Gender and Migration

681 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Gender dimension of migration

In this paper, I apply a critical discourse analysis method to review gendered narratives concerning poverty, social inequalities and gender relations in order to understand how migration reproduces gender-biased social structures. I argue that migration places constraints on women’s agency, contrary to popular notions that women’s empowerment is largely realized through the migration process (in the form of resource gains and improvement in social position). Conversely, I believe that migration increases the burden of patriarchy on women, calling for the sensitive negotiation of gender roles. Drawing on ‘subjective knowledge’ accounts and feminist theories, I aim to problematize the credibility of migration as an effective development strategy, revealing how widely found opinions, which tend to polarize the implications of migration as either good or bad, are supported by a narrow frame of reference, namely economic growth or neoliberalism. I believe that a more representative evaluation requires adopting a human development paradigm, which, as per its distinctive attention to enhancing people’s capabilities, offers a conceptual space for considering other determinants of quality of life such as the intersection of gender with race and class. This is necessary to move beyond overly simplistic conceptions, which have serious repercussions when translated into social policy. For example, policies targeting income poverty alleviation may divert attention and resources away from investigating other forms of deprivation, involving social and political aspects, which could expose more notable consequences. For this reason, I will focus on the exploitation of migrant care workers and consider how globalization intensifies demands on the... ... middle of paper ... ... countries: Recent global evidence. OECD Development Centre. Lutz, H. (2011a). Chapter 2: The household as a global market for women's labour. In H. Lutz (Author) & D. Shannon (Trans.), The new maids: Transnational women and the care economy (pp. 18-30). New York: Zed Books. Lutz, H. (2011b). Chapter 8: Migrant women in the globalization trap? In H. Lutz (Author) & D. Shannon (Trans.), The new maids: Transnational women and the care economy (pp. 185-194). New York: Zed Books. Milanovic, B. (2012). Global inequality: From class to location, from proletarians to migrants. Global Policy, 3 (2), 125-133. Sutherland, P. (2013). Migration is development. Retrieved from Project Syndicate website: http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/migrants-and-the-post-2015-global-development-agenda-by-peter-sutherland World Bank (2009). World Development Indicators Online 2009.

Show More
Related

  • Similarities Between Sweat And The Yellow Wallpaper

    1256 Words  | 3 Pages

    The two works of literature nudging at the idea of women and their roles as domestic laborers were the works of Zora Neale Hurston in her short story “Sweat”, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Whatever the setting may be, whether it is the 1920’s with a woman putting her blood, sweat and tears into her job to provide for herself and her husband, or the 1890’s where a new mother is forced to stay at home and not express herself to her full potential, women have been forced into these boxes of what is and is not acceptable to do as a woman working or living at home. “Sweat” and “The Yellow Wallpaper” draw attention to suppressing a woman’s freedom to work along with suppressing a woman’s freedom to act upon her

    Read More

  • My Fight For Birth Control By Eleanor Cooney

    1036 Words  | 3 Pages

    This article talks about the growing movement of hiring maids for household work. This article starts off as being about gender inequality, but then turns into an issue of class and moral standards. The author explains her own experiences of house cleaning. She also describes how “wealthier class’s children are being raised with the attitude”. (Barbara Ehrenreich) That the people that clean up after them are “lower” than everyone else. Additionally she talks about how the hiring of house hold workers will increase and eventually move on to the middle class homes.

