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Spatializing Social Difference 1

Rachel Silvey
University of Colorado

This article provides a review of the contributions that the discipline of

geography is making to gender and migration research. In geographic
analyses of migration, gender differences are examined most centrally in
relation to specific spatialities of power. In particular, feminist geographers
have developed insight into the gender dimensions of the social construc-
tion of scale, the politics of interlinkages between place and identity, and
the socio-spatial production of borders. Supplementing recent reviews of
the gender and migration literature in geography, this article examines the
potential for continued cross-fertilization between feminist geography and
migration research in other disciplines. The advances made by feminist
geographers to migration studies are illustrated through analysis of the
findings and debates tied to the subfield’s central recent conceptual
interventions.

INTRODUCTION

Recent decades have witnessed a multidisciplinary insistence on the centrality

of space to the social theoretic agenda (Gupta and Ferguson, 1992; Mahler and
Pessar, 2001; Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan, 2003). As the discipline which
concerns itself most centrally with understanding spatial relationships, geography
has been crucial to the debates animating this renaissance (Harvey, 1989; Soja,
1989; Lefebvre, 1991; Watts, 1992; Smith and Katz, 1993; Massey, 1994). Yet
geography’s specific contributions to the conceptualization of space, place,
scale, and migration are often left only partially specified in work outside of
the discipline. Here, I argue that engagement with the feminist geography
literature, and with the growing body of feminist geographic migration
research in particular, can help further specify both some key tenets of recent

1
I would like to thank Patricia Pessar and the anonymous reviwers for valuable feedback, as well
as the Social Science Research Council International Migration Program’s establishment and
support of the Working Group on Gender and Migration, and the funding for the working
group that was provided by the Mellon Foundation. My research has been funded by the
National Science Foundation (BCS: 0422976) and the Fulbright New Century Scholars
Program (2004–2005), and that support is greatly appreciated.

© 2006 by the Center for Migration Studies of New York. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1747-7379.2006.00003.x

64 IMR Volume 40 Number 1 (Spring 2006):64–81

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geographic theory as well as the relevance of these debates to interdisciplinary

research on gender and migration.
Feminist studies of migration have contributed to reworking a range of
canonical approaches to the structures, scales, subjects, and spatial logics at the
foundation of geographic migration research. At the center of this work is
attention to the roles that gender and other social differences play in shaping
unequal geographies of mobility, belonging, exclusion, and displacement. Feminist
migration studies pivot around understanding the social and spatial dimensions
of mobility associated with – now axiomatically – gender, citizenship, race, class,
nation, sexuality, caste, religion, and disability (for reviews, see Kofman et al.,
2000; Willis and Yeoh, 2000). This body of research approaches spatial mobility
as interconnected in its meaning and operation to changes in the economic and
cultural landscapes of which mobility is understood to be a constitutive part.
Extensive reviews exist of the gender and migration literature in geography
and other disciplines (Chant, 1992; Kofman and England, 1997; Boyle and
Halfacree, 1999; Kofman et al., 2000; Momsen, 1999; Willis and Yeoh, 2000;
Silvey, 2004). By way of supplementing these reviews, the emphasis here is on
the specific ways that feminist geography aims to augment interdisciplinary
conversations on gender and migration. In geographic analyses of migration,
social refractions are examined most centrally in relation to specific spatialities
of power (Leitner, 1997; Staeheli, 1999; Lawson, 2002). Geographic research
on gender and migration asks how relations of gender, as these intersect with
race, class, and other differences, are developed and navigated through spatial
mobility. Research examines, for instance, how African-American women’s
limited spatial mobility serves not only as a constraint, but also as a resource,
on their economic security – in ways that are specific to them as a social group
(Gilbert, 1998). Analysis of such examples, detailed further later in this paper,
also points to some ways in which attention to the gender politics of space and
mobility can enrich critical theorizations of power (Nagar et al., 2002;
Mitchell, Marston, and Katz, 2003). That is, if African-American women can
use their spatial rootedness in a community to their advantage, this suggests
that pre-given conceptions of mobility as power and immobility as oppression
require further investigation.2

