Gender and Mobility

A Critical Introduction

Elina Penttinen, Anitta Kynsilehto

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786602695
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Our world is characterized by mobility. The number of refugees on the global scale has increased considerably. Meanwhile border control measures and legal avenues for mobility have been severely curbed, and the political climate has become all the more violent against racialized and gendered “Others”. Business elites traverse the fast-track lines to financial hubs and tourists discover new destinations. Ageing societies need people from abroad to perform care work. Domestic workers carve out nearer and further paths to reach employment, often leaving their family members behind in need of care. This book examines global mobilities from gendered perspectives, asking how gender together with race/ethnicity, social class, nationality and sexuality shape globally mobile lives. By developing analysis that cuts through economic structures, policies and individuals enacting agency, the book demonstrates how intersectional feminist analysis helps to comprehend uneven mobilities. Through multidisciplinary angle the book draws examples from different parts of the world and refuses to provide easy answers. Calling for students, scholars and general readers alike, the book invites the reader to imagine and relate to the world in manifold ways.

Chapter 1

Gender and mobility: A critical introduction

A regular workday is to begin and I open my computer. The first thing that catches my attention is a message I have received from a Nigerian man. We met a month earlier at the detention centre in Korinthos, Greece. He has now been detained for irregular presence in Greece for a year, and as the recent legislative change that was extended in line with the maximum time defined in the EU Return directive from 2008 permits, he is likely to stay detained for a half a year longer awaiting deportation to his country of origin. He had filed his asylum application from detention. Now he has received a negative decision to his claim. Desperate for help, he has sent me the decision asking whether I could find a lawyer to help him. I look at the documents, all written in Greek. I don’t understand a word except for his name and nationality that I’m able to guess. I wonder whether he understands anything more of the decision than I do. I doubt it.

Just a few weeks earlier, in October 2013, I was in Greece and Turkey as a member of an inter-associative team enquiring after the current migratory situation in these countries, and the context of push-backs at the Greek-Turkish border (Frontexit 2014). Now I think of the people met and those with whom I have been in contact afterwards. As a researcher in social sciences, I don’t have much else to offer this Nigerian man other than my contacts.

When I return home from the field, it takes time to adjust my pace to the rhythms of the academia, as it is my job to work toward analytic distance and write in terms of theoretical generalizations. But, what is one supposed to do when the “field” gets back in touch? In other words, when making contact becomes easier in general, how does one manage the daily assignments and routines and long-distance relations, and maintain a balance between different personal and professional spheres?

(Extract from Anitta’s research diary, November 2013)

The above story brings forth the very complex relations between academic research as a knowledge production and an activist practice towards enhancing the awareness of inconsistencies and harmful outcomes of migration policies in contemporary world.

These encounters, situated in places such as the immigration detention centre and communication beyond field research setting, crystallize our multiple positionalities as academics and co-producers of knowledge with research participants, and as activists seeking to influence migration policies and practice. The narrative highlights how our personal hopes, desires and gendered bodies are not somehow separate but influence research relationships and indeed create often unanticipated tensions.

In this particular story, the tension is situated in the interaction between an academic researcher/activist and a migrant detainee seeking for help in an acute crisis. These two positions are literally located on the opposite sides of the barbed fence of detention infrastructure. How would one proceed in such circumstances in relation to a research participant? And how would one proceed with creating an academic text about migration policy for academic audiences in ethically sustainable ways?

The purpose of this book is to explore the complexity of gender and mobility in the contemporary globalized world. Our objective is to compel the readers to question how gender and global mobility come to matter in diverse lived experiences and to think critically about the practices and politics that shape these trajectories based on the range of feminist theorizing.

This book sets out a multidisciplinary and multi-perspectival approach to explore gender, global and mobilities. When we set out to explore gender, global and mobility, we are dealing with a complex issue that combines gender-specific choices and subjectivities, changes in the global labour market and migration policies as well as politics of representation of gender and culture.

