Feminism and Migration

Feminism and Migration: Cross-Cultural Engagements revolves around a simple question with no simple answer: does migration empower women? The collection edited by Glenda Tibe Bonifacio refuses a yes-or-no conclusion. Migration may bring wages, education, mobility, and new political networks, while also producing low-paid care work, undocumented status, family separation, and racialized surveillance. Movement itself is not liberating or oppressive in the abstract; law, labor markets, households, religion, and receiving societies organize its consequences.

The book moves through feminist migration theory, contested identity and agency, resistance and social justice, and religion as a site of change, drawing cases from Western and non-Western contexts. That architecture counters a research tradition in which migrant women appear only as wives, mothers, family dependents, or an undifferentiated immigrant population. Here they are also workers, exiles, nuns, organizers, and producers of knowledge whose choices are constrained by borders but can transform households, communities, and migration itself.

Its treatment of agency deserves particular attention. Agency does not always appear as explicitly feminist identification, departure from family, or the individual choice celebrated by Western liberalism. Women may pursue safety, dignity, and recognition through religious associations, antiracist coalitions, migrant self-organization, and daily negotiation. Bonifacio asks readers not to deny the feminist force of a practice simply because participants do not use that name, while also warning researchers against imposing the label from outside.

Labor forms the material thread across the cases. Transnational economies demand inexpensive workers in domestic service, care, hospitality, and informal sectors, yet frequently discipline migrant women through temporary visas, employer dependence, and partial citizenship. Income described as empowerment may coexist with deskilling, exploitation, and care deficits across separated families. Gender must be read together with class, race, ethnicity, and legal status to explain why one migration route yields resources for some women and deeper precarity for others.

Methodologically, contributors use oral history, multisited ethnography, archival work, and intercultural research to make migrants’ accounts more than footnotes to policy data. Studies of antiracist organizing in Athens, migrant women’s self-organization in Milan, immigrant labor in France and Brazil, and Muslim women’s activism in Chicago show that coalitions can create solidarity while exposing inequalities within local feminism, antiracist politics, and multiculturalism.

The collection also has visible limits. Geographic variety is not complete coverage, and sexuality and queer migration are notably absent. “Migrant women” can remain too broad a category to capture trans, disabled, refugee, and differently documented lives. There is also a risk of interpreting every act of adaptation as feminist resistance. Contemporary readers should supplement the book with queer migration studies, border abolition, disability justice, and more systematic work on global care chains.

Its lasting value for FemRes is to replace the linear story of leaving one country and entering another with a multiscalar account of power. The book helps readers ask who can move safely and who is displaced, whose care makes another woman’s professional freedom possible, and how citizenship, religion, and antiracist alliance reshape feminist practice. Rather than offer one universal image of the migrant woman, it provides a method for escaping the binary of passive victim and triumphant agent.