The ANU Gender Institute and ANU Centre for European Studies have joined in organizing a research workshop whose aim is to gather researchers interested in exploring the gendered dimension to migration and challenging disciplinary boundaries. The workshop will include individual presentations, group discussions, and planning the production of an edited book. Please email Dr Katarzyna Williams for more details or to register your interest in attending.

Workshop convener

Dr Katarzyna Williams is Assistant professor at the International Studies Faculty, University of Lodz, Poland and the Visiting Fellow at the ANU Centre for European Studies, and Monash European and EU Centre. Her main research interests include literary theory, utopian literature, diasporic literature, digital media and performance studies. She is currently working on a book dealing with myth and images of Australia in European literature and culture.

Background notes

Between 1945 and 1954, Australia accepted over 180 000 refugees, primarily the Displaced Persons (DPs) from Eastern and Central Europe (referred to by Arthur Calwell as “Balts”), and sought to attract an increased number of migrants from Southern Europe. Soon after Australia’s millionth post-war immigrant arrived in 1952, an “Operation Reunion” was designed to reunite Eastern European settlers with their families. Postwar immigrants from these parts of Europe, like other early Australian migrants, have aroused the interest of sociologists, historians and oral historians. Historical and sociological research has usually focused on male migrant workers as they were the main labour force. Experiences of migrant women, coming to freedom and safety, and to realize Calwell’s “populate or perish” policy, have typically been ignored. So have, consequently, been their roles in and contribution to cultural life in Australia, at best rendered as dependent on men’s lives and achievements, and thus stereotyped (Boyd, 1986; Mahler and Pessar, 2006). Yet women are collectors of dislocation stories (Knowles, 2003), tellers of new diasporic belongings (De Tona, 2006) and stories that give them the power to understand defeat or danger (Trzebinski, 2002).

Fleeing political conflict and persecution in their home countries, dealing with pre-migration trauma in various camps all over Europe, with becoming “non-repatriables”, with humiliating migrant selection processes, separation from their husbands and sons, with the most menial jobs and other post-migration living difficulties, these women tell important stories, not only of families’ memories and identities, but narratives that show a recognition of the complexities of migration. They are the outsiders whose stories of otherness take many forms and as such should be recognized and not referred to simply with reference to the umbrella term of “Australian multiculturalism” that neglects differences among migrant groups and obscures their gendered dimensions.

Some commentators have observed how these migrant women adjusted to new circumstances better than men, more easily found a sense of purpose and constructively dealt with the re-construction of a coherent self commonly associated with forced migration. Perhaps this is the result of stubbornness in sustaining home culture and becoming transnationals, in Werbner’s understanding of the term (1999), referring to those who live “in their enclosed cultural worlds” rather than a new and challenging reality. Perhaps it is the acknowledged necessity to adopt the roles and behaviours imposed on them, to build a coherent self and strategically position it in relation to past and present, without a sustaining language, culture and often family, that resulted in determination and motivation, leading to individual and professional success, perhaps even liberation that would have never happened back at home. Yet maybe, contrary to what Hondagneu-Sotelo assumes (1992), migration is not really gendered, different for men and women, but only gendering, i.e. challenging or enforcing gender related assumptions, accentuating gender divisions and changing gender relationships within society and migrant families.

Sociological work alone seems insufficient in trying to capture migrants’ understanding of reality and themselves. It cannot explain or provide an interpretive appreciation of how migrants feel not only about their homeland and the new land, but also about national attachments and identifications, often involuntary loyalties, common cultural narratives and imaginings. Thus reaching for literature and art, for various kinds of (auto)narratives, life writing as well as literary narratives that often emphasize personal meanings over facts, can help us understand how experiences, emotions and motivations are interpreted by individuals, conceptualized and dealt with in this particular subtle and fragmented context of migration.

The world has changed considerably since the first ‘Displaced Persons’ arrived in Australia, but the need to understand the experiences and transformations of migrants is just as urgent as it was at the end of the Second World War. Equally important is the need to deal with “the well-established practice of gender blindness in migration studies” (De Tona, 2006). Thus, the goal of the workshop is to gather researchers interested in exploring – via the examples of ethnic writing and various kinds of artistic expression – the experiences of women from Eastern and Central Europe, DPs sent to Australia in the late 1940s and early 1950s, wives and mothers coming within family reunion programs in the 1960s or professional individuals arriving to Australia to escape later political turmoil and economic crisis in Europe. Moving within the constantly expanding interdisciplinary arena of literary, gender and migration studies, as well as history, sociology and studies in visual culture, participants are invited to engage in reflective dialogue, looking for collaborative research methodologies, some general patterns that may allow us to better understand a gendered dimension to migration, and possible answers to questions which are still relevant in the current migration context both in Australia and Europe. These questions include, but are not limited to:

1. What is a gendered dimension to migration? How do women migrants deal with their “otherness” and ”outsider” status both as women and as residents of different ethnic origin?
2. What are the characteristics of migrant women’s narrative practices / artistic modes of expression? Can their writing be situated in a context other than the realist mode?
3. What is the purpose of telling these stories? Is it is always a fantasy of return to a lost world? Is it to deal with suffering? To empower themselves? Is it a quest for identity and self-knowledge? What are their shared stories?
4. What are the features of displaced women’s storytelling that distinguishes it from other minority stories? How do they incorporate their experiences as well as personal and collective memories?
5. How do they respond to external stereotypes and conceptualise their situation and self? Do women migrants’ stories explore or subvert gender roles and models? How do they respond to socially constructed labour market categories such as “immigrant women”? Do migrant women develop different social networks or share the same ones as men?
6. Do the narratives of women migrants encourage alternative approaches to migration or transnationalism? How do they contribute to current debates pertaining to gender and migration studies?

ANUCES is an initiative involving four ANU Colleges (Arts and Social Sciences, Law, Business and Economics, and Asia and the Pacific) co-funded by the ANU and the European Union.

References

Boyd, M. “Immigrant women in Canada”. International migration: The female experience. Eds. R. J. Simon and C. B. Brettell. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1986. 45-61.

De Tona, Carla. “Narrative Networks: Italian Women in Dublin”. IIIS Discussion Paper 152 (2006).

Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierette. Gender and US immigration: contemporary trends. University of California Press, 2003.

Knowles, Caroline. Race and social analysis. London: SAGE, 2003. Mahler, Sarah J. and Patricia Pessar. “Gender matters: Ethnographers bring gender from the periphery toward the core of immigration studies”. International Migration Review 40 (2006): 27- 64.

Trzebinski, Jerzy. “Narracja jako sposób rozumienia świata”. Narracja jako sposób rozumienia świata. Ed. Jerzy Trzebiński. Gdańsk: Gdańskie Wydawnictwo Psychologiczne, 2002. 87-121.

Werbner, Pnina. “Global pathways. Working class cosmopolitans and the creation of transnational ethnic worlds”. Social Anthropology 7.01 (1999): 17-35.

Photo source: www.world-psi.org/en/issue/migration