conditioners, a double-door fridge, and inverters. She says, ‘If I ask [for] anything, he never replies.’ Neha adds, ‘I felt really bad I couldn’t send any gifts to my family on special occasions. … Any time, I asked my husband for money, he always refused.’

SEQUESTERING MONEY IN THE COUNTRY OF ORIGIN The moral duty to send money home in most societies the global South can also cloak the husband’s attempt to sequester money overseas and invest in assets that exclude the wife. These transnational investments jeopardize ‘women’s long-term finances’ (Chowbey 2017, p. 459).

236  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration Bina, a support worker with an Indian community organisation, said she knew victim– survivors who did not know the extent of the money being sent and how it was used in India. Women felt they needed to trust their husbands. The investments, however, were most often with parents or brothers, excluding the wife. Prema, 36, migrated to Australia as a skilled worker. She was pressured by her family to get married when she was 30, knowing the man was marrying her for her Permanent Residence Visa. She still hoped she could have a good marriage and supported him to set up a business. He gambled most of his money away. Five years after marriage,he received AUD$200,000 as compensation for an accident. It was only when she went to India, she discovered he had taken all that money to India. He subjected Prema to horrific physical, reproductive, and emotional abuse. After he gained his Permanent Residence, he stole Prema’s jewellery, divorced her, married again, and claimed half the house Prema had paid for. There was no mention that he had sequestered AUD$200,000 in India, taking it out of the marital assets that were divided at divorce.

THE SILVER LINING OF COVID-19 Economic abuse has increased during COVID-19 in 2020 and 2021. Women have become more vulnerable as they have lost more hours of paid work, increased unpaid care at home, received less of the COVID subsidies in high-income countries, become more financially excluded in the global South, and lost or withdrawn their retirement funds (Surviving Economic Abuse and Standard Life Foundation 2021; Boxall and Morgan 2021; Abraham et al 2021; Taub 2020; Singh 2021). COVID-19 changed the experience of financial abuse in Australia as the woman lost present money as well as future money. During COVID-19 the government allowed people to withdraw from their retirement funds to help tide them over the pandemic. Neha’s husband used that directive to tell her to withdraw her superannuation. She withdrew all the AUD$8,000 in her retirement funds. Neha said, ‘I was so scared at this point that I just did what he wanted. I wanted to avoid verbal and physical abuse, so I kept doing whatever he asked.’ COVID-19, particularly in Melbourne, Australia, with the longest period in lockdown between 2020 and 2021, has seen women locked down for months with their perpetrators. Working at home has meant that the woman has had little private space to seek help. Face-to-face support from the family in India has also not been possible because of international travel restrictions that were in place for 21 months. However, this also meant that, if a woman’s perpetrator was visiting India when international restrictions began, he was not able to return for 21 months. His absence gave the woman breathing space to build up confidence so that she could look after the children, the household, and herself. She no longer saw herself only through the eyes of the perpetrator. Anita, a counsellor with a multicultural organisation, said the husband’s absence empowered one of her clients to separate from him. Anita’s client was from India and had two children. Before going for her paid work, she would cook and clean. He would take all her money giving her a few dollars. When she lost $10, her husband stopped giving her any money, saying she ‘didn’t know about money.’ He would hit her and abuse her economically and emotionally. She continued to live with him, partly because she saw separation as shame and dishonour, and partly because she felt she and the children could not survive on their own.

Remittances, migration and economic abuse  237 Her husband took all their savings to India before COVID. During his absence, she sought help, received counselling, and found she and the kids were doing well and living comfortably. COVID was a ‘wake-up call’ for her. Her husband returned when travel restrictions eased. Anita’s client told her husband not to come home. This was not a one-off instance, for a similar case was confirmed by Bina, a support worker for an Indian organisation. She said that, during this COVID-19-related enforced absence, ‘women realise they don’t need to be in an abusive relationship.’ She adds that women ‘have been empowered by the media’ and the increased discussion of family violence. Women in the Indian community now feel they can talk about the violence they suffer and are saying they are not going ‘to take it.’ Bina says the language of economic abuse remains unfamiliar. But when asked whether they are being denied money, whether their money is being appropriated, whether they are being coerced into debt, women recognise they are suffering economic abuse.

CONCLUSION: ADDRESSING THE GAP IN THE LITERATURE ON MIGRATION AND MONEY Remittances are rightly seen as a lifeline for millions of households in the low- and middle-income countries of the global South. Remittances put food on the table, help educate the children, and build up assets for the family in the country of destination. Remittances are also an important part of a region’s prosperity and the gross domestic product of a country. When we think of remittances, often the image is of the lone migrant struggling in difficult conditions, doing without, so that his (and sometimes her) family can prosper. This image is grounded particularly in the Gulf countries and others, where migration is temporary. The migrant is alone in an alien land. In countries where settlement is permitted, there are accounts of the difficulties migrants face balancing the settlement needs of the family in the country of origin and the wife and children in the country of destination. Often, the family in the home country sees foreign streets paved in gold and increases the pressure on migrants to remit (Lindley 2009; Akuei 2005; Horst 2006). Despite this recognition, the emphasis in migration and development literature is often on the empowering effects of remittances on the recipient family in the country of origin. The sociology of money and migration has also focused on care, belonging, and transnationalism. Attention is seldom focused on remittances and the dynamics of the management and control of money in the sending family. Recognising that remittances can be a medium of economic abuse does not negate their importance for the migrant who sends money home and for the family, region, and country of origin. However, it is also important to recognise that remittances, like other culturally accepted money practices, can become abusive when not accompanied by the morality of money. The conversation around remittances needs to move from the ‘good son’ to the ‘good son and daughter-in-law’ sending money home. The ‘good daughter’ is also increasingly wanting to be recognised, with the ‘good son-in-law’. Remittances then can be a medium of care for the natal family in the country of origin as well as the family in the country of destination.

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REFERENCES Abraham, Rosa, Amit Basole, and Surbhi Kesar. 2021. ‘Down and out? The gendered impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on India’s labour market’, Economia Politica. doi: 10.1007/s40888-021-00234-8. Agarwal, Bina. 1994. A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia; 2nd edn, 1996. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Akuei, Stephanie Riak. 2005. ‘Remittances as unforeseen burdens: the livelihoods and social obligations of Sudanese refugees’, in Global Migration Perspectives 18. Geneva: Global Commission on International Migration, via https://​www​.refworld​.org/​docid/​42ce4d354​.html (accessed on 18 July 2022). Basu, Srimati. 2005. ‘Haklenewali: Indian women’s negotiations of discourses of inheritance’, in Dowry & Inheritance, edited by Srimati Basu, 151–170. New Delhi: Women Unlimited. Boxall, Hayley and Anthony Morgan. 2021. Intimate Partner Violence during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Survey of Women in Australia. New South Wales: ANROWS. Chowbey, Punita. 2017. ‘Women’s narratives of economic abuse and financial strategies in Britain and South Asia’, Psychology of Violence 7(3): 459–468. doi: 10.1037/vio0000110. Horst, Heather A. 2006. ‘The blessings and burdens of communication: cell phones in Jamaican transnational social fields’, Global Networks 6(2): 143–159. Lindley, Anna. 2009. ‘The early-morning phonecall: remittances from a refugee diaspora perspective’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 35(8): 1315–1334. Postmus, Judy L., Gretchen L. Hoge, Jan Breckenridge, Nicola Sharp-Jeffs, and Donna Chung. 2018. ‘Economic abuse as an invisible form of domestic violence: a multicountry review’, Trauma, Violence & Abuse, 1st edn, 27 March, 1–23. doi: 10.1177/1524838018764160 Ratha, Dilip, Eung Ju Kim, Sonia Plaza, and Ganesh Seshan. 2021. ‘Resilience: COVID-19 crisis through a migration lens’, in Migration and Development Brief 34. Washington D.C.: KNOMAD– World Bank. Ratha, Dilip, Supriyo De, Eung Ju Kim, Sonia Plaza, Ganesh Seshan, and Nadege Desiree Yameogo. 2020. Migration and Development Brief 33: Phase II: COVID-19 Crisis through a Migration Lens. Washington D.C.: KNOMAD–World Bank. Ratha, Dilip, Eung Ju Kim, Sonia Plaza, Ganesh Seshan, Elliott J. Riordan, and Vandana Chandra. 2021. ‘Recovery: COVID-19 crisis through a migration lens’, in Migration and Development Brief 35. Washington D.C.: KNOMAD–World Bank. Sharp-Jeffs, N. 2015. Money Matters: Research into the Extent and Nature of Financial Abuse within Intimate Relationships in the UK. The Co-operative Bank and Refuge. Singh, Supriya. 2016. Money, Migration and Family: India to Australia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Singh, Supriya. 2019. ‘The daughter-in-law questions remittances: changes in the gender of remittances among Indian migrants to Australia’, Global Networks 19(2): 197–217. doi: https://​doi​.org/​10​.1111/​ glob​.12215. Singh, Supriya. 2020. ‘Economic abuse and family violence across cultures: gendering money and assets through coercive control’, in Criminalising Coercive Control: Family Violence and the Criminal Law, edited by Marilyn McMahon and Paul McGorrery, 51–72. Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. Singh, Supriya. 2021. Domestic Economic Abuse: The Violence of Money. New York: Routledge. Singh, Supriya, and Mala Bhandari. 2012. ‘Money management and control in the Indian joint family across generations’, The Sociological Review 60(1): 46–67. Singh, Supriya, and Anuja Cabraal. 2014. ‘“Boomerang remittances” and the circulation of care: a study of Indian transnational families in Australia’, in Transnational Families, Migration and the Circulation of Care: Understanding Mobility and Absence in Family Life, edited by Loretta Baldassar and Laura Merla, 220–234. New York: Routledge. Singh, Supriya and Jasvinder Sidhu. 2020. ‘Coercive control of money, dowry and remittances among Indian migrant women in Australia’, South Asian Diaspora 12(1): 35–50. doi: 10.1080/19438192.2019.1558757. Stark, Evan. 2007. Coercive Control: The Entrapment of Women in Personal Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Remittances, migration and economic abuse  239 Surviving Economic Abuse and Standard Life Foundation. 2021. The cost of Covid-19: Economic abuse throughout the pandemic. Retrieved from. Taub, Amanda. 2020. ‘A new Covid-19 crisis: domestic abuse rises worldwide’, New York Times, April 6. Accessed 2 June 2020 at https://​www​.nytimes​.com/​2020/​04/​06/​world/​coronavirus​-domestic​ -violence​.html​?action​=​click​&​module​=​RelatedLinks​&​pgtype​=​Article

PART IV AFRICA

19. Women and cross-border trade between Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo Asaf Augusto and Lesley Braun

INTRODUCTION The 2,500km land border between Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) was originally conceived of by the imperial powers that carved up the African continent during the infamous Berlin Conference of 1884–1885. These new territorial lines bisected land previously governed by the Kongo Kingdom. Since the fourteenth century, historic trading routes connected peoples and geographic areas that extended over the present-day northern part of Angola, the Republic of the Congo (Brazzaville), and the Western region of the DRC. Ebbs and flows of people traversing these historic trading networks continue to this day. In more recent times, Angola’s diamond mining, which contributed to the fueling of the postcolonial civil war, added to the movement of peoples. Here, dramatic stories relating to migration seem to coalesce along this border. War, smuggling, illicit diamond trading, the expulsion of migrants, and UNHCR-created refugee camps have been a source of media scrutiny. Complex migratory patterns between Angola and the DRC reveal circular trajectories—people continuously move from one region to the other, staying temporarily, only to leave again to cross back over into the other side—their traces discernible partly due to the networks of people and kin. Migrant women, both Angolan and Congolese by citizenship, are also active in cultivating their networks in both regions, though their experiences are sometimes eclipsed by those of male migrants. Pressed on by social and economic needs, women, for their part, have been moving between these two regions in constant pursuit of new opportunities. Amid civil war, diamond and oil booms, and now a global pandemic, intrepid trader women find ways through their cross-border market activities to sustain not only themselves but also their extended families who are often spread between Angola and the DRC.

BACKGROUND CONTEXT The mighty Kongo Kingdom once encompassed parts of the present-day Republic of Gabon, northern Angola, the southwest of the Republic of Congo, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It flourished in no small part due to the circulation of people between regions who established intervillage trading networks premised on rubber, ivory, and slaves.1 Despite the colonial lines that have since divided up the kingdom’s territory, this vast area is still home

1 Slave trade occurring in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in conjunction with Portuguese settlers gave way to a tumultuous movement of peoples through forced migration (Chico, 2019).

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242  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration to the Bakongo ethnic group, who maintain their identity and traditions across these borders (Vellut, 2006). There has been a significant movement of migrants back and forth between Angola and the DRC. The first wave of Angolan migrants to the DRC began after the Angolan revolution of 1961, which was followed by a protracted civil war (Marcum, 1969).2 Minerally rich land that fueled the conflict in the postcolonial era still continues to be the dominant factor in the latent conflict between the Angolan government and the separatist movement in the area known as the Lunda Tchokwe Protectorate Movement (Marques, 2011). The second wave of migration in the mid-1980s saw a return of many Angolan migrants from the DRC to places like Luanda, where many were referred to as retornado3 (Hodges, 2004). The third wave consisted of large numbers of refugees from Bakongo arriving in places like Cabinda and Lunda Norte in the 1990s and 2000s. According to Muller (2016), Congolese refugees in Cabinda were able to settle and mix into the local population because they were few in numbers, whereas in Lunda Norte, the massive influx of refugees faced discrimination. Although the northeastern region is one of the richest in Angola, it is also one of the most neglected, a legacy that can be traced back to the colonial era, when the local population was excluded from using its resources. In post-independence Angola, the Lunda region continued to be isolated; and during the civil war, Angolans who wished to visit the area were required to have a special permit that was intended to avoid the illegal smuggling of diamonds (Marques, 2011). Given this imposed isolation, and combined with the region’s proximity to the DRC, Angolans from other provinces are considered foreigners in the Lunda region. Consequently, Congolese migrants have strategically instrumentalized these local othering practices, adopting Lunda identity when they move into the capital city. Citizens of the DRC living in Angola’s capital city of Luanda are concentrated in the neighborhoods of Mabor, Petrangol, Palanca, and Kikolo. Markets referred to as mercado dos congolenses, or “Congolese markets,” bustle with traders from across the DRC. In fear of being driven out during heated moments of xenophobia, many of these individuals identify themselves as Angolans from the northern regions that were once part of the Kongo Kingdom. Hip hop artist Yannick Afroman’s song entitled “Bakongo” illustrates the ways in which people who identify as Bakongo avoid being associated with migrants from the DRC who are pejoratively labeled langa Zairense.4 Today there is substantial documented and undocumented daily migration across the porous border between Angola and the DRC.5 From farm laborers to schoolchildren, people walk across the border, leaving in the morning and returning in the afternoon. Others cross over to

Angola’s civil war between the MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola), the FNLA (National Front for the Liberation of Angola), and later the UNITA (União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola) lasted for 27 years between 1975 and 2002. 3 “Retornado” is a pejorative term used to describe Angolans migrants who returned from the DRC. Sometimes a retornado is commonly referred to as a “retro.” Besides retornado, there are other pejorative words, such as “zaico” and “langa.” One of the characteristics used by Angolans in urban places to identify a retornado is the pronunciation of certain Portuguese words when returning Angolans speak that language. For Angolans in urban centers, the accent of retornados sounds like Congolese migrants’ accent in Angola. 4 The song “Bakongos” glorifies his bakongos ethnic roots, achievements, and intelligence in spite of latent discrimination: https://​www​.youtube​.com/​watch​?v​=​DtIC98HSBQA (accessed 19 July 2022). 5 Avelino Chico writes, “Though there is no data, according to the Police Chief, Paulo de Almeida, there are more than half a million illegal immigrants in Angola” (Chico, 2019: 16). 2

Women and cross-border trade  243 attend university or for medical treatments in the capital of Kinshasa (Chico, 2020). This border’s “permeable membrane” (Ribas-Mateos and Dunn, 2021: 3), reveals for us what Saskia Sassen has described as local logics (Sassen, 2021: 285). Sassen points out that powerful international actors also play a significant role in some of the border dynamics. This is particularly the case in countries rich in natural resources where corporations and local elites are actively involved in exploring and exploiting the natural resources. Angola’s economy experienced significant growth, especially after the end of the conflict in 2002.6 In addition to its oil production—Angola is the fifth largest oil-producing country in the world and second largest oil exporter in Africa after Nigeria (Candeias et al., 2019)—the Angolan economy is dependent on the extraction of diamonds. The country is the fourth largest global diamond producer in the world (Kimberly Process, 2011). See also Figure 19.1.