2
This is a geographic parallel to the sociological insight about ethnic enclave economies
operating not only to limit the opportunities of their members, but also to provide distinct
benefits, such as discounts and free services, to people living within the enclaves. Feminists have
furthered these observations to point out that the costs and benefits of social network
membership are internally differentiated by gender (Menjívar, 2000).
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Feminist geographic migration research makes several primary conceptual

contributions.3 Specifically, feminist geographers have developed insight into
the gender dimensions of the social construction of scale, the politics of
interlinkages between place and identity, and the socio-spatial production of
borders. The potential for continued cross-fertilization between feminist
geography and migration research in other disciplines is evident in the debates
circulating around these conceptual interventions, each of which is examined
in detail in the following sections.

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF SCALE

Since its inception as an imperial discipline, geography has been concerned with
questions of scale, though the questions themselves have changed substantially
over time. The earliest geographers focused on cartographic scale, or “the rela-
tionship between the distance on a map and the corresponding distance on the
ground” (Marston, 2000:220). Scale, as a measure, mattered most for the
mapmakers involved in charting and dividing new territories for imperial expansion
(Bell, Butlin, and Heffernan, 1995). The drive for territorial control and
accumulation lay behind the quest for cartographic accuracy, and geographers
of the colonial era played their roles as explorers and recorders, entrenched in the
production of geographies of dependence. The migrants involved in the
“fieldwork” required for the making of early maps were almost exclusively male,
and the epistemological and methodological orientations of geographic fieldwork
and exploration were intertwined with that era’s particular forms of patriarchy
and colonial domination (Blunt and Rose, 1994; Sparke, 1996; Phillips, 1997).
Colonial mapmakers relied, largely implicitly, on several additional
aspects of scale. First, geographic scale mattered, as it “refers to the spatial extent
of a phenomenon or a study” (Marston, 2000:220). The growth of the metro-
politan economies depended on managing the expanding spaces of intrusion
and extraction, meaning governance of the geographic aspect of scale was
essential to colonial rule. Second, the “[o]perational scale, which corresponds to
the level at which relevant processes operate” (p. 220, my emphasis), includes
conceptions of the national, regional, provincial, district, and local realms of

3
This review focuses on gender as a central analytic construct and in so doing delimits itself to
the research within the discipline that reflects this theoretical and substantive set of foci. There
is also a rich, extensive tradition that continues to evolve rapidly within population geography
that examines similar themes without a central emphasis on gender (for a review, see Gober and
Tyner, 2003).
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colonial intervention. Both of these dimensions of scale were commonsensical

at the time, and without being named as such, each was a component of E. G.
Ravenstein’s geographic approaches to gender and migration.
In the midst of the high colonial period, Ravenstein (1976) wrote his
seminal geographic work, “The Laws of Migration.” The assumptions that he
made about scale remain influential in much research on gender and migration
today. Among several other general laws, he posited that females migrate more
frequently than males within their country of birth, but are less likely to move
further afield. In this framework, the national scale features as an important
container of women’s mobility. Gender, meanwhile, is reduced to biological
sex, thereby naturalizing, rather than questioning, the gender constructions
tied to specific short- and long-distance migrations and the relative frequency
and rationales behind women’s and men’s particular travels.
Ravenstein also stated that males are overall more mobile than females,
with the exception that women in Europe made more numerous short journeys
than men.4 The evidence on which he based this argument was thin for coun-
tries beyond Europe, and more recent research suggests that his conclusions
were likely inaccurate for many former colonies (Sharpe, 2001). In that his laws
reflected the dichotomization of European versus non-European spaces that
was commonplace at the time, he participated in circulating the Eurocentric
geographic imaginary fundamental to colonial power (Blaut, 1993). Moreover,
his view that males are more mobile overall than females reflects his gendered
assumptions about which scales of mobility – cartographically, geographically,
operationally, and in terms of resolution – most matter. In particular, the daily
forms of mobility that made up the majority of women’s mobility did not
count in his definition of migration. The point here is not that Ravenstein’s
definitions were exclusive. Rather, his definitions were selectively exclusive of
the types of mobility in which women most participated. Underlying this
approach were gendered productions of a hierarchy of scales in which “larger,”
“higher” scales, such as the national and international, were coded as masculine
arenas, and “smaller” scales, such as the household and the body, were largely
ignored and implicitly coded as feminine.
Ravenstein’s assumptions about scale matched those in most pre-feminist
geographic research on migration. As a corrective, a primary concern of early
feminist research has been to make women and women’s activities, as well as

