Gendering Migration: Not for feminists only and not only in the household

A glance at the main journals, and at recent edited volumes published in the United States on the topic of immigration and international migration reveals that basic concepts such as sex, gender, power, privilege, and sexual discrimination only rarely enter the vocabulary or research design of immigration research. This is puzzling. Gender is one of the fundamental social relations anchoring and shaping immigration patterns, and immigration is one of the most powerful forces disrupting and realigning everyday life. This conference paper draws from the introductory essay I wrote for the edited volume Gender and U.S. Immigration: Contemporary Trends (Hondagneu-Sotelo, editor, 2003), and seeks to remedy this absence by showing how gender and immigration social science research has unfolded in the United States. The paper does not focus exclusively on Mexican migration and gender, but instead, offers a panoramic view first of the trajectory of gender and migration research in the U.S., followed by short summaries of research on gender and immigration concerning a myriad of groups (Russian Jews, Salvadorans, Filipinos, etc.). Along the way, I suggest that looking for gender and analyzing gender only in the household blinds us to other important gender dynamics that are involved in migration.