Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

This book examines the links between gender and migration and their implications for social justice thinking, both at the experiential and normative levels. It offers insights also into the uses of human security thinking as a framework for attention to social justice concerns, including in trans-border contexts, and to their intersectional complexity. The volume presents a diverse but selective set of empirical, theoretical, and methodological issues on gender in migration from migrant-centred and Southern perspectives. Its aim is to stimulate debate and discussion among migration scholars and professionals engaged in migration-related policy and to enable insights and enrich practices on gender and social justice.

This chapter provides a perspective on the chain of social injustice faced by Indonesian migrant domestic workers in the (UAE). By using the lens of gender to connect practices within the Indonesian management system for labour migration with those guided by regulations governing the management of foreign labour in the UAE, the chapter reveals the consequences of the absence of a specific law governing the presence of domestic workers in both countries. Labour migration management systems are bounded by the nation state, whereas domestic workers must rely on transnational coordination between two systems. Where their work is not legally defined, they can become subject to arbitrary treatment at different points in their migration along a transnational chain of relations of structural dependency. They tend to bear the weight of institutional dysfunctions, often with dire consequences for their private lives. Learning from their experiences can help us draw lessons for future action towards achieving standards of decent work within a territory and standards of basic human security applicable to their transnational movement. Just as research into transnational migration has moved beyond methodological nationalism, so also labour migration policy needs to find frames of reference appropriate to context to ensure that workers’ rights are protected in different places.

Amid increasing irregular flows of Senegalese migrants to Spanish territories, the two countries entered into a bilateral agreement in 2007 for a temporary work scheme that ultimately saw the migration of more than 700 Senegalese women for work in the agricultural sector in Spain. Due to a number of factors, including weaknesses in the recruitment process on the sending side and the nature of the work on the receiving side, many of the women subsequently abandoned their posts in search of domestic work or jobs in personal services in Spanish cities, thus transitioning to irregular status. Using data collected from 525 of these Senegalese migrant women, this chapter examines how they came to form this unintended cohort of unauthorized migrants and their experiences as they strive to live, work, and access various social rights in the context of the current Spanish labour market and economic crisis. Some measures are suggested to strengthen the management of future temporary work schemes and protect Senegalese women migrants in Spain.

This case study argues that even in increasingly unstable circumstances women migrant workers have to continue to balance their reproductive responsibilities as mothers and daughters with their ongoing roles as wage workers and economic providers, often managing complex transborder care arrangements. The chapter extends the global care chain framework to investigate the ways in which Burmese migrant factory workers in Thailand organize reproduction and childcare in the place of destination and in the in-between places at the international borders between the two countries. The chapter provides new insights into ways migrant women factory workers adapt and strategize to achieve daily, generational, and biological reproduction needs and the links between these strategies and the pattern of capital accumulation in Thailand’s border industrialization strategy. The elaboration of multiple forms of control and regulation from the state to the factory as well as community highlights the structures of constraint as well as the ways women negotiate around these constraints. The aim of the chapter is to delineate key issues of social injustice relating to their nationality and legal ambiguity of status (migrant or worker). Focusing on the individual agency of migrant workers, our research demonstrates that existing analyses of the women’s experiences of work and of harassment in Thailand needs to be supplemented by an understanding of their ongoing but changing connections with home and family, in terms of resourcing care for children, the elderly, and other relatives in their home country, as well as their community and family obligations and responsibilities in their place of employment.

Since the late 1990s there has been a rising trend of Vietnamese women migrating to neighbouring countries (Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and China) for marriage. Previous studies of such cross-border marriages have emphasized either issues of choice and agency for women, or their poverty and victimhood. This chapter analyses this trend along the lines of the debate on the East Asian model of welfare and family policy, with case studies in Taiwan and South Korea. It views (CATM) as an institution that connects changing gendered regimes of social reproduction at the sending and receiving ends. Mediated by a combination of asymmetrical relations – gender, class, age, ethnicity, and national belonging– this institution operates in a transnational space through which material and symbolic resources are circulated. These in turn construct subjectivities and identities for participating actors. There is a dimension of trans-masculinity embodied in the practices of CATM and this requires further exploration regarding informed consent and the rights of its users. Beyond this, CATM should be further analysed in the context of changing family welfare and intergenerational care as gendered regimes, and such an analysis should also address how households adapt and devise new strategies to sustain and reproduce themselves economically, socially, and culturally. Such an understanding can help open the research agenda on social policy and rights and provide a regional perspective.

This chapter contributes to the emerging literature on men who do ‘women’s work’. It focuses on the ‘feminine’ occupation of domestic worker and on how male and female migrant workers balance their gender identities at the intersection of class, race, and immigration status. It addresses the related research gap in the Netherlands by focusing on the situation of migrant domestic workers from the Philippines with irregular status. From the perspective of hegemonic gender identities, male migrant domestic workers, too, are subjected to gender injustices. These injustices are rooted in the devaluation of everything coded as ‘feminine’, including their occupation. The resulting ‘male femininities’ are threatening male domestic workers’ sense of self-worth and their societal recognition. This misrecognition adds to the exploitative economic circumstances that both female and male migrant domestic workers experience and has negative repercussions on male migrants’ access to employment. Ironically, workers themselves contribute to reproducing these symbolic and material injustices and, hence, consolidate them. Redressing these injustices requires changes both in the economic structure and in society’s ordering of status. When the demands for respect for domestic workers and for their labour rights are combined, this necessity is reflected in workers’ national and international campaigns. They need to be complemented by national regulation that will protect all workers effectively, independent of the location of their work, their gender, their race, or their immigration status. Last but not least, given their crucial role in societal reproduction, domestic workers should be included in the categories of migrant workers who are welcome in European labour markets in redefined and relaxed transnational migration regimes.