4
The temporal assumption built into law-like statements is permanence or timelessness. A
historicization of Ravenstein’s laws would reveal that they were specific descriptions of a point
in time and also reflective of his particular sociogeographic positioning.
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the scales at which they occur, empirically visible. Prior to feminist interven-
tions, the household was perceived as a unified unit and scale of decision
making, and the differences in the ways that costs and benefits of migration
might accrue to women and men within households were not of analytical
importance (Willis and Yeoh, 2000). Unpacking the household, and analyzing
the hierarchies and power relations within it, has been at the heart of feminist
contributions to migration studies (Lawson, 1998). Geographers have explored
the construction of the scale of the household as it hinges on the spatialized
interplay between patriarchal structures and the agency of gendered subjects
(Chant, 1998; Marston and Smith, 2001; Mattingly, 2001). Thus, whereas osten-
sibly gender-neutral theorizations of the household viewed it as the migration
decision making unit, feminist geographers have asked how gender and age
hierarchies within households shape migration patterns (Chant, 1992).
Feminist geographers have emphasized the gender-specific material
consequences of particular constructions of scale. The household, for instance,
takes on its place-specific meanings through the social practices defining
domesticity, tensions around the boundaries separating public and private,
meanings of kinship relations, norms of sexuality, and the relationships between
various work and caring spaces (Bondi and Rose, 2003; Mitchell, Marston, and
Katz, 2003). “There is,” as Neil Smith (1992:73) writes, “nothing ontologically
given about the traditional division between home and locality, urban and
regional, national and global scales.” The gendered and political distinctions
between the household and, for instance, the local labor market are inseparable
from the social practices forging the meanings of these scales. Thus, the
gendered selectivity and motivations of migrants into particular segments of a
labor market depend on spatial entailments which reflect and contribute to the
lower value ascribed to feminized work (Pratt, 2004).
Over time, the meanings of scale are contested and reformulated, a point
that is particularly salient to research on gender and migration in the contem-
porary context of globalization (Staeheli, 1999). Liberal feminists, beginning
in the 1970s, tended to argue that women’s generalized subordination “within
the household” could be challenged through women’s greater involvement in
wage labor (Chant, 1992). The liberal feminist hope driving this research
rested on the idea that women’s migration into the “public” sphere would
translate into women’s liberation, power, and freedom (Freeman, 2004).
Challenging and extending these early views, antiracist feminist geographers
have underscored the colonial, national, and racial-ethnic politics of domestic
spaces and the household scale (Aitken, 2000; Mattingly, 2001). They have
demonstrated that households are not only sites of gender subordination, but
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can be spaces within which women of color in particular may find some refuge
from the exploitation, harassment, or indignity they face on the job or in
“public” (Martin and Mohanty, 1986). Thus the “household” scale is con-
structed differently for and by different groups of women, and it is produced
in conjunction with historically specific racial and national migration patterns
(Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2002; Pratt, 2004). Feminist geographers
have also recently begun to contribute to understanding the “global” and the
“transnational,” as elaborated further below.

