Re-counting Migrant Women’s Invisibility: Feminist Interventions and the Gendered Foundations of Migration Studies

Abstract

This article traces the intellectual development of feminist migration studies, charting the field’s transformation from the invisibility of women in early migration research through the foundational work of the 1980s and 1990s, the transnational analyses of the 2000s, and the critical and intersectional approaches of the 2010s and 2020s. It examines how feminist scholarship redefined migration as a gendered, relational, and embodied process, revealing how women’s movements, labour, and care practices both sustain and transform global systems of mobility, belonging, and power. By foregrounding women’s reproductive, care, and affective labour, feminist theorists re-signified what counts as work and value, exposing the intimate foundations of global capitalism. More recent contributions in intersectional and critical border studies reveal how gender, race, class, and citizenship intersect to produce stratified regimes of mobility and control. The article concludes by revisiting the enduring tension between agency and constraint, proposing it as a key interpretive lens for understanding how migrant women navigate and transform structures of domination. Recounting women’s historical invisibility thus remains not only a historiographical task but an epistemological and political intervention in how migration continues to be studied, governed, and imagined.