"Women's Space is Everywhere!" - A Study of Narratives of Bordering and Gendering

Abstract

In 2015/2016 Europe experienced a great influx of refugees. As a response to the high number of refugees, the countries of the EU has emphasised a strengthening of their borders, as well as implemented an externalisation of the European outer-borders to control the number of refugees coming to European territory. Consequently, we argue that a securitisation of refugees has been enforced as the EU constructs the refugees as a threat to societal and state-security. The EU employs measures to execute state sovereignty to ensure the cultural and social homogeneity of their country. Consequently, the restrictions on asylum legislations and strengthened border controls makes border-crossing in the present European context challenging, difficult and unsafe. Thousands of people are forced to undertake more dangerous routes to avoid detention and repatriation. In the current situation, more women and children are fleeing than ever before. The present thesis seeks to examine how refugee women experience crossing borders when they are forced to flee. We look into how the refugee women perceive differentialities between borders, as well as their chosen strategies. We apply the method of narratology, as it will help us understand how the refugee women experience their movement to and within the borders of the EU. Furthermore, narratology will assist us in exploring how the different situational positions of the women affect their experience, as well as which strategies they employ on their different routes. We thereby employ a gender-perspective, as our conducted narratives are told by women. The thesis builds its research on the narratives of three female refugees, each experiencing border-crossing to and within the EU differently. We also conducted participant observation during a conference in Hamburg called “International Conference of Refugees and Migrants: The Struggle of Refugees – How to go on? Stop war on Migrants! 2016”. Moreover, we outline a contextual overview of the present border-regime in Europe, and analyse the narratives and the observations in Hamburg in the light of such context. We argue that the refugee women navigate through a male-centred field, demonstrated in asylum legislation, the EU border regime and the Hamburg Conference. The refugee women are excluded from the political sphere, excluded from the narrative authority and are thus left navigating within a victimising role. The victimising discourse related to refugee women is also evident in the manner in which female migration often is framed within the field of human trafficking or through domestic labour migration, linking migrating women to the private sphere. Furthermore, the narratives of this study demonstrate that the interviewed women define the EU-border system as based on security and violence, which directly affects the manner in which they are navigating. We claim that the strategies employed by the female refugees are gender-specific, and furthermore predominantly stems from a feeling of being exposed to a gendered insecurity - and that the strategies employed has the aim of enhancing their own security. We identify which measures they use to enhance their security, and recognize means as financial capital, travelling with a male protector, or in groups as common strategies taken to navigate the border-regime. Furthermore, we recognize visibility/invisibility as a strategic, to either make oneself invisible for men who are considered as threats, or gendering; to make oneself visible - by using gender to be seen as either a victim or someone in need of protection. Thus, we find that processes of bordering becomes processes of gendering, demonstrating the dialogical relationship between the manner in which the interviewed women conceptualise the EU borders and how the EU borders simultaneously construct the women within a framework of an essentialised ‘female refugee experience’. This dialogical field, defined by connotations on safety and uncertainty, fundamentally affects how the interviewed women are navigating.

A master thesis from Aalborg University

"Women's Space is Everywhere!" - A Study of Narratives of Bordering and Gendering

["Kvinders Plads er Overalt!" - Et Studie af Narrativer om Grӕnser og Køn]