PLACE AND IDENTITY

Geography’s approach to scale is paralleled in the discipline’s theorization of

place and identity in the gender and migration literature. Historically, most
migration research in the discipline focused on mobility behavior as the key
outcome to be explained, and little work examined questions of identity in
relation to mobility. In recent decades, by contrast, feminists have emphasized
the differences within and between groups, the ways these differences inflect
individuals’ and groups’ identities, and the implications of these differences
and their definitions in particular places (Nagel, 2002). Further, rather than
seeing identities as fixed definable characteristics of migrants, geographers have
increasingly emphasized the co-constructed nature of identities and places and
the ongoing nature of this process (McDowell, 1999; Bondi et al., 2002).
Feminist geographers have focused particular attention on the ways in
which power is manifest in and through the identities of migrant and
immigrant “communities.” For instance, Claire Dwyer (1999, 2000) has
examined the meanings of belonging to a “Muslim community” among
second-generation British Muslim South Asian women. Dwyer’s work shows
that gender relations, and women as iconic bearers of culture, are intrinsic to
forging and refashioning community identities over time. The younger
generation of immigrant women positions itself on the relative margins of their
parents’ “Muslim community.” Their social repositioning in contrast to the
position of their parents as social “others” in the UK both reflects and contrib-
utes to producing the changing meanings of the UK as a “multicultural” place.
The younger generation presents itself as distinct from the religious and ethnic
community gender norms of their parents, and in so doing they multiply the
identifications associated with the place. Rebecca Elmhirst (2000) also argues
that gender formations are critical for understanding migrants’ ethnic identities.
Specifically, she details the ways that the migration practices associated with
Indonesia’s transmigration program have promoted ruptures in the state’s
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notions of “Javanese” femininity. She distinguishes between the complexities of

gendered identity among transmigrants themselves and the Indonesian state’s
homogeneous notion of the Javanese woman. In both of these studies, migrant
groups’ identities are viewed as produced within place-based contexts of power
relations and “community” politics that shape and are shaped by the gender-
differentiated possibilities of migration and ethnicity.
Recently, enriching and complementing research on identity, geographers
with feminist sympathies have examined the transposition of particular dis-
courses into gendered forms of biopolitics and internalized governmentality.
Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan (2003:193) focus on specific groups of
circular migrants “who through their travels and travails, often acquire
political sensibilities that are strategically expressed in their places of origin
as a ‘body politics.’” These scholars base their approach to “body politics” on
the theoretical work of feminists who argue that bodies are not “natural objects,
prior to culture” (p. 193). For migration scholars, feminist theories of corpo-
realization raise questions about how and why particular time-spaces are coded
as dangerous for women’s bodies to enter, and how women’s and men’s bodies
perform and materialize fear or disorder in specific places.
Inasmuch as women are often “othered” at night or in “public” spaces,
for instance, it can be more threatening for them to travel alone, after dark
(Listerborn, 2002), enter into the city (Wilson, 1991; Bondi and Rose,
2003), or migrate into a frontier zone of economic development (Wright,
2004). The social costs of mobility as transgression tend then to be subjectified
in women’s bodies more than men’s, sometimes via ailments such as agora-
phobia (Davidson, 2002) and eating disorders (Bordo, 1993). Geographic
research thus highlights the ways in which the gendered meanings of
embodiment are linked to specific social orders of emplacement (Cresswell,
1996, 1999; Domosh and Seager, 2001; Mountz, 2004). Put another way,
the structures of gender, race, and class play into determining whose bodies
belong where, how different social groups subjectively experience various
environments (e.g., who feels safe in “public” places, powerful in alleyways,
at home in red-light districts, afraid in the suburbs, or “in place” in the
central city), and what sorts of exclusionary and disciplinary techniques are
applied to specific bodies (e.g., regulations against “loitering” that label
homeless peoples’ bodies “out of place”). These arguments revolve most gener-
ally around the question of who has the power to define a place as accessible to
whom, how various social groups experience places as inclusive or exclusive of
them and others, and how the regulation of space reflects and reinforces the
privileges and interests of some groups over others.
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Geography focuses on the ways in which migrants are policed through

