15 Internationale Migrationskonferenz/Migration and Gender
Dudelange, Luxembourg | Centre de Documentation sur les Migrations Humaines
Gender is, along with race and class, a line of difference in society leading to structures of inequality. It is also of central importance in the context of migration. Since the 1980s, social-scientific research on migration and gender has become ever more differentiated, initially in particular with an eye to motives for migration, the life situations of female migrants and the image of the woman migrant. From the end of 1990s, the specific conditions of socialization of youth (male and female) from migrant backgrounds were also increasingly investigated in research on youth. Later, more interest emerged in the dimension of gender relations. In the 1990s, some spoke for a time of a feminizing of migration. The reason for that was the increased migration of women to work as domestics in private households and in the care sector. This is a migration of interest because here in public discussion the cliché of ‘women’s work’ emerged once again. Only in the past decade has research on masculinity in the context of migration become a focus of its own in the German-speaking countries.
In the analysis of masculinities and migration, as in research on female migrants as well, along with the categories of gender and ethnicity, class and body also must be taken into account and explored. The approach of intersectionality focuses on a nexus between these various relations of inequality and oppression and their importance for the social positionings and various different mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. In the meanwhile, queer theory has also been given greater attention. Through its lens, further dimensions of gender relations in the context of migration can be rendered visible and the bipolarity of gender construction in particular can be interrogated. In the framework of the conference, the relations between migration and gender will be analyzed and discussed from an interdisciplinary and international perspective and within a range of different contexts.
The conference will focus on the following theoretical and empirical perspectives: Principal thematic focal areas: Gender relations in the context of migration; approaches in research on gender and migration; media and public representations of gender and migration; sexuality-body identity in the context of migration; flight migration and gender; Migration and gender in cultures of memory: exhibitions, museums and public space.