Progress in Human Geography 28,4 (2004) pp.

1 –17

Power, difference and mobility:

feminist advances in migration
studies
Rachel Silvey
Department of Geography, Box 260, University of Colorado, Boulder,
CO 80309-0269, USA

Abstract: The feminist migration literature in geography has contributed to bringing several
critical social theoretical themes to the forefront of migration studies. Specifically, feminists
have foregrounded the politics of scale, mobility as political process, questions of subjectivity/
identity and critical theorizations of space and place. This article provides an overview of the
feminist migration literature organized around these themes. In addition, it argues that
feminist migration studies can play a pivotal role in the ongoing project of marrying the
materialist concerns of political economy to those of critical social theorists.

Key words: feminist, migration, social theory, mobility, scale, politics.

I Introduction

The recent history of feminist migration research in geography has mirrored the cen-
tral advances in feminist theory more broadly (Women and Geography Study Group,
1997; Seager and Domosh, 2001). Specifically, early feminist migration research
aimed to correct for the neglect of women’s specific migration patterns and experi-
ences (for a review, see Willis and Yeoh, 2000), while more recently studies have
examined the implications of the intersections between gender and other axes of
difference for understanding migration (for a review, see Kofman et al., 2000). Yet
feminist migration research has done more than reflect transitions in feminist theory.
As a body of work, it has developed innovative theoretical approaches for exploring
the power relations enmeshed in the changing migration patterns and processes
associated with post-1989 economic globalization (Nagar et al., 2002). As a result, it

# Arnold 2004 10.1191/0309132504ph490oa

2 Power, difference and mobility: feminist advances in migration studies

has helped to explain the political dynamics driving the feminization of both internal
and international migration flows, as well as the absolute and proportional increase
of women of color participating in global migration flows in recent decades
(Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1999).
Feminist geographers have interrogated the political meanings ascribed to
migration and their relationships to ‘work’ and place. They have investigated the
operation of regimes of power that underwrite the gender divisions of mobility
and global labor as these play out in export-orientated manufacturing (e.g., Cravey,
1998; Wright, 1997), domestic service (Pratt, 1997; Momsen, 1999), sex work (Law,
2000) and escort and entertainment work (Truong, 1996; Tyner, 1996; 1997). Arguing
that the domestic, sexual and intergenerational construction of social reproduction as
‘women’s work’ has been tied to its devaluation and coding as nonwork (Lawson,
1999), feminist geographers have examined the gendered and recialized construc-
tions of cleaning and caretaking in the context of international reductions in public
support for such labor (Katz, 2001a; Sassen, 2002). Their research has shown that
ascriptions of particular activities as work, divisions of labor and the politics of
labor market hierarchies are inseparable from the processes shaping socially differ-
entiated migration patterns, regulations and experiences (outside of geography,
see also Constable, 1997; 2003; Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2003; Kempadoo and
Doezema, 1998; Parrenas, 2001; Mills, 1999; 2003; Sassen, 1998, especially Chapters
5 and 6; 2001).
Feminist geography has also explored the ways that these gendered and otherwise
differentiated processes of work and migration are interwoven with other broadly
based social dynamics. Specifically, research has paid attention to the connections
between socially differentiated migration processes and the production of national-
ism and citizenship (e.g., Yeoh and Willis, 1999; Kofman and England, 1997), the
enforcement of social and spatial boundaries defining race and ethnicity (e.g.,
Nagar, 1998; Fincher, 1997; England and Steill, 1997), social control based on
norms of sexuality (e.g., Binnie, 1997; Tyner and Houston, 2000), the construction
of categories of belonging, exclusion and identity in particular places (e.g., Lawson,
2000; Dwyer, 1999; Yeoh and Huang, 2000) and the social and spatial dynamics of
diasporic communities (Dwyer, 2000; Elmhirst, 2000; Huang et al., 2000; Lloyd
Evans and Bowlby, 2000; Silvey, 2000a; Tyner and Kuhlke, 2000; Yeoh and Huang,
2000; Zhou, 2000). It has thus begun to explore not only the ways that gender and
difference shape migration but also the roles that migration plays in shaping social
orders, geographies of inequality, spatialized subjectivities and the meanings of
difference across scales.
The research I discuss here reflects the growing conceptual repertoire of feminist
geography as it applies to studies of migration, immigration and spatial mobility.
Rather than provide an exhaustive review of the gender and migration literature,
which can be found elsewhere (Willis and Yeoh, 2000; Kofman et al., 2000;
Chant, 1992; Momsen, 1999; Boyle and Halfacree, 1999), I focus on four major
themes – specifically, questions about the politics of scale, mobility as political process,
place and space, and subjectivity/identity – that I argue are at the theoretical center of
feminist contributions to the subfield. Through attention to the feminist research
focused on these concerns, I explore the contributions that this work has made to
the broader project of linking critical theory to migration studies (Graham, 2000;
Graham and Boyle, 2001; Longhurst, 2002; Tyner, 2004; White and Jackson, 1995).
 Rachel Silvey 3

