Gender, Sexuality and Migration: Global Questions and Their Colonial Legacies

In this chapter, I review the intersecting literature on gender, sexuality and migration to critically reflect on its present state and the emerging possibilities for future research. I begin this chapter with a brief overview of some of the developments that have taken place in the study of gender, sexuality and migration over the past three decades. I then go on to look at the relevance of notions of coloniality for the study of gender, sexuality and migration. I do this because coloniality has become increasingly influential in Southern scholarship in recent years and it is useful for migration studies because of its focus on global power dynamics and how they have changed, or not, in the postcolonial era. However, I argue that postcolonial studies have also been guilty of ignoring the ways in which the colonial project has been shaped by the regulation of gender and sexuality and that attention to gender and sexuality will assist in understanding how coloniality is a feature of contemporary concerns over migration. I analyse how theories of coloniality can help shape a more critical understanding of trafficking as just one area of migration studies where gender and sexuality have shaped coloniality.