Introduction. - Free Online Library (2024)

Abstract

While the declared global "refugee crisis" has receivedconsiderable scholarly attention, little of it has focused on theintersecting dynamics of oppression, discrimination, violence, andsubjugation. Introducing the special issue, this article definesfeminist "intersectionality" as a research framework and ano-borders activist orientation in transnational and anti-nationalsolidarity with people displaced by war, capitalism, and reproductiveheteronormativity, encountering militarized nation-state borders. Ourintroduction surveys work in migration studies that engages withintersectionality as an analytic and offers a synopsis of the articlesin the special issue. As a whole, the special issue seeks to make anintersectional feminist intervention in research produced about (forced)migration.

Resume

Alors que les universitaires se sont beaucoup interesses a la<<crise des refugies>> mondiale qui a ete declaree, ilsn'ont que peu envisage les dynamiques croisees del'oppression, la discrimination, la violence et la subjugation. Letexte introductif de ce numero special definit<<l'intersectionnalite>> feministe transnationale commecadre de recherche et comme un activisme oriente sans frontieressolidaire des personnes deplacees par la guerre, le capitalisme etl'heteronormativite de la reproduction, qui se heurtent a desfrontieres nationales et etatiques militarises. Cette introductionexamine les etudes sur la migration qui retiennentl'intersectionnalite comme perspective d'analyse et offre unsommaire des articles de ce numero special qui, envisage dans sonensemble, vise a degager une intervention feministe intersectionnelledans les travaux de recherche qui concernent la migration (forcee).

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This special issue emerges out of a larger, developing project tobuild a network of feminist scholars and organizers under the nameFeminist Researchers against Borders (FRAB). (1) Our project aims tobuild durable collaborations across disciplinary boundaries and nationalborders among scholars and organizers whose work emerges from a feministperspective that centres gender and sexuality as key analytic lensesthrough which the repercussions of war, violence, forced displacement,asylum, and resettlement can be understood. What unites us is that weare feminists who have been troubled by the absence of intersectionalanalyses in studies on the "refugee crisis," even as borderand (forced) migration studies have proliferated. In this regard, wetake the inextricability of racial, gendered, sexual, and class powerrelations as the entry point to interrogate how the current"refugee crisis" is constructed and contested. As researcherscommitted to ethical reflexivity, we enter into this work with concernsover the circulation of research on "refugees" in an economythat turns human suffering into the currency of scholarship, divorcedfrom the responsibility to transform the conditions that shape violence.Further, we are concerned with the way our own work risks entering intothe broader state objectives of migration management that allownation-states to criminalize and capitalize upon cross-border movement,(2) while refusing entry to millions of people and detaining anddeporting countless others.

Our intervention comes at a moment when the United Nations RefugeeAgency (UNHCR) has announced that there are now more refugees andinternally displaced people worldwide than ever before. (3) What hasbeen termed the "refugee crisis" has been most widelyrepresented by the largest group of refugees, Syrians fleeing the warthat began in 2011, who comprise 5.4 million people displaced primarilyto Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Europe, and overseas; 6.1 millionpeople have been internally displaced, while 2.98 million are inbesieged areas, according to UNHCR statistics. (4) However, as DeniseHorn and Serena Parekh remind us, the human experience of"displacement" is far broader than just this "refugeecrisis." (5) Forced migration and displacement have been a centralfeature of human experience since the foundation of the modernnation-state, the quintessence of which is the control of human movementat the limits of its territory and within its social body. (6) Thepresent "refugee crisis" is a product of the acceleratedconditions of war and state violence, which are inextricable fromglobalized capitalism, histories of colonialism, and contemporaryimperialism. It also foreshadows the increasing global humandisplacement that results from climate change.

To understand the current "refugee crisis," it isimportant to note that seeking asylum is a legal right under theinternational 1951 Refugee Convention. On the basis of this convention,signatory countries are obliged to examine the claims for protectionfrom persecution of every individual who arrives at their borders.However, the convention does not oblige signatory countries to providelegal entry or safe passage. Consequently, European and North Americancountries have created visa restrictions to deny entry to people fromcountries ravaged by war and imperialism, including debt colonialism.The result is what has been referred to as a "hellishdead-end" for refugees. (7) Put differently, since many need a visato enter a country, and a visa requires money and must meet strictcriteria, one cannot claim asylum from abroad without substantial accessto social, political, and economic mobility. (8) As Adrienne Millbankhas argued, the current crisis starkly shows that the 1951 convention isoutdated, while the problems of holding states accountable to theirobligations have been known for decades. (9)

In response to this conjuncture, the articles gathered in thisspecial issue interrogate assumptions about "deserving"subjects within refugee law and humanitarian reason; (10) contributorscritically assess the ways in which anxieties, fears, and desiressurrounding the figure of the refugee are produced by socio-legalconstructs and political economic relations, including those thatarticulate racial capitalism and hetero-patriarchy. One way thedistribution of deserving subjects has manifested is through theterminology used in relation to the "migration/refugeecrisis." As Ron Kaye explains, the use of certain terms casts doubtupon the "genuineness" of some claimants' refugee status,as stipulated by the UNHCR and interpreted by signatory stateauthorities. (11) A report from the UNHCR has similarly illustrated thatconfusing terminology is directly related to "the negative mythsassociated with asylum seekers and refugees." (12) It found that,although the majority of those now in Europe would qualify as"refugees" because they are "fleeing from war, conflictor persecution at home, as well as deteriorating conditions in manyrefugee-hosting countries," they are most often referred to as"migrants." (13) While we use the term refugee in our title,some contributors to this special issue have opted to use other labels,especially migrant, to describe the "figure" at the heart ofthis "crisis." (14) Rather than insisting on the use of onelabel throughout, and given that all of the aforementioned labels arestate and supranational categories, we wanted individual authors to usethe term(s) that seemed most appropriate to them for the specificarguments they make and the contexts on which they focus.

Although the conditions shaping migration and the "refugeecrisis" provide intertwined concerns for our special issue, thevaried use of the terms is not meant to imply that they areinterchangeable. Rather, they signal the complex political ways thatlanguage and terminology feature in general understandings of the"crisis." (15) In debates surrounding linguistic correctness,some have advocated dropping the distinction between refugees andmigrants (some of whom are designated as "irregular") for theuniversal designator refugee (with the argument that economic "pushfactors" are as vital to people's survival as is war orpolitical persecution), while others argue for the universal designatormigrant (with the argument that refugee is a stigmatizing andexclusionary juridical category that social movements ought not toadopt). Such debates highlight the way language is used variously toundermine and defend the protected rights of those entitled to makerefugee claims. This also points to the problem of the distinction madebetween refugees and migrants within the legal frameworks themselves. Inthis sense, the terminology that marks people crossing borders can beunderstood as a state tactic for naturalizing distinctions between thosewho "deserve state protection" and those to whom it can bedenied. As Nicholas De Genova points out, the vacillating use,ambivalence, and equivocation of these terms and labels in mass medianews coverage in Europe "are telling signals of the ambiguities andcontradictions that bedevil such terminological categories asgovernmental contrivances." (16) Indeed, such debates highlight theway language is used variously to undermine and defend the protectedrights of those entitled to make refugee claims.

Focusing on the legal status of migrants in Calais, France,Marie-Benedicte Dembour and Marie Martin argue that because thesemigrants are not "authorized aliens," they are excluded fromthe regime of rights that is in place only for those who have the statusof national citizens or regularized migrants. (17) The process ofdetermining whether an asylum seeker is a refugee is not only,typically, in the hands of national authorities, but alsomunicipalities; thus, refusal of the legal designation of "refugeestatus" can be a powerful means to regulate access to rights in thecity and the nation-state. Movement is ever more intensely controlledand instigated while the border becomes ever more mobile, and peopleever more stuck (including being stuck in movement). (18) As EncarnacionGutierrez Rodriguez examines in her contribution to this issue, thebinary between "forced" and "voluntary" migrationunderpinning these debates can be a means to deny the globalentanglements of racial capitalism and what she terms"settler-colonialism migration," which structure humanmovement. We argue that an intersectional feminist approach to forcedmigration questions the reliance of asylum decisions (as well as thewhole asylum infrastructure) on the construction of deserving andundeserving victims of violence--a juridical distinction thatnaturalizes certain forms of violence that are inherent in racialcapitalism and hetero-patriarchy and leave unchallenged the power ofnation-states to arbitrarily deny movement across national borders.