While much recent migration research that engages with critical social theory may
not consider itself feminist per se, its foci overlap with those of feminist geography
(Longhurst, 2002; Graham, 2000), and feminist migration research occupies a cut-
ting-edge place in this work (Boyle, 2002). In tracing this work,1 my intent is not
to outline limiting categorizations of any particular piece or theme, but rather to
underscore the relevance of this body of feminist migration research to broader
debates in geography. Indeed, most of the research reviewed here speaks in some
way to each of the themes discussed, and each study signals progress in the field
as well as promising directions for future work in feminist migration studies.

II The politics of scale

There is widespread attention within contemporary geography to the politics of scale

(for recent reviews, see, for example, Kelly, 1999; Herod and Wright, 2002). Marxian
geographic examinations of the political construction of scale (e.g., Smith, 1992;
Swyngedouw, 1997) have shown that scales are not pre-given entities. Rather, scale
is socially constructed, and its meanings come into being through, and are pro-
ductive of, sociospatial hierarchies and processes. Parallel to this broader concern,
feminist migration research is specifically interested in analyzing the power-laden,
socially constructed and gender- and difference-inflected nature of spatial scales
(Marston, 2000; Nagar et al., 2002; Hyndman and Walton-Roberts, 2000; Tyner, 2000).
Historically, most migration scholarship conceptualized scales as empirically
identifiable categories through which to understand push and pull factors (for a
review, see Brown and Lawson, 1985). Neoclassical migration research focuses on
both micro- and macroeconomic processes to examine and predict migration pat-
terns within and between nations, from rural to urban areas, and between regions
(for a review, see Massey et al., 1993). This work has been careful to delineate the defi-
nitions of particular scales, and has provided a wealth of information about the link-
ages between economic change and migration flows. But the scales of analysis at the
heart of neoclassical studies of migration are understood as the spatial categories
within and across which migration processes play out, and are not themselves the
focus of inquiry. Neoclassical migration research does not address questions about
the political or gender-specific processes tied to the construction of scale.
In contrast to neoclassical approaches, feminist migration research is centrally con-
cerned to disentangle the politics of gender and difference as they shape both the
knowledge that is produced about scale and the dynamics and meanings of scale
in practice. Hyndman (2001), for example, argues that a 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 pre-
cisely because such assumptions define research questions, shape government poli-
cies, and generate common frames of reference’ (Hyndman and Walton-Roberts,
2000: 246). Feminist migration research investigates the construction and operation
of scales – including the body, the household, the region, the nation and suprana-
tional organizations – as processes tied to the politics of gender and difference.
Take the national scale. Neoclassical theorists view the nation as an objective scale,
and understand national economic conditions as the key forces prompting and inhi-
biting international migration (Massey et al., 1993). Feminists ask additional
4 Power, difference and mobility: feminist advances in migration studies