DIAMOND FRONTIERS AND CROSS-BORDER MOBILITY Angola’s diamond-rich areas, predominantly located in the Lunda Norte province, which borders the DRC, have attracted internal economic migrants as well as migrants from West Africa and the neighboring DRC. During the throes of Angola’s civil war, illegal mining boomed, and smuggling networks between these two regions became a channel through which hopeful individuals, often living in highly economically precarious situations, could earn a living. Frontier towns emerged in tandem with Angola’s artisanal diamond mining boom, luring people from neighboring countries who arrived in hopes of profiting from some of the action. These Congolese traders came from the Kasai area, Bandundu, or Kinshasa. Filip de Boeck, a scholar who spent substantial time in the region in the late 1980s and into the 1990s, studied the various dynamics linked to frontier urbanization and the diamond trade (1999a). He notes that, “before the UNITA took over the Lunda Norte area in the early 1990s, Congolese would cross the border with all kinds of commodities (tins of sardines, soap, whiskey bottles, transistor radios and so on) which were sold or bartered in return for diamonds” (1999b: 89). During Angola’s civil war, mines were captured by rebels, and in the early 1980s, artisanal mining production expanded. Congolese people began arriving en masse to mine and smuggle diamonds outside the country through clandestine trading networks. Male migrants were often referred to as aventuriers, or “adventurers,” referring to someone who embarks on a journey. “L’aventure” entails the use of physical and mental skills and sometimes even putting one’s life in danger (MacGaffey and Bazenguissa-Ganga, 2000: 54).7 Although the literature has tended to focus on young male migrants working in artisanal mines, women have also been active in the region, yet the “adventurer” moniker carries different connotations for women.8 Angola’s mining regions have become border-zone economies

6 In 2005 it was one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, registering growth of 20.6% GDP, 18.6% in 2006 and 27% in 2007 (OECD, 2010: 40). 7 During the 1990s, young Congolese men who returned home wealthier than when they left acquired the moniker bana Lunda, or “children of Lunda” (De Boeck). Now in a position of being able to provide for their extended families, these bana Lunda disrupted household arrangements, creating generational tensions. 8 De Boeck describes the border towns of Kahemba and Tembo, and the multitudinous ways in which women actively participate in the diamond industry (1999b).

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Source: Geospatial Information Section, Map of Angola, August 2008, No. 3727 Rev. 4, http://​www​.refworld​.org/​ docid/​4937c7b50​.html (accessed 19 July 2022).

Figure 19.1

Map of Angola and neighboring countries

with people engaged in all manner of cross-border trade.9 During the throes of the civil war in the 1990s, women arrived at the mining areas often through treacherously violent routes. Highly adaptable and industrious women found work in hotels, bars, restaurants, stores, and markets structured around the extractive industries there. These mobile women were referred to as bambwa bakata singa, or “dogs who break the leash,” a designator to describe their movements away from the patriarchal constraints of their natal homes (De Boeck, 1999b).

9 They sometimes worked as physical laborers, transporting bags of sand to and from trucks. Still other women washed the sand in the UNITA-controlled mines.

Women and cross-border trade  245 With the end of civil war in 2002, these mining frontiers boomed with business, attracting even more hopeful Congolese women searching for new economic opportunities.

EXPULSIONS FROM ANGOLA One characteristic of the postcolonial Angolan state was to foster a sense of national unity through a disavowal of ethnic diversity (Schubert, 2017).10 According to the postcolonial project, to be Angolan is indirectly associated with speaking Portuguese, having a Portuguese name, and not touting any ethnic affiliation (Soares de Oliveira, 2015). There have been numerous surges of violent migrant expulsions in Angola, particularly from the Lunda province. During Angola’s civil war, economically desperate Congolese migrants crossed precariously into Angola to work in the mines. Conversely, Angolan refugees looking to escape the atrocities of war flooded across the border into the DRC. This two-way flow of people was significant enough that the UNHCR arrived to set up refugee camps at the border. Upon the signing of the peace treaty in 2002 that marked the end to Angola’s bloody civil war, many Angolans returned from the DRC, along with hopeful Congolese eager to work in the diamond mines as well as in the capital city of Luanda. Since the mid-2000s, Congolese women have been migrating to Angola, searching for a better life largely through entrepreneurial activities. Some migrant women already had family members living in Angola, while others arrived alone. One feature shared by most migrants is the motivation to quickly acquire the Portuguese language. Another factor that complicates migration patterns are the retornados. While there are entire neighborhoods of Congolese migrants living in Luanda, such as Palanca, Petrangoal, Kikolo, and Mabor, exact figures are difficult to come by.11 However, the recorded figures of how many were expelled from the region give us a sense of these migratory flows. Between 2003 and 2013, about half a million Congolese were deported from Angola, many of whom were women. During this time, gruesome accounts of rape and torture at the hands of military personnel were recorded by humanitarian groups such as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) (Betts, 2013). By 2018, more than 420,000 immigrants, mainly from the DRC, were deported from Angola (Âgencia Lusa, 2018).12 Much like what other migration scholars have described elsewhere, the border here has become a “clash of neoliberal logics and humanitarian projects” (Ribas-Mateos and Dunn, 2021: 2). Angolan deportation of migrants has been linked to the worsening of the economic situation of the post-oil-boom crisis. Since 2014, Angola has been experiencing a post-oil-boom crisis that has significantly curbed migration into the country. Consequently, there has been a shift in perception among would-be migrants, especially as stories circulate among migrants themselves about the limited income-generating opportunities available (Gaibazzi, 2019). Congolese television shows feature journalists interviewing various people working in Luanda’s sprawling mar-

10 Likewise, Domingos Da Cruz (2019) argues that the Angolan national anthem is a clear expression of how ethnicity is erased through this mythic unity of Angolan as a nation, “Um só povo uma só nação” [One people, one nation]. 11 At https://​www​.dn​.pt/​globo/​cplp/​congoleses​-em​-luanda​-sao​-angolanos​-do​-uige​-1391524​.html (accessed 19 July 2022). 12 These expulsions also included West African migrants living in Luanda (Gaibazzi, 2017).

246  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration kets,13 specifically asking them their opinions about whether it is feasible for Congolese migrants to make a living in Angola. Invariably, interviewees claim that Angola no longer continues to be a “land of milk and honey,” and that competition for customers is fierce in markets. One interesting observation to glean from this television show is the large number of Angolans who speak Lingala (one of Congo’s lingua franca) as a result of themselves having spent time in Congo. What’s more, people’s accents, specifically the Portuguese accent, have become a primary identification marker. For instance, those who are Angolan born but have lived in Congo are thought of as Congolese based on their accent, which further complicates who is seen as Congolese and who as Angolan. In fact, it is common practice for Angolans from the provinces outside of Luanda to change their names into Portuguese-sounding names and change their place of birth.

COMMERCE WOMEN Gender and Entrepreneurship Although the experiences of African women in migration and transregional movements have been eclipsed by men’s histories of travel and journeying (Braun, 2020), market women in Africa feature prominently in African histories. There is an extensive body of literature attending to the ways in which migrant women have been vital to marketplaces across the continent (Clark, 2018). Outside of African contexts, women entrepreneurs have been shown to be vital to entrepreneurial development as they increase the diversity and complexity of the process (Verheul et al., 2004; Venkatraman, 1997; Freeman, 2001). Other research has also shed light on gender-based differences in ethnic entrepreneurship, focusing on the housewives of migrant men from the global south who themselves become entrepreneurs in a highly developed economy (Billore, 2011). Indeed, as these scholars show, concepts of gender and trade are not opposed (Bruni et al., 2004), and given that identities are unstable and fluid, people deploy diverse strategies to negotiate identities with different constituencies. While many of these studies place an emphasis on the ways in which minority identities shape entrepreneurs’ experiences, this chapter aims to reveal the complexity of this dynamic due to the fact that many Congolese entrepreneurial women ethnically identify as Kikongo. Since this ethnicity is also present in Angola, and given that there has been much circular migration between the two countries, what constitutes an ethnic “other” remains flexible. Scholars show that “the role of borders have informed what is narrativized as ‘smuggling’ by local actors” (Schomerus and de Vries, 2021: 158). Sidestepping some of the conceptual issues that come with trying to define what is formal and informal, licit and illicit, we deploy the term “cross-border entrepreneurship” to describe women’s trading activities. Further, we focus on women’s adaptability, especially within fluctuating markets that sometimes occur as a result of global forces, as exemplified with the Covid-19 pandemic.

For some examples of these shows, see https://​www​.youtube​.com/​watch​?v​=​NLPG9vcpjek and https://​www​.youtube​.com/​watch​?v​=​XpLMoAoi94s (both accessed 19 July 2022).

13

Women and cross-border trade  247 Basi ya Kilo: Women of Weight The Congolese French word débrouillardise, or “resourcefulness,” defines a concept that shapes many people’s lives in both Angola and the DRC.14 In the DRC, men and women, working as teachers or as government civil servants, rarely enjoy stable paychecks (de Herdt and Marysse, 1996; Trefon, 2004), which pushes them to search for alternative means to sustain themselves. Transnational trade has become one such avenue. While some women are full-time traders, others rely on entrepreneurial trading to supplement their other jobs. In what follows, we offer an overview of some of the women traders working in and between the DRC and Angola. As there exists little industry for consumer products in many sub-Saharan countries (with the exception of South Africa), countries like the DRC and Angola depend on goods from abroad, giving rise to an informal economy structured around import/export practices. Clothing, beauty products, jewelry, household items, and construction materials for houses are some examples of what individuals buy from abroad from countries such as Turkey, the UAE, Brazil, and China. Some traders purchase wholesale goods to sell in their shops, but most sell informally out of their homes to their network of customers. That said, there are several categories of traders, and what they import reflects the amount of financial capital to which they have access. For instance, one woman might be in the business of filling entire shipping containers in China with expensive household furniture and construction material, while others transport bags filled with cheap sandals that they resell for five times the wholesale price. Women in sub-Saharan Africa, long involved in entrepreneurial activity working as vendors and wholesale dealers, are highly adept at understanding and negotiating local markets.15 New questions have continued to emerge with regards to the transnational dimensions of trade, partly as a result of deepening Sino-African relations. Cheaply produced imported products from China have enabled more Africans to participate in global consumerism. The massive market base in Africa enriches not only Chinese factories but also those African women traders involved in bringing merchandise to local markets. These women succeed in this trade when they have reached a position where they are able to accumulate enough wealth to support their extended families through their businesses. There are numerous intersecting supply chains that benefit entrepreneurs at different levels. For instance, Angolan trader women import clothing from Brazil into Luanda, which is then sold to Congolese trader women, who import it across the border for resale in Kinshasa. Manisha Desai understands these cross-border traders as “innovators using new economic opportunities and thus participating in economic restructuring” (2009: 379). Household structures are also changing in relation to this work. With more Congolese women engaging in transnational entrepreneurial activities, new issues arise about how they are perceived as moral beings and about womanhood in general.16 For instance, while both men and women

The Portuguese equivalent used in Angola is desenrascar. Women were involved in early contact with the Portuguese, selling newly arrived European items in local markets. Market women have historically been an important subject group among social scientists, and much of this research was largely predicated on the socio-economic dimensions within female entrepreneurship (Robertson, 1976; Clark, 1994; Hansen, 2000). 16 Scholars have pointed to the ways in which local conceptions of womanhood exist in relation to economic change (Boserup, 1970; Bledsoe, 1980; MacGaffey, 1991). 14 15

248  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration conducting business out of the country are seen as worldly or cosmopolitan, for Congolese women, this new status also invites suspicion about their personal morality (Braun, 2019). The post-oil-boom crash, which Angola has been experiencing since 2014, has altered trading patterns as Angolans have less money to spend on consumer items such as clothing, electronics, and household appliances. Angola’s artisanal mining region in the north continues to be a profitable location for trade as more individuals have access to more wealth. There is heavy competition for customers in this region, and many traders have spoken about how much these markets are becoming saturated. Consequently, many trader women, previously involved in importing items yielding high profits, among them electronics, have pivoted to trading agricultural products. Traders can make a small profit by buying beans, corn, manioc, peanuts, or dried fish with kwanza (the Angolan currency) and then reselling their products in the DRC in US dollars, which are accepted as cash alongside the Congolese franc (CFA) for virtually all transactions. Women traders engage in what is referred to as le va-et-vient, or “the coming-and-going” between these regions. Many of these traders have spent considerable time in both countries, and some have dual citizenship and therefore identify as both Angolan and Congolese, further adding complexity to the category of the “migrant.” Women must often travel on their own across these borderland trading circuits, especially if they cannot afford to arrange for other people in their network to travel in their stead. This is physically exhausting work as it entails driving hundreds of miles for days in trucks that frequently break down along the way. Indeed, cross-border trade requires substantial stamina, grit, and skill. One example of such a trade route beginning in Luanda is through Huambo, which might take a full day to return to Luanda again. As many women traders do not trust others with their cargo—it is not uncommon for theft to occur—many see no other option but to make the trips themselves. Once they arrive in agricultural regions, women sometimes wait for crops to be harvested and oversee the loading of goods in the hot sun. The cargo is then transported to Luvo (referred to as Lufo among Congolese), taking about a day and a half, and onward to Kinshasa, DRC, which demands another full day of transport. Another route traders take is to Huambo, then immediately to the Congolese border at Dundo, where they go through into Tshikapa, and finally Kikwit, where they deposit their goods—a route that can take several weeks. Another dimension of débrouillardise activity in the DRC is structured around the act of searching for new contacts, ones that can sustain and protect one’s business activities. It is understood that social networks are crucial drivers of success both locally and globally, and social capital, or the idea of “wealth in people,” is as equally important for women as it is for men.17 Whatever one’s social class, one’s social network of contacts is necessary for mitigating the risks associated with trade, including paying fines and bribes. Negotiating at the border with customs officers thus forms part of cross-border trade, which requires not only savoir-faire but ideally also connections with individuals working at the border. In this environment, women must protect themselves from theft and extortion, and they do this, in part, by leveraging their connections (Howson, 2012). Women with kin, or a husband in a powerful position such as in the government or military, have an advantage over women who do not have access to people who might provide assistance in their business activities. This is

For an elaborated discussion about the “wealth in people,” see Jane Guyer (1993).

17

Women and cross-border trade  249 particularly so in a system where financial success depends on one’s continuous engagement with a political and economic system premised on social networks and gift-giving. These advantages enjoyed by well-connected women today are similar to how, during the 1990s, Congolese women who had the good fortune of marrying an officer in the UNITA political party were in a better position to engage in the cross-border trade of commodities (De Boeck, 1998). As Sylvie Bredeloup states, “Femininity, though it is often regarded as a handicap in business, thus turns into an asset” (2013: 177).18 In this vein, De Boeck describes the ways in which migrant women temporarily ally with men to form “mining marriages” whereby revenues gained were shared between the couple. He writes, “For the women involved it is a way to protect themselves or establish themselves as ‘women of weight’ (basi ya kilo) or ‘big women’ (grandes femmes)” (De Boeck, 2001: 555). These strategic alliances can invite moral disapproval from certain segments of society, especially those who are threatened by female financial empowerment (Braun, 2019). In her research among Senegalese smugglers, Cynthia Howson notes, “While accumulation to ‘get rich’ was discursively linked to women’s sexuality, accumulation as evidence of criminality was discursively linked to masculinity” (2012: 434). Indeed, there are gendered differences in cross-border trade, and it is clear that women carry with them not only physical cargo but invisible baggage as well (Braun and Haugen, 2021). The role of the trader woman then represents a context where power and morality come into play. Although powerful trader women may be regarded with suspicion, the wealth amassed by these women is generally reinvested in family networks back in their natal villages, further revealing the circular modes of migration associated with multilocal networks.19 This redistribution of profit generated from cross-border trade becomes a way for women to guard their respectability in the face of any negative perception about women involved in these trading activities.

