In this article, I investigate how gendered nationalism is articulated through everyday practices in relation to immigrant integration policy and the intersectional production of inequality in South Korea. By using ethnographic data collected at community centers created to implement national “multicultural” policy, I examine the individual perspectives and experiences of Korean staff and targeted recipients. To defend their own “native” privileges, the Korean staff stressed the gendered caretaking roles of marriage migrants and their contribution to the nation as justification for (...) state support. The migrants, while critical of the familial responsibilities imposed on them in Korea, underscored their gendered value to the nation to offset their subjugated position. The diverging perspectives of the two groups are informed by “everyday” nationalism, generated through constantly gendered terms and effects. Bringing together the literature on nationalism and migration through a focus on reproductive labor, I expose how national boundaries are drawn through quotidian practices of gendered nationalism, with significant implications for gender and ethnic hierarchies. (shrink)

Carrillo Rowe provides an analysis of Monster's Ball as a cultural narrative of white masculinity's redemption from the atrocities of racism through an interracial love story that erases white masculinity's national history and implication in a racist past while it displaces the black female body from that history and identification with the struggle for reparation. The nexus of sex, race, and desire is used to produce a new whiteness consistent with the emerging national multicultural logics of color blindness by undermining (...) the narrative, memory, identity, and racing of bodies grounding the logic of reparation. (shrink)

This article presents the results of a case study that aims to highlight the processes by which French female migrants in London and Manchester attempt to de/re/construct identities to negotiate the challenges of the cultural and social structures in England. This research centres on 15 semi-structured interviews with French women residents of diverse backgrounds. The interviews conducted represent counter-narratives to existing studies which focus only on highly skilled French migrants in London and define them as free movers and ‘invisible migrants’. (...) This study attempts to fill a gap by examining solely French women migrants in Manchester and London as a strategic research site for a number of key research questions taken from the current literature of intra-European migration, gender and identity. Indeed, the ways in which migrants negotiate their identity are crucial to migration studies and have to be analysed in relation to women’s specific experience. The study exemplifies how migrants’ identities are a ground of negotiation, contestation, deconstruction and reconstruction. Patterns that emerged in this study first highlight the high heterogeneity among women’s strategies of self-identification and definition and sense of belonging in a changing Europe. The article concludes by proposing a refined notion of transculturality as a useful concept for future explorations of changes in contemporary European societies and the role women can have in them. (shrink)

This article identifies a misfit between transnational feminist networks observed at the World Social Forum and the extant scholarship on transnational feminism. The conceptual divide is posited as one between transnational feminism understood, on the one hand, as a normative discourse involving a particular analytic and methodological approach in feminist knowledge production and, on the other, as an empirical referent to feminist cross-border organising. The author proposes that the US-based and Anglophone character of the scholarship, its post-structuralist and post-colonial genealogies (...) and the transnational paradigm’s displacement of area studies can be seen as contributing to the misfit. The article concludes by arguing for theoretical reconsideration of activist practice, place and the ‘posts’ – post-structuralism and post-colonialism – in the study of contemporary transnational feminist activisms. This marks an effort to get beyond the binary framework of ‘transnational feminism’ versus ‘global sisterhood’ in analysing activist practices within an increasingly diverse and complex transnational feminist field. (shrink)