questions about the nation and migration, most centrally the question ‘Whose
nation?’ As Yeoh and Huang (1999) argue, the national scale is produced through
social and political processes that privilege particular identities and exclude others
as national subjects. They critically examine the ways that the nation is founded
on notions of citizenship that both materially and symbolically exclude specific
women, in the case of their research migrant female domestic workers. They write:
‘By virtue of being a woman, a foreigner, a domestic, and a menial, not only is the
[migrant] “maid” in Singapore significantly excluded from the material spaces in
the public sphere but also her physical invisibility signals the lack of a foothold on
the metaphorical spaces opened up in recent public discourse on potentially more
inclusive notions of citizenship and civil society (Yeoh and Huang, 1999: 1164)’. In
focusing on these issues, they illustrate the ways in which the nation is constructed
in conjunction with gendered migration, as well as the ways in which this particular
view of the nation contributes to the marginalization of migrant women who work as
domestics in Singapore. They underscore the socially constructed and exclusionary
operation of the concept of the national scale, both as it applies to migration research
and as it operates in the lives of migrants (see also Huang and Yeoh, 1996).
Two further examples illustrate feminist contributions to rethinking the national
scale in migration studies. First, Radcliffe (1990) examines the ways in which national
identity is fortified through specific practices of incorporation and marginalization
directed at migrant women who work as domestic servants in urban Peru. She
details the processes that mark rural-urban migrant women as different from the pri-
vileged norm in terms of ethnicity and degrees of modernity. She explores the ways
in which the migrant women who cook, clean and care for the children in homes of
wealthier Peruvian urbanites are important to imagining the nation as their differ-
ence is used to symbolize the class, ethnic and gender relations central to Peruvian
nationhood. Secondly, Ruth Fincher (1997) addresses the ways in which Australian
immigration policy differentiates along the lines of gender, age and ethnicity, and
explores the ways that these crosscutting differences shape migration experiences
of different groups. While none of these feminist contributions to thinking about
the nation are primarily aimed at conversations with migration researchers, each
of them deals with migration. Each of them also shows that the processes of con-
structing the nation, and the meanings of the national scale, are connected to the poli-
tics of gender and difference as they play out in migration processes.
As with the example of the nation, feminist research has shown not only that pre-
vious conceptualizations of the household scale were blind to gender and difference,
but also that once the concept of the household was revised different questions could
begin to be addressed.2 For instance, in Costa Rica, Chant (1991) explores the role of
reproductive labor in shaping migration flows, finding that it played a more import-
ant role in determining household migration decisions than did pushes and pulls
associated with wage labor. Also critically examining the household scale, Mattingly
(2001) investigated the linkages between domestic divisions of labor and the class
structuring and racial-ethnic organization of the immigrant labor pool. She illustrates
the ways in which divisions of socially reproductive labor at the household scale are
shaped by racial and gender ideologies that themselves are forged in part through
international networks. She writes that for ‘immigrant domestic workers and their
employers, networks of caring labor interlace the home and the world’ (p. 384).
Her work demonstrates that, from a feminist perspective, migration processes
 Rachel Silvey 5

operating at one scale are understood in dynamic relation to, not in isolation from,
the gender relations forged at other scales. The household takes on its meanings
and composition through its members’ mobility and migrants’ interactions with
national, transnational and regional labor processes.
Most recently, feminist migration studies have begun to deal with the body as a
scale of analysis (Chan, 1999; Cresswell, 1999; Tyner and Houston, 2000; Tyner,
2004; and, for overviews of feminist work on the body, see Longhurst, 2001; Duncan,
1996; McDowell, 1999, especially Chapter 2; Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan, 2003).
In previous approaches to migration, the body was not interrogated as either concept
or scale. Migrants were conceived as disembodied actors responding rationally to
economic forces, as in neoclassical approaches, or acting in response to the politi-
cal-economic structures organizing their mobility, as in structuralist approaches.
Their responses were not understood as tied to corporeal experience as it is socially
differentiated. In structurationist migration work, human agency figures centrally
(Goss and Lindquist, 1995), but even from this perspective agency is disembodied,
understood in isolation from the views and experiences of different bodies. By con-
trast, feminist research argues that the body is a theoretically powerful starting point
from which to examine migration. For instance, Mountz (2001, as cited in Nagar et al.,
2002) shows that attention to corporeal geographies and migrants’ embodied experi-
ences can reveal the racialized and gendered containment practices of the state, and
goes further to explore the state itself as embodied. Geraldine Pratt (1998) also pays
theoretical attention to the body in examining Filipina domestic workers’ experience
of the material spaces of the homes in which they work, and how social differen-
tiation and thus the perpetuation of inequality is wrought through bodily practice
and discourses surrounding the body. This work contributes to migration studies
by adding attention to embodied subjectivities and the material and discursive
roles of migrant bodies in producing space, place and interscalar relations.
In revising gender-neutral approaches to scale, feminist migration research has
contributed to explaining both the role of difference in socially constructing spatial
and analytical scales, as well as the various gendered meanings of the scales through
which the dynamics of the causes, consequences and experiences of migration are
played out. Attention to the national scale as gendered, and concern with the politics
of scales both finer and coarser than the national scale allows for the conceptualiz-
ation of relational linkages between bodies, households and the transnational sphere
(Nagar et al., 2002). A feminist focus on the politics of scale does more than note the
exclusion from migration studies of particular scales such as the body and the house-
hold. It develops understandings of these scales as integral to the analysis of mobility
and salient to the operation of forces and processes at those scales conventionally
viewed as most salient to migration such as the region and the nation. In so doing,
feminist migration studies break ground for retheorizations of the dynamics between
scales and the working of power within particular scales.

