Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies - Volume 17, Issue 2, 2014

Drawing on theories of subjectivity and subject formation, this article explores the social construction of the category ‘refugee’ as a subject position. It purports that the refugee subjectivity, here called ‘refugeeness’, has been inscribed with traditionally ‘feminine’ characteristics, particularly the assumption of dependence and helplessness. Based on this claim, the paper argues that through policy aimed to control the lives of asylum seekers, men who fall within this category experience a process of emasculation as they are forced to adopt the purportedly docile subjectivity of ‘refugeeness’. Through in-depth interviews with several male asylum seekers in Switzerland, this paper seeks to understand how men experience their own sense of masculinity within the Swiss asylum classification system.

‘Are Flemish people then also not well integrated?’ An intersectional analysis of integration discourses in Flanders from the standpoint of undocumented, single mothers’ is based on a longitudinal ethnographic study of ten undocumented migrant women who were residing in Flanders before and during the second regularisation period in 2009. This article deals with their confrontation with the regularisation criteria that were launched by the government in September 2009. From the point of view of single, undocumented mothers, the criterion of sustainable local anchoring relates to an ambivalent policy objective, which sometimes has contradictory outcomes. Authorities conceptualize integration largely through participation in networks, and in addition, networks are understood in a specific manner, which may disadvantage solidarity and in particular that in the lives of single, undocumented mothers. This article contrasts the way in which the authorities understand ‘networks’ to what participation in networks may mean to ten undocumented mothers, and indicates potential consequences of these different visions for social cohesion and social solidarity.

Family migration policies are part of a larger integration policy trend referred to as the ‘civic integrationist turn’. States across Europe have moved away from more rights-based approaches for the integration of immigrants towards a stronger emphasis on obligations, implying that new arrivals must prove to have attained certain integration achievements before accessing rights in the host country. This development has to be understood in relation to growing concerns about national identity and social cohesion where immigrant groups are seen to pose a threat to existing liberal values. Arguably, discourses of gender equality are at the heart of this debate, and have pushed the question of women’s emancipation closer to the borders of Fortress Europe. It is in this context that we locate our paper on gender equality discourses on family re-unification policies and more specifically marriage migration in the UK and Sweden. The rationale behind our comparative approach is that these countries share a similar ‘multicultural’ integration policy legacy and were previously regarded to be the most committed to the ‘multicultural programme’. But while the UK has made significant policy moves, with the introduction of stricter requirements, Sweden remains reluctant towards the use of civic conditioning of rights as an integration policy tool.

This article employs a postcolonial-post-communist lens to analyse the latest theoretical developments in the field of sexuality studies in the Eastern European region. In particular, it focuses on the collection of articles De-centring Western sexualities: Central and Eastern European perspectives (2011), edited by two Polish scholars: Robert Kulpa and Joanna Mizieliñska. This article asks if the critical approach taken up by the authors of this book does justice to the complexity of the Eastern European situation vis-à-vis ‘the West’. Although the book claims to de-centralise Euro-centrism, it actually reiterates the East-West binary and reinforces the progress narrative, only reversing, but not annihilating the hierachy. As the postcolonial queer approach taken up in this article demonstrates, such reversal does not escape orientalist tropes and can be called a scholarly ‘sexual nationalism’.