Migrant Women’s Experiences in the City: A Relational Comparison (original) (raw)
Nomkhosi Xulu-Gama 9.1 Introduction and Background Something remains to be said about how African migrant women's experiences, […] have affected the system of migrant labour (Phillips & James, 2014: 411). Scholars who write about migrant women, whether rural-urban or international migrants, have tended to always link women's migration processes to men's, thereby reducing women's agency and will power. It is in this regard that women's positionalities have continued to remain on the peripheries in literature (see Phillips & James, 2014), even if in reality they have become the main players in their own right. Kihato's (2013) work reiterates the importance of the role of migrant women in shaping the way the city's life is played out. Jayaram et al. (2019) posited that women are very mobile, frequently moving locally and internationally between their areas of origin and different urban work destinations. Xulu-Gama (2017), Kihato (2013) and Zulu (1993) prove that women do migrate on their own. This chapter is a contribution to the emerging field of women's migration in the Global South literature. It uses feminist-standpoint epistemology as a way of embracing and acknowledging as valid the experiences and voices of women, especially in the field of migration, which was historically designed to be solely for men. The focus is on going beyond the differences and the complexities and embracing the undervalued similarities which exist between rural-urban and foreign-national migrant women. This chapter intends to make a relational comparison between African rural-urban and African foreign-national 1 migrant women in the South 1 'Foreign national' means an individual who is not a South African citizen or does not have a permanent residence permit issued in terms of the Immigration Act, according to the South African Immigration Amendment Act 13 of 2011.
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