Intersectional Solidarities in Resisting Intersectional Fragilities: Kurdish Migrant Women’s Activism in Germany
摘要
Women from the Global South often face different and potentially greater obstacles in the countries where they arrive as migrants and refugees. Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term intersectionality, refers to the problems of Asian migrant women in the US to illustrate what intersectionality looks like in practice. Feminist and gender scholars have since studied and documented the intersectional challenges that migrant and refugee women face. However, we are still far from fully understanding the full implications of their plight as well as the potential of their agency. Kurdish migrant and refugee women have not been exempt from the consequences of forced migration to Germany, which renders them fragile at the intersection of gender, ethnicity, nationality, class, legal status, and language skills. The combined effect of these identities, belongings, socio-economic backgrounds, and legal status generates various forms of fragility in their lives after migration. In the face of such multifaceted fragility, Kurdish migrant women engage in what can be identified as “intersectional solidarity” activities in a wide range of formal and informal networks. Drawing on the interviews and online and on-site participant observations I conducted between 2020 and 2024 among Kurdish migrant women in Berlin, Germany this paper analyzes the fragilities from an intersectional, relational, and processual perspective. It aims to contribute to our understanding of what makes various groups of migrants fragile in certain contexts and how they respond to these fragilities.