gendered places. For instance, Brenda Yeoh, Shirlena Huang, and Katie Willis
(Huang and Yeoh, 1996; Yeoh and Huang, 1998, 1999, 2000; Yeoh and Willis,
1999) explore questions of transnational migrant identity as they play out in
tension with national imaginaries. They point out that Singaporean national
identity has been reshaped in response to the high numbers of migrants on work
contracts from many nations both entering and leaving the country. Their analyses
investigate the recursive relationships between gender identities, racialized
hierarchies, (trans)national processes, and the shifting meanings of home as these
are retrenched through changing migration patterns. As geographers, their
emphasis is on clarifying the ways that place matters in migration. Place, for
these scholars, is not taken to be a backdrop on which to explore other migration
dynamics. Rather, place itself is a process that makes and is made by migration.
Migration research that centers on questions of gendered places and
identities views the migrant as produced through a range of intersecting
forces and processes, and emphasizes the human agency migrants have in the
production of places and identities. Feminist geography aims to take seriously
migrants’ own interpretations of place and self as lenses which, albeit partial
and interpretively complex, can reveal important aspects of the ways that
broader structures are mediated into particular distillations of place and self
(Tyner, 2004). Further, through understanding migrants’ socially differenti-
ated identity and subjectivity formation processes as central to the pressures
shaping migration, this work supplements economic formulations of push/pull
factors. For instance, rather than taking wage differentials between regions, or
differences in regional labor markets, as the question driving their research,
Hanson and Pratt (1995) examine how the gender “typing” of particular
occupations is wrapped up in the spatial expectations and behaviors ascribed
to gender (and class and ethnicity). In a now classic study of Worcester,
Massachusetts, they explore the gender- and race-specific segmentation of
labor markets as produced, importantly, by spatial differences in employers’
and potential employees’ social networks. They find that employer searches
are spatially circumscribed to fit their expectations of the location of their
preferred applicants, and potential employees also inhabit and access spatially
and socially circumscribed networks. Together, these sociospatial limitations
contribute to reinforcing the exclusion of women and people of color from
the higher-wage jobs with better working conditions. By interviewing both
employers and employees, they are able to get at the gender identities and
gendered productions of place underlying spatial divisions of labor and by
extension the gendered mobility patterns tied to labor market restructuring.
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THE SOCIOSPATIAL PRODUCTION OF BORDERS AND

BOUNDARIES

Most conventional migration scholarship in geography implicitly conceptualizes

borders as empirical delineations across which to measure and define migration
(Hyndman, 2000). Feminist geographers, by contrast, make borders them-
selves the focus of investigation and examine the socially specific processes tied
to their development (Nagar, 1998, 2002; Bailey et al., 2002; Yeoh, Charney,
and Kiong, 2003). The edges and entry points of the nation, the region, or the
body are seen to refract geohistorically specific social cleavages and power
relations (Cresswell, 1996; Nagel, 2002). In this work, borders, like scales, are
understood to be shaped fundamentally by gender and difference (Marston,
2000; Hyndman, 2001; Boyle, 2002).
Geographers investigate the ways in which the boundaries of particular
places and the sociospatial networks of capital and human mobility are devel-
oped in tandem with specific gendered social agendas. For instance, Jennifer
Hyndman (2000) puts forth a framework that she terms “the geopolitics of
mobility” in which she juxtaposes the hypermobility of capital flows with the
relative immobility of people. Specifically, she is interested in examining the flows
of humanitarian aid across international borders with the general spatial
entrapment of displaced people in refugee camps (Hyndman, 2000:30). There
is, she points out, a variable porosity of borders, and the unequal geographies of
spatial control reflected and created through these borders are intertwined with
social hierarchies of gender, race, nation, and class. Hyndman’s work shows how
the multiply differentiated capacities of social groups to choose mobility, direct
flows of capital, or control space are reinforced through the political hierarchies
and boundaries separating aid providers and clients in the “refugee industry.”
Rather than examining women refugees per se, Hyndman’s project traces
the ways in which the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
(UNHCR) “manages difference among groups of displaced people” (2000:63)
and the implicit and explicit gender geographies of UNHCR policy. She puts
forth a transnational feminist framework that she argues can move past such
dualized gendered notions of space and subjectivity, and explores the emanci-
patory potential of building alliances across social differences and across
borders. Her approach thus parallels that of other geographic scholarship in
that it highlights the complex spatial politics of gendered and otherwise
differentiated mobility (Devasahayam et al., 2004).
Feminist geographers aim to contribute to understanding the ways in
which gender and difference are spatially interpolated in distinct geohistorical
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contexts. Research examines the constitution and fixing of particular borders