The binary distinction between "deserving" and"undeserving" migrants illustrates the internal contradictionsembedded in national policies on refugees. In the case of Canada, theturn to viewing the nation-state as a protector of human rightsdemonstrates the instrumentalization of refugees fleeing sexuality- andgender-based violence. In his contribution to this special issue, EdwardOu Jin Lee argues that the role of the nation-state in adjudicatingrefugee claims is embedded in a convergence between national borderingand colonial formations. Lee argues that Canadian refugee policies thatblock queer and trans refugee claims from the Global South reveal thelegacies of colonial violence that produce uneven geopoliticalconditions that shape hom*ophobic violence in the Global South, thusdenying the coimplications of colonial violence in Canada and elsewhere.This echoes the work in progress of other members of our network, suchas Melissa Autumn White, whose research on the Rainbow RefugeesAssistance Program in Canada situates the nation-states project ofopening up sponsorship of sexual orientation and gender identity andexpression (SOGIE) refugees in neo-liberal policies that reinforceCanada's branded humanitarianism. This illustrates how seeminglycontradictory practices in national responses to forced migration canserve to reinforce the nation-state: while parading tokenized refugeesas emblems of Canada's self-congratulatory humanitarianism, thenation-state forecloses and denies asylum to thousands of possibleclaimants through ineligibility policies.

In what follows, we first problematize the construction of the"refugee crisis," joining a growing body of critical scholarswho examine how the discourse of "crisis" functions to securenational and supranational projects of "migration management."(19) We then survey the existing and emerging scholarship, which laysthe ground for our own intersectional feminist intervention. We closethe introduction by briefly describing the articles that comprise thespecial issue.

Querying the "Refugee Crisis"

Describing the current situation of global mobility as a"crisis" questions for whom there is a crisis. As De Genovahas written, understanding mobility in terms of crisis is a way toreconfigure it into "a device for the authorization of exceptionalor 'emergency' governmental measures aimed at enhancing andexpanding border enforcement and immigration policing." (20) Thelanguage of crisis thus shifts the focus from the experience ofdisplacement as a crisis for refugees, to the perception of their entryas a crisis for nation-states. The shift from crisis as the cause offorced migration to the construction of crisis as an effect of humanmobility has a number of important political effects, not least of whichis that it enables accelerated border militarization (as evinced by thedeployment of Frontex and NATO in the Aegean and Mediterranean seas) andthe closure of paths to safety (e.g., the fencing of the Evros landborder between Turkey and Greece in 2012, or of the Hungarian borderwith Serbia and Croatia in 2015), ostensibly as the means to"manage the crisis." As Sara Ahmed has argued, the declarationof "crisis" enables the institution and justification of"new forms of security, border policing, and surveillance ... It isnot simply that these crises exist, and that fears and anxieties comeinto being as a necessary effect of that existence. Rather, it is thevery production of the crisis that is crucial." (21)

The declaration of "crisis," then, has a crucialrelationship to the introduction or augmentation of techniques ofgovernmentality. As Aila Spathopoulou, Myrto Tsilimpounidi, and AnnaCarastathis argue in their contribution in this issue, it is notincidental that the declaration of "crisis" has led to (or waspre-visaged by) the institution of what the EU terms"hotspots" (22) in Greece and Italy; that is, detentioncentres in which people on the move are sorted into legitimate refugees"deserving" international protection and "illegal"economic migrants slated for deportation. The construction of"crisis" is always ideological; therefore, its invocation andlocation in a particular space and time is always political, both as adiscursive construction and in its material effects. Myrto Tsilimpounidisuggests that the representation of crisis as a rupture of a prior stateof normalcy to which we could, eventually, return, functions torehabilitate the system in crisis, foreclosing the states of emergenceintrinsic to a state of emergency. (23) In this sense, crisis ispotentially a moment to reflect upon fixed categories of experience andanalysis, the violent rupture of which can impel us to devise newmethods to register the invisible or unseen. Bringing these analyses tothe question of how the current "refugee crisis" isconstructed in racialized and gendered ways points toward the need tothink through not only how states reconsolidate borders in response toan articulation of human mobility--projected onto the figure of therefugee / economic migrant / illegal immigrant--as a social threat, butalso how societies transform their politics of belonging andestrangement precisely by framing the mobility and presence of somepeople as a danger, or alternately as an opportunity for forming newsocial relationships and new ways of dwelling in place together. The"crisis" becomes one of "integration" of refugees in"host" societies, or its supposed impossibility.

Whether "for" or "against""integration," the terms of this debate engage in an insidiousreconstruction of the past, implying that once we were all the same, wenever moved, and we all understood each other, as Gutierrez Rodriguezargues in her contribution to this issue. The relatively recent historyof the nation-state is imagined as ahistorical and universal,naturalizing "ethnicized bonds" and the violent operations ofdemographic racism. (24) Arguably, much work that is produced in forcedmigration studies reproduces "methodological nationalism" byreifying the violence of border and citizenship regimes in the figure ofthe refugee. (25) Thus migration is understood as an"antinomy" to the nation-state and its naturalizedisomorphisms between citizenry, nation, sovereign, and state. (26) Sincemigration is viewed from the hegemonic perspective of stasis (stayingput in one's supposedly natural place), migrants are constructed as"failed citizens." (27) Yet this conceals the fact that thesystems of capitalism globalized through colonialism are in constantcrisis, producing contradictory temporalities and social relations ofperpetual conflict and perpetual movement.

If crisis is fundamental to the post-colonial project ofnation-states and of EU integration, it reverberates in the liminalspaces both within and outside "Europe" of uneven developmentand incomplete democratization, through ongoing accumulation bydispossession. (28) As Gutierrez Rodriguez and Lee each argue, the"refugee crisis" exists in continuity with, and is not arupture of, the colonial project; its technocratic, militarizedmanagement has led to unspeakable human suffering and devastation forthe people caught in its machinery. To the extent that people aredefined by migration regimes as belonging to particular naturalizedcategories--through which some people are always imagined as being of aplace, and others as perpetually out of place--migration is alwaysimagined as a crisis for the nation. In that sense, in a time ofmultiple, successively declared, and overlapping--indeed,intersecting--crises, it is useful to be reminded, as Bridget Anderson,Nandita Sharma, and Cynthia Wright have argued, that "peoplesmobility is seen as only ever caused by crisis and as crisisproducing." (29)

Mind the Gap: Intersections in (Forced) Migration Studies

Intersectional research has consistently shown that experiences ofmigration and displacement differ significantly, depending on how peopleare positioned in hierarchies of gender, race, class, age, religion, andsexuality. (30) Nevertheless, the majority of (forced) migrationscholarship continues to approach the subject without attending to thesimultaneity of experiences and co-implication of positionalities shapedby gendered, racialized, class, and sexuality-based power relations.(31) While the "question of gender" in migration was firstraised in the 1970s and 1980s, (32) it nevertheless remains a marginalfocus within the scholarly field of studies on migration. (33) Forexample, Pierette Hondagneu-Sotelo has analyzed a leading social sciencejournal in the field, International Migration Review, finding only sevenarticles that contained either the word woman or gender in the titlebetween 2007 and 2009. (34)

