The Gendered Pathways of Trauma How Syrian Refugee Women Express & Process Pain

• In Event: Global and Transnational Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 6. Migration Experiences I

Abstract

This article examines how Syrian refugee women express and process trauma through gendered shifts in role, identity, and belonging after displacement. Since 2011, forced migration has fractured not only homes but the social worlds that anchored recognition and selfhood. I argue that women’s trauma responses emerge less as discrete psychological symptoms and more through the ongoing demands of resettlement: institutional navigation, intensified caregiving, and the pressure to remain emotionally composed while carrying loss. In this context, responsibility becomes a primary site where pain is lived.
Bridging Identity Theory and Social Identity Theory with the sociology of emotions, the article shows how displacement disrupts role-based identities such as caregiver and mother while resettlement simultaneously expands them. Many Syrian women assume new public roles—school liaison, translator, case navigator, sometimes wage earner—while maintaining domestic care work and family emotional stability. Drawing on Hochschild’s concept of emotion work, I interpret these practices as gendered survival labor: women regulate their own distress and absorb family strain to sustain household coherence. What appears as resilience often involves chronic self-suppression and quiet burnout.
The analysis is grounded in qualitative fieldwork conducted during my service as a cultural orientation director at a Florida resettlement center (2022–2025), including 32 Arabic interviews and focus groups with recently resettled Syrian adults. Findings reveal two patterns. First, women disproportionately carry the public and emotional labor of resettlement, navigating institutions while managing fear of misrecognition and linguistic exposure. Second, trauma frequently manifests as emotional silencing: postponing grief, minimizing distress, and maintaining composure to protect children and spouses.
I conclude that resettlement reproduces trauma through misrecognition and unequal emotional burdens. Gendered coping should not be read as cultural deficiency but as patterned response to identity disruption under constraint. Trauma-informed resettlement must recognize women’s invisible labor and support identity repair through culturally familiar spaces, childcare, and pathways to skill recognition and leadership.

Author

• Shahd Alasaly, University of South Florida