Week 2 Day 2

 

In this week’s readings, we discussed on a deeper basis the role of women in society, especially in the plane of immigration. Whereas before the focus was on the idea of women fitting stereotypes and fitting into a society that views them as the beest homeworkers, this week, there has been a heightened focus on their immigration and their virtue. It cannot be denied in these readings that sex is a very important determiner of whether someone can immigrate into a country. This is most evident in the article “Entry Denied” by Eithne Luibhéid and also in “National Identities and Transnational Intimacies” by Éric Fassin. As discussed in class, there is a focus on their inability to immigrate into a country due to their status. Luibheid and Fassin focus on this in different ways. Luibheid mainly discussed the effects of the laws on immigrant women, while Fassin focuses on the ideas of the French identity and movement in France. In “Entry Denied”, there was a clear differential in the way that both men and women were treated in the creation and the update in the laws. For instance, Luibheid referenced the Page Law, which banned Asian prostitutes, and made immigration for women to immigrate alone (Luibheid, 6). However, this was not the only discrimination against women. Fassin also briefly discusses the idea of women having equality in France, while in fact, it was not true, how according to Hirsi Ali, women have to fight against “‘male domination in general’”(Fassin, 511). They take it one step further on the discussion about the definition of courage, and how it is a word that was designed for men rather than women, although women can use it, but this is a threat to the societies that have been formed for men (Fassin 510-1).

Unmarried pregnant women especially posed a threat as they differed greatly from the standard norms. Many women were in fact denied entry because they either were pregnant and unmarried, or fit the description of a pregnant. If there was even a hint of a women having an illness or something different about her, the government did as much as possible to keep them from entering the country (Luibheid 6-7). Because of the possibility of pregnancy, women were inspected at a much higher basis than men. In these articles, we find that women were simply“reduced to reproductive functions” (Luibheid, 5). So indeed, it was much more difficult for women to emigrate to the US than men. There is also a heightened sense of culpability for women instead of men, especially if men were the ones to pay for their immigration. They were the ones that claimed the blame of being “immoral” (Luibheid, 11). This is extended to sexual crimes against them. There is also the risk of immigrating with an unborn child and the child being a naturalized citizen, as Fassin explores with the case of Mohammed and Fatma his mother, who had to leave him in France when she returned to Algeria (524-5).

Immigration into the US and France are based on the ideal of conforming into society. There are many of the same expectations for women, but immigration into France is difficult because of cultural norms, specifically la laïcité in France. This applies specifically to burkhas, as they are Muslim symbols that are not supposed to be shown publically due to la laicite, but are shown because they are an essential part to that branch of the religion of Islam. As a result, there is still a connection to the idea of patriarchy, as it is rooted in religion as well.Because the US is mostly Protestant based, some of the associations, such as the antibigamy law, falls against the ideas of the Mormon church, but as Luibheid also cites, as something that before Mormons, was “‘almost exclusively a feature of life for African and Asiatic people'’” (Luibheid, 7). As was seen in the article “Planet-Love”, there are many marriages that are in the US currently that are a result of American men marrying someone from Latin America. In France, although they say there is a de jure campaign for binational marriages, as Fassin explores, many of the marriages are long term in order for both in the couple to be benefited by the marriage in order for both ofthem to gain citizenship in France. The issue of marriages in order to gain citizenship, the so-called “gray marriages” is something that they believe to be a problem, because of the rate of these occurrences of marriages. But there are cases of love and false accusations, as in the case of Josiane Nardi (Fassin 528-529).

In both of these articles, there is an inherent need for someone coming in to conform to the standards of the country. When this fails, there is blame placed and it is made much more difficult to enter into and become a part of the country. It is these conformist ideals that create the threat of difference in people's heads and makes it much more difficult for new people to immigrate into the country. While the US was not trying to hide this, in France, there was an atempt to subvert the obvious problems, althogh it is very clear that there is a discrimination against these women and others to become a part of the nation. If they want to move forward (the US has quite a bit but not too far), there needs to be an allowance for greater change and acceptance. Without it, there will be no future for immigration, and it will become a problem again especially with more recent nationalist regimes taking power in both the US and France.