Although research on gender and migration has been growing in thedecade between her research and the publication of this special issue,(35) the questions shaping such research remain a point of feministconcern. As Ingrid Palmary, Erica Burman, Khatidja Chantler, and PeaceKiguwa argue, "The question should be less about why gender has notbeen (as yet) 'mainstreamed' into migration, than about howand why it figures in conceptualizations of mobility, and with whateffects." (36) Thus, although leading journals have increasinglyfeatured research that makes mention of gender in migration--just under20 per cent of the articles published in 2016 to 2017 address gender(37)--looking at how gender is positioned in these articles illustratesthe methodological absence of an intersectional approach. For example,two articles recently featured in International Migration Review deploya "gender-based analysis" in an empirical assessment ofwhether migrant communities hold views of gender that are, in the wordsof the authors, "more egalitarian" or "moretraditional." (38) We see this type of research as emblematic ofthe essentialized and single-axis approach to gender-based research, thepremises of which we hope to problematize using an intersectionalfeminist approach. (39) Palmary and her collaborators suggest that suchresearch has a pathologizing effect on the category of "themigrant," by decontextualizing, essentializing, and naturalizingmigrants as an organic category of research analysis. (40) Whileattempts to make gender differences in migration visible may revealuseful information about population demographics, they simultaneouslyreduce these differences to gender in isolation from the widerconditions shaping experiences of displacement and resettlement.Moreover, this deployment of "gender" as an essentiallydemographic category mirrors nation-state logic, naturalizing itsproduction of a binary gender system, and eliding how gender is producedand reproduced in nationalized and transnational heteropatriarchal powerrelations. (41)

Introducing an intersectional feminist analysis can help us examinethe resulting gap in current research and new possibilities forattending to the concomitant ways that gender and sexuality, forinstance, shape the lives of refugees and migrants, extending beyond thetypical foci on reproduction and population management. We define anintersectional feminist approach in the next section; prefiguring thatdiscussion, we offer a few examples in relation to which anintersectional lens has the potential to yield new framings. When"women" are centred in work on migration, they are oftenconstructed as mothers, wives, daughters, and not as political agents,workers, community leaders, or public figures; this reduces theinterests of women to their roles within heteronormative formulations ofthe family. "Women" are assumed to be cisgender, heterosexual,and defined primarily through their compulsory positioning in theheteropatriarchal family, the existence of which is naturalized as aneffect of "their" cultures. Thus, in advancing anintersectional approach to research on gender in (forced) migration, forexample, we can introduce a different set of questions that examinegender, kinship, and reproduction beyond the dominant focus on women,maternity, and fertility.

What interpersonal, institutional, infrastructural, andexperiential constraints and inducements shape the choices migrant womenmake about reproduction? What happens to kinship relations when familialestrangement and death shape the migratory experience? How arenon-biological and non-heteronormative forms of kinship affected by theconstruction and state recognition of "family" in procreative,nuclear, and hetero-patriarchal terms? Further, what differentchallenges arise when researchers consider the way single parenting,trans parenting, and queer parenting are introduced into projects thatexamine family development, reproduction, and fertility? Combined withan analysis of the racial projects of nation-states, an intersectionalfeminist approach to reproduction might ask instead how migrant womensreproductive roles posit them as either threats to the racializedcitizen or as burdens on health-care systems, as (im)possible users ofmaternity and fertility medical services. Therefore, while fertility isan important aspect of the lives of some women, specifically as a resultof their positioning as agents of reproduction of the racializednation-state according to a hetero-patriarchal logic, it remains alimited frame through which to consider the gendered dimensions ofmigration. To take another example, research on labour migration andstate policy frequently fails to consider the intersecting dynamicsshaping political economy. As a result, labour migration continues to betreated as though it is a "genderless" experience within themajority of scholarship in the field. (42) Moreover, since the"generic migrant" is not genderless but implicitly aheterosexual and cisgender adult man, the lack of an explicit focus ongender in migration amounts to the erasure of those who identify aswomen, as trans people, as non-binary genders, and/or asnon-heterosexual.

Our intervention joins other intersectional interventions in borderand migration scholarship that urge attention to how gender, sexuality,racialization, age, (dis)ability, and class are implicated in theseprocesses. (43) Such interventions are still relatively rare, since theycontinue to be marginalized within border and migration studies. It is,for instance, significant that despite being able to trace calls formigration scholarship attentive to the intersections of race, gender,and class to at least ten years ago, (44) the urgency of these callsdoes not seem to have been diminished a decade later. We see thisspecial issue as contributing to the critique and analysis set out inprior special issues that point to these oversights. A recent example isthe November 2016 special issue of the Osterreichische ZeitschriftfurSoziologie (Austrian Journal for Sociology), which described itsintervention as contributing to overcoming "a number of majoromissions and curtailed interests in the field of migrationstudies" which include "deemphasizing [sic] gender andsexuality, ignoring the 'intersectional' interplay of genderwith other dimensions of inequality in migration societies, Eurocentricpreoccupation, [the] non-consideration of the agency of migrants and[being] caught up in methodological nationalism." (45)

This special issue continues the work of other collaborations thataddress intersectional analyses of borders and migration, such as the2015 special issue of Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power,"Investigating Intersectionalities, Gendering Mobilities,Racializing Trans/Nationalism." (46) In the introduction, theissues editors argue for the need to situate an analysis of migrationspecifically in relation to racializing processes and colonialconfigurations of power, while also gesturing toward the importance ofgender and class. Ultimately, they argue, "intersectionality isanalytically important in accounting for the diverse racial, class andgendered experiences in international migration." (47) Locating ourcurrent intervention within Refuge's own trajectory, it issignificant that in the 2009 special issue, "No Borders as aPractical Political Project," editors Bridget Anderson, NanditaSharma, and Cynthia Wright argue for the need to understand borders asideological instruments producing inequality through mechanisms"that are deeply racialized, gendered, sexualized, and productiveof class relations." (48) The repetition of the insistence on theneed to attend to the converging systems of capitalism, white supremacy,and heteropatriarchy, gendering, and the production of racializedgenders, sexualities, disabilities, and class relations in (forced)migration, and their inextricable relationship to processes ofbordering, found across this work is one that we are, once again,repeating.

The contributors to this special issue offer an answer to thatcall, drawing on queer migration frameworks, post-colonial andde-colonial theory, a no-border politics, and an intersectional analyticsensibility, (49) thus helping form the emerging field of scholarship onintersectional feminist research on borders and (forced) migration. Thisresearch demonstrates how migration policies, citizenship, and migrantadvocacy converge; for instance, in the reproduction of heteronormativenationalisms through family reunification policies that place the burdenof proof on queer migrants to legitimate their claims for status and/orasylum through heteronormalized evidence of kinship, (50) which mark theboundaries of intelligibility of intimate relationships. (51) Queer andtrans migrant research and activism reveal the heteronormative functionof birth and citizenship. The natural citizen through birth, and thenaturalized citizen through migration are co-constituted by thereproductive history or futurity of the migrant's role in relationto the nation-state. Thus a deserving migrant does not challenge thereproductive order of citizenship through non-normative forms of familykinship. Much as migration is used to naturalize citizenship and borderregimes, it is also used to naturalize the deeply gendered andracialized structures of societies governed by the nation-state form bybinding the recognition of certain rights and entitlements to themirroring of the heterosexual couple. Moreover, since in Europe, NorthAmerica, and Australia migration policies are intrinsically bound up inprojects of whiteness, and the reproduction of the nation aroundwhiteness, these reproductions of citizenship have a fundamentallyracist character--not only in centres of white supremacy but in allnation-states that regulate the inheritability or transitivity ofbelonging through reproductive logics. Given that these processes areessential to how migration and citizenship are bordered bynation-states, they need to be centred in research and activism, and notadded as afterthoughts to a predominantly heteronormative,racial-colonial frame.