PANDEMIC DISRUPTIONS The Covid-19 pandemic has produced profound disruptions with regard to trade, especially due to the closure of the border between Angola and the DRC. Partly as a lesson learned from various Ebola outbreaks, Angola implemented a strict response, restricting the movement of nationals as well as forbidding foreigners from crossing into the country. With many traders stranded on either side of the border, unable to return to their families, an illicit transit corridor has consequently opened up, referred to in Lingala as kati-kati (“middle passage”). As travel across this passage involves crossing water, people have also referred to it as “Turkey” in reference to other migrants who embark on journeys through the Mediterranean Sea. Small makeshift boats and janky inflatable rafts transport both people and their merchandise into the DRC. It is not so much the water-passage that is considered perilous—getting caught by 18 In the literature about Nigerian women, these strategies are referred to as “bottom power” (Okeke-Ihejirika, 2004; Osirim et al., 2008), thus acknowledging the agentive power that women summon by using their femininity to survive. 19 The moral suspicion levied against women is linked to their activities that are conducted outside of patriarchal structures (Hodgson and McCurdy, 2001). Migrant women’s bidirectional movements are certainly not unique to Angola and Congo, and many scholars working in different African contexts reveal the ways in which women’s money is redistributed among family members (Cole and Groes-Green, 2016).

250  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration soldiers patrolling the border poses an even greater danger. Here, women participating in this small-scale trade run the risk of losing their money to soldiers, having their goods confiscated, or being sent to prison. Women are also vulnerable to sexual violence that can occur at the hands of authorities. While the majority of Congolese and Angolan traders have managed to leverage their entrepreneurial acumen—often with the support of cross-border kinship networks—the pandemic has enriched select elite groups who are mainly involved in high-volume trading. These individuals, privileged with powerful connections in the government on both sides of the border, have continued to be active in commerce throughout the pandemic regardless of border control. Both Angola and the DRC confront pointed challenges as they are also imbricated in global supply chains. What’s more, these challenges are further compounded by the effect that inflationary pressures will have on market prices for all manner of goods, particularly since the CFA is pegged to the US dollar.

CONCLUSION The border between Angola and the DRC has continuously been traversed—legally and illegally—by women engaged in varying scales of cross-border commerce. Amid oppressive historical colonial matrices of power, civil wars, and now a global pandemic, women have boldly leveraged their market abilities by circumventing both physical borders as well as other social, economic, and political obstacles. There’s been a significant reduction in the number of Congolese-born women heading to Angola to trade, and this is largely due to the fact that Angolans are confronted with an economic crisis that has reduced their purchasing power for non-essential items. Trader women now focus their efforts on importing products from Angola into Congo where they can be traded for a small profit. Despite official border closures, this corridor of commerce has been utilized by traders throughout the pandemic to transport foodstuffs such as beans and manioc, as well as other mundane items like rubber sandals. What these intrepid women cross-border traders reveal is that the self-interest of economic activity is indeed not the most important motivating factor for them. Rather, despite the arduous difficulties and potential dangers, these women’s activities of movement, exchange, and wealth redistribution are what reproduce families and communities, even when their ethnic, cultural, and linguistic origins are ever shifting and evolving.

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20. The Anglophone crisis and migratory patterns in Cameroon: some social and economic implications for women Tassah Ivo Tawe and Henri Yambene Bomono

INTRODUCTION Over the past five years, Cameroon in the Central African sub-region has become a hotbed for violent conflicts. These have generated an unprecedented and spontaneous wave of migration among its English-speaking population into the nearby bushes, which have become permanent safe havens, and into the French-speaking parts of the country; and a significant proportion of the population has moved to neighbouring Nigeria and elsewhere, where they have become refugees. This stands in sharp contrast to the distant past, as the country had prided itself as being the citadel of peace and economic stability in the sub-region, providing a safe home for refugees from the Central African Republic, Sudan, Chad, Niger and Nigeria. The conflict has therefore set a reversal to the peace and economic stability enjoyed by the country. According to studies by Piet Konings and Francis Bernard Nyamnjoh cited by International Crisis Group Africa Report N° 160 (2010), the Cameroon Anglophone regions have since October 2016 witnessed protests born out of sectoral demands, which have degenerated into a political crisis. This crisis has led to the re-emergence of the Anglophone question and highlighted the limits of the Cameroonian governance model, based on centralization (International Crisis Group Reports, 2016). The International Crisis Group Reports (2016) further noted that the politicization of the crisis and the radicalization of its protagonists by the government due to denial, disregard, intimidation and repression have aggravated the situation to a point where secession is now looked upon by the affected population as the only feasible way out of the crisis. The Anglophone zone of Cameroon consists of two of the country’s ten regions, the Northwest and the Southwest. It covers 16,364 sq. km of the country’s total area of 475,442 sq. km and has more than 5 million of Cameroon’s 26 million inhabitants. It is the stronghold of the main opposition party, the Social Democratic Front (SDF), and plays an important role in the economy, especially its dynamic agricultural and commercial sectors. Most of Cameroon’s oil, which accounts for one twelfth of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP), is located off the coast of the Anglophone region (International Crisis Group Reports, 2016). This chapter examines the socio-political crisis in the Northwest and Southwest regions (the Southern Cameroons) of the country, which has recently degenerated into an armed conflict. It will employ a descriptive and analytical approach, with data generated through field surveys, interviews of 40 respondents and focus group discussions. Information from desk reviews also formed a valid source of data acquisition through content analysis in order to show the new wave of migratory patterns generated by the conflict and to demonstrate how it has affected the social and economic fabric of women and young girls in this part of the country. 254

The Anglophone crisis and migratory patterns in Cameroon  255 The narratives presented herein are underpinned by the theory of gender-based violence as a weapon of war, as brought forward by the United Nations. As noted by Meger (2011), civil conflict is the primary form of warfare around the world, with the use of smaller arms and less conventional tactics than traditional interstate wars. It is in this context that sexual violence and rape have become a central feature of contemporary war. Sexual violence is not only defined as the lack of sexual consent, it is also considered violence when sex is utilized by women as a survival strategy to avoid harm, or to obtain basic necessities. As observed in the field, sexual violence against women has been a regular feature of the ongoing conflict in the Anglophone regions and is a brutal weapon used by the belligerent armed groups against the women. According to Meger (2011), the goal of these armed groups is not to maim or kill but rather to control an entire socio-political process by crippling it. It is an attack directed equally against personal identity and cultural integrity. The first part of this chapter presents an introduction, and the second part examines the elements of the Cameroonian migratory space. The third section gives an insight into the socio-political crisis in the Anglophone regions of Cameroon, while the fourth part examines the socio-political crisis and how it has led to the collapse of migratory barriers in Cameroon and the fifth part present the general situation and its implications for women and finally moves to present the way forward and ends with a conclusion.

ELEMENTS OF THE CAMEROONIAN MIGRATORY SPACE The elements of the Cameroon migratory system have a bearing with its colonial legacy. Due to differences in administration and language instituted by the colonial regime, spatial interactions and movement between the British Southern Cameroons, the British Northern Cameroons and the French Republic of Cameroon or the Eastern Cameroon was restricted. Movement was essentially from rural to urban areas, with defined migratory lines and in strict respect of State boundaries. Three types of migratory patterns were observed during this period in the British Southern Cameroons. The first involved migrations into the diaspora caused by socio-political dynamics in the Southern Cameroons. The second concerned the wide use of English in many developed countries, notably Great Britain, the United States of America and Australia, and the extensive use of the English language in many institutions of learning even in the non-English-speaking countries such as Germany, Russia, Italy, Belgium, among others. Finally, a significant proportion of migration into the diaspora was accelerated by the growing use of the French language in many institutions in the British Southern Cameroons, contrary to the expectations of the Southern Cameroonians during the plebiscite of 1961. There was also migration caused by the dual development approach whereby some areas were virtually more developed than others and therefore attracted many rural dwellers. When economic infrastructures and institutions were dissolved in the British Southern Cameroons, most migrants were in need of jobs and therefore had to migrate into the French Cameroun, breaking barriers of language and culture because those were the new frontiers where employment could be enhanced. The National Institute of Statistics report (2010) noted that the rate of urbanization was high, stating that the urbanization rate had grown from 28 per cent in 1976 to 52 per cent in 2010 with a significant proportion of rural–urban migration. The industrial and commercial activities of the urban centres also attracted the rural migrants. In the former British Southern Cameroons, the urban centres that attracted most migrants included Bamenda, Mamfe,

256  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration Kumba, Buea and Victoria (Limbe). During this period, linguistic, cultural and psychological differences acted as significant barriers to migration between the two former States. Therefore, in terms of searching for economic opportunities, the former British Southern Cameroonians migrate and trade with neighbouring Nigeria and other English-speaking countries while the French Camerounians equally migrated and traded with other French-speaking countries. Migrations from the French Cameroun to the British Southern Cameroons during and after the colonial period were attributed to political instability in the French Republic of Cameroon between the Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC) political party and the French colonial power. The crackdown of citizens belonging to the UPC political party who were mostly against French colonial rule and colonization created a refugee problem that led to mass migration into the British Southern Cameroons; this was considered a safe haven for refugees because French troops alongside troops of French Cameroun could not interfere with the territorial integrity of the British Southern Cameroons. These refugees, mostly from the Bamilike and the Bassa tribes, settled permanently in the Southern Cameroons as most of them were political opponents of French Cameroun’s regime. Political interference in the British Southern Cameroons included the introduction of Laisser Passer, which was a document intended to restrict internal movement in the French Cameroun being introduced in the British Southern Cameroons. This drastically limited migration and internal movement in the British Southern Cameroons, as those who could not afford this document were either arrested or obliged to pay heavy penalties for non-possession of the Laisser Passer document.

THE CONTEXT OF THE ANGLOPHONE CRISIS IN CAMEROON The recent Anglophone crisis in Cameroon, which began in November 2016, is rooted in the country’s colonial history. Cameroon was a United Nations mandated territory placed under the control of Britain and France after the Second World War saw the Germans defeated in Cameroon. These colonial powers partitioned the country with France possessing three quarters and Britain one quarter. These two colonial governments both administered their respective shares of the territory independently (International Crisis Reports, 2016; Abang, 2020). Britain divided its territory into two: the British Southern Cameroons and the British Northern Cameroons. As part of its policy, the British Northern Cameroons was joined to Nigeria. The focus of this chapter is the British Southern Cameroons. France administered its section as Republique Française du Cameroun (French Cameroun). On 1 January 1960, Republique Française du Cameroun gained independence from France and became La Republique du Cameroun, while the Southern Cameroons, which at this time remained a United Nations mandated territory under Britain, was given a condition to gain independence on 1 October 1961 by joining either Nigeria or La Republique du Cameroun. According to International Crisis Group Reports (2016), the majority of the population in the British Southern Cameroons aspired to independence, but the United Kingdom and some developing countries were against it on the premise that the Southern Cameroons was not economically viable and that it was best to avoid the creation of micro-states. They therefore advocated a vote in favour of joining Nigeria. The UN therefore excluded the independence option and limited the referendum to a choice of either joining with Nigeria or reunification with La Republique du Cameroun. Under the federal system of government, the British Southern Cameroons joined La Republique du Cameroun in a United Nations-organized plebiscite and

The Anglophone crisis and migratory patterns in Cameroon  257 the country became the Federal Republic of Cameroon. After the reunification on 1 October 1961, Cameroon became a federal republic, but in practice it inherited a shaky federalism with an unequal distribution of power between the two federated states in the federal assembly and in the government (International Crisis Group Reports, 2016). On 20 October 1961, Ahidjo, who was the president, signed a decree reorganizing federal territory into seven administrative regions, including West Cameroon, and appointed a federal inspector for each region, who was to report to the federal president. This provoked discontent among Anglophones, because Southern Cameroon could not at the same time be a federated state according to the constitution and an administrative region by decree. The federal inspector had more power than the elected prime minister of West Cameroon and demonstrated it on a daily basis by humiliating members of the federated government and parliament (Konings and Nyamnjoh, 2003). Eleven years after independence, the government’s federal system was suppressed on 20 May 1972, when Cameroon became the United Republic of Cameroon, after the referendum. Anglophones challenged the legality of this policy on the grounds that the 1961 constitution did not provide for any alteration in the form of state and stipulated that only parliament could amend the constitution. Anglophone militants also consider that the referendum should not have taken place throughout the country and should have been limited to the Southern Cameroon, which had the most to lose. Finally, they claim that it was not possible to hold a free and transparent referendum in the context of the time and that the ballot was marred by serious irregularities (International Crisis Group interviews, 2017). When Paul Biya succeeded Ahidjo in November 1982, he further centralized power. In 1984, he changed the country’s official name to the Republic of Cameroon (the name of the former Francophone territory) (Crisis Group interviews, 2017). This change of name therefore meant the dissolution of the 1961 union between the English and French sections of Cameroon. This was perceived by the people of the British Southern Cameroons as an index of forced annexation because both parties came into the union with equal status and a well-defined constitution that spelled out the terms of the union. As a result of this, Fongum Gorji Dinka, the first ever lawyer who was the president of the Cameroon Bar Council, called for the Southern Cameroons to become independent and to be re-baptized as the “Republic of Ambazonia” (Konings and Nyamnjoh, 1997). Furthermore, in the wake of this political shift, there was systematic destruction of all State institutions in the Southern Cameroons such as the Tiko international airport, Tiko Port, Victoria Seaport, the Southern Cameroons Electricity Corporation, the National Produce Marketing Board and the Cameroon Bank, among others. Further, the former Southern Cameroons’ educational system was francophonized—teachers of French Cameroun extraction were sent to teach children with an Anglo-Saxon background in the Southern Cameroons (presently called the Northwest and Southwest regions). The Southern Cameroons’ common law system was destabilized and the Civil Law system in French Cameroun imposed in the English Courts whereby magistrates of French-speaking extraction were posted to practise in an environment where the people did not understand the French language. Consequently, lawyers and teachers from the Northwest and Southwest regions called for a peaceful protest over the bruising injustice and marginalization imposed on the former Southern Cameroonians. Rather than seeking peaceful solutions to these problems, the government responded with beatings, intimidations, and arrest of teachers and lawyers who demanded the return of the Anglo-Saxon system in all their institutions. Continuous military repressive measures and intimidation from the central government and killing of civilians

258  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration led to the call for independence as the leaders of the former Southern Cameroons movement declared restoration of independence on 1 October 2017. The central government responded with a crackdown resulting in the arrest, imprisonment and murder of more than nine persons. This marked the beginning of ongoing violent clashes between non-State-armed groups (Amba boys) in the former Southern Cameroons and the government forces, which have of late degenerated into a conflict in the Southern Cameroons. This has led to an unprecedented population displacement into neighbouring countries and elsewhere.

THE CRISIS AND THE COLLAPSE OF MIGRATORY BARRIERS IN CAMEROON Over the past five years, the crisis in the English-speaking regions of Cameroon has escalated into an armed conflict between non-State-armed groups (Amba boys), who demand a separate State (the Federal Republic of Ambazonia) and the government forces. This has consequently driven thousands of English-speaking Cameroonians into internal displacement. People have either fled into the surrounding bushes, which have become permanent homes, or into the French-speaking part of the country; still others have been pushed to migrate into neighbouring Nigeria and elsewhere. According to studies by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR, 2018), the displaced, most of whom are women and children, face a grave humanitarian situation in the refuge zones where they find themselves. Having fled with few belongings and little in the way of financial means, their presence in host communities is straining the available resources coupled with their own personal wellbeing. As of October 2018, OCHA estimated that there were over 437,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) in Cameroon. More than 246,000 of them were in the Southwest Region, 105,000 in the Northwest Region, and 86,000 in the Littoral and West regions. In addition to triggering internal displacement in the Northwest and Southwest regions of Cameroon, the ongoing conflict has also forced more than 70,000 Cameroonians to seek asylum in Nigeria. As the conflict persists in Cameroon, UNHCR anticipates that the influx into Southeast Nigeria, which is considered a permanent safe haven, will continue, with more than 20,000 refugees projected to flee in the coming months. Aziamin and Tassah (2020) reported that the clashes between Amba boys and defence and security forces have displaced the civilian population into the surrounding forests and villages. It has been reported that over 80 per cent of the displaced population have found refuge in the forest. The two regions have equally experienced a deterioration of living conditions, which has primarily affected school-age children, women and the elderly, coupled with the collapse of livelihoods as well as heightened abuses. Similar reports by Abang (2020) noted that the military onslaught and the Amba boys is unforgiving, stating that international media reports as of 2017 reported 19 deaths, while the Anglophone civil society reports put the death toll above 150. Entire communities have taken refuge in the bushes, while others have fled across the border into refugee camps in Nigeria. Some 2000 unarmed Anglophone youths were arrested and transferred to military tribunals in Yaoundé. The conflict and subsequent displacement have prevented people from accessing their agricultural fields and markets. For most of the affected population who relied upon agriculture or livestock as their main sources of livelihoods before the crisis, dependency on external assistance has therefore become inevitable as it has compounded pre-existing vulnerabilities in their host communities.

