Keywords

Gender Innovation

The term ‘gender innovation’ is sometimes used to describe a gain in scientific knowledge. For instances, in a forthcoming book, entitled Gender Innovation in Political Science, the contribution of feminist scholarship to new norms and knowledge in various areas of political science is analysed.Footnote 1 My use of the term is different. I understand gender innovation as a subform of sociopolitical innovation in relation to the emergence, implementation or dissemination of new forms of life in different areas of society, but always with reference to a change in gender relations.Footnote 2

I strongly dissociate myself from another use of the concept ‘social innovation’, namely when it becomes ‘a convenient buzzword to forward neoliberal ideology in a time of austerity’.Footnote 3 Note that, depending on the perspective of the beholder, innovation doesn’t necessarily have a positive connotation—in fact, the term ‘social innovation’ long had pejorative connotations, describing deviant behaviour and especially socialist doctrines.Footnote 4 By choosing this concept, which is today usually positively connoted, I nonetheless intend to reverse the usually negative framing of migration as first and foremost a ‘problem’.

The Intersection of Discrimination and Privileges and New Reconfigurations

To understand processes of sociopolitical innovation, the concept of intersectionality is highly important. This term was first coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in a seminal paper in which she analysed the ‘particular manner in which Black women are subordinated’.Footnote 5 At the intersection, different kinds of discrimination meet. The resulting oppressive effect follows a ‘logic’ of its own and is not limited to the simple addition of the various forms of discrimination.Footnote 6 An intersectional approach thus studies how specific discriminatory effects result from the connection of various kinds of oppression. Crenshaw developed her approach as a critique of how the legal system in the USA reacted to lawsuits where both race and gender discrimination were involved. Accordingly, the focus was on the specific effects of multiple forms of discrimination. Without neglecting the important dimension of discrimination, the concept of intersectionality can also be used in a broader sense,Footnote 7 in order to analyse situations where certain privileges intersect with specific ways of discriminating and as a consequence, the potential for new social and political configurations results. It is precisely the coexistence of privileges and discrimination that can generate change, as several examples in this book will show. Intersectionality therefore not only allows the actors of different social movements to realise the ‘interconnectedness of the issues that concern them’ and in doing so to strengthen their struggle.Footnote 8 Even without such an awareness of the actors involved, the intersection of privileges and discrimination can produce a situation that fosters social change, as we will see.

The clash of privileges with specific forms of discrimination has been addressed by different scholars. For instance, Floya Anthias called this ‘contradictory locations’.Footnote 9 At the end of her article, Anthias also briefly indicates that such situations have a potential for transformation, but she does not provide any empirical material to demonstrate this. The concrete examples described in this book shall hopefully take the theory of intersectionality a small step further by analysing such processes very concretely.

A ‘Migrantisation’ of the Past

History systematically told from a perspective of migration changes national self-perceptions.Footnote 10 Such an intention can, however, remain on the level of an empty assertion, if the constitutive dimension of migration is not shown in concrete terms. For it is not a question of adding a history of migration to so-called general history. Migration should therefore not only be brought to the fore where its influence is obvious. Instead, all fields of society have to be looked at differently: democracy, agriculture, or, as is the case here, gender equality. What we need is not primarily a history of migration, which can be found in books that specifically address this topic, but a ‘migrantisation’ of our understanding of the past. In short, we need a different viewpoint.Footnote 11

Very often, dominant discourses—and not only in Switzerland—suffer from a sedentary bias and thereby produce an unquestioned assumption that migration is per se a problem.Footnote 12 If migration is perceived from the point of view of a sedentary bias, then it inevitably becomes something that ‘needs to be fixed’ by a certain set of policies: ‘The repressive variant is tight border control, the more liberal one is addressing the “root causes” of migration—especially poverty and violence in origin countries—so that people do not have to migrate. Either way, migration is seen as harmful and dysfunctional’.Footnote 13 The fact that migration often takes place under very problematic conditions should of course not be negated. The ‘problem’, however, is not migration itself, but rather the enabling conditions of our political and economic system, for instance in regard to the inequality under which most South–North migration takes place.Footnote 14

A sedentary bias can also be found in academic approaches to migration. For instance, in recent essays I have shown how Swiss history has often been written in such a way as to frame migration as, above all, a challenge or problem in need of a solution.Footnote 15 As a result, the fundamental way in which migration has shaped contemporary society is overlooked. The relations described in this book between migration and what I call gender innovation thus often go unrecognised. For example, if we look at one of the most recent publications analysing the women’s movement in Switzerland, groups formed by ‘migrant’ women fighting for equal rights are completely ignored. It is as if they were not part of the women’s movement.Footnote 16 This shows that if we do not start to look at the past from a different perspective, statements, or omissions that are unjustifiable when migration is taken into account, will occur again and again. The Swiss case is not an isolated case. For the USA, the following statement was made in 2001: ‘US women’s history […] still has not completely succeeded in conceptualising ‘the immigrant woman’ into its analysis of the women’s movement’.Footnote 17

The present struggle for gender equality too has so far mostly been written as one in which migration is seen as a problem. Specifically, ‘migrant’ men are seen as causing problems and ‘migrant’ women as having them—as being a risk and being at risk, as Marlou Schrover aptly puts it.Footnote 18 The significance of migration as a possible motor of equal rights is thus erased both from history and the present.

This contribution presents a different picture of the role of migration in Swiss society.Footnote 19 Specifically, it analyses distinct but also interrelated fields of research: access to higher education and political rights, the changing gendered division of work and, connected to this, the establishment of a nursery infrastructure. These fields have been selected to show that migration generated gender innovation in various constellations. They allow us to reflect on how, precisely, such processes of migration and emancipatory change occur and how they can be explained. This question will, whenever possible, be addressed by means of an agency-centred approach,Footnote 20 while at the same time taking into account those social structures that shape and delimit the possibility of individual and collective action.