Currents of critical scholarship located within the fields ofmigration and border studies have engaged in critiques of the alignmentof state policies and scholarship, particularly pushing back against theways more traditional work in these fields has positioned migrants aspassive objects, (52) and against simplistic notions of bordering,seeking to give more dynamic accounts of how borders are brought intobeing through acts of bordering. (53) These critical accounts, whileemphasizing autonomy and mobility, and displacing the false dichotomiesput in place by migration regimes--such as the migrant/refugeedistinction, discussed above--have nevertheless also continued tomarginalize questions of gender, sexuality, and racialization. (54) Thismarginalization functions not only through a failure to attend to theintersections of gender, racialization, and sexuality, but sometimesthrough a more structural move, in which experiences of power that relyupon and are effects of gendering and racialization are abstracted frommigration dynamics in order to put forward theoretical claims about thefunctioning of borders, and the production of migration statuses, ingeneral. (55) Recognition of these oversights has led scholars workingwithin these subfields to explicitly call for more attention toprocesses of gendering and racialization. (56) Yet while Victoria Bashamand Nick Vaughan-Williams observe that "particular regimes ofmobility and immobility are only imaginable, implementable andsustainable because they tap into and reify prior assumptions aboutgender, race, class and their interconnectivity in contemporarypolitical life," (57) a comprehensive intersectional feministapproach has yet to materialize.

Defining an Intersectional Feminist Approach

In calling for an explicitly feminist intersectional approach tothe question of migration and displacement, we hope this special issuecan do two things. First, we hope it will offer a way of reading thephenomena that have gained visibility and that have been renderedinvisible by the discursive construction of the "refugeecrisis" against the grain of current research on refugees andmigration, in order to trouble the logics that frame this field ofscholarship. Second, we aim to encourage researchers to consider theimplications of an intersectional approach to (forced) migration.Perhaps the most important implication, for us, is intersectionality asan analytic and political commitment to challenging the systems,infrastructures, and logics that inflict violence on those deemed"out of place" by fortressed nation-states. Here we areinvoking intersectionality as a provisional concept, confronting us with"a profound challenge, as opposed to a determinate resolution ofcognitive essentialism, binary categorization, and conceptualexclusion." (58) Thus, the aforementioned "intersectionalcall" to (forced) migration studies is understood not inquantitative terms--calling for the study of ever "moreintersections" (59)--but in terms of reframing, deconstructing, andcontesting how categories of oppression and struggle are reproduced inresearch and activism around what is termed the "refugeecrisis." As Jennifer Nash has argued, the call for moreintersections, and the "logic of more" to "complicate,nuance, and deepen" feminist scholarship positionsintersectionality as a guarantor of better scholarship and moreinclusive politics, an ameliorative politics to improve institutions by"institutionalizing the margins." (60) By contrast, theintersectional approach we advocate with respect to border and (forced)migration studies takes an abolitionist approach to institutions thatreproduce systems of power. This is consistent with the aims of FeministResearchers against Borders, who are unified around a commitment to"dismantle the structures that produce, constrain, criminalize,control, and shape immobilities and mobilities, whether forced,coercive, elective, or otherwise--including the borders of the modernnation state and its management of human life and ecology throughgender, class, sexuality, racialization, ableism, citizenship, andcolonialism." (61) The contributors to this special issue reflectupon, problematize, and/or reject the use of state categories--which areinheritances of the coloniality of power--in research about, andsolidarity movements with, refugees. Not only for the reason that statecategories are representational acts that materialize violently to pushthose whom they exclude overboard; but that even those whom they includethey dehumanize. (62)

This conception of intersectionality--as a critique of state powerin shaping the foundational categories of perception and representationthat also drive resistance to oppression--is drawn from the criticalrace legal scholar Kimberle Williams Crenshaw (63) and is prefigured bya tradition of Black feminist thought that can be traced to thenineteenth century, when Black women were not citizens, and theycontested the violence of citizenship in a colonial, racial state (anddid not simply seek inclusion within it). In part as the result of awhitewashing of its radical history, (64) we believe intersectionalityis a term now often misunderstood and misused by academics andactivists. As Sirma Bilge argues, the annexing of"intersectionality to disciplinary feminism and decentering theconstitutive role of race in intersectional thought and praxis"(65) is part of how intersectionality has become a "buzzword,"(66) not only in women's, gender, and sexuality studies courses,but also in mainstream disciplines and social movements. (67) A casualapplication of the term that merely pays lip service to race, sexuality,or class in gender-based analyses troubles us. We see this non-rigorousoveruse of the term as a type of co-optation, or, as NikolAlexander-Floyd has put it, even as a form of neo-colonial appropriationthat detaches intersectionality from the concerns of Black feminists whointroduced the analytic. (68) As Alexander-Floyd and numerous scholarshave observed, although intersectionality emerged as a vital lens, the"mainstreaming" of the concept has resulted in itsdepoliticization. (69) Thus, in addition to"intersectionality" being deployed in various ways by authorsin this special issue as a theoretical approach, an analyticsensibility, and/or a methodological framework, we want to underline thesignificance of the politics of intersectionality. Specifically,following the call of Black and transnational feminists, we are callingfor a feminist praxis premised on a politics of location (70) ortranslocation. (71) In this context, an intersectional approach isinextricable from a no-borders politics, that seeks to dismantle thenation-state system and its various practices of bordering and themultiple manifestations of power and domination that it embodies. AsJasbir Puar argues, "Intersectional critique has both intervened inthe legal and capitalist structures that demand the fixity of therights-bearing subject and has also simultaneously reproduced thedisciplinary demands of that subject formation." (72) Building oncritiques of dominant interpretations of intersectionality and theiraccommodationist relation to state power, we view intersectionality as acommitment to undoing the effects of the nation-state (and the systemsthat crystallize within it): its hold on our imaginations, affects,perceptions, concepts, solidarities, and mobilizations.

Intersectionality, as we are invoking it in this context, istherefore an intervention into categorical exclusions that secure thefixity of naturalized, apparently self-evident categories of oppressionand of struggle. Rather than viewing systems of oppression ashom*ogeneous in the effects they may have in people's lives,intersectionality as an analytic can denaturalize categories into whichpeople are placed by state demographic projects, and are adopted insocial movements, advocacy efforts, and other contexts of criticalpraxis. An intersectional sensibility can help us identify who falls (oris pushed) through the cracks of representational dilemmas that resultwhen categories of oppression and struggle (for instance,refugee/economic migrant; migrant/native; host/ guest, etc.) areconstructed as mutually exclusive. Moreover, it can reveal dimensionsand dynamics of power that are rendered invisible or hidden from view byhegemonic framings. For instance, the heteronormative construction ofrefugees as "men, women, and children" reproduces theinstitution of the family while obscuring the hom*ophobic and transphobicoppressions and persecution that LGBTQI+ (73) people face, both in theircountries of origin and in/through necro-political migration regimes.(74) In this sense, as the contribution of Edward Ou Jin Lee in thisissue demonstrates, (75) an intersectional feminist perspective iscrucial in that it offers analytic and organizing tools to confront aglobal reality in which people's reasons for needing to leave andbeing refused the legal ability to stay are proliferating, which furtherdemonstrates how the Geneva Convention's definitions of who is tobe granted protection or who deserves pathways to relative safety failto align with the realities of (forced) migration. (76)

Intersectionality is invoked not as a guarantor of a"critical" feminist epistemology, but as a methodologicalcommitment to uncover layered histories and geographies of power ofwhich we may not be conscious. This will require collaborative praxisacross, beyond, and, most importantly, against borders of multiplekinds. Indeed, an intersectional approach to migration problematizes thefixed categories of identity through which peoples subjective andembodied experiences are clinically, juridically, or analytically sortedand (mis)understood: the universality of gender and sexuality; theself-evidence of racial, ethnic, and religious divisions; and the fixityof class, caste, and status in trans-local contexts. In this sense, weseek to underscore the point that it is not only identity that affectsmigration experiences, but migration that affects and effectsidentities. This is a challenge to intersectionality studies as a fieldthat seems committed to nativist U.S. constructions of identity rootedparochially not only in the social movements that emerged there, but inthe demographic projects of that nation-state that inform how"communities of struggle" have formed and understand theirnormative subjects in (anti-)segregationist terms. (77) As Floya Anthiashas suggested, neither can "migration" (or even its ostensiblyexhaustive subcategories, e.g.,"voluntary"/"forced") in intersectional terms beunderstood as a singular, hom*ogeneous process that is undergone byself-evident groups; nor can intersectional theories of identity, power,and belonging ignore the effects of "translocational"processes in subject-formation in a structurally violent, pervasivelymobile world. (78)

