“These Women Will Revolt:” Defining Gender Equality in the French Immigrant Integration Program

• In Event: 1564 - Gender and Immigration

Abstract

Gender equality amongst immigrants has been the subject of fraught debates over multiculturalism and belonging in Europe. Politicians from across the spectrum claim that gender equality is a central value in contemporary European societies and that immigrants who do not share this value are a threat to Europe. These claims, as well as policies designed to empower immigrant women, often rely on stereotypical representations of immigrants from the Global South as inherently patriarchal and fail to acknowledge the multiple, intersecting forms of inequality that immigrant women face. This paper contributes to the critical scholarship that identifies the paradoxical, exclusionary functions of gender equality in the field of immigrant integration policy in multiple ways. Rather than taking the concept of gender equality as a pre-defined tool that is employed by the state to either exclude immigrants or include women by the extension of rights, the paper explores how gender equality is defined through the interactions of official state discourses, frontline workers, and immigrants. While most related studies employ national or cross-national policy or legal analyses, I examine the interpretation of gender equality as it occurs in the implementation of policy, using ethnographic observations and field interviews with the staff and participants in the French civic integration program. I find that program staff who are themselves immigrants appear constrained by the French civic model and neoliberal trends in social policy, as they largely reiterate state discourses and express their dedication to saving immigrant women.

Author

• Elizabeth Onasch, SUNY-Plattsburgh