It’s a man’s world: a feminist reading of the West African / EU border’s differential porosity

Gender is a constitutive factor of both international migration and the borders that states put in place to manage it.

Border scholars are, however, reluctant to give gender the importance it deserves, both in their analysis of the border-crossing experience and of border policy and practice.

This curtails our understanding of borders as complex entities with variable meanings and levels of porosity.

Using feminist geopolitics as the critical foundation for my discussion, Luna Vives will analyze the West African/Southern European border as an example of how a heavily gendered and racialized conception of South-North migration determines who must be stopped and how.

Luna Vives is a Geography PhD Candidate at the University of British Columbia. Her PhD research focuses on the cross-border journeys of Senegalese women who have recently migrated to Spain and the ways in which the intersection of race, gender, and migration status shapes their experiences once in the country.

Photo : Javier Acebal.