In advancing an intersectional feminist approach to what has beenconstructed as the "refugee crisis," we therefore argue thatresearch "on" refugees and migrants must take into account howthose pushed into categories of "refugee,""migrant," and "citizen" are constituted byintersecting systems of capitalism, white supremacy, andhetero-patriarchy, and their dynamics of discrimination, violence, andsubjugation. This means that power relations are multidirectional andcontradictory and do not only constitute the exterior of mutuallyexclusive categories (such as migrant/citizen) but their interiority andinterconnection as well. It also means that categories of oppressioninform, and are informed by, categories of struggle. Tracing thismultidirectional relationship between hegemonic power and oppositionalmovements, we follow two key insights of intersectionality as ananalytic: the observation of the "irony" of the fact thatsocial movements often "adopt a top-down approach todiscrimination" and oppression; (79) and that in processes ofretrenchment, "symbolic change" is used by the state to"legitimize and thus reinforce ongoing material subordination"while co-opting and defusing radical and reformist politics. (80)Mindful of the gaps and the continuities between the various forms ofpower that constitute the field of knowledge "about" oppressedgroups, we propose the project of intersectional feminist research aboutborders and (forced) migration as taking us along a trajectory throughand beyond the naturalized categories--themselves constituted throughacts of bordering--and to solidarities and coalitions against borders.

Description of Articles

The first two articles in this special issue locate theconstruction of migration as a "crisis" within diachronicnational colonial projects, contributing to the production ofsocio-legal categories, which in turn legitimize states' attemptsto control movement. Taking a de-colonial approach, EncarnacionGutierrez Rodriguez brings questions of race (particularly whiteness)and colonialism to the foreground of discussions on migration, whichhave been repressed in anxieties of long historical duration, but alsoas the "refugee crisis" has been unfolding in Europe, andespecially in Germany, since 2015. As Gutierrez Rodriguez insists, nopart of Germany has been "untouched" by the entangledhistories of coloniality. As she puts it, "The coloniality ofmigration operates within the matrix of social classification based onracial hierarchies," themselves reminiscent of colonialdifferentiation. (81) Placing migration patterns and claims for asylumwithin this history, the racial, ethnicized, and gendered logics of bothinclusionary and exclusionary practices become evident.

In their article, Aila Spathopoulou, Myrto Tsilimpounidi, and AnnaCarastathis offer an insightful exploration of what they refer to as the"vocabularies of crisis," tracing the political origins,etymologies, and the contemporary meanings of "crisis" and"hotspots," and of state categories such as"citizen," "migrant," or "refugee." Indenaturalizing these terms, they ask what is produced, and in turn whatis eclipsed by certain articulations, and remind us that thesecategories are invented by states (and supranational institutions) inorder to control movement. Using Greece as a case study for theintersecting crises that have unfolded there, they illustrate the waysin which discourses of crisis have been transformed hegemonically,producing normative subjects of suffering.

Moving across the Aegean Sea, the two articles that follow turn tothe located histories and experiences of refugee resettlement in Turkey.Nergis Canefe's article seeks to move past the Eurocentrism of thediscourse of the "refugee crisis," considering the interwovenhistories that have shaped movements of migration, displacement, trade,and travel across the Mediterranean. Canefe contextualizes the current"crisis" in terms of socio-legal histories and specificallyshows how labour and gendered precarity is produced and sustainedthrough socio-legal status for Syrian women in Turkey by examining therelations between forms of precarity that frame what she terms"refugee reception regimes in the Middle East."

Secil Dagtas's piece considers the positionality andexperience of women who have recently arrived in Turkey from Syria, inthis case by taking up the complex politics and positionalities ofhospitality. Drawing on her long-term fieldwork in Hatay, the Turkishprovince bordering Syria to the northwest, Dagtas challenges victimizingdepictions of sexual and gender-based violence by turning to theday-to-day experiences of women who live in the region. She argues foran approach to these practices that views them as "contingentassemblages of gendered practices and religious discourses," (82)while drawing attention to the tension within relations of hospitalityfor Syrian women in the province. She argues that hospitality is an actthat is at some level denied to these women, since they are seen as"guests" themselves, denied the status of "hosts,"and faced with the refusal of their hospitality by other neighbourhooddwellers. For many of Dagtas's research participants, acting as"host" makes it possible for them to feel at home; thus, theyexperience a refusal of entry into the community as anything more than aguest, while the extension of hospitality is a form of intervention inthis exclusion. She shows how these acts of hospitality can therefore beunderstood as providing a counter to state-level notions of"cosmo-political" hospitality.

Finally, in the last article, Edward Ou Jin Lee invites us toconsider the complex role that the nation-state plays in limiting andenabling the movement of people through the socio-legal processesemergent in "refugee and migrant resettlement." This workreveals the way state processes shape migrants' and refugees'experiences of (in)hospitality and (non-)belonging by interrogating thecolonial legacies and hetero-patriarchal and cisnormative ideologiesthat shape Canadian policies. Specifically, Edward Ou Jin Lee examinesthe relationship between the legacies of colonial history as"forgotten histories" of violence that embed Canada'snational borders in the project of racial exclusion that connecthistories of slavery, genocide, and indentureship to contemporaryexclusionary practices in refugee adjudication. In particular; Leehistoricizes the conditions shaping hom*ophobic persecution in the GlobalSouth to the imposition of European colonial anti-sodomy laws thatcriminalized hom*osexuality and gender inversion in the colonies, and thelater incorporation of these legal prohibitions in criminal law in theestablishment of the modern, post-colonial nation-states. Drawing oninterviews with queer and trans refugee claimants from the Global South,Lee argues that Canadian refugee policies deploy"hetero-cisnormative" logics that exclude queer and transrefugees from asylum through eligibility criteria, such as denyingtravel visas to queer and trans people from the Global South in order toinhibit future asylum claims.

Following the tenet of feminist praxis, we offer this special issueas an entry point for working intersectionally and collaborativelyagainst borders, as feminist researchers and activists. To this end,what might it mean to think with and alongside one another, and how canwe actively struggle with the ethical and political challenges facing uscollectively? The articles that follow move us between and acrossseveral geopolitical, formal, and informal spaces of knowledgeproduction. Our hope is that this issue speaks "to" and"with" grassroots and transnational organizers, researchers,activists, and academics. In this sense, our approach follows in thetradition of transnational feminist scholarship, (83) which, as AmandaLock Swarr and Richa Nagar define it, means "rethinking themeanings and possibilities of feminist praxis" beyond the threerelated binaries of "individually/collaboratively producedknowledges, academia/activism, and theory/ method." (84) We hopethe work gathered in this special issue, but also the work ofresearchers and activists who made it possible, will contribute to apractical-political overcoming of the false divide not only betweenempirically and theoretically driven work, but also between research andpractices of coalition, resistance, contestation, and transformation.

Acknowledgements

This work was made possible with the support of the Social Sciencesand Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Zukunftskolleg of theUniversity of Konstanz.

[c] Anna Caraslhatis, Natalie Kouri-Towe, Gada Mahrouse, and LeilaWhitley, 2018. this open-access work is licensed under a CreativeCommons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Licence, whichpermits use, reproduction, and distribution in any medium fornon-commercial purposes, provided the original authorship is creditedand the original publication in Refuge: Canada's Journal onRefugees is cited.

