Intersectionality, violence, and migration during COVID-19: women on the move in Central America

Adriana Salcedo

Chapter 8 in Research Handbook on Migration, Gender, and COVID-19, 2024, pp 109-122 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter analyses the challenges experienced by migrant women (in their diversity) during their transit through Central America, especially with the closing of borders and other travel restrictions imposed during the Covid-19 pandemic. A securitization paradigm has shaped efforts by governments worldwide to contain the pandemic, with people on the move often characterized as carriers of the virus. This has led to the adoption of xenophobic policies and discourses (akin to Mbembe’s necropolitics) that cannot be justified on health grounds, and to violence against migrants/refugees. Women, girls and LGBTQI+ people experience violence at every stage of the migratory journey (origin, transit, destination and return). Border closures, gendered quarantines and other pandemic-related restrictions have accentuated the invisibility of, and discrimination against, people on the move. This chapter applies an intersectional lens in analyzing power relationships and systems of oppression that intersect to perpetuate the exclusion of migrant/refugee women in their diversity. It highlights measures taken by certain governments to grant migrants temporary protected status and proposes a gender-sensitive approach that opens channels for regular migration without discrimination and violence, with a view to transforming necropolitics into rights-based politics and addressing the structural violence experienced by migrant/refugee women.

Keywords: Development Studies; Economics and Finance; Politics and Public Policy Sociology and Social Policy; Sustainable Development Goals; Urban and Regional Studies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781802208672.00014 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:21342_8

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().