Therefore, gender analysis of global mobilities is about recognizing not only how gender matters in terms of what kinds of choices or possibilities are available for individuals and families but also how migration policies and global market direct and channel migration. The politics of cultural gender representations concretize and produce mobilities, in turn producing and reconfiguring new representations. Yet asking questions about gender in the context of global mobility is really about understanding the lived realities of people on the move in the complex globalized world.

Our hope is, in line with Enloe (2004), to inspire open-hearted feminist curiosity in the practice of inquiry on how gender, global and mobility come to matter in the lived experiences of people on the move. An open-hearted approach (Penttinen 2013) means being open to different stories of lived experience and being ready to question the unquestioned assumptions that guide our inquiry. It means being open to different theoretical perspectives as well as different levels of analysis and seeing what can be learned from them, instead of only defending one’s position or point of view. This book is an invitation to a journey with us to imagine the multiple and interconnected ways in which gender, global and mobilities intersect, instead of simply providing information and conclusive answers to how gender is configured in global mobility.

THE ETHICS OF OUR APPROACH: CRITICAL THINKING AND PRACTICE

Our method of making sense of gender and global mobilities stems from our background in ethnography, activism and academia. In this book we provide theoretical tools and a range of case studies to develop an understanding of how gender and mobility concretize in individual experiences, in specific geographical locations and at the intersections of gender, race, culture, politics and economy. Each chapter is informed with a particular theoretical perspective and introduces the main concepts specific to each theoretical insight. These theoretical perspectives are (1) migration and mobility studies, (2) queer studies, (3) feminist economics and global political economy, (4) feminist policy analysis and critical border studies and (5) feminist research on violence. In chapter 7 we shift the focus towards the future and invite the reader to imagine global mobility drawing on a basis in posthumanist ethics of worlding. We combine these theoretical perspectives with open-ended narratives, which leave room for the reader to analyse and read between the lines and figure out how processes of power and politics of representation are configured in the lives of people on the move and how they oppose, resist and transform these same practices.

Therefore, contrary to common academic practice, we are not arguing for any particular theoretical approach over or against another perspective. This is an ethical choice as we see how such internal debates within academia actually take the eye off the issue, that is, the people on the move and their real-life trajectories. We recognize how easy it is to get lost in the internal academic game and competition and lose sight of what the purposes were for inquiring about the politics of gender and mobility in the first place. Therefore, we ask academic researchers, teachers, students and activists alike to remind themselves of what the motivations and purposes were to ask questions on gender and global mobilities. What purposes does the knowledge production on gender and global mobilities serve? And perhaps even more importantly, who are we accountable for?

As a means to move towards creating ethically sustainable academic knowledge, we contend the necessity of multidisciplinarity and openness to engage in conversation across disciplinary boundaries. We argue for the importance of moving out of our comfort zones and familiar (disciplinary or cultural) backgrounds in order to create novel insights together and take responsibility for how our own belief systems and positions of privilege guide our perceptions. Academia in itself is already entangled with the processes of power, politics of representation, colonial powers, gender order and specific positions of privilege and otherness (Mohanty 2003, Ahmed 2004), which enable and restrict mobility.

The ethics of our approach is therefore informed by the following three key themes: (1) We ask the reader to recognize that understanding gender and global mobilities is really about real-life people on the move, whose lives are not easily categorized or do not fit into existing theories about migration. (2) We ask the reader to care about these lives of real people and recognize how we are all connected. (3) We ask the academics in different fields to open up to a multidisciplinary conversation and recognize the value in combining or collaging different perspectives on the same question in order to enhance academic research in this complex and continually changing world.

Therefore, for us, analysing gender and global mobilities is not only an intellectual exercise confined to the domain of academia but also a matter of recognizing the complexities and potentialities of real lived experience. Regardless of the abstract theorizing academics engage in, there are real persons on the move all the time. And they do so using creativity and variety of networks, despite the manifold difficulties imposed on them, often in ways that defy the theories that should explain their possibilities and constraints.