at specific historical moments. For instance, Melissa Wright (1997, 1998,
1999, 2004) examines the changing political geographies of gender in the
maquiladora town of Ciudad Juárez. Specifically, she examines the spatial
practices and processes through which low-income women are erased and
devalued. She traces the high rates of rape and murder of women in the border
zones between various historically containing spaces. She demonstrates the
ways that migration to the factories and “into transnational circuits of capital
investment … [is tied to the production of these women’s] bodies as low quality
– as the personification of waste” (Wright, as cited in Pratt and Yeoh,
2003:160). The devaluation of migrant women factory workers, and the low
wages that are rationalized through their devaluation, function in support of
global capital accumulation. Her analysis illustrates powerfully the high cost
paid by women in the border zone, and the high profits made by others, in the
context of women migrants’ border crossings.
Applying feminist geography’s insights to migration studies entails a re-
reading of borders and their relationship to mobility processes (see Hyndman,
2001). Furthering feminist conceptualizations of borders as processes
structured by gender and difference, it is possible to examine how migration
is governed through a multiplicity of border crossings and fortifications.
Further, it is possible to recognize that borders not only play a role in organ-
izing migration, but are themselves shaped through political action and
mobility processes that are also organized by gender and difference. Future
feminist migration research can further explore the implications of these
critiques for understanding how the power relations tied to borders and the
knowledge that is produced about borders play into the social differentiation
of mobility.

SPATIALIZING GENDER AND MIGRATION STUDIES

Geography is not of course the only discipline that critically examines scale,
boundaries, space, and place. But because geographers take these issues to be
of central concern, it is here that the discipline has most to offer. In particular,
geography’s explicit attention to the gendered social construction of spatiality
can enrich interdisciplinary approaches to the study of gender and migration.
Scholars from other disciplines may build on the work reviewed here to ask
critical questions about the gender politics of their own discipline’s spatial
logics and implicit geographic theorizations. My goal here has not been to
suggest that geography is uniquely suited to examine these issues, but rather to
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provide an overview of some key contributions from within feminist

geography to the growing body of gender and migration literature.
As this interdisciplinary literature continues to expand, there are several
geographic points that deserve further attention. First, feminist and critical
geographers have underscored the point that scales are not empirically
identifiable categories through which to understand push and pull factors
(for a review, see Brown and Lawson, 1985). Rather, scale is a framing device.
Feminist geographic migration research is specifically interested in analyzing
the power-laden, socially constructed, and gender- and difference-inflected nature
of spatial scales (Hyndman and Walton-Roberts, 2000; Marston, 2000; Tyner,
2000; Nagar et al., 2002). Rather than understanding the international,
national, regional, or household scales as the spatial categories within and across
which migration processes play out, gender and migration research examines
the construction of scale itself as the focus of inquiry. A primary goal of this
work is to disentangle the politics of gender, race, and class to uncover how these
structures shape both the knowledge that is produced about scale (e.g., whose
nation and whose national boundaries; for whom is something of “global”
importance and who gets to decide; what is viewed as worthy of the label
“macro-scale”) as well as the dynamics and meanings of scale in practice (e.g.,
the WTO does wield power over international trade agreements; the WHO does
determine the scope of necessary health interventions for much of the world).
Critical analysis of dominant scale discourses allows investigation of the
assumptions and power relations that are embedded in standard geopolitical
views of scale, a project that “is important precisely because such assumptions
define research questions, shape government policies, and generate common
frames of reference” (Hyndman and Walton-Roberts, 2000:246). The rights of
migrant domestic workers, for instance, can be framed as a “global issue,” a
“women’s issue,” or an issue that is primarily a result of the “national economic
needs” of low-income countries. Migrant domestic workers’ rights are also
often located in the “private” spaces of homes, and subsequently viewed as
beyond the scope of national or international jurisdiction. In discourses that
consider migrants’ rights primarily “local” rather than “global,” abuse tends to
be construed as the responsibility of the individual migrant, her family, or her
nation of origin. When migrants’ issues are presented as global issues, the
global stage may be opened up as an arena, a scale, and a political space, through
which to confront the migration issues that involve sending and receiving
communities. On the other hand, “going global” does not necessarily or solely
promote an issue in the way early advocates may hope. Indeed, recent scholar-
ship on sex work and “trafficking” finds that the internationalization of the
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antitrafficking movement has brought with it a re-entrenchment of hierarchies