III Mobility as political process

In addition to rethinking the spatial scales and scalar relationships at the center of
migration studies, feminist geographers have contributed to advances in under-
standing spatial mobility as a social and political process. Much neoclassical and
6 Power, difference and mobility: feminist advances in migration studies

structuralist research views migration as a discrete event, or, as in studies of circular

migration, a series of discrete events. The migration event is examined for the eco-
nomic or geopolitical forces that led to its occurrence and timing (for reviews, see
Massey et al., 1998; Castles and Miller, 1998). These forces are not analyzed in relation
to gender, and they thereby implicitly inscribe a set of unmarked masculinist
assumptions about the nature of political-economic change and the significance of
migration (Nagar et al., 2002). Specifically, for instance, little attention is paid to
the divisions of childcare or housekeeping labor that structure gendered migration
possibilities, because in most nonfeminist research on migration such ‘private’
work is assumed to be less important than formal sector wage-work in shaping
mobility (Pratt and Yeoh, 2003).
By contrast, feminist theorists have focused on the gender politics of identity con-
struction, and the complex relationships between identity and the production of
migration and place. Feminists conceive of the socially differentiated migration pro-
cess not just as an outcome of gendered processes, but as part and parcel of the var-
ious gender politics of migrants’ lives and broader political and economic processes.
To examine migration as a political process is to question the economism central to
much migration research, to ask what interests are served when certain groups of
people migrate for particular purposes, and to uncover the power relations that
underpin the migration flows and experiences of specific social groups. For example,
Tyner (1994; 1997) analyzes the ways that gendered migration from the Philippines is
socially constructed. His research examines how the categories of ‘immigrant’,
‘woman’ and ‘Filipina’ work to shape the patterns, experiences and political pro-
cesses of Filipina immigration. Focusing on the discourses constructing Filipina
migrants, his research highlights the political nature of mobility itself and of the
social dynamics tied to it. Tying feminist analysis to broader social theoretical con-
cerns, Pratt (1997) examines the stereotypes of Filipina and British nannies in Van-
couver, Canada, and the ambivalence and inconsistencies in the discourses that
employment agents circulate about these migrant workers. She argues that within
the instability of the stereotypes it may be possible to unsettle the fixed notions of
Filipina racial/national categories that inform much of the literature on migrant
domestic workers. Her work shows that mobility processes are not structured by
discourse through a simple causal logic, but rather that the politics of mobility and
domestic work are influenced by multiple, complex, ongoing processes of ideolo-
gical contestation and production (see also Tyner, 2004).
A further example is Binnie’s research (1997) that focuses on the heteronormativity
of state immigration regulations, demonstrating the ways that the state polices citi-
zenship along the lines of sexuality. He finds that lesbian and gay couples are
excluded from full citizenship rights as a result of laws that exclude them from
the identities and relationships that the state denotes as normal and legitimate
(i.e., those based on bloodlines and marriage). Also examining immigration policies,
but from a transnational perspective, Walton-Roberts (2004) addresses migration
strategies and migration behavior linking the Punjab, India, and Vancouver, Canada.
She focuses on the social processes at work at both ends of the migration field, and
the ongoing transnational negotiations of marriage practices. Her analysis under-
scores the point that the key gender issues tied to migration, such as marriage and
state policies, are better understood as interlinked processes than as discrete events.
Her work shows that state regulations of immigration and marriage operates not just
 Rachel Silvey 7

in places, but across space through migration policy, and affect migrants in gender-
specific ways. Attention to the ways that race and gender relations influence
migration policy and practice reveals the fundamentally political nature of migration
processes.
Concern with the political dimensions of migration has also led to research that
works against understanding mobility exclusively in terms of transgressive,
agency-driven, potentially empowering moves (on rootedness in place, see Pratt
and Hanson, 1994). Hyndman’s work (2000) offsets this mobility-orientated thinking
by focusing on displacement. She examines the politics of humanitarian discourse
surrounding refugee resettlement, and the ways in which forced migration, as
well as efforts to ameliorate its consequences, limit the agency of refugees. An
additional study that also focuses on the range of nodes of power that structure
mobility and limit agency is Melissa Wright’s (1999) examination of the effects of
the construction of women workers in Mexico’s Maquiladora factories as ‘cheap’,
‘docile’ and disposable. Wright traces the ways that these stories contribute to ratio-
nalizing the high rates of murder and rape of factory women in the region, and in
later work (2001) explores the ways that a group of women activists organized its
message to reverse the devaluation of these women, and to confront the violence
that they face. For feminist migration studies, this work puts forth a complex reading
of power that refuses dualistic, structure/agency polarizations, and insists that mobi-
lity itself is enmeshed in the cultural struggles of migrants themselves as well as the
forces at work in controlling their mobility (see also Gibson et al., 2001). Each of these
examples of feminist migration research demonstrates the ways in which the politi-
cal processes that forge gendered difference are tied to spatial mobility, as well as
how spatial mobility itself is a political process (see also Leitner, 1997; Staeheli, 1999).

