The Dubious Gift/Debt of Integration: Patriarchal regimes, ethnicity and sexuality in the school lives of migrant girls in Cyprus

Abstract

The paper conducts a gendered critical analysis of school policies of migrant integration in secondary education schools in Cyprus. It examines how processes of ethic gendering intersect with processes of racialization, both in the discourse deployed by educational policy makers, who capitalize on integration as an expression of the patriarchal welfare state’s, and in the attribution of meanings to migrant girls’ daily interactions with teachers and peers. The interactions analyzed in the paper trace how migrant girls negotiate the burden (or refuge) of otherness with the promise (or precarity) of integration. The authors suggest that there is a need to re-theorize the operation of gender taking into account the power terms of migrant reception and integration, as well as the complexities of the intersection of gender with ethnicity. The methodological emphasis on intersectionality destabilizes the causal linking of ethnic marginalization and gender violence with migrants’ origins and culture, and reorients research questions from the gender identities of migrant students to the gendered processes of their subjectification where the very technologies of integration participate