The Anglophone crisis and migratory patterns in Cameroon  259

THE GENERAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE ARMED CONFLICT According to studies by Brunet and Rousseau (1996), the impact of armed conflicts on women and young girls cannot be considered in isolation because they are the primary child and adult caregivers. These studies reported that, as men leave to fight in times of crisis, women are left behind with responsibilities to maintain the social and economic fabric of their communities and to stand as instruments of continuity by supporting and nurturing healings from war-related trauma. This of course, though similar in all respects, is not the case with the Anglophone crisis in the English-speaking regions of Cameroon that began in November 2016 and in which both women and young girls (Amba girls) have been fully involved, causing massive displacement into neighbouring French-speaking towns and cities of Douala, Bafoussam, Dschang, Melong and Yaoundé, while others have had to migrate into Nigeria. According to the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (2020), both women and men are actively involved in the conflict as actors, perpetrators and victims. Men play the role of fighters/combatants, spies and informants. Women, on the other hand, act as spies and informants, provide food, and care for fighters. Women and girls are also leaders of some armed groups and are commonly referred to as “Queen mothers”, while men are known as “Generals”. However, women like men are often victims of kidnappings and torture. Furthermore, while young men are targeted by the Amba boys to be recruited into their ranks, they are also targeted by the State-armed group as suspects. Young girls, on the other hand, are victims of sexual violence perpetrated by both camps. The crisis has led to an intensification of other conflicts that existed within families, communities and ethnic groups, such as the farmers–graziers conflicts between cattle herders and farmers in the northwest (Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom 2020). Overall, the majority of IDPs assessed through fieldwork (80.4 per cent) have been displaced for more than four years. The assessment indicated that over 31 per cent of IDPs live independently, whereas 72 per cent are hosted by households in the French-speaking part of Cameroon. Overall, 83.7 per cent of IDP households interviewed were female-headed households whose husbands are fighters (Amba boys) and either live in bushes or have been killed in the process of fighting. These facts therefore lay down the basis for understanding the effects of the crisis on the affected population in general and the women population in particular.

SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE CRISIS ON WOMEN According to field reports, women and young girls make up about 70 per cent of the most-affected population from the conflict. Therefore, in the course of movement into nearby cities, the physical and psychosocial health and survival of these women and young girls become very critical. Media channels indicate that these women are exposed to sexual violence, rape and sexual abuse, from the military and the Amba boys who all claim to ensure maximum protection of the population. Further, the specific effects reported by women of all ages were displacement, loss of homes and properties, the involuntary disappearance of close relatives, poverty and hunger, family separation and disintegration. Victimization also occurred through acts of murder, terrorism, torture, and the involuntary disappearance of siblings, parents and husbands, with others held behind to serve as cooks, messengers and porters; all were field narratives of the affected women population. According to one particular report produced by

260  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration OCHA Cameroon in collaboration with humanitarian partners in September 2021, during the imposed lockdown in Donga-Mantung division, Amba boys had attacked a girl, chopping off her fingers simply for attending school. In another case reported, the Amba boys kidnapped five public school principals in Ngo-Ketunjia division, killing one of them six days later. Gender-based violence (GBV) partners reported 1,996 cases in the Southern Cameroons to specialized service providers. This represents a 60 per cent increase from 1,205 cases reported in August 2021. In total, 85 per cent of GBV survivors were female and 30 per cent of the total incidents reported were cases related to children. In relation to the type of reported incidents, 37 per cent are denial of resources or opportunities, 10 per cent are cases of physical assault, 34 per cent are emotional abuse and 14 per cent are incidents of sexual violence. There are increasing reports of GBV cases during lockdown periods, including reports of femicide. It has been observed by the researchers that women and young girls are being used as war tactics by opposing camps. As noted, most of the women are either kidnapped as a means to force their husbands, who are the warlords, to come out of their hideouts and surrender; and in some cases, they demand for huge ransoms for their release while others are killed. The consequences of these acts on the affected women population in the area leaves much to be desired as it has negatively impacted the psychosocial and general health situation of these women. As observed in the field, the affected populations of women in this war-torn area of Cameroon have had to assume the responsibilities of both mothers and fathers, as the men, especially the male youths, have been killed serving as fighters in the course of the war. In addition to dealing with their own deep wounds of loss, hunger and frustrations, and equally confused about where to run to and whether they can run at all as a result of old age, some of these women have voluntarily stayed back in the villages as they are not able to walk over long distances into the bushes or into the French-speaking parts of the country that currently serve as safe havens for IDPs. Field reports indicate that these women, who are unable to move, now have the role of burying the numerous corpses dumped in farmlands, as well as those found along roadsides and in the open and hidden corners of the regions. The abduction and trafficking of women by the Armed Forces and Freedom Fighters out of fear of losing their lives and families are now forced to serve as spies, during which many also lose their lives. In addition, most of the women abducted and assaulted sexually are left with unwanted pregnancies. Women who succeed to move into the French-speaking part of the country are stranded in towns without homes or any form of shelter and food. They have become street beggars with corresponding high rates of stealing and prostitution as the only survival strategy. As observed, the rate of prostitution among these women is very high, with an increasing rate of abortions and infant mortality. Some of the women and young girls give birth to children under deplorable conditions with significant lifetime effects. Further, the education of these women and young girls has been greatly affected by the conflict, as they have been out of school for already five years. Their displacements and traumatic experiences place them in a state of becoming school drop-outs. They are not able to go back to school as they can neither trace their school materials nor have money to finance their education in their host communities. Besides, studying in an unknown environment without knowledge of the French language and no home becomes unbearable. All that they need is simply a means to survive and to stay alive.

The Anglophone crisis and migratory patterns in Cameroon  261

ECONOMIC IMPLICATIONS: CRISIS AND DISPLACEMENT With regard to the economic dimensions, it was reported by respondents that women constitute 60 per cent of the labour force of the war-torn Anglophone regions of Cameroon. They contribute significantly to the growth of the economy of these regions through the production of food and cash crops. Their role as home managers and unit of family development has long ceased to exist with the advent of the crisis as their sources of livelihoods have either been destroyed or carted away. While women’s associations—financial and market—constitute important economic and commercial hubs, they no longer exist due to the intensity of the conflicts. Field reports indicate that the quantity of some food items periodically supplied to different markets, such as cocoyam, plantains, cassava flour (water fufu), corn flour and beans, have reduced drastically, not to mention the purchasing power of the population. This is because the farmers cannot meet up with the labour requirements in their farms to plant, weed or harvest crops. Their farmlands are now controlled by Amba boys and the State security forces who depend on the farm produce for survival as well. Decreased investment from individual women and women’s associations, trade and productivity, along with human and physical capital, has been destroyed, including the forced displacement and devastating effects on education and healthcare, which are some of the key channels that have slowed down economic growth in these regions. Furthermore, most labourers, as women working for the Cameroon Development Corporation (CDC), the Cameroon Tea Estate, have been retrenched, which has affected the general production of tea, and banana produce for exportation. The displacement of women from these company and cooperatives has greatly reduced the labour force, thereby influencing the productivity level, which has caused the economic wellbeing of individuals, families and the government of Cameroon.

CRISIS IMPLICATIONS ON HEALTH CONDITIONS OF WOMEN AND YOUNG GIRLS Public health, which refers to the provision of conditions that allow people to achieve physical, mental and social wellbeing (Mann et al., 1994), and depends upon several basic and essential conditions such as the availability and quality of food, water and access to health services, is a major challenge faced by women in these regions due to the ongoing war. The armed conflict has created disproportionately negative health effects for girls and women. Due to the conflict, women have been unable to carry out their usual responsibilities, such as to protect and feed their children, while others are malnourished, face starvation, and are less physically and psychologically available to their children. As the public health infrastructures are destroyed, such as the Kumba District Health Centre, which was the largest in Meme division, accessibility to life-saving health and medical care has decreased significantly (Abang, 2020). Due to the reduction in access to health services, the major public health effects noted in these war-torn regions include: ● Pregnancy and birth complications: without basic health and medical services, girls and young women increase their risks for both morbidity and mortality. Breastfeeding mothers who are malnourished or otherwise impacted by hunger, exhaustion and trauma have been

262  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration unable to nourish their infants and young children or to physically support their pregnancies. In these circumstances, some of the women who are physically strong are rushed to any nearby areas in the French-speaking part of the country where the situation could be rescued, thereby breaking migratory barriers. The migration of these women and girls has exposed them to severe diseases such as HIV/AIDS, cholera, dysentery, malaria and COVID-19, leading to significant numbers of deaths. ● The public health infrastructure: as the war persists, health personnel have become increasingly scarce. Those available to attend to the military are closely watched to ensure they do not attend to Amba boys, while some are killed by stray bullets, or leave the country. Many health posts have been closed due to the destruction and fear of loss of lives and properties.

THE WAY FORWARD Women have long been actors in peacebuilding processes, but they have usually worked in less visible ways than men and much more at community levels as opposed to formal political positions. This, however, is changing as substantive global initiatives are now aimed at increasing women’s leadership and political capabilities. Field reports indicates that the divisional officer for Ngoketunjia Division came out publicly and called on the Ndop community of the Northwest Region to unite and take action for peace to return. She has in her action plan as a main objective to increase the participation of women in conflict resolution at decision-making levels. The plan recommends that action be taken to promote equal participation of women and to provide equal opportunities for women’s participation in all forums, all levels of peace activities, and particularly at decision-making levels. This will require empowerment and capacity building in women, families and communities to the goal of improved protection of children. Women’s groups play critical roles in peacebuilding activities, such as demilitarizing communities, promoting healing and reconciliation processes related to children’s war experiences, and reintegrating children back into the community. Further, women’s groups and organizations have been influential in promoting the presence of women at the negotiating table where they can act as their own advocates and agents for peace. An example is the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) program in Africa, namely, African Women in Crisis, which is working to strengthen the capacity of women’s peace movements throughout Africa. This study recommends that women be incorporated in all peacebuilding efforts, such as peace missions, reconciliation forums, negotiation teams and others.

CONCLUSION The consequences of the Anglophone crisis in the Northwest and Southwest regions of Cameroon have brought the understandings that armed conflict to an extent is gender-specific, and that women and young girls are clearly targeted in tactics of war. Compounding these gender-specific effects are the lifelong social, economic and psychological traumatic consequences of this crisis, foreign occupation and domination (Brownmiller, 1975). As a result, psychologists concerned with reducing the psychosocial impact of armed conflict upon children must include women in their clinical work and action research. They should become the

The Anglophone crisis and migratory patterns in Cameroon  263 focus of attention on the part of human rights organizations and women’s advocacy groups. The focus on gender should not be limited to the effects of armed conflict: it should advocate for the development of women’s capacities by involving them in negotiations to end fighting, in the development of peace accords and judicial processes, and in reconstructing communities as well as building peace and effecting reconciliation. As members of the civilian population, women need to live free from forced displacement and relocation—that is, they should not be forced to become internally displaced persons or refugees, and they ought to be able to remain safely in their homes, families and communities (Ashford and Huet-Vaughn, 1997). More so, because of the role of women and young girls as caretakers, this chapter highlights women as actors and agents of change, and therefore emphasizes that their roles should be protected and expanded to include the socio-economic, political and security spheres during and after crisis to help them revamp the economy and families. Further, when health services are dominated by men, the result may be an underutilization of services by girls and women due to cultural and/or religious reasons. This is why in emergency situations, as is the case in the north and southwest regions of Cameroon, the number of female health and protection workers needs to be increased. Psychologists concerned with reducing the psychosocial impact of armed conflicts upon children must include women in their clinical work and action research. Investigating both differential psychosocial effects of armed conflicts upon girls and boys and the appropriate healing modalities for children within their cultural context is a critically important direction. If such effects exist, there may be ways to strengthen women’s resources so that they, in turn, can provide better psychosocial and physical protection for their children. The buffering and sustaining roles of women in mediating the effects of armed conflicts for children is also important to investigate. If children are to be protected and nurtured, there must be women and mothers to sustain and rebuild homes and communities. Women therefore must be safeguarded from gender-specific violence and, when it occurs, supported in their own psychosocial healing. Their peacebuilding effort must be promoted at all levels: local, regional, national and international. In turn, children will also be beneficiaries (McKay, 1998) of such a peacebuilding achievement.

REFERENCES Abang, M. Kennedy (2020): Southern Cameroons Negotiating an Existence. Werewum CIG, Bamenda, February. Ashford, M. W. and Huet-Vaughn, Y. (1997): The Impact of War on Women. In B. Levy and V. Sidel (eds), War and Public Health (pp. 186–196). New York: Oxford University Press Aziamin, Norah Asongu, and Tassah Ivo Tawe (2020): Assessing the Role of Women as Actors in Addressing the Socio-Political Conflicts in the North West and South West Regions of Cameroon. In Le terrorisme au Cameroun: Acteurs, Mutations d’Approches et Impact (pp. 133–144). Brownmiller, S. (1975): Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. New York: Simon & Schuster. Brunet, A., and Rousseau, S. (1996): Acknowledging Violations, Struggling against Impunity: Women’s Rights as Human Rights. Working paper presented at the Consultation and Planning Meeting for the Campaign Against Impunity in Africa, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Crisis Group interviews (2017): Interviews with members of Southern Cameroons National Council, Bamenda, April. International Crisis Group Africa Report N°160 (2010): Cameroon: Fragile State?, 25 May 2010. International Crisis Group Reports (2016): Cameroon’s Anglophone Crisis at the Crossroads.

264  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration Konings, P., and Nyamnjoh, F.B. (1997): The Anglophone Problem in Cameroon. The Journal of Modern African Studies, 35, 207–229. Konings, Piet, and Francis Bernard Nyamnjoh (2003): Negotiating an Anglophone Identity. Available at https://​www​.crisisgroup​.org/​africa/​central​-africa/​cameroon/​250​-cameroons​-anglophone​-crisis​ -crossroads, accessed on 22/11/2021. Mann, J., Drucker, E., Tamntola, D., and McCabe, M. (1994): Bosnia: The War against Public Health. Medicine and Global Survival, I, 130–146. McKay, S. (1998): From War to Peace: Women and Societal Reconstruction. In L. Lorentzen and J. Turpin (eds), The Women @ War Reader (pp. 348–362). New York: New York University Press. Meger, Sara (2011): Rape in Contemporary Warfare: The Role of Globalization in Wartime Sexual Violence. African Conflict & Peacebuilding Review, 1(1), 100–132. National Institute of Statistics, Yaoundé-Cameroon (2010) The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (2020). Gender Conflict Analysis in Cameroon; Executive Summary. Available at https://​www​.wilpf​.org/​, accessed on 23/11/2021. United Nations High Commission for Refugees (2018): Fleeing Violence, Cameroonian Refugee Arrivals in Nigeria Pass 30,000. Available at https://​www​.unhcr​.org/​uk/​news/​briefing/​2018/​11/​5be551224/​ fleeing​-violence​-cameroonian​-refugee​-arrivals​-nigeria​-pass​-30000​.html, accessed on 23/11/2021.