IV Space and place

Feminist geographers have been centrally involved in developing advances in the

theorization of place and space (Massey, 1994; McDowell, 1999). Historically, most
migration research has conceptualized the spaces through which migrants travel
in largely economistic terms with very little attention to the cultural struggles that
shape the meanings of spaces and migrants’ experiences of them (see Brown, 1991,
for a review). Migrants’ places have tended to be understood in terms of economic
pushes and pulls, and their boundaries have been addressed primarily as empiri-
cally identifiable distinctions rather than as political constructions in need of
interrogation (Silvey and Lawson, 1999). However, feminists, paralleling and extend-
ing recent work by political and cultural geographers (for overviews, see Agnew,
1998; Mitchell, 2000), have shifted the focus of questions about space and place in
migration studies towards more critical theoretical concerns.3
Several specific examples illustrate the central ways in which feminist studies of
migration have contributed to revising concepts of space and place. Analyzing social
boundaries as gender, race, religion and class inflect them, Richa Nagar (1998) has
examined the meanings of place among South Asian immigrants in Tanzania. She
details the ways in which the politics of immigrants’ social identity formation are
generated in tandem with the meaning of communal places. The categories of differ-
ence the organize place-based belonging and exclusion, and the ways in which
8 Power, difference and mobility: feminist advances in migration studies

immigrants are affected by these processes, are key questions in this work. In exam-
ining these processes in this way, Nagar rejects conceptions of place that are tied to
sociospatial fixity, yet continues to examine geographical specificity. Like Massey
(1999: 40), she is able to ‘re-imagine place . . . in a way [that is] i) not bounded ii) not
defined in terms of exclusivity iii) not defined in terms of an inside and an outside,
and iv) not dependent on false notions of an internally-generated authenticity’.
Secor (2002) develops a feminist angle on space as it is reworked through mobility.
She examines Turkish women’s various experiences of moving in and out of spaces
where the practice of veiling and women’s mobility are coded differently. Her work
shows that women’s decisions about veiling in relation to their mobility play a cen-
tral role in the production of particular spaces as more or less secular, Islamic, demo-
cratic and urban. She provides a nonessentialist understanding of gender identity
and the veil, and simultaneously reveals the gendered production of place as
process. She illuminates the ways that ‘[s]pace, whether sacred or profane, is not
produced in a vacuum, but rather through a web of cross-cutting power relations
that are themselves forged at multiple scales from the local to the global’ (Secor,
2002: 7). In her work, power operates in and through a range of scales and places
to generate particular meanings of space with distinct social norms attached to
them for specific social groups.
Lastly, Bailey, Wright, Miyares and Mountz (Wright et al., 2000; Bailey et al., 2002)
show that attention to the transnational social fields linking Salvadoran immigrants
in the USA to their families in El Salvador, and the gender roles embedded in these
networks in particular, leads to a deeper understanding of the multiple spaces that
shape these migrants’ experiences. Specifically, by examining migrants’ transna-
tional family duties, they ‘think anew about the localness of local labor markets’
(Wright et al., 2000: 273). They link the places of work, home and nation to under-
stand the complex ways in which citizenship status, gender roles and labor markets
interact (see also Mattingly, 2001). In this way, their work reflects Katz’s (2001b: 1214)
call for a topographical feminist approach which is based on ‘a detailed examination
of some part of the world . . . in order to understand its salient features and their
broader relationships’. They show how networks stretching across national borders
shape the local, and suggest how these networks contribute to constituting the
national and global politics of immigration. Focusing on the interlinked social and
spatial processes across scales moves feminist research away from the bounded con-
ceptions of place central to most conventional population geography, and towards a
greater appreciation of the politically constructed dimensions of space and place as
they operate in migrants’ lives.

V Identity and subjectivity

Until recently, most migration research did not examine migrants’ identities, and
focused instead on mobility behavior as the basis of theorization. Migrants’ behavior
was interpreted through the lenses of modernizationist, political-economy and cul-
turalist frames of reference. Early cultural geographic studies of migration (e.g.,
Chapman, 1969) do address migrants’ cultural identities as represented in their
locally specific views of mobility, but they do so according to a different understand-
ing of identity and subjectivity than those that feminist theorists have recently
 Rachel Silvey 9

engaged. Identity was understood to be a shared understanding of a group of people