and exclusions based on race, class, and nation (Kempadoo, 2005).
Second, in addition to scale, geographers have contributed to theorizing
the gender politics of place as these are intertwined with identity. Across the
disciplines, the core geographic concerns of place, space, and mobility have
taken a more central substantive and analytical role in recent decades. Atten-
tion to the work of geographers can enrich these debates. In particular, there is
potential for further interdisciplinary discussion of the geographic understand-
ing of place as process (Massey, 1994), rather than site or location, and the rela-
tional production of identities in conjunction with places (Keith and Pile,
1993). In addition, the strong tradition within geography of Marxian political-
economic analysis of spatial fixities (for a review, see Sheppard, 2004) lends
itself well to understanding the spatial politics of gendered place and identity
production in migration studies. Most fundamentally, feminist geographers
ask migration researchers to see not only gender identities as social construc-
tions in the making, but also to critically examine the ways in which places
themselves come into being in part as a result of gender, race, class, and other
social relations moving through and locating in those places. The sex work dis-
trict in Bangkok (Phat Phong), for example, takes on its allure and its stigma,
its meaning as a site of livelihood generation, and its international fame in the
context of historically layered gendered, raced, and classed migrations. Phat
Phong is produced in the context of centuries of Orientalist fantasies about
Asian women’s sexuality (Manderson and Jolly, 1997); it was a rest stop for mostly
male, American troops headed to battle in Vietnam (Ryan and Robinson, 1998);
and is today the main destination for low-income women (and men) seeking
to supplement their families’ incomes (Mills, 1999). The meanings ascribed to
Phat Phong as a place then influence who migrates there, for what purposes,
and with what consequences for their bodies, their identities, their national
military or economic goals, and their position within the global economy.
Third, feminist analyses of borders and boundaries can help to under-
stand the relationships between migration, the operation of power, and the
construction of social order. Attention to feminist geographic theory can move
questions about borders beyond essentialist formulations of lines drawn on
maps, without forgetting the embodied, often bloody ramifications of milita-
rized border zones on the ground. Gender and migration researchers may
draw on the work of feminist geographers to push forward the analysis of these
complexities of gender formation by examining the ways they are tied to migra-
tion. In particular, this suggests the importance of continuing and expanding
analyses of the roles of gender and difference in making the politics of borders,
76 I M R

and understanding how these shape national, militarized, and imagined

borders integral to defining migrants’ embodied experiences.
Having argued for the specific contributions that geography can and is
making to the study of gender and migration, it is worth repeating that these
observations are by no means the exclusive domain of the discipline. Further,
the examples selected to illustrate debates within geography are not aimed at
defining the discipline. Rather, the themes and examples drawn out in this
essay are directed towards the invigoration of interdisciplinary dialogue.
Through persistent engagement with debates about the social construction of
scale, the relationships between place and identity, and the politics of borders
and boundaries, feminist migration studies may contribute to more complete
and accurate scholarship, and hopefully also in some small way to more equi-
table lived geographies of mobility.

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