This chapter argues that the effacement of gender in macro-analyses of internal migration in India is based on the collective inability to delineate the contours of female labour migration from the official databases. While critiquing the monocausal approach to migration which overwhelmingly privileges social over economic reasons in female migration, the chapter essays a gendered macro-view of labour migration in India, for which new methods of approaching the data of the most recent macro-survey on migration in India (2007–08) are applied. The authors argue that the migration pattern is enhancing structural gender inequalities in the labour market. While the domination of services and industry in male migrant employment has contributed to a degree of diversification in the structure of the male workforce away from agriculture, the same is not the case for the female workforce. Drawing on primary surveys conducted across 2009–2011, the chapter argues that a meso-level view shows a predominantly long- and medium-term migratory pattern among upper-caste women to have brought hitherto home-bound women into diversified employment in more white-collar services. On the other hand, short-term and circulatory migration involving hard manual labour with limited scope for social advancement predominates among women from traditionally disadvantaged castes/tribes. A distinctively gendered process of concentration among migrant women in paid domestic work, however, cuts across caste hierarchies. While women workers’ involvement in family decisions to migrate and ‘autonomous’ migration by women is not insignificant, a broad tendency towards their concentration in a narrow range of occupations is identified. It is argued that the temporary nature of much of employment leads to a pullback to villages, despite agrarian crisis. In foregrounding the intersections between caste, class, and gender inequalities, and arguing that such inequalities are being reconfigured through migration, the chapter draws on the perspective of the women’s movement in India. It is argued that the absolute reduction in employment for women during the most distinctive phase of high GDP growth in India posits the need for more redistributive and equalizing growth as the path forward for social justice.

This chapter addresses the rights issues of women migrants in China in the context of their complex, lengthy, unstable, and diverse migration processes, and from a gender perspective. It first documents recent efforts by governments and relevant institutions in China to address the rights issues of women migrants. It then presents results from two recent surveys of rural-urban migrants and from subsequent in-depth interviews in Fujian Province, a major destination of rural-urban migrants in China. Although great efforts have been made and significant progress has been achieved, major rights issues still exist for women migrants. The chapter suggests that the common conceptualization of rural-urban migration as a one-way transition is oversimplified. It proposes a non-urban-centred and non-residence-based approach to migrants’ rights. Migrants require inclusion in a system of rights that extends wider than the municipality or locality level, probably to a nationally integrated system, to be adequate to their real, complex patterns of movement, instead of integration into a locality-specific system of social rights only. In addition, the chapter illustrates other policy implications that flow from a more gendersensitive analysis of key issues affecting the achievement of women migrants’ rights and social entitlements, including education and access to work after the age of forty.

This chapter offers a perspective on gender relations in a predominantly male migrant-sending community in Mexico. The aim is to bring to the fore the impacts of migration as lived in the sender community and their implications for social justice and human security. The case of the indigenous rural municipality of San Martín Ticlajete in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, a male migrant-sending community, is examined, drawing on methods of critical feminist ethnography and social representations theory to illustrate the changes for the women who stay behind. Parallel to migration, the community has also experienced important transformations due to the development of a woodcrafts trade and increasing tourist activity. Very gradual changes in gender representations and empowerment have taken place, with women becoming household heads, as well as craft makers and retailers, educators, administrators, agricultural producers, social figures, and civil servants. Nevertheless, detailed narrations of women’s experiences show that their new roles and responsibilities do not necessarily translate into greater social, political, and economic autonomy, or recognition of the invisible material and emotional costs linked to migration.

The re-scaling of border control and the conflation of migration, crime, and national security in Mexico in the last decade have generated new practices of ‘flow management’ at the southern border with a differentiated impact on migrants. This chapter draws on research findings on Guatemalan im/migrant women (some of whom have been living in Mexico for generations) to examine the kinds of insecurity they face in daily life as migrants of Mayan origin. By engaging with the contextual and specific meanings of in/securities generated by the processes of ‘othering’ experienced by these migrants, especially those with an irregular status, the chapter focuses on the significance of the politics of everyday life and how in/visibility becomes a strategic field of struggle for them, both to ensure daily well-being and to avoid the risks of being detected and the punitive responses that follow. The chapter proposes that where the concepts of citizenship and rights are unlikely to be satisfied for those who need them most, the analytical lens must shift from a normative understanding of rights to the interface between the practices of border control and migrants’ strategies. Understanding in/visibility is introduced as a strategy to help discern the power dynamics that affect their social conditions and the consequences for policy advocacy.