Threatened identities and gendered opportunities : Somali migration to America

Abstract

Recent literature pays close attention to the ways in which gender mediates the migration experience. In addition to showing that gender matters in the migration process, this scholarship highlights how institutions in the host society can provide opportunities to challenge gender hierarchies within migrant households and communities. At the same time, this body of recent works complicates prior assumptions that migration is always empowering for women, by stressing how the empowermentdisempowerment dichotomy simplifies complex processes that both enable women to challenge patriarchal practices and deter them from doing so. This article seeks to extend this literature through an ethnographic investigation of the dynamic process of change in gender relations among Somali immigrants in Minnesota, a Muslim African refugee population. Most immigrant case studies draw from groups originating from Latin America and Asia, the major sources of migration to the United States in recent decades. Focusing on the migration experiences of Somalis offers a fresh venue to further document and theorize the gendered nature of the new wave of twenty-first-century migration.