about who they are, whereas feminists emphasize the differences within and
between groups that inflect individuals’ and groups’ identities, and the political
implications and importance of these differences and their definitions (Nagel,
2002). Further, rather than seeing identities as fixed definable characteristics of
migrants, feminist migration studies have increasingly emphasized the constructed
nature of identities, and the ongoing nature of this process.
Some of the first feminist research on migration adopted similar conceptions of
cultural identity to those that were employed historically in cultural geography,
but they added attention to gender within culture. So, in examining migrants’ cul-
tural identities, gender-focused migration scholarship was particularly concerned
to investigate the gender cultures of origin sites, and the specific manifestations of
patriarchy and gendered social networks in migrants’ lives (e.g., Ellis et al., 1996).
More recently, feminists have placed questions about the complexity, processual con-
struction and political implications of identity at the core of their analyses of migrant
and immigrant ‘communities’. For instance, Dwyer (1999; 2000) examines the mean-
ings for young British Muslim South Asian women – as children of immigrants – of
belonging to a ‘Muslim community’, and illustrates the critical role of gender for
understanding the ways in which the boundaries of community identity are forged.
Mohammad (1999) also analyzes the central role of women in marking community
boundaries, in this case the internal, class-based divisions within the Pakistani Mus-
lim ‘community’ in southern England. According to Elmhirst (2000), gender identi-
ties are also critical for understanding how the cultural politics of Indonesia’s
transmigration program have disrupted the notion of ‘Javaneseness’. By centering
gender and ethnic difference in her analysis, she counterposes the Indonesian state’s
discourse on Javanese femininity with the complexities of identity formation among
transmigrants themselves. In each of these studies, gender and difference are under-
stood as crucial to defining the identities of migrant groups, and migrants are
understood to participate in producing their own identities in the context of the
power relations and ‘community’ politics that shape the possibilities of migrants
as subjects.
Current concern with migrants’ subjectivities is distinct from the concern with
identities, though the two are often conflated. Attention to subjectivity connotes a
more Foucaldian view of the migrant self, a view that attends less to human agency
than does the concept of identity (Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan, 2003). Specifi-
cally, migrant subjectivities are formed through discursive fields that push migrants
to develop specific views of themselves. From its beginnings, feminist migration
research has dealt with women’s subjugation to structural patriarchal limitations
on the self (i.e., identity), but more recently it has also examined the ways that dis-
courses are circulated and transposed into gendered forms of internalized govern-
mentality and biopolitics (i.e., subjectivity). An example is the work by Hubbard
(1998) that examines the discourses and practices that serve to marginalize street
prostitutes in Birmingham (UK). In examining the ‘notions of appropriate sexual,
gender, and racial behavior [that are invoked] in [the] identification of prostitutes
as immoral’ (Hubbard, 1998: 55), he shows how prostitute subjectivities are othered
and marginalized. In this example, mobile subjects are policed by discourses defin-
ing the boundaries of appropriate gendered, place-based behavior (see also Yeoh and
Huang, 1998; Silvey, 2000b).
10 Power, difference and mobility: feminist advances in migration studies

Aguilar’s (1996; 1999) work explores questions of identity in the context of what
he understands as the recursive relations between transnational migration and
national identities.4 Specifically, he argues that Philippine national identity has
been reshaped in light of the high numbers of Filipino/a migrants involved in over-
seas contract work, particularly domestic work. The subordinate status of domestic
workers, and the fact that so many of them are Filipina, brings a ‘transnational
shame’ to bear on Philippine national identity, leading to a reassessment of tra-
ditional ideas of national identity. In addition, in as much as racism pervades the
countries where Filipinas find work as domestic servants, the category of ‘Filipino’
has been refashioned from one of nationality to one of race. Aguilar ’s ana-
lysis thus delves into the mutual constitution of migrants’ identities, racialized
hierarchies and (trans)national identity, as these are retrenched through the
Filipino/a diaspora.
Feminist views of identity and subjectivity turn migration studies towards an
understanding of the migrant self as constituted through a range of intersecting,
sometimes competing, forces and processes, and as playing agentic roles in these
processes. They take seriously the experiences and narratives of migrants’ interpre-
tive voices as a lens onto the ways in which broader-scale structures are represented,
understood, mediated and funnelled into particular understandings of self and
agency. Further, through understanding the ways in which migrants’ views of them-
selves and their actions take shape, migration research moves beyond deterministic
formulations of push/pull factors towards a deeper appreciation of the interlinkages
between political-economic economic and subjectivity formation processes as these
shape mobility. By including migrant subjectivities and identities as important
research foci in themselves, feminist geographers argue that migrants’ views of
themselves, their possibilities, and their proper places operate in conjunction with
labor markets, regional wage differentials and legal and juridical regulations to pro-
duce particular migration patterns, meanings and experiences.

