Intersectionality Theory

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the question of not only who is eligible to fit the normative conception of citizenship but also who has the right to judge who is a member of a community. The deportability and the construction of the deportable subject go hand in hand with migrant illegality. Both deportability and illegality or legal production of illegality aims to create a non-citizen subject in a precarious legal status. Since 1990’s, the increasing production of migrant illegality has been perceived as a problem or crisis of border policing strategies, migration policies and state sovereignty. Policy oriented scholars consider illegality as a failure of border control policies. However critical border theorists such as de Genova (2002; 2004) draw attention to the organic…show more content…
When intersectionality and migration is concerned, it is surprising that intersectionality as a theory or a concept is almost non-existing in migration scholarship. While the majority of ethnographic research on migrant women has an intersectional understanding of one’s experience, studying how gender, race, ethnicity class, religion or migrantness shape these experiences to some extent, the word intersectionality was almost never mentioned explicitly. One simple reason might be that intersectionality, understood as a concept of gender studies, has never been fully incorporated to migration scholarship. Another reason for the lacking explicit reference might be the assumption that migration studies, especially transnational migration scholarship, studying multiple embeddedness of migrants, is supposed to be intersectional as a result of its own very nature. Therefore it is possible to argue that even though intersectionality did not yet find its rightful place in the migration scholarship, it has been frequently used as a method of conducting “proper ethnographic…show more content…
As Hondagneu-Sotelo (1999) stress, (labor) migration was considered as a male domain, where migrant women were too often associated with the socio-cultural, the domestic (private) space and the family, while in contrast, men inhabit the economic and the workplace (public). Migrant women were exclusively employed in domestic labour, care and sex work, while migrant men occupy the commanding heights of the knowledge economy and society. Similarly, Ehrenreich and Hochshild (2003) argued that the international transfer of women’s labor from less to more developed countries concentrated on services that are associated with a wife’s traditional role; child care, homemaking and sex. Therefore, the involvement of female migrants in labour market is problematically restricted to several less skilled sectors. As a consequence, studies on gender and labor migration overwhelmingly concentrated on domestic work, entertainment and prostitution (see Anderson, 2000; Sassen, 2000; Lutz, 2002; Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003). According to Helma Lutz (2010) employment of migrant women in the feminized, lowest end of the labour market is a direct consequence of this single-edged definition of work. When the majority of workers become female, the feminization of work coincides with low wages, low status and low occupational
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