21. Humanitarian tropes in the Casamance: presumptions about gender-based violence in conflict and displacement contexts Markus Rudolf

INTRODUCTION In line with the framework of counter-geographies and the globalisation of survival as introduced in the preface of the volume, this chapter relates the discourse on the impact of armed conflict on gender relations in Western knowledge production with its reification in humanitarian intervention and with the impact on local social realities. Focusing on Africa’s longest-running civil war and its consequences – e.g., social ruptures, heightened economic vulnerabilities and displacement – in the Casamance, Senegal, it first argues that the assessments of needs are distorted because of different presumptions about gender-based violence (GBV), women’s protection, criminalisation of gender-related offences and gender relations. It, secondly, shows that gender relations are more complex and heterogenous than generalised institutional approaches suggest. Thirdly, it reasons that the interpretation of humanitarian and specifically GBV needs as defined by the international community, tend to produce expected results among the people they serve. While analytically differentiating between local and global knowledge production on the one hand and practice on the other, the chapter’s main purpose and aim is to unveil the mechanisms of where they actually interrelate and how they interdepend. The intercultural, international and inter-institutional translation of a locally perceived fact to an institutional response often resembles a broken telephone game in which the originally forwarded message quickly becomes distorted beyond recognition. These everyday misinterpretations remain mostly unrecognised and, thus, unresolved. An explanation of the original message is not requested because everybody recognises the message. Bacon called this the idols of the market (idola fori) – different people use the same words with different meaning for each – while everyone assumes they share the same idea (Bacon, 1861, p. 252, § XLIII). This means that it is not the message as such that gets changed but the interpretation of what it means. The question of how institutions or locals define a social fact feed back into respective concepts in the form of acknowledgment of differences, approval or rejection. The central research question, therefore, is, what impact does this interrelation have on cooperation, differing or converging assessments, and finally changes or consolidation of social practice. When it comes to humanitarian needs related to sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) in armed conflict, a lot of research – and policy – looks foremost into SGBV or rape as a weapon of war (Bergoffen, 2009; Buss, 2009; Card, 1996; Carter, 2010; Meger, 2011; Sitkin

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266  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration et al., 2019; Sverdlov, 2017).1 Fewer studies or policies deal with more indirect and general impacts of armed conflict – e.g., on gender roles and relations (Abramowitz & Moran, 2012; Buvinic et al., 2013; Carpenter, 2006). Fewer still look into needs resulting from long-term consequences of such shifts on family structures or individual life cycles. This is due partly to administrative advantages of generalised approaches for international institutions, and partly to prevalent self-referential structures that largely disregard external inputs (Luhmann, 1977); as well as to power imbalances between donors and beneficiaries that favour anticipatory compliance over openly communicated disagreement (Bohnet et al., 2015). The following section will examine these issues using the Casamance conflict as an example.

PRESUMPTIONS ABOUT GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE The cases draw from various socio-anthropological research projects conducted by the author between 2006 and 2013 and in 2021 in the Casamance, Southern Senegal. Using a long-term approach and mixed methods (participant observation, in-depth and biographical interviews, collection of oral history), the research focused on traditional mechanisms of conflict resolution in the Basse Casamance (Rudolf, 2013). This region is culturally, religiously and ethnically heterogenous. It is populated predominantly by Diola (or Jola) people, and has been known as an infamous region for its nearly four decades of civil war. Research during the abovementioned projects periods showed that the conflict has catalysed both changes, and consolidations of traditional gender roles and relations. In contrast to assumptions that the position of women in such contexts is generally weakened, research found that some of their positions were strengthened while others were weakened. The research furthermore revealed an impact of humanitarian intervention in regard to local discourses on gender, which, if set in relation to local practices, were cases in point of idola fori – i.e., the gulf between different interpretations of the same term. The region, whose population is roughly 1,300,000, is experiencing a low-intensity conflict since 1982. The conflict has seen various cyclical highs and lows of violence and displacements in the 1990s and 2010s. Over the last years, the number of incidents of violence and new displacements has declined sharply (Evans, 2021; IDMC, 2021; Ray, 2017), though the conflict remains unresolved (Foucher, 2019). Consequences include around 850 victims of landmines, with the latest fatalities occurring in October 2021. There are furthermore numerous 1 The UN defines sexual and gender-based violence, abbreviated SGBV, as “any act that is perpetrated against a person’s will and is based on gender norms and unequal power relationships. It includes physical, emotional or psychological and sexual violence, and denial of resources or access to services” (https://​emergency​.unhcr​.org/​entry/​51693/​sexual​-and​-gender​-based​-violence​-sgbv​-prevention​ -and​-response; accessed 1.8.22). Sexual violence is, thus, in principle a subcategory, though the most prominent one, of GBV. Attempts for a global enforcement of this definition are flanked by international conferences (https://​www​.un​.org/​womenwatch/​daw/​news/​unwvaw​.html; accessed 30.7.22), initiatives like the sustainable development goals (https://​sdgs​.un​.org/​goals; accessed 25.7.22), campaigns (spotlight initiative: https://​www​.un​.org/​sus​tainablede​velopment/​ending​-violence​-against​-women​-and​-girls/​; accessed 2.3.22), conventions (Istanbul Convention (Council of Europe, Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence)), and international regulations (https://​eige​ .europa​.eu/​gender​-based​-violence/​regulatory​-and​-legal​-framework/​international​-regulations; accessed 23.1.22), but local definitions and practices differ (see below). This chapter assesses the ambiguities and contradictions of the humanitarian response towards SGBV in a context of displacement.

Humanitarian tropes in the Casamance  267 heightened vulnerabilities – e.g., loss of livelihoods or lost access to land and precarious living conditions – associated with the conflict. Finally, the conflict has changed gender relation and gender roles, e.g. those of women, both as political actors – namely as mediators (Diallo, 2011; Diedhiou, 2016; Mané, 2012; Osemeka, 2011) – and as victims/survivors of violence. A peculiarity of the conflict, in comparison with other wars in the region – e.g., Sierra Leone or Liberia (Coulter, 2009; Ellis, 1999; Hoffman, 2011) – is that female combatants, child soldiers, or systematic mutilations or SGBV have been virtually absent. On the contrary: due to characteristics of the conflict described below, the argument is that the position of mothers has in certain situations been strengthened, and their risk of becoming a victim of sexual, gender-based or domestic violence decreased. There are nevertheless two important caveats: a local division between female social youth and mothers separates both groups rigidly, and there is nevertheless a general heightened risk for all females to be victimised due to indirect impacts of the conflict, namely in temporarily ungoverned spaces that are open for criminal activity, or for IDPs living in physically cramped, economic precarious and psychologically traumatising circumstances. Even though women might – as in the Casamance – not be actively involved in the fighting itself they are affected by it and have specific needs and potentials: “An accountable, efficient and transparent humanitarian system that saves more lives, should recognise and value women’s agency and gender-specific needs” (Lafrenière et al., 2019, p. 187). The effects of violent conflict for women are diverse and have both short-term and long-term impacts. Among the former are mortality, morbidity, widowhood, SGBV, displacement, loss of property or resources; and among the long-term impacts are changes in labour division, marriage practices, political participation (cf. Buvinic et al., 2009). Due to events in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), GBV became the most prominent of these adverse effects (Baaz & Stern, 2013; Bartels et al., 2013). In parallel to the academic debate, humanitarian organisations made it a crosscutting issue for their work. This means that also in Senegal – namely in the Casamance conflict – the need for aid targeting SGBV survivors became an issue. Our research showed that international interest in SGBV and the importance placed upon it by Western donors, had an impact on local communities. For example, during a discussion group with Western representatives of an international organisation, local women recounted a conflict-related mass rape of about a dozen girls. It had occurred in a rural village in the Casamance. Members of an unknown armed group had reportedly abducted the girls not far from the village. According to the villagers, this violence was a symbol of the insecurity that they had to endure due to the ongoing Casamance conflict. The account was confirmed by various people from the community. The Western experts – myself included – had looked for such incidents without any success, but now had finally encountered an example of conflict-related SGBV. Although we inquired only indirectly about SGBV, respecting local norms and with the necessary intercultural sensitivity, the local community picked up our interest in the topic and related their situation to such incidents they had heard about occurring, e.g., in DR Congo, Liberia or Sierra Leone. When inquiring in detail about the local ways of (medical and psychosocial) support to the girls – which untypically turned out to be lacking – the same group of women started to reveal details about the story that changed it considerably. Instead of a group of unknown armed men, the incident was attributed to a single member of the local anti-government secessionist movement – Mouvement des forces démocratiques de la Casamance (MFDC). The group and the

268  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration person in question had been well known to the villagers. He had approached a group of twelve girls that had gone too close to the MFDC’s well-known base. He had asked two of the girls to join him for a walk into the forest. The rest of the girls had left and – upon their return to the village – informed other villagers. When the remaining two girls showed up in the village afterwards, they recounted that the guy had made sexual advances, to which the girls declined. They pointed out that they had their period and he had let them go. Due to cultural norms within Diola culture,2 which have become increasingly important in the conflict (see below), men traditionally cannot see women during their period. In sum, questions about war-related SGBV resulted in responses that emphasised certain aspects of the story while questions about psychosocial support brought up other aspects.

PRESUMPTIONS ABOUT WOMEN, SGBV AND PROTECTION Scholars have described various cases where an escalation of violent conflict correlated with an increase in women’s vulnerability or with GBV (Freedman, 2016; Liebling et al., 2012; Meger, 2011). GBV is an appalling symptom of unequal power relations between men and women. In Senegal, it is usually difficult to obtain information on GBV and especially on sexual violence. It is equally challenging to integrate local notions of violence (see deprivation of food below) into the analysis. In one of the mentioned research projects in the Ziguinchor and Sedhiou region in 2012 that explicitly focused on SGBV, all persons interviewed agreed that it is (in general) taboo to speak about sexual violence against women and that it is not a subject of everyday conversation. Sexual violence against men was never mentioned or alluded to.3 Speaking about sex and sex-related issues within the family – especially between parents and children – is virtually impossible. This taboo is a question of good manners, but it is also connected to and based on a variety of religious rules concerning genitals, menstruation, birth, and others (Baum, 2008; Diedhiou, 2016; Linares, 1988, 1992; Thomas, 1959). Local oral testimonies are, thus, often contradictory: while some people described GBV as very common, widespread and on the rise, others believed it does not exist at all. While some claimed that the Casamance is a region with a lower incidence of GBV than in the rest of Senegal, others seemed to be convinced of the opposite. The availability of reliable data on the incidence of GBV is limited. The abovementioned case of SGBV that evaporated into thin air shows why it remains extremely difficult to inquire about a taboo. The story can be seen as a courtesy to the Western guest who was obviously looking for such cases. It is furthermore known that the international community is supporting survivors worldwide. It would have been seen as impolite to contradict them. In other words, both the researchers and the researched had their role in a generalised playbook that required all participants to link rape and war. This framework had not only nearly led to an only partly 2 Diola culture as such is not monolithic. Diola comprise a diverse and very heterogenous group distinct in religion, language and traditions, residing within different national borders, but they nevertheless show certain overlapping features that have been consolidated into a kind of pan-Diola identity – reinforced, among other issues, by the conflict (Foucher, 2019; Mark, 1985; Pélissier, 1958; Rudolf, 2001; Thomas, 1959). 3 In the Casamance, the only known cases of gender-based violence against men have been linked to torture in police or military custody (Amnesty International, 1998). Those reports are about torture involving the genitals of men, but there are no cases of male rape.

Humanitarian tropes in the Casamance  269 accurate account of events (that would have reinforced common assumptions) but it would have hidden another story, told unexpectedly by the women in the continuation of the group interview, changing the subject to domestic violence. They explained that domestic violence had in fact decreased due to the ongoing conflict. They described how a while ago a husband was beating his wife badly. “She cried so loud that it was heard in the maquis [local synonym for MFDC camp]. The maquisards [local synonym for MFDC members] came, told the man, ‘Stop beating our sister!’ – and then hit him badly.” After that event, the men in the village reportedly did not dare to argue with their wives anymore (group discussion, Balantakunda village, 2012). The reaction of the maquisards needs to be seen in the larger context. This story refers to a popular local narrative claiming that people of the Casamance treat their mothers and sisters with more respect than Northerners. The reaction of the maquisards might indeed be related to a political-ideological narrative that justifies the armed movement by claiming that it defends such traditional values. According to oral tradition, women have had a special position in the conflict since 1982.4 In previous research, local elders recounted: “When the conflict started, there was a demonstration and women went ahead carrying water symbolising peace – the police used violence, nevertheless. They beat them. They did not respect our traditions. People fled and gathered in the bois sacré [space open only to initiated Diola] to organise themselves. That was the start of the conflict” (anonymous interview, Ziguinchor, 2007). The role of mothers (Linares, 1988) and their being sacred is a central element of the political ideology of the MFDC that sets them apart from other Senegalese (Rudolf, 2013). Even though oral history and historical accounts (Baum, 2008; Linares, 1988) have confirmed the narrative around women to be more respected and protected in the Casamance than elsewhere, its relevance needs to be put in relation to the political economy of the conflict. Various interviews with MFDC members showed that they were keen on setting the MFDC apart from infamous examples such as Liberia, Sierra Leone or the DRC. Apart from benefits to their image as individuals and as a movement, they did not fail to notice that such actions were prosecuted at the Special Court for Sierra Leone or the international court in Den Haag (various interviews with members of the political and armed wings of the MFDC, 2007–2012). The impact of the global discourse on SGBV was also noticeable within the wider population. Instead of referring to the story about MFDC members protecting “their sisters” from the beginning, the women first recounted the alleged mass rape that they assumed to better fit the generalised framework provided within humanitarian institutions for SGBV. Be it the rebels who claimed a moral high ground or the women who cautiously argued for aid, their references and the way they positioned themselves show that the local and the global discourses on SGBV are interrelated to a high degree.

4 Due to a lack of other historic documentation and to avoid a bias or an imbalance of local versus colonial records, scrutinising local narratives and oral traditions has been the most prevalent method in anthropological research in West Africa. For wider discussion of the benefits and limits of dealing with oral history, cf. Geertz, 1975; Jessee, 2011; or Wright, 1985.