It seems that we are undeniably living in a world of extreme contradictions. While mobility is celebrated as a value and a fact in the contemporary world, access to mobility or potential for mobility (motility) is highly uneven for differentially positioned people across the globe. For so many, mobility is indeed an obligation, a risk that needs to be taken in a situation where staying is no longer an option due to the lack of livelihood or a devastating conflict that one needs to escape. Moreover, bodies are differentially mobile by their location in the axes of healthy/impaired or able-bodied/disabled. One may find it necessary to rely on other people with sight or hearing. For another, it may be impossible to move one’s body at all without help from others. We emphasize that the academic research work is never separate from the complexity and messiness of the interconnectedness, hierarchies, struggles and opportunities that emerge in contemporary world. Owing to information technology and social media, the exit from the field and return to academic sphere is never clear cut. In the contemporary world, the fact that we are already entangled with the world and that our actions and inactions have consequences cannot be hidden under the pretence of distance. Everything we do counts.

In this book we bring forth the individual level through stories, anecdotes and fieldwork diary entries in order to bring the reader close to the lived experience of people on the move. As we bring attention to how people on the move manage, make choices or respond or react to constricting conditions imposed by outside realities, we show that these people are full human beings, with emotions, feelings, sexualities and desires. In other words, people on the move are not different from anyone else or stick figures. They are not the “other” or the “object” of research. This is first and foremost a question of ethics.

Most importantly, in bringing forth the lived experience of people on the move, we ask the reader to care about the people on the move. Writing in such a way that the reader can feel transforms the illusion of distance between self and other. As the reader is brought close to the individual lived experiences of the people on the move, she cannot presume the illusion of distance that academic inquiry provides. This is in line with new ethnography, feminist pedagogy and postmodern qualitative approach to research and writing.¹ These approaches can be seen as sharing similar principles, for example, empowerment of minority groups and experiences, and privileging multiple voices. Most importantly, these approaches challenge the hierarchic dualisms that guide our perception such as those between researcher and the field, professor and student, and researcher and activist.

Both postmodern qualitative approach to research and writing and feminist pedagogy as a practice of generating and enabling learning challenge traditional notions of what social scientific text looks like or what learning is in a classroom setting. For us, these starting points imply that scientific writing is never innocent (Richardson 1997), but it always involves multiple positionalities, which need to be rendered visible in line with feminist research ethics and practice (see, e.g., Ackerly and True 2010). Carolyn Shrewsbury (1997: 167) has framed feminist pedagogy as a project that seeks to empower students “to learn to think in new ways, especially ways that enhance the integrity and wholeness of the person and the person’s connection with others,” valuing the diversity of experience and facilitating the development of a voice of one’s own (Mohanty 2003). Thus, learning is an active engagement with students and teachers as well as with the materials used in the classroom. Adhering to feminist pedagogy in teaching and learning about global mobilities entails that the hierarchies as well as privileges in academic research on gender and global mobilities can be openly discussed, and the classroom can be used as a space that creates new insight.

Therefore, multidisciplinarity as a practice is not something fancy, but rather a method of being curious and open-hearted to different points of view and different experiences, understanding and disentangling privileges, and being open to learn instead of conquer. It is a practice of appreciation for diversity of different disciplinary practices in forming research questions, selecting materials and writing. Important here is the recognition that the classroom is not separate space from the sphere of academic research or a secondary activity to research, but a space for collaborative learning.

The teaching tools in this book are based on student-based active learning pedagogy (Biggs 2003) informed by the values of feminist pedagogy (Chow et al. 2003). We follow the idea of research-led teaching, which means the practice of building curriculum on the basis of teacher’s research projects as well as enhancing research through the practice of dialogue in the classroom. Research-led teaching as a space for transformative learning (hooks 1994) builds on respect for the diversity of students in the classroom and the recognition of students as active participants in collaborative learning, instead of knowledge consumers. In our own practice of teaching, we emphasize the role of students as academic experts in training and hope to inspire readers of this book to also take this book as a resource for enhancing one’s own practice for critical thinking than simply as a source of information.

