Wenona Giles

Waiting for what? The feminization of asylum in protracted situations

Millions of refugees are stuck in camps and cities of the global South without permanent legal status. They wait in limbo, their status unresolved in what the United Nations (UN) calls ‘protracted refugee situations’ (PRS). The material conditions and depictions of such refugees as immobile and passive contributes to a feminization of asylum in such spaces. In contrast, refugees on the move to seek asylum in the global North are perceived as threats and coded as part of a masculinist geopolitical agenda that controls and securitizes their movement. Policies to externalize asylum and keep potential refugees away from the affluent nations of the global North, in which they may seek legal status, represent one strategy of exclusion. This article traces these divergent trajectories of im/mobility and demonstrates how humanitarian space for both groups is narrowing over time. For those seeking asylum in the global North, measures such as increased detention and rapid return to transit countries aim to deter migrants from arriving at all. It is contended that the discrete systems that manage asylum seekers in the global North and refugees in long-term limbo are themselves gendered. European Union policies to ‘externalize’ asylum and keep asylum seekers offshore dovetail with policies by EU member states to ‘build capacity’ for refugee protection in refugee ‘regions of origin’. These represent a shifting, not a sharing, of responsibility for their welfare and prolongs their wait.

The Domestication of Women's Work: A Comparison of Chinese and Portuguese Immigrant Women Homeworkers

Changes in the Canadian political economy, including trade liberalization, economic recession, the shift to postfordist forms of production, and monetarist economic policies, have intensified two processes which define the nature of womens work in the 1990s: informalization and domestication.

Re/membering the Portuguese household in Toronto: Culture, contradictions and resistance

Abstract This paper explores the notion of “home” through the experiences of first and second generation Portuguese women and men in Toronto. Two empirical case studies provide a deeper way of understanding household survival strategies and decision making among Portuguese in Toronto.

Gender Inequality and Resistance : the Case of Portuguese Women in London

While they value the wage derived from their work in the labour force, married Portuguese migrant women in London do not necessarily find that this alters gender relations in the household to their satisfaction. There is little research on how women continue to struggle in spite of the changes wrought by their involvement in wage labour. Because womens day-to-day experiences are multifaceted, expressions of resistance to gender inequalities in the household can best be explored by examining both household and non-household relations, as well as other socio-political experiences. Married women express discontent with their lives in London by their orientation to return to Portugal. However, their involvement in the labour force has resulted in different return orientations among married and single women and men. I explore these differences by examining the social relations of the wage workplace and the household

Reflections on the Women in Conflict Zones Network

In this brief article, I discuss the epistemology and interdisciplinary methodology of the Women in Conflict Zones Network (WICZNET), an academicactivist organization which originated at York University, Toronto in the early 1990s. The WICZNET was actively involved in research on gender and militarization until about 2000, and WICZNET linkages that endure to this day have mushroomed into other research alliances. This network brought feminist researchers, policy-makers and activists from many parts of world and across ethnic-nationalist boundaries together, to share knowledge and experiences. This shared base of knowledge/experience helped the WICZNET to ‘think through’ a comparative project involving Sri Lanka and the region of the former Yugoslavia. Our exploration of the gender relations of militarized conflict was risky, and at times exhausting, but also productive and exhilarating. I have two main objectives in this article. First of all, I am interposing the international Women in Conflict Zones Network that I co-coordinated into debates about the ‘globalocentricism’ and neo-liberalism of many feminist NGOs in recent decades in order to understand better the limitations and possibilities for feminist networking and activism into the future. Second, I am asking how new networks might not only take advantage of the lessons learned by the WICZNET, but also the experiences of two other recent alternative globalization movement approaches: that of Women and the Politics of Place (WPP) and the World Social Forum (WSF) process. I have chosen to focus on these two latter approaches because of their particular relevance – from the perspectives of both commonalities as well as differences – to the