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PRESUMPTIONS ABOUT CRIMINALISATION OF SGBV AND LAW ENFORCEMENT The Casamance conflict was found to be one of the rare cases where the protection of women might have heightened during an armed conflict, at least theoretically and bearing in mind indirect negative impacts on domestic and criminal violence (see below). Rape was not used as a systematic weapon of war; and the conflict might not have led to a growing number of SGBV but on the contrary, in certain circumstances, increased the protection of women. There are nevertheless vulnerabilities and needs that are related to the conflict and to gender. The conflict has changed gender relations, either by reinforcing traditional gender roles or altering gender inequalities. The repercussions of the conflict on gender nevertheless vary according to the heterogenous social structure of the region: traditionally, the local division of labour throughout most of the Casamance assigns a major share of work to women. Across all ethnic groups, men, rather than women, are dominant in economic affairs. Women trans-locally and trans-ethnically often expressed concerns that men did not live up to the expected roles, such as providing adequate nutrition, school fees, and representation of the family in public affairs. Even though the local division of labour often assigns women a major role (household chores but also farming or trade), men have traditionally been seen as the uncontested leaders of the household. This concept is not only found in rural areas. Women in the Casamance – as in many other African contexts – are foremost perceived (by themselves and others) as mothers, as life givers, as wives, as housewives, and as the primary caregivers of the children on a daily basis. Relations, rights and obligations, degree and type of workload, involvement in decision-making, power and autonomy of the respective gender role vary according to an intersecting and interdependent set of factors such as residence (rural/urban), economic circumstances (occupation/livelihood), the level of education of family members – but above all by ethnicity and religion. All these factors nevertheless combine into rather unique variations among individuals, couples and groups. This means that neither urbanisation, wealth and education nor ethnicity and religion correlate with specific gender relations and roles. Even though ethnic and religious customs significantly condition gender relations, neither unequal gendered power relations nor GBV can be unilaterally and universally correlated with either ethnicity or religion. Individuals and local authorities tend to differentiate rights and obligations that touch gender relations – e.g., marital disputes or divorces – according to ethnic affiliation. But there are also intersecting factors that set certain cases apart from others within ethnic groups, e.g., economic status – and there are others that coincide, e.g., narratives of generalised male dominance. To assess individual cases with regard to vulnerabilities or assets, a reframed multi-layered approach to gender is necessary as outlined in the concept of intersectionality: gender and gender roles are subject to and need to be assessed against the backdrop of other crosscutting power imbalances (Cho et al., 2013; Crenshaw, 2017). Senegalese law criminalises assaults and provides for punishment of one to five years in prison and a fine, both of which are increased if the victim is a woman. Domestic violence causing lasting injuries is punishable with a prison sentence of ten to twenty years; if an act of domestic violence causes death, the law prescribes life imprisonment. But observers note: “Violence against women is against the law, but the law was not enforced” (Department of State, The Office of Electronic Information, 2011). Interviews and observations from our research showed that the local understanding of what constitutes GBV does not coincide with

Humanitarian tropes in the Casamance  271 definitions found in national and international conventions. The legal definition of sexual violence is not echoed locally: in numerous conversations male respondents listed different types of physical violations just to explain that none of them happened in their neighbourhoods (anonymous men, different ages, ethnic, economic and ethnic backgrounds, married and unmarried, rural and urban areas, Ziguinchor and Sedhiou region, interviews, 2012). Many respondents explained that the divorcing wife’s family would ask the woman seeking to leave her husband: “Are you given enough food?”, “Did your husband feed you well?”, “Have you eaten every day?” If the answer were positive, the family would usually send the wife back, asking her, “So – what do you want? Go back to your husband” (various interviews in the Casamance, 2007–2012). In other words, economic conditions and customary social norms transcend the religious and ethnic foundations of gender relations. Both, ultimately, laid the ground for GBV: numerous interviewed Casamançais, referring to traditions and everyday needs, held domestic violence, abuse, or marital rape as no legitimate reasons for divorcing or abandoning your spouse. An older man who participated in our research first asserted that sexual violence is absent in his village community. But he then also explained that a wife has to compensate her husband for not satisfying his sexual demands on one occasion by having intercourse with him every day during the following week. Otherwise, she would be excluded from social life (anonymous man, interview, June 2012). Such statements point to the existence of de facto institutionalised marital rape and show that GBV exists without being directly related to conflict.5 The local perception of what constitutes GBV is evidently not congruent with aforementioned national and international (legal) conventions. During various observations and numerous interviews, it became clear that being slapped was mostly not considered violence, neither for children nor for women. Being deprived of food was considered a serious form of violence (see above); being denied commodities such as soap, nice clothes or jewellery was often mentioned by women as examples of violence. In other words, economic deprivation is more widely recognised as a form of violence than physical or sexual violence. In sum, understandings of what constitutes domestic violence were found to vary significantly within the Casamance region among men and women. In order to assess the prevalence of domestic violence, a survey investigated the acceptability of physical violence in cases of burning a meal, engaging in an argument with the husband, going out without telling him, child neglect and refusal of sexual relations with the husband. According to the responses, more woman (60%) than men (24%) found domestic violence justified in at least one of the abovementioned cases (Agence Nationale de la Statistique et de la Démographie (ANSD), 2012, pp. 286ff.). Research also indicated that men are regarded as superior to women regardless of the ethnicity of the respondent.

PRESUMPTIONS EQUATING WOMEN AND GENDER To understand the impact of the conflict on gender relations in the Casamance, there are numerous first- and second-round, direct and indirect impacts of the conflict on all levels of society that have to be taken into account. Individuals and families suffer direct economic 5 GBV is rarely prosecuted in Senegal: “The government did not fully enforce existing laws, particularly when violence occurred within families” (United States Department of State, 2021, p. 16).

272  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration losses, do not have access to their fields, and often live in cramped rooms under precarious conditions. Those who were affected directly are inter alia people killed or wounded during attacks or mine incidents, rape survivors, victims of robbery; those who are affected indirectly are refugees and IDPs, but also widows, orphans, and the victim’s families in general.6 Many women from the latter group face a special situation: they become the leader of the household, locally described as “both father and mother”. As cheffe de ménage in female-headed households, they are exclusively responsible for the accommodation and nutrition of the family, for medical care and school fees for their children. Therefore, many women have to take up extra income-generating activity alongside the domestic work for which they bear the full burden. The domestic work remains an additional responsibility to whatever other job or obligation women might have had before. Men face different but not necessarily less risks and vulnerabilities, many of which are related to their gender roles as well. The role as the head of the family traditionally attributed to men is linked to the command of economic resources. Men are, thus, blamed for any economic deprivation of family members. Such deprivation is regarded as a lack of responsibility at best and a violent mistreatment at worst. The conflict diminishes men’s chances of establishing themselves as social adults. The effects of the conflict distress men directly where livelihoods disappear, access to land is blocked, and the low-cost social insurance offered by village life is lost. Men are affected indirectly where income opportunities for family members diminish, or where relatives are otherwise affected by the conflict, because it remains a responsibility of the head of the household to ensure a decent living for them. In the past, humanitarian and development aid programs dealing with gender issues often equated gender with women – for example, by counting a high number of female participants in trainings as a success. According to IDPs, hosting communities and local experts (local health and administration sector in Ziguinchor in 2012), gender issues were more diverse: needs were related to the disruption of gender-based division of work and affected both men and women. The economic consequences of the conflict had dramatic effects on the relations of men and women. Several respondents noted a rise in domestic violence and linked it to economic conditions of the affected household. Many attributed a number of violations to the living conditions of IDPs. According to them, men may turn violent because they cannot live up to the expectations and provide for their family after they have lost their livelihoods due to the conflict. Families that become impoverished due to the conflict cannot afford to pay the education or feed their children, who are consequently given away. While this is true for both girls and boys, girls are more vulnerable in this regard. Forced marriages are a way to give away girls at an early age in order to have one mouth less to feed. It is also evident that the education of young women suffers due to ongoing conflict.

CONCLUSION International humanitarian aid by definition transgresses national boundaries. Much of the debate on how to meet humanitarian needs, thus, takes place on a global and rather abstract The term “victim” is used here to distinguish a perpetrator from the individual targeted. It does not imply that the affected person is or has been without agency, strength or determination. It encompasses survivors and non-survivors. 6

Humanitarian tropes in the Casamance  273 level. The assessments of how to meet needs, in turn, depend on which needs are identified. What is institutionally identified as a need depends, among other factors, on the issues of which the identifier is aware. The level of awareness is mostly defined by first-hand or communicated experience, which is mostly determined by the field of action (health, protection, etc.). While, for example, any national social welfare system is, thus, foremost a reaction to and a product of national issues, an international organisation ideally responds to issues emerging in its international operating area. For reasons of feasibility these issues are usually collected, compared and generalised. What does this mean for the assessment of local needs in a context like SGBV in conflicts? Even though it is difficult to differentiate between conflict and non-conflict-related shifts in gender roles, in the case of the Casamance, the ongoing conflict certainly has changed the roles of men and women. Respondents perceived the traditional balance as shaken: according to interviewees of field research between 2006 and 2012, women are said to have more responsibilities and to have better diversified their activities. This, in turn, has challenged the role traditionally attributed to men, which has allegedly led to more tensions and divorces than before the conflict. When men cannot provide for the family anymore, or when they flee or get killed, women have increasingly been obliged to take on the work traditionally reserved for men, in addition to their traditional obligations such as childcare, household and daily labour. To assume such a role is especially difficult under the current economic difficulties related to the conflict (e.g., access to the fields, transport of products, etc.). But it is also problematic under circumstances where traditional customs frequently do not provide equal access to or ownership of land to women (cf. Rudolf, 2022). While many women cope despite these challenges, some become dependent on aid from external sources. The changing capacities of men to act as the breadwinner has on the one hand empowered and/or impoverished women, and on the other lowered male adults to the status of social youth. This, in turn, has posed a serious challenge to the customary role of men and thus the traditional fabric of families. These observations pertain to a context of protracted conflict. Given that conflicts function as a catalyser rather than an exceptional state, they make existing structures more salient (Schlee, 2003). The observations, thus, might be helpful to approach similar contexts in West Africa and beyond. Research in the field also illustrated the differences between young men and women and those (male and females) considered social adults. The situation of a woman acting as “father and mother in one person” differs significantly from that of an unmarried young woman. The social position of a family father is so closely connected to the capacity to act as a breadwinner and provider that it transcends gender, as is shown in the expression “both father and mother” for females and the degradation of males who cannot provide for their families, to social youth. The complexity and heterogeneity of these issues points to the relevance of dissecting needs and humanitarian responses in relation to the respective diverging circumstances. Any meaningful analysis of gender relations in contexts such as in the Casamance that fails to reflect on the named presumptions will therefore experience the pitfalls of the idola fori. It will come up with cases grouped together in categories that coincide but do not reflect local realities – and it will return with a bag of self-fulfilled prophecies (Devereux, 1984). Abstracted, due to exclusionary mechanisms widely debated in postcolonial and subaltern studies (Basch et al., 2013; Comaroff & Comaroff, 2006; Spivak, 2016, 1999; Werbner, 2002), organisations as entities of institutionalised practices, select and process information in ways that necessarily mirror and reify certain biases. It helps to remember the lengthy and winding pathway of how needs are defined at an institutional level to understand how distortions or

274  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration blind spots come about and why individual perceptions of needs differ. This is no unidirectional process, though: institutional definitions form feedback loops altering individual perceptions, which in turn alter the awareness of those affected. Logically, they adapt their testimonies to what they perceive to be of interest to outsiders who have or might give access to resources.

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Humanitarian tropes in the Casamance  275 Diallo, A. (2011). Stratégie d’Actions de Plaidoyer des Femmes de la Casamance pour la Relance du Processus de Paix et la Fin de la Violence Faite aux Femmes. Dakar: Procas. Diedhiou, P. (2016). Les mécanismes traditionnels de résolution des conflits: le rôle des femmes des bois sacrés dans la résolution du conflit de Casamance. Proceedings of the African Futures Conference, 1(1), 63–93. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1002/​j​.2573​-508X​.2016​.tb00025​.x Ellis, S. (1999). The Making of Anarchy. New York: New York University Press. Evans, M. (2021). Displacement in Casamance, Senegal: lessons (hopefully) learned, 2000–2019. Canadian Journal of African Studies/Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, 55(3), 635–654. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​00083968​.2020​.1869571 Foucher, V. (2019). The mouvement des forces démocratiques de Casamance: the illusion of separatism in Senegal? In L. de Vries, P. Englebert & N, Schomerus (Eds.), Secessionism in African Politics (pp. 265–292). Berlin: Springer. Freedman, J. (2016). Gender, Violence and Politics in the Democratic Republic of Congo. London. Routledge. Geertz, C. (1975). On the nature of anthropological understanding: not extraordinary empathy but readily observable symbolic forms enable the anthropologist to grasp the unarticulated concepts that inform the lives and cultures of other peoples. American Scientist, 63(1), 47–53. Hoffman, D. (2011). The War Machines: Young Men and Violence in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. IDMC. (2021). Country Profile: Senegal. https://​www​.internal​-displacement​.org/​countries/​senegal; accessed 3.5.22. Jessee, E. (2011). The limits of oral history: ethics and methodology amid highly politicized research settings. The Oral History Review, 38(2), 287–307. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1093/​ohr/​ohr098 Lafrenière, J., Sweetman, C., & Thylin, T. (2019). Introduction: gender, humanitarian action and crisis response. Gender & Development, 27(2), 187–201. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​13552074​.2019​.1634332 Liebling, H., Slegh, H., & Ruratotoye, B. (2012). Women and girls bearing children through rape in Goma, Eastern Congo: stigma, health and justice responses. Itupale Online Journal of African Studies, 4, 18–44. Linares, O. F. (1988). Kuseek and Kuriimen: wives and kinswomen in Jola society. Canadian Journal of African Studies/Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, 22(3), 472–490. Linares, O. F. (1992). Power, Prayer, and Production: The Jola of Casamance, Senegal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Luhmann, N. (1977). Differentiation of society. The Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers Canadiens de Sociologie, 2(1), 29–53. https://​doi​.org/​10​.2307/​3340510 Mané, I. (2012). Engagement pour la paix en Casamance: la plateforme des femmes exige l’audition de Wade et de Macky Sall. Le Quotidien. Mark, P. (1985). A Cultural, Economic, and Religious History of the Basse Casamance since 1500. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Meger, S. (2011). Rape in contemporary warfare: the role of globalization in wartime sexual violence. African Conflict & Peacebuilding Review, 1(1), 100–132. Osemeka, I. N. (2011). The public sphere, women and the Casamance peace process. Historia Actual Online, 25, 57–65. Pélissier, P. (1958). Les Diola: Étude sur l’habitat des riziculteurs de Basse-Casamance. Paris: Karthala. Ray, C. (2017). Challenging the classical parameters of “doing host–refugee politics”: the case of Casamance refugees in The Gambia. In C. K. Højbjerg, J. Knörr & W. P. Murphy (Eds.), Politics and Policies in Upper Guinea Coast Societies: Change and Continuity (pp. 53–75). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rudolf, M. (2013). Integrating Conflict – Assessing a Thirty Years War. Halle/Saale: Martin Luther University. Rudolf, M. (2022). For us, women are sacred: gender and conflict in the Casamance. Cadernos de Estudos Africanos, 42, 147–172. https://​journals​.openedition​.org/​cea/​6644 Schlee, G. (2003). Identification in violent settings and situations of rapid change. Africa, 73(3), 333–342. Sitkin, R. A., Lee, B. X., & Lee, G. (2019). To destroy a people: sexual violence as a form of genocide in the conflicts of Bosnia, Rwanda, and Chile. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 46, 219–224. https://​ doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.avb​.2019​.01​.013

276  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration Spivak, G. C. (1999). A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Spivak, G. C., & Riach, G. (2016). Can the Subaltern Speak? London: Macat International Limited. Sverdlov, D. (2017). Rape in war: prosecuting the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and Boko Haram for sexual violence against women. Cornell International Law Journal, 50, 333–359. Thomas, L.-V. (1959). Les Diola: essai d’analyse fonctionnelle sur une population de Basse-Casamance (Institut français d’Afrique noire, Ed.). Dakar: IFAN. United States Department of State. (2021). Senegal 2020 Human Rights Report. https://​www​.state​.gov/​ reports/​2020​-country​-reports​-on​-human​-rights​-practices/​senegal/​; accessed 23.12.22. Werbner, R. (2002). Postcolonial Subjectivities in Africa. London: Zed Books. Wright, D. R. (1985). Beyond migration and conquest: oral traditions and Mandinka ethnicity in Senegambia. History in Africa, 12, 335–348.

PART V THE MEDITERRANEAN

22. Missing in the Mediterranean: a perspective from Tunisian mothers1 Sofia Stimmatini and Constance De Gourcy

Since 2011, mothers and wives of the harragas – missing irregular migrants – have regularly taken to the streets of Tunisia to demonstrate. One can observe a growing feminization not only in border crossings (Schmoll, 2020), but in the struggles to find missing relatives as well. Relatives of people missing from migration, especially their mothers, are gathering, organizing, sharing their experiences, and looking for traces and signs of life. To be recognized by the State, they have joined forces through associations that fight for political recognition (Honneth, 2000). One of the demands they address is for states to provide answers concerning the disappearance of their children and spouses who left for Europe. This leads to several questions. How, then, does a silent practice that does not leave a trace and cannot be easily traced become an event?2 By what means and through what struggles does this transformation take place? What are the types and practices of resistance that arise in the construction of a regime of non-presence (De Gourcy, 2020)? While in recent years researchers have studied deaths from migration in different places of the world, still little is known about disappearances from migration in the Mediterranean area. As it is, these studies discuss these phenomena through research predominantly focused on European countries (see for example Kobelinsky and Le Courant, 2017; Pillant, 2019; Kobelinsky, 2020), with only a few studies from the perspective of African countries (Zagaria, 2019; Diallo, 2018). In this chapter, our focus is on the experience of missing migrants’ relatives in Tunisia. First, we must clarify what we mean by “missing”. The International Organization for Migration (IOM)’s Missing Migrants Project considers missing migrants to be people “who have died at the external borders of states, or in the process of migrating to an international destination, regardless of their legal status.”3 Another definition of “missing migrants” refers to “individuals whose whereabouts are unknown to their relatives and/or who, on the basis of reliable information[,] go missing in the context of migration” (ICRC, 2017, p. 8). These people could be dead or alive, and their families do not have any information on their whereabouts. Due to the lack of coordination between states, acquiring news about someone who left without legal documentation is complicated. People are often shipwrecked or contact with them is otherwise easily lost when they are subjected to the violence of the arrival system upon reaching the Schengen area. For instance, some authors have pointed out the increasing number of children 1 We would like to thank Aaron Ponce (LAMC, ULB) for his proofreading work, and Natalia Ribas-Mateos for revisions of the text. 2 Here, we refer to “event” as “a moment, a fragment of perceived reality which has no other unity than the name we give it” (Farge, 2002, p. 1). It is “made, moved and accomplished in the wide field of emotions” (ibid., p. 4). In this sense, an event “is … a permanent construction which spreads out considerably in time” (ibid., p. 6). So, “socially manufactured, [an event] is appropriated in a very differentiated way by the whole of the social layers” (ibid., p. 7). 3 See https://​missingmigrants​.iom​.int/​methodology (accessed on 22 July 2022).

