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date: 14 February 2025

A Review of Gender and Refugee Studies in Lebanon, Jordan, and Türkiyelocked

A Review of Gender and Refugee Studies in Lebanon, Jordan, and Türkiyelocked

  • Irene TuziIrene TuziBielefeld University
  • , and Estella CarpiEstella CarpiUniversity College London Institute For Risk and Disaster Reduction

Summary

Drawing upon academic sources and policy reports of nongovernmental organizations, the UN, and other bodies, it can be shown how most of these studies have often adopted a gender-binary approach, contributing to an over-focus on and to the stigmatization of “refugee women” as a self-standing category of analysis and a homogeneous social group, while differently gendered bodies on the move have been under-investigated. Although fluid understandings of gender have long since informed gender and sexuality theories, the binary approach, when coming to the field of forced migration, remained the most common way of framing displaced gendered bodies.

In this framework, the leading discussion revolves around how the women-focused literature in the Middle Eastern context has scarcely intertwined with the LGBTQ+ literature. The regional-based critical review, while noticing a refugee masculinity-focused literature on the rise, evidences an anachronistic compartmentalization between women-focused and LGBTQ+-focused research, which contradicts the performative interpretations of gender debated since the early 1990s while reinforcing a monolithic understanding of gendered experiences of displacement. As a result, to some extent, it can be argued that humanitarian and migration practices and policies tend to reflect the gender binarism underlying the related academic research.

Subjects

  • Exposed Populations
  • Gender Issues
  • Population Movements

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