NOTES

(1) We want to thank everyone who participated in our first twoworkshops, which were hosted in 2017, the first at the University ofKonstanz, Germany, and the second in Athens, Greece: Bridget Anderson,Nora Butler Burke, Secil Dagtas, Encarnacion Gutierrez Rodriguez,Jennifer Hyndman, Miranda Iossifidis, Sharalyn Jordan, Serdar Kandil,Edward Ou Jin Lee, Catherine Moughalian, Seinat Neftalem ViviPapanikola, Estela Schindel, Nandita Sharma, Aila Spathopoulou, PennyTravlou, Myrto Tsilimpounidi, Pinar Tuzcu, Melissa Autumn White, andRola Yasmine.

(2) Nicholas De Genova, "Spectacles of Migrant'Illegality': The Scene of Exclusion, the Obscene ofInclusion," Ethnic and Racial Studies 36, no. 7 (2013): 1180-98.

(3) Adrian Edwards, "Global Forced Displacement Hits RecordHigh," UNHCR, June 20, 2016,http://www.UNHCR.org/en-us/news/latest/20i6/6/5763b65a4/global-forceddisplacement- hits-record-high.html.

(4) United Nations High Commission for Refugees, "SyriaEmergency," UNHCR, 2018, http://www.UNHCR.org/syriaemergency.html.

(5) Denise M. Horn and Serena Parekh, "Introduction to'Displacement,'" Signs: Journal of Women in Culture andSociety 43, no. 3 (2018): 1.

(6) Zygmunt Bauman, Strangers at Our Door (Malden: Polity, 2016).

(7) Marie-Benedicte Dembour and Marie Martin, "The FrenchCalaisis: Transit Zone or Dead End?," in Are Human Rights forMigrants? Critical Reflections on the Status of Irregular Migrants inEurope and the United States, ed. Marie-Benedicte Dembour and TobiasKelly (New York: Routledge, 2011), 124.

(8) For further reading on the distinction between mobility andimmobility, see Viola Thimm, "Muslim Mobilities and Gender: AnIntroduction," Social Sciences 7, no. 1 (2018): 2.

(9) Adrienne Millbank, Moral Confusion and the 1951 RefugeeConvention in Europe and Australia, Research Report (Victoria:Australian Population Research Institute, March 2016),http://tapri.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/1951Convention.pdf.

(10) Didier Fassin, "The Precarious Truth of Asylum,"Public Culture 25, no. 1 (2013): 39-63.

(11) Ron Kaye, "Redefining the Refugee: The UK Media Portrayalof Asylum Seekers," in The New Migration in Europe, ed. KhalidKoser and Helma Lutz (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), 167.

(12) For more on the report prepared for the United Nations HighCommission on the negative myths of refugees, see Mike Berry, InakiGarcia-Bianco, and Kerry Moore, Press Coverage of the Refugee andMigrant Crisis in the EU: A Content Analysis of Five European Countries(Cardiff: UNHCR and Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and CulturalStudies, December 2015), http://www.UNHCR.org/56bb369c9.pdf.

(13) Berry, Garcia-Bianco, and Moore, "Press Coverage of theRefugee and Migrant Crisis in the EU," 36.

(14) For more on the distinction between refugee and migrant, seeThomas Nail, The Figure of the Migrant (Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, 2015).

(15) Daniel, H. Rellstab, "Refugees? No Refugees?Categorizations of Migrants in the Wake of the Arab Spring in SwissOnline News and Comments," in Representations of War, Migration,and Refugeehood: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Daniel Rellstab, H.and Christiane Schlote, 109-39 (New York: Routledge, 2015).

(16) Nicholas De Genova, The Borders Of "Europe":Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of Bordering (Durham, NC: Duke UniversityPress, 2017), 8.

(17) Dembour and Martin, "French Calaisis."

(18) Aila Spathopoulou, "The Ferry as a Mobile Hotspot:Migrants at the Uneasy Borderlands of Greece, in "GoverningMobility through European Hotspot Centres," ed. Lauren Martin andMartina Tazzioli, special issue, Society and Space (November 8, 2016),http://societyandspace.org/2016/12/15/the-ferry-as-a-mobile-hotspot-migrantsat-the- uneasy-borderlands-of-greece/.

(19) For examples of critical scholarship on "crisis,"see Martina Tazzioli and Nicholas De Genova, "Europe / Crisis:Introducing New Keywords of 'the Crisis' in and of'Europe,'" in New Keywords of "the Crisis" inand of "Europe," ed. Nicholas De Genova and Martina Tazzioli(London: Zone Books, Near Futures, 2016),http://nearfuturesonline.org/europecrisis-new-keywords-of-crisis-in-and-of-europe/; Julien Jeandesboz and Polly Pallister-Wilkins, "Crisis,Routine, Consolidation: The Politics of the Mediterranean MigrationCrisis," Mediterranean Politics 21, no. 2 (2016): 316-320; MartinaTazzioli and Glenda Garelli, "The Crisis as Border: Choucha RefugeeCamp and Its 'People Not of Concern,"' Etnografia eRicerca Qualitativa 1 (2014): 15-26.

(20) Nicholas De Genova, "The 'Crisis' of theEuropean Border Regime: Towards a Marxist Theory of Borders,"International Socialism 150 (2016), http://isj.org.uk/thecrisis-of-the-european-border-regime-towards-a-marxist-theory-of-borders/.

(21) Sara Ahmed, "Affective Economies," Social Text 79,no. 2 (2004): 132.

(22) European Commission, "Explanatory Note on the'Hotspot' Approach," Statewatch, 2015,http://www.statewatch.org/news/2015/jul/EU-com-hotsposts.pdf.

(23) Myrto Tsilimpounidi, Sociology of Crisis: Visualising UrbanAusterity (London: Routledge, 2017).

(24) Fatima El-Tayeb, European Others: Queering Ethnicity inPostnational Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011),23.

(25) Andreas Wimmer and Nina Click Schiller, "MethodologicalNationalism and Beyond: Nation-State Building, Migration and the SocialSciences," Global Networks 2, no. 4 (2002): 301-34.

(26) Wimmer and Glick Schiller, "Methodological Nationalismand Beyond," 309.

(27) Nail, Figure of the Migrant, 3.

(28) Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: ThePerformative in the Political (Cambridge: Polity, 2013).

(29) Bridget Anderson, Nandita Sharma, and Cynthia Wright,"Editorial: Why No Borders?" Refuge: Canada's Journal onRefugees 26, no. 2 (2010): 9.

