Reflection Paper on Gender, Migration and Theory

Pierrette Hondagneu­Sotelo’s Gender and Migration Scholarship: An Overview from the 21st Century Perspective (2011) is an overview about gender and migration in the 21st century as it was clearly written in the title. Hondagneu­Sotelo believes that much of immigration scholarship shows continuing androcentric blindness to feminist issues and gender. The purpose behind her article is to outline the six distinctive streams of gender and migration. The following will briefly explain the meaning behind each of the streams.

The goal behind the first stream, Gender and Migration Carrying the Flag, is to make gender an institutional part of immigration studies where a small group of intrepid scholars are carrying the flag to establish legitimacy for gender in immigration study. The focus of the second stream, Migration and Care Work, is exclusively on the link between gender roles and migration. The third stream, Sexualities, is related to the humanities, queer studies and cultural studies. The focus here is on sexualities, including gay, queer identities, hetero-normativity and compulsory heterosexuality as a form of legal immigration exclusion as well as inclusion. The fourth stream, Sex Trafficking, is centered on debates about sex trafficking and migrant women engaged in sex work. The fifth stream, Borderland and Migration, focuses on the hybridity of identities and the hybrid space of borderlands. The sixth and final stream, Gender, Migration and Children, focuses on children and the gendered ramifications of transnational migration.

A Glass Half Full? Gender in Migration Studies by Katherine M. Donato et al.’s main focus is to find other disciplines for gender and migration beside that one discipline which was used until the mid-90s. The change in this perspective reflects two things; one, scholars have succeeded in bringing female migration out of the shadows in many disciplines, and two, many migration scholars now insist that migration itself is a gendered phenomenon that requires more sophisticated theoretical and analytical tools than studies of sex roles and of sex dichotomous variable in the past. The purpose behind this article is why the spread and acceptance of gender as analytical category has varied sharply across the disciplines. For instance, in some disciplines we have found a divide between scholars who view gender as both relational and constitutive of all human behavior and thought. In other disciplines, it is how scholars treat gender as situational, making it difficult to capture without resources to qualitative methods or to theorize on a grand or universal level that predicts for all time and places.

I think the two research studies are important because they show how the concept of gender varied and developed throughout the years. The two articles agree that research on gender and migration is vastly growing. The purposes of the two papers are clearly stated as mentioned above, Hondagneu­Sotelo’s paper focuses on an overview about gender and migration in the 21st century, whereas, Donato et al.’s focuses on the research progress of gender and migration. However, there is a very important weakness that I couldn’t not pin-point which is the methodology. The methodology of the first research study was not stated at all, whereas, in the second one, it was surveys.