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Missing in the Mediterranean  279 that have gone missing in attempts to escape arrival detention centers (Jiménez Álvarez, 2019). If they are shipwrecked, bodies often stay in the Mediterranean or are buried without having their specimens taken, thus eliminating the possibility of an identification process. In response, forensic anthropologists and scientists have launched projects to retrieve bodies from the Mediterranean and contact families of the deceased (Cattaneo and D’Amico, 2016). Despite these already rare interventions by civil society, most of these bodies are “literally lost in a fog of bureaucratic ambiguity, unmourned and uncounted” (Kovras and Robins, 2016, p. 48). To find them, their next of kin, women in particular, often try to reach Europe as well. Sometimes they too go missing in the middle of the journey, or after they have been separated in the different migratory hotspots. In previous years, authors have started to concentrate on the consequences of disappearance of migration, focusing on families’ experiences: for them, it is necessary to pay attention to the affective dimension of this phenomenon and to link it with the governance of borders (Robins, 2016; Kovras and Robins, 2016). Some authors have taken an interest in the mobilizations of the missing migrants’ relatives, either highlighting the State’s obliviousness about the issue (Ben Khalifa, 2013) or supporting activist research (Sossi, 2013). This chapter, based on ethnographic research among missing migrants’ families conducted in Tunisia in 2018, aims to deepen knowledge of the consequences of disappearance, reflecting on the affective and political dimensions of this experience. Following Federico Oliveri (2016) and Farida Souiah (2019), who argue that the missing migrants’ mothers and spouses re-politicize necroviolence at the southern border of the Schengen area, this contribution argues that an event embedded in a regime of invisibility with regard to border-related policies leads to a series of acts that make the citizen’s body a central issue of politics. Overall, the sequence of these actions bears witness to the silent coordination between the present and the absent.

DISAPPEARANCE: A PARADOXICAL PHENOMENON The families of Tunisians who have disappeared from migration cannot know whether their children or spouses are alive once these go out to sea. Some relatives have not received any news since the day of departure, while others say they have received calls from Italy, followed by a disturbing silence. Since these events, the lack of communication and information has weighed heavily on them, with the uncertainty remaining, coupled with a never-ending wait. This stretching of time and waiting for return characterize disappearances from migration, all pointing to a lack of resolution. Paradoxically, the phenomenon of disappearance exists as a specific regime only because it is without materiality. Moreover, it is repeatedly said that families of missing migrants have lost trace of their loved ones. The possibility of receiving news of the missing, at worst the recovery of lifeless bodies, would end this specific regime. Therefore, the place of this phenomenon is not in history, which is denied by the State, but more in the memory of families: these memories keep the missing alive. Hence, the importance of commemoration – producing traces of the past and making them visible – becomes manifest in performing this absence, giving it a social and political meaning that extends beyond its emotional resonance. Disappearance becomes an event, perceived and internalized by families and activists and socially constructed by them, when it is inscribed both in a narrative and a visuality, to then exist and enter the circuit of mobilization.

280  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration Modes of entry into the category of the “missing” include different scenarios because the assumption of death is not the only possibility; there is, for instance, the possibility of incarceration or detention in camps, which, despite not being ideal either, at least nourishes the prospect of an exit from the silence of the “absent”. For families, the relationship with the “missing” defines several non-specific ordeals, but which are all characteristic of a type of commitment to the event of the “disappearance”. The loss of all trace of the loved one following their departure characterizes the first type of disappearance: this kind of loss triggers entry into the systemic regime of disappearance, a chronology marked by uncertainty about the loved one’s future. The assumption of death is probable, although it is also this very silence – a non-confirmation of death – that gives hope to the possibility of return. These families remain in suspense as long as death’s certainty does not prevail, where doubt becomes the domain of the always possible. In the second type of disappearance, signs of life are produced. The families receive news at first, followed by the possibility of seeing their loved ones through technology, such as the internet or television. The hope that the person is still alive endures. Perhaps the silence is voluntary; maybe the missing are prevented from speaking and giving any news to relatives. To end this type of uncertainty, associations whose leaders have become the spokespersons for the families (Bourdieu, 2001) provide practical and logistical help for mobilization.4 Finally, in the third configuration, death’s certainty prevails over doubt. However, bodies are still missing, and any information concerning death is likewise absent: their passing on remains unconfirmed. This demobilization refers to a specific regime of ordeal after a period of fruitless mobilization that is often long and intense; the hope of finding the disappeared alive fades away. The wait is now directed towards its conclusion, the recovery of the body and/or obtaining proof of death, which ends this regime of disappearance. In all these ordeals, the common denominator is the missing body, a tangible trace that would point the way out of the specific regime of disappearance. The lifeless body is the ultimate tool for “reality-testing” (Freud, 1917, p. 244); if it is not accessible, death cannot be confirmed. Here, the event of disappearance organizes time in a mode of suspension. Since relatives cannot carry out the funeral rites, which are essentially rites of separation, the absent person becomes trapped in this regime of uncertain disappearance. When the funeral cannot take place, “there is no way and no time for the space of representation to be constituted and thus give meaning to the disappearance of the other” (Fraire and Rossanda, 2008, p. 22). The waiting is interminable and unfathomable. In the case where the ending of life is likely, Laura Marina Panizo speaks of “neglected death” understood “as the opposite of socially recognized death, for which society, through certain practices, such as the death certificate or specific rites, recognizes a person’s death” (2017, p. 92).5 As the event of disappearance produces an indeterminacy of their status, the missing can be considered liminal beings who belong neither to the world of the living nor to the world of the dead. Indeed, “what is specific to the missing as a liminal subject is that symbolically he or she does not rest in a single, fixed place, such as a cemetery. He is suspended in several places simultaneously, depending on the date and place where he is remembered” (ibid.). Their absence is thus placeless and timeless, but simultaneously in all places and always. It causes an indeterminate and painful confusion: families build Association la Terre pour Tous, ARDEPTE (Association pour la Recherche des Disparus et Encadrement des Prisonniers Tunisien à l’Étranger). 5 Unless otherwise indicated, French sources have been translated by the authors of this chapter. 4

Missing in the Mediterranean  281 their lives and their future around the expectation of their absent loved ones, which extends over a long period, punctuated by daily rituals such as preparing food made available to the absent person in case of return. The temporality of disappearance is thus juxtaposed with social temporality, therefore creating links between the families of the missing relatives. In addition, the absence caused by disappearance puts into question other forms of absence that are due to geographical distance and the emancipation from the bonds of dependence that binds male and female migrants to their community (De Gourcy, 2018). Despite an intensive network of technology (e.g., Facebook and WhatsApp), the disappearance, being an indeterminate and inexplicable lack, which Pauline Boss defines as an “ambiguous loss”, namely “a loss that remains unclear” (2017, p. 105), does not allow the loved one to be located either physically, psychologically, or spiritually. The impossibility of knowing the destiny of the missing person thus also problematizes the relationship that the living has with the missing person. As suggested, considered in its temporality, the event of disappearance is a social construction, “a continual process of building up knowledge of those missing persons” (Saint Cassia, 2006, p. 118). In this process, political authorities have a crucial role. As recent history has taught us, states have often had – and still do have – a decisive role in causing and organizing disappearance. The paradigmatic example is the Desaparecidos of Argentina and Chile, sequestered by military juntas that arbitrarily removed individuals considered nuisances, while withholding news from their families. Disappearance became “a means of freezing social relations, thus putting an end to politics” (Verstaeten, 2006, p. 75). In this regime of terror, mothers of the Desaparecidos started to clamor for the right to discover the truth and to find their sons and daughters, or at least their bodies, if no longer alive. In Argentina, they occupy the Plaza de Mayo every Thursday, challenging the dictatorship with their maternal bodies. The conception of the mother’s suffering as the most intense of all, a “general pain which contains within itself all bereavement” (Loraux, 1990, p. 12), allows these parents to gain public space. Motherhood here plays a fundamental role: it gives them the courage to take to the streets while also legitimating their presence in the public space (Morales, 2017; Zarco, 2011). As Marysa Navarro points out, “instead of reinforcing acceptance and obedience [in the mothers], the disappearances had the precisely opposite effect. In fact, the abduction of a child was the catalyst that prompted a mother to act” (1989, p. 256). These disappearances have given rise to a struggle that continues to this day (Burchianti, 2004). The Madres de Plaza de Mayo maintain a link with the Desaparecidos through political struggle, thereby reconstituting modalities of presence through art and political action. Like the Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, the mothers and spouses of missing migrants in Tunisia fight for their right to find out the truth and retrieve the bodies in case of death. For them, too, motherhood is a central claim in the political narrative they mobilize.

PRODUCING PRESENCE, REFUSING DENIAL: RESPONSIBILITY IN QUESTION In the case of the Tunisian disappearances, Tunisian and Italian political authorities officially involved play a fundamental role in the disappearance and the construction of the meaning of the disappearance of migration. The families of the missing harragas, referring to legal frameworks such as the Geneva Convention, consider the Tunisian and Italian states to bear the political responsibility for the disappearances. The missing migrants’ families, who have

282  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration formed collectives since 2011, believe these states have determined the conditions that ultimately make it impossible for most of the Tunisian population to leave for Europe legally. Moreover, the families reproach Tunisian and Italian authorities for not doing what is necessary to find their missing relatives. While policies for the repatriation of the bodies of citizens who died through migration have been in place for several years (Chaib, 2000), state silence surrounds the regime of information on the disappearance and death of migrants. The disappearances occupy the outside of society. In the chronology of resistance against state silence, the families have been asking since 2012 for “a proper investigation about facts … to determine what happened, concerning the boats’ disembarkation, people’s on-board disappearance and the fate that was reserved for them, as well as the crimes that may be discovered in the facts that will be established.”6 At the same time, Italian authorities have communicated that, due to the large influx of Tunisians in the spring of 2011, not all individuals could be identified. Subsequently, Tunisian and Italian authorities did not follow up on the search requests. From 2014 onwards, the families began to mobilize so that a Commission of Inquiry could be set up: on 12 May 2015, after meeting a civil society delegation,7 the President of the Republic of Tunisia, Béji Caïd Essebssi, finally decided to form a Commission, in collaboration with the Italian authorities. The Commission’s mission was to discover the fate of migrants who had departed from Tunisia in 2011. Meanwhile, families and lawyers asked Italian authorities to compare photographs of people who had arrived in Italy in 2011 and Tunisian families’ pictures. However, these comparisons have not been successful due to several difficulties regarding the operative conditions of viewing the photos. As it was written in the appeal submitted to the European Court of Human Rights by Imed S. and his lawyer, “the applicants were summoned to examine the image files of the persons who disembarked on Italian territory during the reference period of 6 October 2016 at the Questura di Agrigento in conditions insufficient to ensure the effectiveness of the operation.” In short, the states did not actively participate in the research, nor did they facilitate it: the damnatio memoriae8 was imposed on the missing through migration. Following Bilgesu Sümer (2021), we argue that states avert their gaze from these absent bodies, exercising invisible violence, profoundly hurting families. Furthermore, the necropopulist discourses9 (Sümer, 2021) of the Italian and Tunisian states devalue harragas as belonging to neither the Italian nor Tunisian nations because of their irregular and so-called unlawful migration. Henceforth, harragas, as non-nationals, are no longer the subjects of rights, so they can disappear without any nation-state laying claims on 6 The complaint was written on 11 April 2012 and filed on 26 April at the Public Prosecutor’s Office at the Court of Rome. 7 The delegation was composed of Abdessattar Ben Moussa, President of the Tunisian League for Human Rights (LTDH); Kacem Afaya, member of the executive board of the UGTT; Rami Salhi, Director of the Maghreb office of the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network (EMHRN); and Abderrahmane Hedhili, President of the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights (FTDES). 8 In ancient Rome, in severe cases, individuals could be sentenced to damnatio memoriae. As a result, all memories (portraits, inscriptions) of those affected by such a decree were erased (Ritaine, 2015). 9 Following Sümer, necropopulist discourses build on “infrastructure of care for the politically significant dead bodies” (2021, p. 135). These discourses impose “new cultural understandings of political order and legitimacy for national aspirations” (ibid.). Therefore, through these discourses, populist leaders politicize the dead: they “are utilizing the symbolic meaning of death for constructing political message” (ibid.).

Missing in the Mediterranean  283 them. The state is “the producer of legitimacy ‘in the last resort’”, which constantly excludes irregular migrants from “the historical and social community” (Saada, 2000, p. 41). While Tunisian families are increasingly organizing themselves around a “topicality of denunciation” (Boltanski, 1993) in which the state is a central figure, the internationalization of the problem contributes to minimizing state responsibilities. Nevertheless, as Charles Heller and Antoine Pécoud (2017) point out, there is a causal relationship between border surveillance and migrant deaths and/or disappearances. Since the end of the 1990s, both European states and member states of the Maghreb have developed a defense system to monitor the Schengen area border, relying particularly heavily on “remote police” (Guild and Bigo, 2003, p. 2), but also on direct border repression. It aims to control “the movement of people even before they enter the territory [of the Schengen Area]” (ibid., p. 3), through a “science of identification” that registers all those who can obtain a visa and those who cannot. While this “does not necessarily mean that states [are] legally responsible for these deaths, nor that they intend to cause them, it is sufficient to establish the direct role of states in the conditions that lead migrants to take often fatal risks” (Heller and Pécoud, 2017, p. 64). Thus, “[r]estrictive migration policies create ‘irregular’ migration, which states on the southern and northern shores of the Mediterranean choose to combat by implementing ever more securitarian policies” (Souiah, 2013, p. 101). Even on the assumption that states cannot be considered legally responsible for migrant deaths and disappearances, they are still very much politically accountable: the new thanatopolitics lets people who are not considered part of the nation die and disappear (Palidda, 2021).10 Despite this, mothers and wives have not stayed passive against the thanatopolitics of European and non-African states. Mothers, in particular, have performed agency and autonomy, negotiating their position and expressing their subjectivity (Schmoll, 2020). Women gave new definitions to missing migrants, highlighting that they have families, histories, and identities, as well as ties to the state that did not act responsibly, in the sense of care for them. In short, and as mentioned earlier, mothers use their motherhood in the fight for human rights: considering the sacredness of motherhood in the Islamic religion, they are able to offer a uniquely feminized expression of pain of which men are incapable. Like the dead, the missing people became political symbols (Verdery, 1999) for claiming human rights, where particular conflicts of recognition arise. The struggle for political recognition that families have been waging since their occupation of the streets, embassies, and Italian or Tunisian consulates, is a call on states to acknowledge their responsibility and recognize the disappeared and their relatives as “subjects of mourning” (Butler, 2010). Thus, during sit-ins, seminars, colloquia or other events, the living assert the political presence of the missing through various “tools of awareness” (Trainï and Siméant, 2009), which then becomes a “public thing – a thing of res publica – which enters fully into the circuits of law, into the games of power and the conflicting field of politics” (Didi-Huberman, 2012, p. 93). Being public and therefore political objects, the absent bodies of the disappeared

Salvatore Palidda explains that the “‘dangerous invasions’ of poor migrants to rich countries … is the fearful ‘spectre’ that preoccupies dominant-country elites and is the principle reason for the transition from a more tolerant biopolitics of migrations favourable to the migrant integration into the receiving society to a more coercive thanatopolitics of death and exclusion (well-established concepts that refer to Foucault’s work). This is basically the radical shift in the meaning of migration policies: from let live to let die” (2021, p. 174). This shift took place in the last 20 years in the Global North, as the literature on migration attests. 10

284  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration must, as a result, be thought of as loci of conflict, “in tension between several ways of considering and treating them” (Kobelinsky, 2019, p. 22). On one end, states prefer to erase all traces of the missing; on the other, families and activists from associations want to re-establish their presence. Notwithstanding the impossibility of finding the missing, the living maintain a strong link with the absent migrants: absence is inscribed in the lives of families, despite everything, as a modality of presence, organized around the political traces constantly being created.

