Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies - Volume 17, Issue 3, 2014

This article explores adaptation strategies among Russian-speaking immigrants in Germany from a gender perspective. The methodological basis of the research is Berry’s model of acculturation and feminist theory. The acculturation strategies and determinants of migration behaviour are analysed based on migration statistics and the results of a survey. Particular attention is paid to gender differences in adaptation strategies. The author comes to the conclusion that female immigrants use more successful strategies and have better adaptability than male immigrants.

The position of female rejected asylum seekers in the Netherlands reveals how European citizenship is built on gendered notions of belonging to a national body, with its annexed discourses on migrant exclusion and asylum that set the conditions for rejected asylum seekers. This paper examines the experiences of female rejected asylum seekers who rely on NGOs, municipal homeless shelters, and informal networks for their basic needs in the Netherlands; it considers how they negotiate their everyday lives, and how the state’s exclusionary policies and the workings of NGOs affect them. This paper argues that, in order to chart the complexity of their agency, it is necessary to collapse the division between ‘victimhood’ and ‘agency’ as mutually exclusive subject positions. This requires an intersectional analysis of their experiences, as multiple axes of oppression simultaneously interact in defining which subject positions are available for female rejected asylum seekers and what their material options are.

This article will focus on marriage related forms of migration in Cameroon and will reconsider the gendered nature of fortress Europe by critically questioning how regulatory technologies at consulate offices grant or withhold access to Europe to both men and women. In their daily work, consulate officers construct some visa applicants and family members as deviant criminals, while others are framed as in need of protection and rescue. Wanting to go away from a statist driven security agenda on migration, I set out to do an ethnography of the regulatory framework of emigration within which people in Cameroon are obliged to try to achieve their ambitions of mobility – amongst others to achieve ‘security’ for the future of their families. I will draw on observations of marriage visa interviews at the French consulate service in Yaoundé, Cameroon. Regulatory dynamics at the French consulate office are driven by fears and accusations that visa applicants might be committing fraud – often with respect to the welfare state – for their selfish personal purposes. I argue that aspiring migrant women are seen as security threats precisely because consulate officers and aspiring migrant women distribute care needs and social risks differently between state, family, and individual.

Care has long been a key field of struggle and discourse for feminist interventions and movements. The significance of gendered assumptions, attitudes, and practices about caring tasks and those who care has led critics to specifically focus on this crucial task of human reproduction that has previously largely been considered a private matter. Starting in the late 1980s, the tensions and conflicts between dominant moral theories and questions of care has been a crucial concern for theorists. Joan C. Tronto, Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota, US, has been one of the key thinkers who have developed the ethics of care approach that puts care at the centre of the construction of a new morality. In this interview, Tronto recalls some of the main steps in the development of her own thinking and the formulation of different aspects of a theory of justice that starts with human relationships rather than abstract, completely independent individuals. The interview links Tronto’s personal intellectual journey with the development of a theoretical and ethical perspective that has had strong influences on feminist discourses for several decades. Important contemporary questions such as the relationship between the concept of care and the discursive reproduction of gender are explored and put into a broader context of a feminist theory of justice. Tronto also speaks of her latest attempts to link processes of care and relating with questions of global democratic challenges.