Introduction: Gender, Migration, and the Media

From Megan C. MacDonald and Mara Mattoscio, in the journal Femina Media Studies

Un article de Megan C. MacDonald, Résidente à l’IMéRA, et Mara Mattoscio, dans le journal Femina Media Studies.

MacDONALD Megan

Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Koc University, Istanbul. Résidente à l’IMéRA du 10 Septembre 2018 au 12 Juillet 2019 ; EURIAS Fellowship. Projet de recherche: The Way Back: Mediterranean Wakes and Urban Archival Futures

Introduction: Gender, Migration, and the Media

Full article in : https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14680777.2018.1532142

Across the sensationalist media coverage of recent migratory movements, generally labelled as the “refugee crisis,” crucial issues of gender, including health-care disparities, differential access to asylum and/or citizenship, and national policies on integration, have received ambiguous treatment. Cases of sexual violence suffered by migrants or visible gender identifications have mostly been framed in stereotypical ways, reinvigorating essentialist oppositions between the West, seen as “progressive and endangered,” and the rest of the world, deemed “backward and threatening.”

Tales of trafficked women have, for instance, ended up constructing almost all forms of female mobility, with the notable exception of domestic work, as “high risk” and morally unadvisable (Felicity Schaeffer-Grabiel 2011 Schaeffer-Grabiel, Felicity. 2011. “Transnational Media Wars over Sex-Trafficking: Abolishing the ‘New Slave Trade’ or the New Nativism?” In Circuits of Visibility: Gender and Transnational Media Cultures, edited by Radha Sarma Hegde, 103–123. New York: New York University Press.[Crossref], [Google Scholar]; Enrica Rigo 2017 Rigo, Enrica. 2017. “Re-gendering the Border: Chronicles of Women’s Resistance and Unexpected Alliances from the Mediterranean Border.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, Dec. Accessed August 30, 2018. https://www.acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1436. [Google Scholar]). More nuanced understandings of the gendered complexities of migration, border surveillance, and media systems have been often overlooked (Radha Sarma Hegde 2011 Hegde, Radha Sarma, ed. 2011. Circuits of Visibility: Gender and Transnational Media Cultures. New York: New York University Press.[Crossref], [Google Scholar]). Shringarpure, Bhakti, Michael Bronner, Veruska Cantelli, Michael Busch, Jessica Rohan, Melissa Smyth, Jason Huettner, Gareth Davies, and Noam Scheindlin, eds. 2018. Mediterranean. Brooklyn: UpSet Press.

Read the rest of article on : https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14680777.2018.1532142

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