(30) For examples of intersectional research on (forced) migration,see Tanya Aberman, "Gendered Perspectives on Refugee Determinationin Canada," Refuge: Canada's Journal on Refugees 30, no. 2(2014): 57-66; Arlene S. Bierman, Farah Ahmad, and Farah N. Mawani,"Gender, Migration, and Health," in Racialized Migrant Womenin Canada: Essays on Health, Violence and Equity, ed. Vijay Agnew,98-136 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009); Rupaleem Bhuyan andTracy Smith-Carrier, "Precarious Migratory Status in Canada:Implications for Social Work and Social Service," Canadian SocialWork 12, no. 2 (2011): 51-60,http://welcomingcommunities.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Settlement-of-Newcomers-to-Canada-Fall-2010 .pdf#page=5i; Sirma Bilge and Ann Denis,"Introduction: Women, Intersectionality and Diasporas,"Journal of Intercultural Studies 31, no. 1 (2010): 1-8; Canadian Councilfor Refugees, Pathways to Gender Justice: A Tool Kit for People Workingin the Immigrant and Refugee Sector in Canada (Montreal: CanadianCouncil for Refugees, 2006),http://ccrweb.ca/sites/ccrweb.ca/files/static-files/Gender.pdf; CanadianCouncil for Refugees, Gender-Based Analysis of Settlement: ResearchReport (Montreal: Canadian Council for Refugees, November 2006),http://ccrweb.ca/sites/ccrwebxa/files/static-files/GBAresearch.pdf;Canadian Council for Refugees, Pathways to Gender Justice Handbook:Applying a Gender Lens in Working with Newcomers (Montreal: CanadianCouncil for Refugees, 2009,http://ccrweb.ca/sites/ccrweb.ca/files/static-files/Genderhandbook.pdf;Christina Clark-Kazak, "Theorizing Age and Generation in MigrationContexts: Towards Social Age Mainstreaming?" Canadian EthnicStudies 44, no. 3 (2012): 1-10; Jennifer Hyndman, "Introduction:The Feminist Politics of Refugee Migration," Gender Place andCulture: A Feminist Journal of Geography 17, no. 4 (2010): 453-9; EdwardOu Jin Lee and Shari Brotman, "Identity, Refugeeness, Belonging:Experiences of Sexual Minority Refugees in Canada," Canadian Reviewof Sociology 48, no. 3 (2011): 241-74; Charlotte-Anne Malischewski,"Integration in a Divided Society? Refugees and Asylum Seekers inNorthern Ireland," Refugee Studies Centre, Working Paper Series no.91, April 2013, http://www.refworld.org/docid/55c9f61c4.html; KellyOliver, "The Special Plight of Women Refugees," inDecolonizing Feminism: Transnational Feminism and Globalization, ed.Margaret A. McLaren, 177-200 (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017);Eileen Pittaway and Linda Bartolomei, "Refugees, Race, and Gender:The Multiple Discrimination against Refugee Women," Refuge:Canada's Journal on Refugees 19, no. 6 (2001): 21-32; Edna A.Viruell-Fuentes, Patricia Miranda, and Sawsan Abdulrahim, "MoreThan Culture: Structural Racism, Intersectionality Theory, and ImmigrantHealth," Social Science & Medicine 75, no. 12 (2012):2099-2106.

(31) Sabine Gatt, Kerstin Hazibar, Verena Sauermann, Max Preglau,and Michaela Raiser, "Migration from a Gender-Critical,Postcolonial and Interdisciplinary Perspective," in"Supplement 3," Osterreich Zeitschrift fur Soziologie 41,(2016): 1-12.

(32) Mirjana Morakvasic, "Birds of Passage Are AlsoWomen," International Migration Review 8, no. 4 (1984): 886-907.

(33) For examples of research that identifies the missingconnections between gender and migration, see PierretteHondagneu-Sotelo, "New Directions in Gender and ImmigrationResearch," in The Routledge International Handbook of MigrationStudies, ed. Steven J. Gold and Stephanie Nawyn, 180-8 (London:Routledge, 2013); Stephanie J. Nawyn, "Institutional Structures ofOpportunity in Refugee Resettlement: Gender, Race/Ethnicity, and RefugeeNGOs," Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare 37, no. 1 (2010):149-67; Silvia Pedraza, "Women and Migration: The SocialConsequences of Gender," Annual Review of Sociology 17 (1991):303-25.

(34) Hondagneu-Sotelo, "New Directions in Gender andImmigration Research."

(35) Horn and Parekh, "Introduction to'Displacement'"; Ingrid Palmary, Erica Burman, KhatidjaChantler, and Peace Kiguwa, eds., Gender and Migration: FeministInterventions (London: Zed Books, 2010).

(36) Palmary et al., Gender and Migration, 1.

(37) The journal publishes eight or nine articles in each of itseditions, which means that out of a sample of fifty-one articles, ninehave specifically constructed themselves in a way that takes gender intoaccount at some level in the past two years, or just under 20 per centof the articles published at our time of writing.

(38) In the International Migration Review, two recent articlesfeature gender without an intersectional analysis: see Yassine Khoudjaand Fenella Fleischmann, "Labor Force Participation of ImmigrantWomen in the Netherlands: Do Traditional Partners Hold Them Back?,"International Migration Review 5, no. 2 (2015): 506-41; Mieke Maliepaardand Richard Alba, "Cultural Integration in the Muslim SecondGeneration in the Netherlands: The Case of Gender Ideology,"International Migration Review 50, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 70-94. Of theremaining four articles that feature gender, one considers the effectsof deporting fathers, which, while helpfully locating men as alsopossessing gender and as having responsibilities toward children, alsoconsiders only male migrants: see Jodi Berger Cardoso, Erin RandleHamilton, Nestor Rodriguez, Karl Eschbach, and Jacqueline Hagan,"Deporting Fathers: Involuntary Transnational Families and Intentto Remigrate among Salvadoran Deportees," International MigrationReview 50, no. 1 (2016): 197-230; one considers gender inequality andmigration, specifically by making mention of women, thus locating genderas something specifically women have: see Antoine Bilodeau,"Migrating Gender Inequalities? Immigrant Women'sParticipation in Political Survey Research," InternationalMigration Review 50, no. 4 (2016): 951-976; another looks at thegendered effects of migration on those who remain in Georgia, locatingmigration as something engaged in by both men and women and gender assomething posed by all: see Karine Torosyan, Theodore P. Gerber, andPilar Gonalons-Pons, "Migration, Household Tasks, and Gender:Evidence from the Republic of Georgia," International MigrationReview 50, no. 2 (2016): 445-74; and the last considers the genderedeffects of Canada's immigration policies: see Jennifer Elrick andNaomi Lightman, "Sorting or Shaping? The Gendered Economic Outcomesof Immigration Policy in Canada," International Migration Review50, no. 2 (2016): 352-84.

(39) Such research has fallen into the trap of the methodologicalproblems that intersectional feminist scholarship has long critiqued, byassociating the host culture as "more egalitarian" andmigrants' cultures as "more traditional."

(40) Palmary et al., Gender and Migration, 2.

(41) Elisabeth Olivius, "Gender Equality and the GlobalGovernance of Refugees," International Feminist Journal of Politics18, no. 2 (2016): 270-90.

(42) Gatt et al., "Migration."

(43) Bridget Byrne, "Rethinking Intersectionality andWhiteness at the Borders of Citizenship," Sociological ResearchOnline 20, no. 3 (2015); Karma Chavez, Queer Migration Politics:Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (Chicago: University ofIllinois Press, 2013); Eithne Lubheid, Entry Denied: ControllingSexuality at the Border (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,2002); Eithne Lubheid and Lionel Cantu Jr., eds., Queer Migrations:Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship, and Border Crossings (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Martin F. Manalansan, "QueerIntersections: Sexuality and Gender in Migration Studies,"International Migration Review 40, no. 1 (2006): 224-49.

(44) Hondagneu-Sotelo, "New Directions in Gender andImmigration Research."

(45) Gatt et al., "Migration," 1.

(46) Ramon Grosfoguel, Laura Oso, and Anastasia Christou,"'Racism,' Intersectionality and Migration Studies:Framing

Some Theoretical Reflections," Identities: Global Studies inCulture and Power 22, no. 6 (2015): 635-52.

(47) Grosfoguel, Oso, and Christou, "Racism," 644.

(48) Anderson, Sharma, and Wright, "Editorial: Why NoBorders?," 6.

(49) See Queer Migration Research Network,https://queermigration.com; Nora Butler Burke, "Double Punishment:Immigration Penality in the Daily Lives of Migrant Trans Women,"forthcoming in Red Light Labour: Sex/Work, Regulation, Agency, andResistance, ed. Elya M. Durisin, Emily van der Meulen, and ChrisBruckert (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2018); Chavez, Queer Migration Politics;Sharlyn R. Jordan, "Un/Convention(al) Refugees: Contextualizing theAccounts of Refugees Facing hom*ophobic or Transphobic Persecution,"Refuge: Canada's Journal on Refugees 26, no. 2 (2009): 165-82;Sarah Keenan, "Safe Spaces for Dykes in Danger? Refugee Law'sProduction of the Vulnerable Lesbian Subject," in Regulating theInternational Movement of Women: From Protection to Control, ed. SharronFitzGerald, 29-47 (London: Routledge, 2011); Lubheid, Entry Denied;Lubheid and Cantu, Queer Migrations; Manalansan, "QueerIntersections"; Lee and Brotman, "Identity, Refugeeness,Belonging"; Melissa Autumn White, "Ambivalent hom*onationalism:Transnational Queer Intimacies and Territorialized Belonging,"Interventions 15, no. 1 (2013): 37-54

(50) White, "Ambivalent hom*onationalism."

