Migration
by
The study of modern human migration takes place across multiple disciplines and engages a wide variety of methodologies, and yet issues of gender and sexuality have largely been understood as marginal to this pivotal area of research. This essay highlights key contributions regarding migration by gender and sexuality scholars. First, research on women’s migration experiences has opened new historical understandings of national inclusion and exclusion. Second, critical, queer, and trans migration studies approaches have scrutinized normativity in ways that have produced new and generative questions regarding state-based rights and policies. Third, and relatedly, this critique has forced us to rethink such fundamental social concepts as citizenship, belonging, and borders. To begin, we know that migration is not a haphazard event. Rather, patterns of human migration follow established global political, economic, and military linkages. Saskia Sassen’s (1990, 1999) work has been pivotal in countering the myth of migration as an indiscriminate flow, or “mass invasion,” of the global poor. And while the sources, routes, and numbers of transnational migration may have changed over time in accordance to shifts in capital, technology, and military priorities, its integral role in providing the labor essential for the global economy remains constant. For example, Kitty...
This essay may be found on page 155 of the printed volume.