332 - Special Session. Sexuality in Migration: Complicating Economic Migration Theory

Session Submission Type: Invited Session

Abstract

Traditional sociological approaches to the study of migration tend to privilege the economic and material aspects of motivation for migration; more recent research has made gender, and sexuality, important analytic aspects of migration. Subsequent work has looked at them together in complicating migration analysis. Among the aspects shown to be important in migration scholarship that foregrounds sexuality are: the re-composition of the families in the “host” site; the reconfiguration of gender roles and family’s relationship to work, and often times, power within the family; the complications of sexual migration (in a global-sex framework) within a post-2008 recession era; and the newer ways “American” functions given migration in a post-9/11 anti-immigrant US. Sociology is ideally positioned to further the field of migration studies, where class and economic analysis are shaping the study of migration at the same time that migration analyses incorporate gender and sexuality. This panel will: (1) offer a general outline of the processes and recent developments of the mixing of migration studies with gender and sexuality, (2) present recent empirical work that attends to the intersections between migration, gender, and sexuality, and (3) propose a general mapping of where such work could tend attention to.

Sub Unit

• Special Sessions

Session Organizer

• Salvador Vidal-Ortiz, American University

Presider

• Nancy A. Naples, University of Connecticut

Panelists

• Susana Pena, Bowling Green State University

• Hector Carrillo, Northwestern University

• Gloria Gonzalez-Lopez, University of Texas-Austin

Discussant

• Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, University of Southern California