VI Promising directions

The feminist geographic migration literature has revised understandings of the

scales, subjects, structures and spatial logics at the core of established approaches
to migration. It has asked questions about how relations of gender and difference
are constructed, maintained and reworked through spatial mobility, as well as
how attention to mobility and displacement can enrich feminist theorizations of
power. Recent feminist research on migration covers a wide variety of geographic
contexts, reflects contemporary changes in grounded migration processes and
extends ongoing developments in critical social theory. This article provides an over-
view of these contributions and argues that feminist geography is well suited to
continue to push forward the migration research agenda.
Feminist geographers can build on the work reviewed here to understand the
ways in which changing migration patterns reflect and inform the theoretical and
conceptual frameworks through which we understand them. Several directions
are particularly vital to continue to pursue, or to pursue further than has been the
case to date. First, feminist migration researchers can benefit from reading outside
the discipline (e.g., Gabaccia, 1994; Goldring, 2002; Levitt, 2001; Levitt and Water,
 Rachel Silvey 11

2002). Specifically, two journals (American Behavioral Scientist, 1999, and Identities:
Global Studies in Culture and Power, 2001) have recently published special issues
focused on feminist contributions to migration studies mostly from outside geogra-
phy. The research these journals include both reflects geographic advances and pro-
vides a sense of the specific gaps in the literature that the discipline might aim to fill.
For instance, anthropologists Mahler and Pessar (2001) title the introduction to their
special issue of the journal Identities ‘Gendered geographies of power: analysing
gender across transnational spaces’, and, inspired by Doreen Massey, provide a
strong conceptual framework for integrating theories of gender dynamics into
studies of transnational migration. But they do not explicitly engage with questions
about the politics of scale or the construction of place and space, and feminist geo-
graphy is well suited to extend their framework to address these issues as they
inform approaches to migration.
Secondly, queer theory and focused analysis of sex and sexuality as they relate to
gender can help to understand the centrality of heteronormativity to the relation-
ships between migration, the operation of power and the construction of social
order (see Domosh, 1999, on ‘Sexing feminist geography’). Attention to queer theory
can move questions about subjectivity and identity beyond essentialist formulations
of gender, questioning equivalences between ‘woman’/femininity and ‘man’/mas-
culinity. Whereas a good deal of research has begun to examine masculinity (see
Longhurst, 2000, for a review), there is little scholarship that critically examines
the construction of masculinity, or men as gendered subjects, in conjunction with
queer theory’s problematization of these concepts. Feminist geographers may
push forward the analysis of these complexities of gender formation by examining
the ways in which they are tied to migration. This would allow researchers to ela-
borate the implications of sexuality for understanding the sociospatial processes
long at the heart of migration research, and to work against the marginalization of
sexuality as a focus in the subfield.
Thirdly, as feminist geographers continue to grapple with race and difference,
feminist migration scholars within geography can also begin to examine the connec-
tions between studies of mobility, gender and critical race theory (see, for example,
Valdes et al., 2002). Feminist research that approaches migration as a political pro-
cess, and gender as inseparable from other social differences, has identified connec-
tions between the construction of race, racialized places and mobility (e.g., Kofman
et al., 2000). Building on critical race theory, however, we can expand this approach to
include attention to whiteness, and the racialization of discourses of inclusion and
normalcy, both as these play into defining migration and as migration reorganizes
and reaffirms particular racial politics (Nagel, 2001).
Fourthly, as Hyndman and Walton-Roberts (2000) discuss, migration studies can
be strengthened through invigorated critical attention to borders and boundaries
(see also Wright, 1998). Feminists have argued that most existing geographical
knowledge about borders is epistemologically masculinist (Rose, 1993). Migration Q1
researchers can elaborate on this insight to develop the theoretical and practical
implications of differentially gendered borders and understandings of boundaries
in migrants’ lives. In particular, this suggests the importance of continuing and
expanding analyses of the politics of scale, and attending to the socially differen-
tiated nature of social reproduction not only within the household, but also as it
shapes the national, militarized, public/private and imagined borders integral to
12 Power, difference and mobility: feminist advances in migration studies