    Read More

  • Gender Roles In El Salvador

    1228 Words  | 3 Pages

    As a result of this norm, more feminists who recognize the “systematic disadvantage” (Cahill 206) that women face daily in other countries is the reason why many feminists believe governments should oppose typical gender roles and gender stereotypes by protecting the rights of women. However, culture is always subject to change thus, leading developing countries who have neglected the rights of women to improve due to the global influence of other countries who have gender equality. This, in turn, leads countries to be “forced” to accept feminist agendas who “hold[ing] these patterns… to change them, and thus to change the realities that they produce” (Cahill 208). Not only does gender affect social issues but it also has progressed onto the economic sector for business as well, making gender a multifaceted topic for any

    Read More

  • Melissa Wright Illegal Alien Analysis

    1910 Words  | 4 Pages

    Some women come to the US and take any job that is available even if it means doing long hours and not getting paid a lot of money. Corporations travel over to third-world countries and hire women to do small jobs in large factories for little to no pay. They only hire a certain type of woman. In “Introduction: Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism” the author touches on the subject of the treatment of the third-world woman and what companies expect from her: “This woman turns into a form of industrial waste, at which point she is discarded and replaced.” (Wright, 6) Once this woman has become old and no longer able to perform the task that she was hired for originally, the company throws her out and simply replaces her with another woman. The third world woman has a sad destiny of coming to the US and dealing with the unfair treatment of companies that do not even appreciate their work.

    Read More

  • Critical Analysis Of US Third World Feminism

    766 Words  | 2 Pages

    For this critical analysis two readings, US Third World Feminism: Differential Social Movement by Chela Sandoval and Cultural Feminism versus Poststructuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory by Linda Alcoff will be used to explore the depth of the relation between each authors thoughts an interpretations of feminism. It is obvious from the titles that these two authors clearly are focusing on different aspects of feminism and provide unique insight into the diverse branches of the feminist movement.

    Read More

  • Dependency Work In Love's Labor

    846 Words  | 2 Pages

    Kittay, Eva Feder. Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency. New York: Routledge, 1999. Print.

    Read More

  • Margaret Matlin's Book Psychological Gender Differences Are Typically Small And Inconsistent?

    1793 Words  | 4 Pages

    In terms of the media, men are both seen and heard much more than women are. Women’s biological events are typically not studied into vast detail. Furthermore, women of color are severely unnoticed in psychology research (30). An area in which women go especially unnoticed is domestic work. There are numerous women who immigrate from the Caribbean, Latin America, and other developing countries, to North America. Upon entering North America, these women work in areas where they provide domestic work, such as child care, until they can earn a green card. Matlin (2012) reports further, “They may be expected to work every day—with no time off and no health insurance—for a fraction of the minimum-wage salary. Many of the women report that their employers insult them, do not let them leave the house, and treat them much like modern-day slaves” (226). While this situation sounds like something that would occur in a third world country, it is occurring right in our own backyards. In addition to domestic work, numerous women and their families become involved with garment work. Many women go unnoticed working in sweatshops, where there are numerous labor laws regarding wages and working conditions violated daily. These sweatshops occur all over the world, from North America to Latin America. Matlin recalls a story from one of her students, saying, “Several months later, Ling’s mother began to work on a garment, without asking for the supervisor’s permission. The supervisor then punched Ling’s mother in the chest, and the family called the police to report the assault. The manager then fired the entire family” (226). It is shocking that women go unnoticed and unreported in these unethical and disturbing conditions. In addition to this, women often go unnoticed in health care. Throughout history, women have often been

    Read More

  • The Issue of Immigration for Women

    547 Words  | 2 Pages

    This United States of America is not fond of undocumented immigrants, especially women. Cruel anti-immigrant laws, policies, and practices have had especially dramatic impact on immigrant women and their families. These measures force immigrant women to choose between the threat of an abusive husband and the threat of deportation if they call the police. Immigration policies can also make women sit in detention, thus leaving their children. During this time, some of the women might be raped by officers. This is because detention lacks sexual abuse prevention policies. These women who are in the detention centers are not dangerous, instead they are placed behind bars because of small crimes such as driving without a license or they are charged the civil crime for violating immigration laws.Women are faced with the emotional burden of separation from their families.

