Women in Between

Gender, Refugee Experience and Ageing

Authors

  • Hana Havelková
  • Petra Ezzeddine

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14712/12128112.3355

Keywords:

women, gender, migration, ageing, intergenerational relations, care, social status

Abstract

The study is based on interviews with women with refugee experience from the former Yugoslavia, aged 50+, who have already been living in the Czech Republic for more than twenty years. It covers a long time period of life in migration, which has allowed us to show that the refugee experience of women is not linear but cyclical, gaining new significances at various stages of women’s lives, in various social contexts and transnational environments. There is a special focus on ageing and entrance into retirement age, when the women find themselves under a double pressure: they are trying to safeguard their own vulnerable position at work and at the same time to meet the normative commitments (traditionally expected from women) regarding transnational care of seniors. The study looks at migration from an intersectional perspective in investigating how gender, age, ethnicity, migration status and social class of the women we studied formed their life in the new society.

Author Biographies

Hana Havelková

is a sociologist and co-founder of the Department of Gender Studies at the Faculty of Humanities of Charles University in Prague, where she teaches feminist and sociological theories, empirical research on gender in the socialist era and gender in politics. She is a member of the board of the Institut für Konfliktforschung in Vienna and of the international journal L´Homme. Zeitschrift für feministische Geschichtswissenschaft, member of the editorial board of the American journal Social Politics. She is co author and co-editor of the recent publications “Waste of Talents. Turning Private Struggles into a Public Issue” (European Commission 2004), “The Politics of Gender Culture under State Socialism” (Routledge 2014) and “Vyvlastněný hlas. Proměny genderové kultury české společnosti 1948–1989” (Sociologické nakladatelství 2015).

Petra Ezzeddine

is a social anthropologist. She lectures at the Department of Anthropology and Gender Studies, Faculty of Humanities (Charles University in Prague). She teaches courses on Anthropology of Migration, Gender in Migration and Applied Anthropology. Her ethnographic research deals with gender aspects of migration, transnational forms of parenthood, the globalization of care for children and the elderly and female migrant domestic workers, gender and ageing in migration. She is a member of the editorial boards for Gender /Rovné příležitosti/Výzkum (Gender and Research) and the Journal of Human Affairs (Springer). She cooperates closely with several Czech and Slovak non-governmental and international organizations working with migrants.

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Published

2016-07-01

How to Cite

Havelková, H., & Ezzeddine, P. (2016). Women in Between: Gender, Refugee Experience and Ageing. Lidé města, 18(2), 179-201. https://doi.org/10.14712/12128112.3355

Issue

Vol. 18 No. 2 (2016)

Section

Articles

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.