Forced Migration in the Feminist Imagination explores how feminist acts of imaginative expression, community-building, scholarship, and activism create new possibilities for women experiencing forced migration in the twenty-first century. Drawing on literature, film, and art from a range of transnational contexts including Europe, the Middle East, Central America, Australia, and the Caribbean, this volume reveals the hitherto unrecognised networks of feminist alliance being formulated across borders, while reflecting carefully on the complex politics of cross-cultural feminist solidarity. The book presents a variety of cultural case-studies that each reveal a different context in which the transcultural feminist imagination can be seen to operate – from the ‘maternal feminism’ of literary journalism confronting the European ‘refugee crisis’ to Iran’s female film directors building creative collaborations with displaced Afghan women; and from artists employing sonic creativities in order to listen to women in U.K. and Australian detention, to LGBTQ+ poets and video artists articulating new forms of queer feminist community against the backdrop of the hostile environment. This is an essential read for scholars in Women’s and Gender Studies, Feminist and Postcolonial Literary and Cultural Studies, and Comparative Literary Studies, as well as for those operating in the fields of Gender and Development Studies and Forced Migration Studies.

Not Born a Refugee Woman is an in-depth inquiry into the identity construction of refugee women. It challenges and rethinks current identity concepts, policies, and practices in the context of a globalizing environment, and in the increasingly racialized post-September 11th context, from the perspective of refugee women. This collection brings together scholar_practitioners from across a wide range of disciplines. The authors emphasize refugee women's agency, resilience, and creativity, in the continuum of domestic, civil, and transnational violence and conflicts, whether in flight or in resettlement, during their uprooted journey and beyond. Through the analysis of local examples and international case studies, the authors critically examine gendered and interrelated factors such as location, humanitarian aid, race, cultural norms, and current psycho-social research that affect the identity and well being of refugee women. This volume is destined to a wide audience of scholars, students, policy makers, advocates, and service providers interested in new developments and critical practices in domains related to gender and forced migrations.

Provocative and intellectually challenging, Gender and Migration critically analyses how gender has been taken up in studies of migration and its theories, practices and effects. Each essay uses feminist frameworks to highlight how more traditional tropes of gender eschew the complexities of gender and migration. In tackling this problem, this collection offers students and researchers of migration a more nuanced understanding of the topic.

At the turn of the new millenium, war, political oppression, desperate poverty, environmental degradation and disasters, and economic underdevelopment are sharply increasing the ranks of the world's twenty million forced migrants. In this volume, eighteen scholars provide a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary look beyond the statistics at the experiences of the women, men, girls, and boys who comprise this global flow, and at the highly gendered forces that frame and affect them. In theorizing gender and forced migration, these authors present a set of descriptively rich, gendered case studies drawn from around the world on topics ranging from international human rights, to the culture of aid, to the complex ways in which women and men envision displacement and resettlement.

This book follows the stories of forcefully displaced women and raises the question of whether we can still use the figuration of the nomadic subject in feminist theories and politics. This question is examined in the light of the ongoing global crises of mobility and severe border practices. In recounting their stories migrant and refugee women appear in the world as ‘who they are’ — unique and unrepeatable human beings —and not as ‘what they are’ —objectified ‘refugees’, ‘victims’ or ‘stateless subjects’. Women’s stories leave traces of their will to rewrite their exclusion from oppressive regimes, defend their choice of civil and patriarchal disobedience, grasp their passage, claim their right to have rights and affirm their determination for new beginnings. What emerges from the encounter between theoretical abstractions and women’s lived experiences is the need to decolonize feminist theories and make cartographies of mobility assemblages, wherein nomadism is a component of entangled relations and not a category or a figuration of a subject position. These stories that have now been collected, transcribed and analysed; they have created a rich archive of uprooted women’s experiences and have brought forward a wide range of new ideas that will be presented and discussed in the book: Decolonizing feminist theory Mobility assemblages and geographies of nomadism The art of listening to fragmented narratives and the labour of translation Crossing borders and inhabiting borderlands Radical solitude and radical hope Feminist genealogies of labour under conditions of forced displacement The force of political narratives through the figure of Antigone? Education for hope Imagining the non-nomad 4 narrated stories will also be presented in full interwoven in the theoretical discussions of the book, thus opening up a dialogic space between theoretical reflections and diffractions, and narratives of lived experiences.

A key development in international migration in recent years has been the increasing feminization of migrant populations. Research attention now focuses not only on the growing number of women on the move but also on their changing gender roles as more female migrants participate as principal wage earners and heads of household rather than as 'dependants'. The tensions between population displacement within and beyond Guatemala and the multiple local, regional and national realities encountered and reconfigured by these refugee and migrants allow a fascinating window onto the connections and ruptures experienced in a 'global/local world'. Transnational Ruptures holds great interest and value for a wide readership, from scholars who are interested in transnational and refugee studies and international migration, to upper level university students in disciplines such as human geography, anthropology, sociology, Latin American Studies, gender studies, political science and international studies.

The global landscape is dotted with border crossings that can be particularly perilous for displaced women with children in tow. These mothers are often described by their various legal statuses like refugee, migrant, immigrant, forced, or voluntary, but their lived experiences are more complex than a single label. Reclaiming Migrant Motherhood looks at literature, film, and original ethnographic research about the lived experiences of displaced mothers. This volume considers the context of the global refugee crisis, forced migration, and resettlement as backdrops for the representations and identity development of displaced women who mother. Situated within motherhood studies, this book is at the interdisciplinary intersection of literature, life writing, gender, (im)migration, refugee, and cultural studies. Contributors examine literary fiction, memoirs, and children’s literature by Ocean Vuong, Nadifa Mohamed, Laila Halaby, Susan Muaddi Darraj, Terry Farish, Thannha Lai, Bich Minh Nguyen, Julie Otsuka, V. V. Ganeshananthan, Shankari Chandran, and Mary Anne Mohanraj. The book also explores ethnographic research, creative writing, and film related to refugee studies. The border-crossings discussed in the volume are often physical, with stories from Afghanistan, Syria, Vietnam, Japan, Iraq, Canada, Greece, Somalia, Palestine, Sri Lanka, and America. The borders that displaced mothers face are examined through frameworks of postcolonialism, nationalism, feminism, and diaspora studies.