defining migrants’ embodied experiences and their connections to political

dynamics at various scales.
Finally, applying feminist geography’s insights to migration studies entails a
rereading of the supranational sphere and its relationship to mobility processes
(see Hyndman, 2001). Furthering feminist conceptualizations of mobility as a politi-
cal process and the politics of scale, it is possible to examine how migration is gov-
erned at a multiplicity of scales influenced by supranational regulation. Further, it is
possible to recognize that actions at the supranational scale not only play a role in
organizing migration but are themselves shaped through political action and mobi-
lity processes at other scales, including the local and national (Nagar et al., 2002).
Feminist geographers are critical of the conceptual separation of scales common to
much migration scholarship and have argued against equating masculinity with
the global and femininity with the local scale. Future feminist migration research
can further explore the implications of these critiques for understanding how the
power relations of scalar processes and knowledge about scales play into the differ-
entiation of mobility.
As feminist geography continues to expand its scope and agenda, migration
studies will figure centrally in this progress.5 Because migration research focuses
on the mobility of subjects through space, its substance encourages anti-essentialist
conceptualizations of space, place and identity. Simultaneously, concern with
migration as displacement pushes feminist migration research to attend to the poli-
tical tensions around constructions of belonging, entitlement to place, and violence
and oppression associated with forced relocation. Because migration is a bodily
process, undeniably and corporeally tied to material change embedded in places,
its study holds out particular promise for understanding the connections between
feminist theoretical abstractions about, for example, identity and difference, and
the grounded practices of bodies moving from one place to another. Finally, by
continuing to emphasize the relevance of political economy, and the ways in
which it is intertwined with the construction of knowledge, feminist migration
studies can push forward the dialogue between materialist political economy
and critical social theory. It is through ongoing engagement with debates about
the nature of space and place, the politics of scale and mobility, and migrants’ sub-
jectivities that feminist geography will continue to invigorate migration studies
and perhaps contribute in this way to a more critical, more progressive future
geography of mobility.

Acknowledgements
A revised version of this article is forthcoming in the Blackwell Companion to feminist
geography, edited by Joni Seager and Lise Nelson. I thank the editors and the publisher
for permission to submit it to Progress in Human Geography prior to publication in the
book. Many colleagues have contributed to this article. Vicky Lawson provided inci-
sive critique on an earlier draft. I would also like to thank Paul Boyle, Amy Freeman,
Jennifer Hyndman, Shirlena Huang, Alison Mountz, Caroline Nagel, and three anony-
mous reviewers for feedback that substantially strengthened this article. Funding was
provided by NSF-9911510. That support is greatly appreciated.
 Rachel Silvey 13

Notes

1. The distinct majority of the work selected for this review grapples with migrants either located in
or originating from low-income parts of the world. There is a need for more feminist geographic and
critical theoretical work focused on migrants from more ‘developed’ parts of the world, as well as
research that examines highly skilled migrant female workers (but, for important recent exceptions,
see Halfacree and Boyle, 1999; Willis and Yeoh, 2002).
2. Nonfeminist household strategies perspectives view migration decisions of individual household
members as determined by an overall economic risk/benefit calculation measuring the greater good for
the greater number of household members (for a review, see Lawson, 1998). Studies based on this
approach assume that the migration decision that is best for the household as a whole is ultimately
best for the individual members of the household. However, geographers (e.g., Chant, 1998; Ellis
et al., 1996, Lawson, 1998) have identified ways in which gendered and generational hierarchies of
decision-making power play a part in determining which members of a household migrate and
which stay behind, and how the consequences of migration differ for women and men. Feminist
work emphasizes the contestations over resources within households, and the unequal bargaining
power within households that tends to subordinate women and children’s individual voices and voli-
tion in migration decisions.
3. Space and place are defining concepts for the discipline as a whole, and because virtually all geo-
graphic research includes at least implicit theorizations of the concepts I make no pretence of a thorough
discussion. Rather, the goal, as outlined in the introduction, is to trace the specific ways in which femi-
nist migration research has developed approaches to these concepts.
4. Thanks to Shirlena Huang for this point. As is the case with many of the articles referenced in this
review, Aguilar’s work crosscuts several of the major themes organizing the discussion. Specifically,
space/place and the politics of scale are at the center of Aguilar’s analyses, though for the purposes
of this article his work best illustrates the ways in which identity is linked to these other themes and
questions.
5. While an extended discussion of methodology in feminist migration studies is outside the scope
of this article, recent discussions have discussed the promise of multimethod research (e.g., Graham,
1999; McKendrick, 1999). These are important methodological developments for feminist migration
studies in that methodological plurality and critical interrogation of methodologies are key feminist
concerns with far-reaching implications for knowledge about gender and migration. In addition, as
Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan (2003) have recently argued, critical ethnographies of migration
must go beyond straighforward analyses of migrant narratives to explore their embeddedness in
regional modernities and always contested cultural hegemonies.

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_____________________________________________
Extra 8 pages 15 24 22 35 26 42 32 51 45 72 _____________________________________________
For larger quantities contact the publisher for a quotation.
Add 100% for any offprints including colour reproduction. ____________________________________________

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