(51) Chavez, Queer Migration Politics; Lubheid, Entry Denied.

(52) Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, Border as Method: Or, theMultiplication of Labour (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).

(53) Noel Parker and Nick Vaughan-Williams, "Critical BorderStudies: Broadening and Deepening the 'Lines in the Sand'Agenda," Geopolitics 17, no. 4 (2012): 727-33; Parker andVaughan-Williams, "Lines in the Sand? Towards an Agenda forCritical Border Studies," Geopolitics 14, no. 3 (2009): 582-7.

(54) Victoria M. Basham and Nick Vaughan-Williams, "Gender,Race and Border Security Practices: A Profane Reading Of 'MuscularLiberalism,"' British Journal of Politics and InternationalRelations 15, no. 4 (2013): 509-527; Gatt et al., "Migration";Leila Whitley, "The Disappearance of Race: A Critique of the Use ofa*gamben in Border and Migration Scholarship," borderlands e-journal15, no. 2 (2017).

(55) Whitley, "Disappearance of Race."

(56) Basham and Vaughan-Williams, "Gender, Race and BorderSecurity Practices"; William Walters, "Reflections onMigration and Governmentality," movements: Journal for CriticalMigration and Border Regime Studies 1, no. 1 (2015): 1-25.

(57) Basham and Vaughan-Williams, "Gender, Race and BorderSecurity Practices," 510.

(58) Anna Carastathis, Intersectionality: Origins, Contestations,Horizons (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), 4.

(59) Jennifer C. Nash, "Institutionalising the Margins,"Social Text 32, no. 1 (2014): 45-65.

(60) Nash, "Institutionalising the Margins," 50.

(61) This quotation is taken from the basis of unity of FeministResearchers against Borders (2017).

(62) Myrto Tsilimpounidi and Anna Carastathis, "Facing Crisis:Queer Representations against the Backdrop of Athens," in QueerMigrations 2, ed. Karma Chavez and Eithne Lubheid (forthcoming).

(63) Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, "Demarginalizing theIntersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique ofAntidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and AntiracistPolitics," University of Chicago Legal Forum 1, no. 8 (1989): 140;Williams Crenshaw, "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality,Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color," StanfordLaw Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241-99.

(64) For a discussion of "whitening intersectionality,"see Sirma Bilge, "Intersectionality Undone: SavingIntersectionality from Intersectionality Studies," Du Bois Review10, no. 2 (2013): 412.

(65) Ibid.

(66) Kathy Davis, "Intersectionality as Buzzword: A Sociologyof Science Perspective on What Makes a Feminist Theory Successful,"Feminist Theory 9, no. 1 (2008): 67-85.

(67) Gada Mahrouse, "Teaching Intersectional and TransnationalFeminisms through Fiction and Film," Feminist Teacher 62, nos. 2-3(2018): 232-9.

(68) Nikol G. Alexander-Floyd, "Disappearing Acts: ReclaimingIntersectionality in the Social Sciences in a Post-Black FeministEra," Feminist Formations 24, no. 1 (2012): 1-25.

(69) Bilge, "Intersectionality Undone"; Carastathis,Intersectionality; Rita Kaur Dhamoon, "Considerations onMainstreaming Intersectionality," Political Research Quarterly 64,no. 1 (2011): 230-43; Nash, "Institutionalising the Margins."

(70) For more on the politics of location, see Gloria Anzaldua,Borderlands / La Frontera, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books,1999); Jacqui M. Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty,"Cartographies of Knowledge and Power: Transnational Feminism asRadical Praxis," in Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis, ed.Richa Nagar and Amanda Lock Swarr, 23-43 (Albany: State University ofNew York Press, 2010).

(71) Floya Anthias, "Transnational Mobilities, MigrationResearch and Intersectionality," Nordic Journal of MigrationResearch 2, no. 2 (2012): 102-10.

(72) Jasbir K. Puar, "'I Would Rather Be a Cyborg Than aGoddess': Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory,"Philosophia: A Journal of Continental Feminism 2, no. 1 (2012): 62.

(73) LGBTQI+ is used here as shorthand for lesbian, gay, bisexual,trans (transgender and transsexual), queer, intersex, and the additionalinclusion of other sexualities and genders, such as asexuality,two-spirit, questioning, allies, pansexual, and other emergentidentities.

(74) For more on trans necropolitics and migration, see NaelBhanji, "Trans/scriptions: Homing Desires, (Trans)sexualCitizenship and Racialized Bodies," in Transgender Migrations: TheBodies, Borders, and Politics of Transition, ed. Trystan Cotten, 157-75(New York: Routledge, 2012); C. Riley Snorton and Jin Haritaworn,"Trans Necropolitics: A Transnational Reflection on Violence,Death, and the Trans of Color Afterlife," in The TransgenderStudies Reader, ed. Susan Stryker and Airen Z. Aizura, 66-76 (New York:Routledge, 2013).

(75) Both White and Lee analyze how LGBTQ+ refugee activismtransacts with the coloniality of state power in offering and denyinginternational protection. For instance, the Canadian governmentsresponse to the "refugee crisis" has been to use gender,sexuality, and nation as key factors in determining who is accepted andwho is rejected under the governments resettlement program: insofar asthe selection criteria have prioritized government sponsorship of"whole Syrian families," "LGBTQ Syrians," and Syrianwomen deemed "vulnerable to exploitation."

(76) Jordan, "Un/Convention(al) Refugees."

(77) Carastathis, Intersectionality: Ana Louise Keating,Transformation Now! Toward a Post-Oppositional Politics of Change(Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2013); Roderick Ferguson,"Reading Intersectionality," Transcripts 2 (2012): 93; Puar,"I Would Rather Be a Cyborg," 54.

(78) Anthias, "Transnational Mobilities."

(79) Crenshaw, "Demarginalizing," 167.

(80) Kimberly Williams Crenshaw, "Twenty Years of CRT: LookingBack to Look Forward," Connecticut Law Review 43, no. 5 (2011):1313. Also see Kimberly Williams Crenshaw, "Race, Reform, andRetrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in AntidiscriminationLaw," Harvard Law Review 101, no. 7 (1988): 1331-87.

(81) Gutierrez Rodriguez, "The Coloniality of Migration andthe 'Refugee Crisis': On the Asylum-Migration Nexus, theTransatlantic White European Settler Colonialism-Migration and RacialCapitalism," this issue.

(82) Secil Dagtas, "Inhabiting Difference across Religion andGender: Displaced Women's Experiences at Turkey's Border withSyria," this issue.

(83) Alexander and Mohanty, "Cartographies of Knowledge andPower."

(84) Richa Nagar and Amanda Lock Swarr, eds., CriticalTransnational Feminist Praxis (Albany: State University of New YorkPress, 2010), 2.

Anna Carastathis is an independent researcher. The author may becontacted at [emailprotected].

Natalie Kouri-Towe is a lecturer in the Gender, Sexuality, andWomen's Studies program at the University of Pittsburgh and will bejoining the Simone de Beauvoir Institute at Concordia University as anassistant professor in the 2018-19 academic year. The author may econtacted at [emailprotected].

Gada Mahrouse is an associate professor at Simone de BeauvoirInstitute, Concordia University. The author may be contacted at[emailprotected].

Leila Whitley is a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at theUniversity of Konstanz, Germany. The author may be contacted at[emailprotected].