The Relationship Between Spatial and Social Change

In 1984, a seminal issue on Women in Migration was published in the International Migration Review. Almost thirty years later, Donna Gabaccia, stated that ‘evidence has accumulated that every point in the migration process is gendered’.Footnote 21 Despite this important insight, however, many facets of the historical relationship between gender and migration remain unexplored. In showing how migration generates gender innovation in different settings, this study combines a historical perspective with a discussion of timely issues. It brings together a set of case studies, rendering visible their entanglements, and highlighting how the different examples are ‘both specific to and representative of a larger phenomenon’.Footnote 22 This contribution focuses on the case of Switzerland.Footnote 23 Its findings, however, have implications for the understanding of migration and its relation to sociopolitical innovation in more general terms.Footnote 24

Historically, there has been a dichotomy in academic perceptions of migration and social–political change. One school of thought sees ‘migrants’ as responsible for sustaining the status quo, for example when they are labelled as wage squeezers and strike-breakers,Footnote 25 whereas others perceive ‘migrants’ as natural activists.Footnote 26

Albert O. Hirschman suggested in his famous treatise ‘Exit, Voice, and Loyalty’ that members of a group can either exit or voice their dissent, i.e. try to change the situation by leaving (exit) or by criticism (voice).Footnote 27 This suggests that, if we transfer this concept to the sending country, migration and mobilisation are two mutually exclusive ways of reacting, and that trade-offs exist between exit and voice.Footnote 28 Interestingly, Hirschman later revised his thesis and acknowledged that the relation between exit and voice does not just simply follow a ‘hydraulic model’, according to which the more pressure escapes through exit, the less is available for voice. Drawing on the historical example of the last phase of the German Democratic Republic Hirschman came to argue that exit can cooperate with voice, voice can emerge from exit and exit can reinforce voice.Footnote 29 In short, he showed that under certain conditions migration can further rather than obstruct social and political change in the sending country.

This strict dichotomy between either ‘fighting’ or ‘fleeing’ has also been criticised by Donna Gabaccia. She points to the fact that ‘the word movement has two distinct meanings. On the one hand, movement means mobility or migration […]. On the other, movement describes the desire for change and the organisations and alliances of people working for change’.Footnote 30 It is precisely this relationship between spatial and social change that this book analyses. In contrast to Hirschman’s work, however, the focus is not exclusively, but predominantly on the receiving country.

Migration and Mobility

Not every form of mobility can be called migration. However, the transition between different types of mobility is often fluid. And although the concept of mobility often functions as a generic term and is therefore understood in a broader sense, there is no clear demarcation line between migration and mobility in the scientific terminology.Footnote 31 In this book, my aim is not to define terms in a watertight way, but to investigate concretely what political and social effects can be produced by experiences of migration—understood in a broad sense.

In everyday language, migration is often understood as a movement that involves a crossing of national borders. But definitions always act simultaneously as headlights and blinkers. In fact, a now-dominant paradigm frequently leads to a situation where in public debate only cross-border migration and movements of the ‘global proletariat’ are perceived as migration. Other forms of migration—such as a change of residence for the purpose of tax reduction—are not usually labelled as migration. A bias can therefore also be seen in what is understood by migration in the dominant discourse. Furthermore, migration is nowadays predominantly negatively connoted, often in contrast to mobility.Footnote 32 This can be seen, for instance, when the movement of expats (usually qualified as white) is called ‘mobility’, while other kind of movements connected to work are labelled ‘migration’—even if the length of stay at the ‘new’ location is of a similar length.Footnote 33 Given the current political situation, I argue that we need to transform the connotations of the term ‘migration’ rather than replace it.

A Unified Analysis of Migration

For researchers investigating the effect of migration on the ‘established’ population, it will at times be necessary in their analysis to separate out ‘migrants’ from the ‘rest of the society’, knowing that this is actually an impossible task.Footnote 34 In this context, the question arises of when and for how long someone may be referred to as a ‘migrant’. It can be stigmatising to attach someone to a ‘migrant identity’ and highly problematic to ‘migrantise’ people who have long since become part of society.Footnote 35 As my approach is not intended to lead to the essentialising of identities, I put the term ‘migrant’ in single quotation marks. In fact, there is no straightforward distinction between ‘locals’ and ‘non-locals’—nor should such an approach be taken to imply that there was ever something like a pristine, stable world which was then suddenly affected by migration. Since the beginnings of human existence, societies have been shaped by various forms of migration. If many scholars today rightly point out that migration is to be understood as normal in history, we must not, however, lose sight of the consequences of an effective policy of sedentariness. The nineteenth century, for example, is to be seen as a period in which nomadic forms of life came under increasing pressure worldwide due to colonialism. Especially in those moments when the mobility of Europeans increased due to colonial constellations, that of ‘travellers’ was pathologised, both in the colonial regions and in Europe itself.Footnote 36

The approach envisaged here brings together international as well as internal migration, since it aims to overcome the often unproductive splitting apart of different forms of mobility that so far have rarely been analysed together.Footnote 37 It is about thinking processes together that would not otherwise be brought into concert in this way. Precisely this sort of unified analysis is necessary if we want to understand processes of changing gender relations that have been shaped by diverse forms of migration. In this context, Regina Römhild rightly pointed out that only when research focuses on the entire social spectrum of migration can it show that social and political inequality prevails not only between ‘migrants’ and ‘locals’, but also between different groups of mobile subjects.Footnote 38 It is indeed a limited concept of migration that cannot see these major distinctions. Rather, it itself becomes an instrument of the border regime, precisely because it follows the logic of the latter instead of exposing it.