    Read More

  • The History Of Forced Migration

    1080 Words  | 3 Pages

    Due to the fact of how relevant and how it shares significance today, in a world filled with instant communication and social African American Forced Migrations and the Start of Spiritual Music

    Read More

  • Evolution of Women's Roles in 20th Century America

    1059 Words  | 3 Pages

    In the nineteenth century, in American society women were viewed as the safeguard of the home. Limited to the domestic sphere, women were considered to be dependent on men, emotional, with limited knowledge tending to deal with petty problems such as marriage and socialising. Their job was to look after the home and bear children. Men on the other hand, were citizen producers, family providers, rational, and were the owners of property. However throughout the 20th century this view was challenge by several significant forces, social, economic and most significantly political, which overtime has led to an immense change in women’s roles in society. A trend of women moving out of the domestic sphere has meant that women’s roles have been defined by things other than ‘domestic drudgery’. Between 1900 and the 1950’s women’s rights changes. This means that over all there was

    Read More

  • Personal Narrative: Field Experience

    1280 Words  | 3 Pages

    I empathized deeply with these groups and gained a broader perspective on global struggles with inequality. When I returned to my home university, my mentor and professor, Dr. Hopkins, encouraged me to explore the issues I had learned about abroad in greater depth. Before I left to study abroad, I had developed a questionnaire to assess the perceptions of inequality in each country I visited. Now that I have returned to my university, I have begun mining my data to answer four primary questions: To what extent are people conscious of inequalities? To what do people attribute inequality? To what extent does inequality affect the quality of life in a given country? Does skin tone/color correlate to inequality

    Read More

  • How Poverty Affects Academic Performance

    2579 Words  | 6 Pages

    Kerbo, H. R. (2012). Social stratification and inequality: class conflict in historical, comparative, and global perspective (8th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.

    Read More

  • Proverty Inequality

    752 Words  | 2 Pages

    On today’s life, social inequality is given based on a variety of different characteristics, of race, ethnicity, gender, culture, economic class, immigration status, and sexual preference that a person may have. It is the power of privilege the holds the honor and respect, and the prestige of income and property, that wins every time. Auto-differentially positioning the poor as minority groups to hold less power, and manipulated by those who want to maintain themselves as elite. “Often experiencing unequal treatment compared to the dominant group, giving them a collective sense of being discriminated against” (Carl 2013, Pg.41) It is clear that society still struggles to find opportunities to live in equality with the poor. Rewarding them with only unequal distribution of opportunities that only increases, today’s wage gap and the disadvantages that they must overcome on their way to survive and succeed in life. What factors can increase this inequality? The poor must overcome the lack of economic resources, the stereotypes created among their group, and the government cutbacks that they must live on their daily basis till the rest of their lives.

    Read More

  • Essay About Migration

    700 Words  | 2 Pages

    Every year, most Countries losses half of its active population to migration. This Countries are left behind in the areas such as developmental and economical. The government and the people living in that Country suffers the consequences such as low productivity and poor academic performance due to lack of qualified teachers. People emigrate from their native countries for Economic, Familial, and Educational reasons.

    Read More

  • Essay On Migration And Migration

    1155 Words  | 3 Pages

    I grew up in the Greater Toronto Area, as a result of my parents’ emigration from Montreal as young adults. For my parents, both coming from working class backgrounds, they both faced limited geographical mobility during youth, which studies have shown to be significant in determining the migration path when presented with the opportunity (Molgat, 2010). More concretely, political reasons as well as the search of better opportunities played a role in many young adults leaving Montreal in the 1970s and 1980s. The “Quiet Revolution” that took place in the post-war era in Quebec meant many socio-cultural changes and a reframing of the French Quebecois identity (McRoberts, 1988). Just as throughout history, migratory patterns have often been shaped by exclusion – my English-speaking parents choice to leave Montreal, along with much of their cohort, marks a logical generational trend. This has had significant implications on their language and identity as part of the Quebecois diaspora (Stevenson, 2000).

    Read More

More about Gender and Migration

Open Document