CONCLUSION The event of disappearance consists of sensitive material; to try to grasp it requires working from the void felt by the families: the emptiness, the silence with which they are confronted, and the absence of traces, all of which maintains the regime of disappearance over time. Contrary to death of migration (Kobelinsky and Le Courant, 2017), which immediately raises the question of identification of the bodies found, the journeys of these missing migrants are silent, not listed by the states, and maintained in presence only by the families. Families, especially mothers, are at the core of the narrative device because, by making public the missing’s absence, they render the missing a paradoxical presence as missing beings, despite the averted medico-legal gaze. Reciprocally, the figures of the disappeared act on the living, first and foremost on their families, by making them engage in ordeals marked by loss, resistance, and demobilization, placing them in a temporality suspended between the wait and resistance to oblivion, and denial. This unpartitioned coordination between present and absent is expressed through words and images that form new narratives and question the missing presence. In this political process, motherhood is both what allows women to act and that which makes them political subjects. Moreover, the desire to know the missing’s whereabouts underlies mothers’ and families’ demands and poses the events’ reception and construction as a significant social problem. Furthermore, this energetic desire to know invites us to emphasize that the invisibility created by the state is what paradoxically allows the visibility of the mothers’ movement in the heart of the cities, close to the places of politics. Through body-to-body encounters – that is, between the bodies of both the present and the absent – kin actions such as sit-ins, there is a recognition of a space for those who have only their own bodies to “ex-pose”. In these activities, corporal visibility is created when the families of the missing expose their own bodies in protest, thus raising awareness of the precarity of their right to exist within the cities. In conclusion, the non-presence regime of disappearance is a specific regime of (im)mobility. Likewise in the contexts of war or dictatorship, not just in the migration one, the disappearing and the missing bodies reveal the raw violence and the interstices from which resistances emerge. In Tunisia, the resistance to the denial is performed through sit-ins, when the families and their missing materialize the political criticism of the European border regime. Due to their sensitive (im)materiality, the missing’s absence around the world engages academics to analyze deeply the political and affective dimensions it reveals.

Missing in the Mediterranean  285

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23. Origins of extreme violence in Palermo: health (infectious) impact of the trans-Saharan/ Mediterranean route for women on the move Tullio Prestileo and Natalia Ribas-Mateos

1. INTRODUCTION It is today a well-known general concern in migration studies that women are much more vulnerable than men all along their migratory journey. In addition to all common risks faced by migrants, they are exposed to a number of other physical and sexual threats – beatings, forced labour, sexual harassment, rape, unwanted pregnancies, abortions and miscarriages, high chances of contracting HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) and other sexually transmitted diseases, and psychological related traumas. However, little is done concerning this complex violence to women, as feminist claims tends to address issues more mediatized, such as related to the MeToo movement. This violence at border zones is not new. Hannah Arendt considered the phenomenon of violence a common denominator of the twentieth century. For her, violence, unlike power, force, and coercion, needs to be implemented. For her, violence has always occupied an important position in human affairs, but it has rarely been an object of special consideration. For her, there is no doubt that it is possible to create conditions under which men and women are dehumanized – such as with the contexts of the concentration camps, torture and starvation – but that does not mean that they become like animals. It is under such conditions, according to Arendt (1969), that we see the clearest signs of dehumanization are not the anger and the violence, but their conspicuous absence. In this chapter, we will focus on where today, in a hidden way, violence and health conditions occupy a very strong example in our global world, but very particularly, in contemporary migration in the Mediterranean. Thus, this research does not aim to stigmatize patients but tries to find ways to fight for their rights by considering the conditions of violence and acting throughout. Our research is then presented in a double way, sociological and medical, by unveiling the hidden violence and the need for care and health management following the basic health rights of the person. This violence at border zones is not new to international organizations. The World Health Organization (2018) defines violence as the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation. The definition encompasses interpersonal violence as well as suicidal behaviour and armed conflict. It also covers a wide range of acts, going beyond physical acts to include threats and intimidation. Besides death and injury, the definition also includes the myriad and often less obvious consequences of violent behaviour, such as psychological harm, deprivation, and maldevelopment, that compromise the well-being of individuals, families, and communities. More specifically, violence against women – particularly intimate partner 287

288  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration violence and sexual violence – is a major public and clinical health problem and a violation of women’s human rights. It is deeply rooted in and perpetuates gender inequalities. At present, mortality data are the most widely collected and readily available on such violence in the Mediterranean. In this way, the “necropolitics approach” is now very common in the analysis of Mediterranean migration (see Ribas-Mateos and Dunn 2021). However, we believe, following this chapter and our research (both sociological and medical), that there are other important sources of information to take into account, such as data on morbidity and mortality, However, these data represent only the tip of the iceberg. Other types that can be of relevance and interest are the collections of data on diseases through post-migration research during the pre-COVID time and the experience of the Immigrant Take Care Advocacy (ITaCA) team.1 Specific attention has been paid to refugees and migrants fleeing to Europe as thousands have lost their lives during their attempt to cross the Mediterranean Sea. The main objective of the ITaCA study was to measure the effectiveness of a targeted screening for African migrants, who arrived in Sicily or Italy, and who describe the risk factors associated with these infections. The ITaCA programme, which was built by the regional healthcare organizations of Sicily and NGO volunteers, guaranteed to all migrants arriving in Western Sicily adequate information on and screening for viral infections acquired in their country of origin or during their journey, and proper therapy for people with chronic viral infections. In dealing with this complex topic, it is very challenging to address the central question regarding the connection between experience of violence and infectious health and its form of prevention. The sociological part provides some clues for understanding the general effects of violence and displacement of people, especially concerning women on the move (even if we do not trace here all economical, political, social–psychological, and legal conditions involved). Then, in the medical part, we focus our attention on infectious diseases, as fully related to mistreatment and sexual behaviour (with and without consent).

2.

METHODOLOGY INVOLVING THE CONTEXT OF PAST LIVED VIOLENCE

Migrant women across Libya are held in facilities without female guards, exposing them to increased risk of sexual harassment and violence. Racism and xenophobia against sub-Saharan refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants is commonplace in Libyan smuggling/trafficking routes as well as detention facilities. Violence is expressed in a systematic way: Violence is everywhere, not only in the detention center. Only the international community can help. I’m very scared. There’s no migrants center in Libya, only prisons. Even the place that they call migrant center it’s a prison, here in Tunis in the migrant center you can go out. In Libya, if you are

The medical research was based in the ITaCa network, which has been active since 2013. Within this network we have welcome and cared for undocumented migrants upon their arrival in Sicily. It links: local health care insitutions, 41 reception centers for migrants, SPOKE, local non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the Civico Benfratelli Hospital, Unit of Infectious Diseases, and the Centre for Migration and Health (HUB). 1

Origins of extreme violence in Palermo  289 a woman and you’re in prison, if they want to sleep with you, anytime, they will do. Anytime. All the time. All the stories must be told. (Women in Medenine migrant center)2

In 2016, the United Nations identified gender-specific violence – such as early and forced marriage and domestic violence – as reasons why women are leaving their countries of origin. The problem has persisted for some time in the region. In 2010, an MSF (Medecins Sans Frontières) study on a sample of sub-Saharan women who had fled to North Africa found that 70% had left their countries because of violence or abuse. 2.1

Mobility Conditions as Detention

In Libya, detention has been the foremost matter of “grave concern”; it has been noted as the main reality within human rights abuse. According to the UN, as detainees are forced to live in severely overcrowded facilities with little food, water, or medical care, and suffer physical abuse, forced labour, slavery, and torture. IOM (International Organization for Migration) has also reported on the emergence of “slave markets” along migrant routes where migrants are “being sold and bought to Libyans, with the support of Ghanians and Nigerians who work for them” (IOM 2017, p. 7). Women and children are not recognized as requiring special attention and thus they remain particularly vulnerable to abuse and ill-treatment, including rape and human trafficking. Therefore, we were forced to face a central problem, by not recognizing the vulnerability attributed to women and children as victims of extreme violence by international organizations, and leaving an open debate for the dilemmas of care and violence. We raise here a theme very present in border literature, related to the “fabrication of corpses”. This can be clearly associated with “the manufacture of corpses”, in the logic that Arendt pointed out many decades ago, as the characteristic of a totalitarian regime, wherein one can analyze the limits of human experience. More specifically, she referred to the fabrication of corpses or the factories of destruction that the totalitarianism of the Holocaust developed. This can also be clearly associated with the making of the zones of oblivion, where rights are annihilated and forgotten; and, as Jacques Rancière (2003) adds, where not even humanitarianism is enough. Many independent journalists and many activists are working on these issues along the Central Mediterranean route, even by using the concept of “genocide” (Ribas-Mateos 2019). Others might think that such parallelism can be far too extreme. It is a scenario that is always moving, in a context of Libya where there prevails a culture of impunity with a legal vacuum (which transitional justice groups are trying to work out). Some stories of violence we heard from the women in Medenine (Tunisia) reminded us of the phenomenon of the rape trees, which have become in the last decades a symbol of an after-rape

2 The sociological research was based on in-depth qualitative interviews carried out between October and December 2018 in Tunisia and in Sicily and Italy, especially Tunis, Medenine, Ben Gardane, and Palermo. A total of 32 semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted, of which 25 were face to face (in some cases more than once with the same respondent) and 7 were remote (via WhatsApp). This research shows one side that more empirical than theoretical the topic on violence on the Libyan route has been produced by NGOs and practitioners than by social science scholars. In this case, the original focus of the work is that it combines empirical knowledge (through health and sociological research) and key theoretical questions regarding experiences of violence along the Libyan route. We focused particularly on the conditions of gender vulnerability and extreme violence (Ribas-Mateos 2019).

290  The Elgar companion to gender and global migration situation in the Mexico–US border deserts. Apart from extreme violence, many other concepts encourage us to reflect on our understanding of suffering, distant suffering (view from the distance and the outsider view), when considering the answers to humanitarian crises, as well as the issue of humanitarian accountability and the NGOs’ advocacy in cases of extreme violence (which use and deal with the reconstruction of human testimony). This complexity is all part of finding consistent and repeated patterns of extreme violence in the exploration of testimony and evidence into the time of the digital age. It must be noted that we do not cover here all the experiences that relate to human trafficking and exploitation. We do not ask about sexual exploitation or gender-based violence, which other data have shown account for a large proportion of detected trafficking cases, especially among girls and women. While the data indicate the country where exploitation occurred, they do not specify the location within that country. The largest groups of adolescents and youth on this route said they came from Nigeria, followed by the Gambia, Guinea, Eritrea, and Bangladesh. Most NGOs work on accumulating accounts from victims or survivals stories as their main source of advocacy. Another type of limitation is that some interviews demonstrate our obstacles in understanding the full impacts of violence. Looking into the coverage of the contemporary war in Libya, it may be useful to analyze the very concept of wartime rape and enquire to what extent rape narratives are framed by social constructs of sexuality, gender, and race, as well as by political agendas and also a culturalization of sexual violence, by addressing the strategies of othering implied in the media explanations and contextualization of the rapes. Detainees are frequently held in detention conditions that fall far short of international minimum standards for the treatment of prisoners. In some cases, conditions are so inhuman that they amount to torture and other ill-treatments. Detainees are crammed into small cells lacking light and ventilation, and without adequate washing and sanitation facilities. Some are placed in prolonged solitary confinement in cells that are so small there is no room to stretch out their legs. Such conditions aggravate pre-existing medical conditions and lead to the spread of infections and gastrointestinal ailments. In some cases, poor detention conditions, coupled with medical neglect, lead to deaths, including from otherwise treatable conditions. In contravention of international standards, children are held together with adults in similar squalid conditions.

3.

METHODOLOGY INVOLVING THE MEDICAL CONTEXT OF INFECTIOUS DISEASES

Apart from these conditions in Libya, the massive and persistent boost of migration from the Mediterranean coasts has highlighted critical issues in the healthcare management of chronic infectious diseases related to HIV, Hepatitis B Virus (HBV), and Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) infection in migrant population. Considering the prevalence of these infections in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and sub-Saharan African countries associated with additional risk factors is the starting point of this chapter, connected to the ways those people travel and the time they spent in Libyan camps before they resettled in Italy, migrants are a particularly vulnerable population. Among them, women represent the population that is more at risk of becoming ill, due to higher exposure to sexual violence and torture during the migratory

Origins of extreme violence in Palermo  291 journey and stay in Libya. Thus it is necessary to perform a screening test for infections, in order to start therapy and link to care. Upon arrival, the patients are included in an informal network, Immigrant Take Care Advocacy (ITaCA), which connects the local healthcare institutions and the reception centres all over the Sicilian territory. Migrants were screened for HIV, HBV, and HCV, 4 to 6 weeks after arrival. When the hospital took charge of any patient, there was always a cultural mediator attending them. For those persons with one or more diagnosis of infectious diseases, there was a proper transcultural counselling intervention, fostering linguistic communication and improving the cross-cultural relationship. After this, a programme of diagnosis and treatment was offered, according to the Italian national guidelines. In total, during the triennium 2015–2017, 2.639 migrants were observed, 28% women and 72% men, with a medium age of 24 years. A total of 74% of the migrants came from six countries: Gambia, Nigeria, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Ghana and Mali. Migrants who consented to participate were interviewed with the support of a transcultural mediator. They also completed a structured survey to collect data on sociodemographic variables, risk factors, and migration history 4–6 weeks after initial contact at the reception centre. Medical procedures were explained in the native languages, and written or verbally informed consent was obtained. Through the cultural mediator, a physician explained the importance of early screening for HBV, HCV, and HIV infection, arguing that the purpose of our intervention was to diagnose and treat all subjects without any treatment distinction from the Italian population. Age was also collected as a continuous variable and later re-categorized into more or less than 18 years. The country of origin variable was sub-categorized into North African and sub-Saharan African countries. Responses regarding the duration of time spent in Libya were collected in two distinct categories: migrants who arrived in 2015 and 2016 (group 1) and migrants who arrived in 2017 (group 2). Responses to having suffered sexual violence during the migration journey were collected as a “yes/no” answer and defined according to the WHO world report on violence and health. Moreover, information on pregnancy status was also collected for women. Since 2015, a three-step health model has been organized for screening and linkage to care for HBV, HCV, and HIV infection in migrants and refugees arriving in Western Sicily from Libya. In the first step, cultural mediators inform migrants about the importance of screening for viral infections. In the second step, screening for HBV, HCV, and HIV is offered to all migrants. Finally, in the third step, antiviral treatment is offered to people with chronic HBV, HCV, and HIV infection. Serum samples were collected from participants and screened for HBsAg (Hepatitis B surface antigen), anti-HCV antibody (Ab), and anti-HIV Ab. Patients with HBV infection were tested for anti-hepatitis D virus (HDV).3 The results of serological screening were communicated to each participant and treatment was offered in conjunction with transcultural counselling. Evaluation of the virological and immunological status and liver disease

3 Ab and serum HBV-DNA by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) analysis; HCV-RNA (viral load of HCV) and HIV-RNA (viral load of HIV) analyses performed by PCR to confirm active infection in people with positive screening tests for anti-HCV and anti-HIV antibodies. Patients with HBV or HCV infection underwent ultrasound and liver elastography by FibroScan to evaluate the stage of liver disease. HBsAg-positive subjects with negative HBeAg (a hepatitis B viral protein), HBV-DNA serum