CFP: Special Issue on Gender and Migration

Scholarship on gender and migration has grown tremendously over the past thirty years. It was initiated by studies that put women at the center of their analyses in a field that either implicitly or explicitly imagined men as mobile agents and “their” women or families as passive objects, to be moved along or left behind “at home”. Through the turn toward gender as a category of analysis, scholars working in different disciplines broadened their approach, coming to understand gender as a changing, relational dynamic both shaped, and capable of shaping, social processes like migration. Gender is often at the center of transnational and transregional approaches to migration, which focus on the interconnections between various parts of the world. Scholarly attention to migrants’ everyday lives and longue durée histories reveal the far-flung processes that construct what it means to be a woman or a man, the deterritorialized making of family regimes, as well as the gendered politics of long-distance nationalism and state formation. Some of these cutting-edge perspectives have developed through the study of migration from, to, and across the Middle East. But more work is still needed to engender new understandings of the Middle East, and the Middle Eastern men and women whose presence is felt across the world. This special themed issue of Mashriq & Mahjar seeks to take stock of recent work on gender and migration, to open up fruitful discussion, and to chart paths for future research. It will bring together scholars working in different disciplines to consider the connections, comparisons, and contrasts between the gendered experiences and processes that migrants undergo in different periods and locales. With this in mind, we invite scholars from all disciplines to contribute theoretically innovative and empirically grounded papers on any aspect of gender and migration from, to, and across the Middle East over the last two centuries. Specific topics may include:

• Feminist organizing through migration
• Gender and long-distance nationalism
• The role of gender in shaping migrant families, and migrant families in shaping gender
• The gendering of institutions and practices through migration
• Gender, ethnicity, and sexuality
• Gender and state immigration policy
• Gender and the literary imagination
• Return migration and gender politics in the Middle East

This special themed issue will be co-edited by Sarah Gualtieri (University of Southern California) and Akram Khater (North Carolina State University). Please send abstracts of 250

300 words, including name, contact details, and institutional affiliation as a word or PDF

document by 31 October, 2013 to the following address: akhater@ncsu.edu. After review of the abstracts, potential contributors will be contacted regarding submission of a journal-length paper.