CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies- Special Issue
The gendered migrant body: Embodied experiences and bodily strategies in South-South migration
Guest Editors: Dr. Matthew Walsham (matthew.walsham@manchester.ac.uk), Professor Tanja Bastia (tanja.bastia@manchester.ac.uk) and Dr. Toni Cela (t.cela@miami.edu)
Deadline for Abstract Submission: May 1, 2024
The gendered migrant body: Embodied experiences and bodily strategies in South-South migration
As migrants traverse borders, their gendered bodies become sites of struggle, agency and transformation. A critical focus on the migrant body is increasingly recognised within migration studies as a productive way to engage with the embodied, everyday experiences of migrants and how these are shaped by gendered norms surrounding female and male bodies at every stage of the migration cycle (Dunn, 2010; Christou, 2011; Bond, 2018; Della Puppa, 2019). However, and mirroring the majority of migration scholarship, this literature rarely focuses on the experiences of migrants moving within the Global South (Cortés, 2023; Izaguirre and Walsham, 2021). This special issue will present new empirical data from countries of origin, transit and destination across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. The papers will shed light on the gendered bodily strategies of migrants and their families as they encounter, resist and – in some cases – transform embodied manifestations of power and discrimination before, during and after their migration journeys. Adopting an intersectional framing of these embodied experiences which highlights how specific constellations of gender, race, class and other factors shape migrant trajectories in different contexts, the papers address inter-related themes around gendered notions of purity and stigma (Douglas, 1984); violence, power relations (Bourdieu, 1977), surveillance and patriarchal state control over migrants’ bodies (Foucault, 2004); and the self-care and other bodily strategies of migrants and their families (Lorde, 1988).
Within migration studies, researchers have drawn upon a range of different theorists and approaches for exploring the migrant body. For example, Bourdieu’s notion of ‘habitus’ has been deployed to explore how migration “entails the transformation of the embodied capacities of migrants” (Noble, 2013: 343). Reflecting Bourdieu’s underlying concern with class as a structuring social characteristic, this has produced a growing body of literature exploring how new forms of ‘transnational habitus’ contribute to class formation in countries of origin and destination (Carlson and Schneickert, 2021). In other work, there is a wider focus on how racialised (Portes and Stepick, 1993) and gendered bodies (Winters, 2020) result in unequal outcomes for international migrants. For example, Dunn’s (2010) notion of ‘embodied transnationalism’ draws attention to how the ease of migration and the “extent of choice and compulsion” is “dramatically uneven across racialised axes and by birthplace, gender, and disability” (2010: 4).
Intersectionality provides an explicit framework for exploring these ‘axes’ and for understanding how migrants’ differential experiences reflect “the interweaving of power relations and the way they are co-produced, maintained and experienced through the body” (Duplan and Cranston, 2023: 335). This entails a feminist perspective that honours the roots of the concept in the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw and others, as well as in longer-term histories of intersectional thinking within grassroots women’s movements in the Global South (Bastia et al., 2023).
While much of the extant literature concerns itself with South-North migration, the ‘othering’ of migrant bodies driven by gender, race and other factors is also pervasive throughout the migration cycle in the Global South. Whether manifesting through the state, the community or the family, this has profound consequences for migrants. However, despite clusters of studies around a small number of topics – such as physical and mental health (Kaur-Gill and Dutta, 2020; Vanyoro, 2022); violence, discrimination and the state (Gruß, 2019; Grossman-Thompson, 2023); and sexuality (Cortés, 2023; Baas, 2020; Garcia Dias 2017) – existing research on the migrant body in the Global South is disparate both thematically and geographically, and rarely engages explicitly or systematically with intersectionality as a framework. As such, it struggles to adequately account for the embodied experiences and ‘bodily strategies’ of migrants as they both suffer and resist gendered and intersectional forms of power and oppression.
In this special issue we aim to present new conceptual framings and empirical evidence that address varied but inter-connected dimensions of the gendered, embodied experience of migrants in the Global South. For migrants and, by extension, their families, racism, classism, xenophobia and patriarchal family, community and state structures intersect and interlock to constrain and shape – but not always to dominate – their agency and decision-making capacity. Thus, we are seeking papers that will reflect on the gendered bodily strategies of migrants and their families. We are interested in the whole migration process (before, during and after migration) and the many ways in which migrants encounter, resist and possibly also transform embodied manifestations of power and discrimination. Possible examples include: bodily notions of purity and stigma among migrant women and men, analyses of violence, surveillance and the efforts of the patriarchal state to control migrant bodies; examinations of how these systems of surveillance and control are enacted by and over family and community members who remain in the homeland, how migrants, or organisations who work on their behalf, use migrant bodies to resist these practices and experiences.
Submission Details:
Interested authors are invited to submit a 300-word abstract by May 1, 2024, to the guest editors, Dr. Matthew Walsham (matthew.walsham@manchester.ac.uk), Professor Tanja Bastia (tanja.bastia@manchester.ac.uk) and Dr. Toni Cela (t.cela@miami.edu)
Timeline:
Abstract Submission deadline: May 1, 2024
Invitation to Submit Manuscript: May 15, 2024
Full manuscript (9,000 words, including references) Submission Deadline: October 15, 2024
References
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Bastia, T., Datta, K., Hujo, K., Piper, N. and Walsham, M., 2022. Reflections on intersectionality: a journey through the worlds of migration research, policy and advocacy. Gender, Place & Culture, pp.1-24.
Bond, E. 2018. Writing migration through the body. Cham, Switerzland: Springer.
Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Carlson, S. and Schneickert, C., 2021. Habitus in the context of transnationalization: From ‘transnational habitus’ to a configuration of dispositions and fields. The Sociological Review, 69(5), pp.1124-1140.
Christou, A., 2011. Narrating lives in (e) motion: Embodiment, belongingness and displacement in diasporic spaces of home and return. Emotion, Space and Society, 4(4), pp.249-257.
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Vanyoro, K., 2022. Suspicious bodies: anti-citizens and biomedical anarchists in South Africa’s public health care system. Anthropology Southern Africa, 45(1), pp.30-43.
Winters, N., 2020. Beyond the bird in the cage? Translocal embodiment and trajectories of Nicaraguan female migrants in Seville, Spain. Geoforum, 116, pp.243-251.