We the authors have a background in using feminist methodology and ethnography in studying gender in the context of political science and international relations since the turn of the millennium. Elina has done research on how globalization of the world economy produces gendered and ethnicized subjectivities in the context of global sex industry. The transition to market economy at the time of the Soviet Union’s breakdown resulted in the loss of jobs and closed down whole industries in a very short time period in Russia. Unemployment affected especially women, and they started to look for other opportunities to make any income to support themselves and their families. At the same time, in the 1990s, the sex sector began to grow and normalize within consumer culture. Elina was curious about the ways in which these globalization processes concretized in actual spaces such as erotic bars, brothels and camping sites where Russian and Baltic women came to sell sexual services to local men in Finland. We will return to these findings in chapters 4 and 6. From the sphere of global sex industry Elina moved on to research the politics of gender mainstreaming in the context of international crisis management and peacekeeping, which was implemented mainly by the increase in the share of women within the operations. She interviewed female police officers in order to find out how they felt about the expectations placed on them on the basis of their gender, such as improving operational effectiveness, being able to reach the local population better and being able to keep their male colleagues from misconduct. This research took her also to Kosovo in 2008 at the beginning of the largest EU-led mission, the EULEX. Currently Elina’s field has moved from geographical locations and physical spaces to the Internet. Her current research at the time of writing this book is on the experience of violence and healing process in the context of intimate partner violence (IPV). As part of her research she moderates online support groups for women and does phone interviews in order to ensure the security of targets of violence. Elina also works closely with local NGOs who offer support for targets of IPV and sexual abuse, also among migrant women. She participates as an academic expert in NGO-led national campaigns against IPV.

Anitta has worked with North African women in France in her research situated at the intersection of the feminization of migration debate and the temporally simultaneous yet not fully connected discursive emphasis on attracting skilled migration into Europe. She was interested in understanding how these debates might meet and which could be lived outcomes in the lives of women who are, on one hand, highly skilled and, on the other hand, often portrayed in the mainstream media in the early 2000s only in terms of family making or in successive headscarf debates in France. These insights feed into the following chapter where we examine the conceptual history of migration and mobility studies. In 2010, Anitta moved on to a long-term interest of hers and began to work more systematically on the issue of undocumented mobilities across and around the Mediterranean Sea. This research has taken her to an array of border areas, such as the borders between Greece and Turkey, Greece and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), Turkey and Syria, Morocco and Algeria, Morocco and Spain, and France and the United Kingdom. The research process has led her to examine issues such as knowledge formation, local and transnational solidarity practices, and technologies of control in concrete border locations and beyond them. We will return to these findings in chapter 5. In parallel with her academic work, Anitta takes part in different civil society and activist endeavours by serving as a specialist in migration and asylum issues and by contributing to reporting on human rights issues in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. These engagements inform and feed back into her research on similar topics.

TOOLS FOR THE JOURNEY: CONCEPTUALIZING GENDER, GLOBAL AND MOBILITY

The questions of gender and global mobilities are being asked in social sciences, humanities and beyond. The academic fields that undertake the questions of gender and mobilities range from, for example, political and social sciences, feminist global political economy, feminist and queer migration and mobility studies, human geography, social anthropology, diaspora studies, regional studies to sexuality studies. Asking feminist questions has often meant at first focusing on where women are in the context of migration and mobility. This has denoted emphasizing that gender needs to be added as a variable in analyses of mobility. Further on, it has signified moving on to recognizing how gender and other potential intersectional axes are configured in the systems of power that shape gendered mobilities. We will return to these issues in further chapters. In this section we will move on to define how the concepts of gender, global and mobility are applied in this book.

Is gender enough?

When we want to understand how global mobility is gendered, is the concept of gender enough? To answer this question, we must first stop to consider what the word gender brings to mind. Is it women? Is it women, sex and gender minorities, and ...

Table of contents

• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Gender and mobility: A critical introduction
• 2 Intersectional approaches to human mobility
• 3 Globally mobile life
• 4 Global political economy and global mobility
• 5 Policing borders and boundaries
• 6 Abuse, crime and mobility
• 7 Re-imagining global mobilities
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Authors